Home by Morning

by Alexis Harrington

  “I’m not perfect and I’ve done some things in my life that I’d give anything to do over,” he said quietly. “But I never lied to you. Not before, and not now.”

  “Maybe not.” The vehemence had suddenly drained out of her voice, giving her words a hollow, weary sound. He turned toward her. She looked the same: empty, exhausted. “Anyway, it’s water under the bridge, a part of our past. I can’t think about this anymore tonight. I came here to rest, then I have to go back.”

  “Go take your nap. I’ll wait for you right here at the table. When you’re ready, I’ll drive you over.”

  She shook her head. “That doesn’t sound like a good…”

  He dropped to his knee again, took her hand, and pressed a kiss into her palm. “Please. Let me do this for you.”

  Her eyes fluttered closed for a moment and she sighed. Then she gazed at him with that searching look that had always made him feel as if she could see into his heart. “I guess that would be all right. Give me an hour.”

  “I think you’d better make it two.” He squeezed her hand, loving the way it felt in his.

  She gave him a small, tired smile. “Okay. Two hours.”

  He pulled out his pocket watch with his free hand. “I’ll be right here.”

  Just over two hours later, Cole dropped Jess off at the infirmary. She watched the Ford disappear into the darkness as she stood at the door. In her apartment, she’d slept dreamlessly until she’d felt his hand on her shoulder, nudging her awake.

  They’d ridden over here without much conversation, completely avoiding the can of worms they’d opened earlier—the kisses, their suppressed feelings, the matter of the telegram. What if it was true? What if someone else had sent that message? And who on earth would do such a devious, underhanded thing? Jessica’s mind whirled with the implications.

  Forcing her thoughts to the current emergency, she turned and went inside. The odors that haunted her dreams and clung to her clothing and hair assailed her again. The overall scene was much the same one she’d left. After digging into her bag for her stethoscope, she passed rows of sickbeds and headed straight to Amy. She found Mrs. Donaldson sitting beside her.

  “Oh, good Lord, Jessica, I’m so glad you’re here. The poor thing, the poor little thing.” Laura Donaldson shook her head and wept and wrung her handkerchief as if Amy was already dead.

  Alarmed, Jessica took her sister’s wrist and peered at her fever-flushed face. Her condition was no better, but at least it wasn’t worse. Some people failed so quickly, their lives seemed to drain from them right before Jessica’s eyes. “Mrs. Donaldson, would you be a dear and get her a cold cloth for her head? I’d like a moment to examine her.”

  “Yes, yes, of course!” The woman, whose eyes were faintly discolored from the broken nose she’d recently suffered, jumped off the stool at Amy’s bedside.

  Taking her place, Jess put the stethoscope against Amy’s chest and listened to the sodden, crackling sound of her congested lungs. It resembled the noise of an ice cream soda being sucked up through a straw. With a heavy sigh, she covered Amy’s hand with her own. Her sister’s hair was a snarl of honey-colored strings resting on the pillow, and faint blue smudges underscored her closed eyes. But she still wore the earrings Cole had given her.

  “Oh, Amy,” Jess intoned, more to herself.

  Amy’s lashes fluttered, and she opened her eyes. “Jessie.”

  It was a pet name their mother had used when she was a girl. No one had called her that in years. Jess’s throat tightened and she managed to quell the tears that burned under her lids.

  She squeezed Amy’s hand. “Yes, I’m here, Amy. I’m right here.”

  Wracked with coughing and infection, Amy’s voice was little more than a croak. “Jessie—I feel so bad—”

  “I know, honey. We’re doing everything we can to make you better.”

  “No…I mean I did something…really bad…Promise—promise you won’t tell anyone else. If I die—I need you to know—”

  Cold, inexplicable foreboding gripped Jessica and sent a shiver through her. “Wh-what did you do?”

  “You won’t tell…”

  “No, I promise. Cross my heart.” Jess sketched a quick X over her chest.

  “That china dish…the one from England with the blue-birds…Mother’s favorite…”

  Jessica waited, puzzled. “Dish?”

  “I told her…the cat broke it. But it was me—please—don’t let her know. She’ll be so—” A fit of coughing interrupted her confession.

  Jessica couldn’t keep the quiver out of her voice. “It doesn’t matter. Not now.” She knew there was no point in trying to reason with a delirious patient. She should count herself lucky that Amy recognized her at all.

  Mrs. Donaldson reappeared with a damp cloth. “How is she?” she whispered. She laid the cloth on Amy’s forehead.

  “Still with us. It’s all I can tell right now. She thinks she’s a little girl.”

  “I know.” The woman’s mouth turned down and her brows rose and met as her tears began again. “She told me how much she likes Cole, but he doesn’t notice her because he’s too busy with ‘boy things.’ Even back then she must have loved him. It’s so romantic, so tragic.”

  Jess shifted on the stool, the guilty memory of Cole’s kiss rushing to the front of her mind. But as childish and petty as it seemed, a tart response sprang to her tongue, one she managed to choke back before it escaped.

  I loved him first.

  I love him now.

  “Damn it, dig faster, men!” Lieutenant Collier screamed.

  Shells burst around Riley and his comrades in the cold dawn as a German barrage rained down upon them. They were digging in, stuck here in this apple orchard in no man’s land of the Argonne Forest. He and some of the others, including Stoney, Kansas Pete, and Bob Tompkins, plunged pack shovels into the soil. Thank God he’d unbuttoned the top buttons of his coat earlier—the work was hot, made worse by the close-fitting tunic. Dirt flew from their tools and rained down upon them when the shells hit unnervingly, deafeningly close. Time and again Riley had seen the damage that such artillery fire could inflict upon a human body, sending a man’s parts in different directions. Under this kind of annihilating assault, the tin helmets they wore might as well have been boat-shaped hats made from newspaper. He dared not take his attention from his task, but he glanced up once. Beyond the heavy pall of smoke, pulverized dirt, and the sweat that blurred his vision, he saw men falling like barley under a hailstorm, mere yards from him. Emerging from the curtain of dust and carbon, Whippy appeared, somehow dodging bullets as if he could actually see them coming at him and knew where to run. He tacked across no man’s land, heading toward their dugout, reminding Riley of a football player zigzagging for a goal line. Just to the left of Whippy, a French soldier took a shot in the throat and dropped.

  “Whippy,” Riley shouted, “come on!”

  Another soldier flung up his arms, as if in surrender, and lurched forward, shot in the back.

  Dig faster—dig faster—or that will be you.

  Riley bent his head and hunched his shoulders. He’d mucked out his share of stables in his youth, and scraped out other holes since he’d gotten here, but he’d never worked a shovel like this before. His heart pounded in his chest with the exertion, but at last they had a decent dugout and flung themselves into it. Fear flooded his veins.

  “Gas! Gas!”

  Oh, Jesus God, gas again. He scrabbled through the pack hanging from his neck that held his gas mask. He strapped it on just in time to see the ominous, opaque cloud wafting toward them, carried by the concussion of explosions. Over the rim of their ditch, he saw a man not ten yards away, already overcome by the poison that burned out eyes and blistered lungs. The soldier gasped and flopped around like a speared fish. He made that horrible, familiar gurgling sound that for an instant was louder than all the machine guns and bombs. When he turned his head their eyes met—the other soldier’s streami
ng and bloody, Riley’s hampered but protected by the eye shield on his mask.

  “Whip!” Riley shouted in horror, his voice muffled. Trembling, he stared at Whip where he convulsed on the churned-up dirt. They’d gassed Fournier. The sons of bitches had killed debonair, negligent, cultured Fournier. Someone jerked Riley back down into the ditch, out of the line of fire.

  “Goddamn it, Braddock, do you want to get your ass shot off?”

  Without conscious effort, Riley pressed one hand to the pocket that held Susannah’s photograph, then gripped his rifle in the other and sprang to his feet again. Seized by an unreasoning fury he had never felt before, Riley was determined to kill the bastards who had literally sucked the life from Remy Whipperton Fournier, III.

  He leaped from the ditch he’d worked so hard to dig, into the cloud of gas, screaming an inarticulate profanity and firing his automatic rifle as he went. His first goal was to get Fournier. Riley couldn’t leave him out there to be used for target practice by the damned Boche. Whip would die with his own men, out of firing range, not shot full of holes. He ran to Fournier and reached down to grab his arm. Blind in his death throes, Whip coughed blood and thrust up a hand. His fist closed around Riley’s aluminum identification tag, dangling from its chain, and held on as though it were a lifeline.

  “Don’t you worry, Fournier, I won’t leave you out here!”

  He began to drag him back to the ditch. A sudden blow struck Riley in the leg, one that felt as if he’d been hit with a hundred-pound sack of flour. It knocked him off his feet and he found himself sitting beside Whip, stunned and puzzled.

  He didn’t smell poison gas or the charcoal of his gas mask, but instead the scents of cherry bark and almond.

  He didn’t see the dead, ravaged landscape of a bombed-out battlefield, but rather the broad, green pastures of Powell Springs.

  The last sound Riley heard in the chaos of shouting men and bursting shells was the close-range explosion of the bullet that pierced his thin helmet.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Still no letters from France?” Pop demanded as he presided over the Braddock breakfast table. Most of the early-morning chores had already been finished by the time Susannah rang the triangle.

  This morning only the three of them—Susannah, Cole, and Pop—shared the eggs, pancakes, and fried potatoes that she’d cooked. Tanner and the boys were still banished to the bunkhouse for their own safety. Privately, Cole thought that Susannah’s precautions weren’t of much use; all of them worked together every day. He didn’t believe that making them eat in a separate place would do much good. From what he’d seen, anyone could catch influenza.

  “No letters from France,” Cole replied, avoiding Susannah’s hollow-eyed gaze as she handed him the platter of fried eggs. A break in the clouds let sun stream through the windows, harsh and glaring, cutting a slash across the table. “I stopped at Bright’s yesterday before I came home, but all we got was the usual—feed catalogs, a couple of stockman’s journals.”

  They’d had no mail from Riley in almost three weeks, and that was not like him. He’d always managed to write at least once a week, depending upon how the fighting was going, although they never really knew where he was. He was permitted to tell them only that he was “somewhere in France.” Sometimes all they received was a Field Card, a preprinted post card with general statements such as I am quite well, or I am in hospital. These were used when soldiers were in battle to avoid revealing any details as to their location. Riley would cross out the lines that didn’t apply and sign his name. But they hadn’t even received one of these lately.

  “Oh, your brother’s probably busy giving the Huns what-for. You heard the Allied troops cracked through the German fortifications at the Hindenberg line. By God, I wish I was there.” Pop had built a fort of pancakes and eggs, then flooded the whole thing with a river of syrup.

  “I’m sure he’ll write when he gets a chance,” Susannah replied, with forced confidence. “How is poor Amy? She looked so terrible when I saw her.” Busy as she was, she still found time to help out at the infirmary now and then.

  Cole poked his fork into an egg and watched the yolk run from the center. Susannah was a great cook, but he hadn’t had much appetite since learning about that damned telegram. “She’s hanging on. She doesn’t really know I’m there when I visit.”

  “And Jessica and you?”

  His head came up. Why would she lump the two of them together like that? he wondered. “She’s—well, she’s tired. She’s worried about her sister. How else would she be?” What could he say? That she was beautiful and tempting and elegant and a hundred other descriptions that didn’t do her justice? “And I’m just about as fine as you are,” he said to Susannah.

  She bit her lip and looked at her plate. He felt like a heel for snapping at her but couldn’t manage an apology. He hadn’t slept much. He’d tossed and turned, and stared at the ceiling over his bed. When he had fallen into a doze, he’d managed to wind his bedding around him like one of the bodies waiting for Fred Hustad’s services. He’d woken up sweating and clammy, his heart throbbing like the high school’s bass drum.

  A brief, awkward silence settled over them, finally interrupted by Pop, who was yapping on about something Cole disregarded.

  He couldn’t get that telegram out of his head. He had to find out who’d sent it, had to learn who wanted to come between Jess and him.

  When Susannah began clearing the table, Pop heaved himself halfway out of his chair with a dramatic groan. “God, my knees are stiffer than a new pair of jeans.”

  “Wait a minute, Pop,” Cole said, listening for his sister-in-law’s footsteps to fade into the kitchen. “I want to talk to you about something.”

  The old man let go of the chair arms and flopped back onto the seat. “What? That horse with the strangles still giving you trouble?”

  “No, she’s better.”

  “I hope so, she’s one of our best broodmares. That infection under her jaw could kill her.”

  Cole didn’t need to be reminded. For a while the mare’s symptoms had seemed so much like some of the influenza signs he’d seen, Cole had begun to wonder if they were all going to die of the same thing. “She’s still on soft food and hot fomentations. Tanner is minding her.”

  “Then what?”

  This was harder than Cole had imagined. “Pop, I know you never much liked the idea of my marrying Jessica.”

  His father’s eyes fixed on him, and he repeated his oft-cited assessment. “Pretty enough. Too smart for her own good.”

  Cole glanced toward the kitchen and lowered his voice. “Would you—did you ever think of trying to stop us?”

  “Stop you? Boy, what are you going on about?”

  Cole wanted to avoid the direct question. If he told the old man about the wire Jess had shown him, he’d blab it to everyone at Tilly’s and Cole would lose the advantage of secrecy. “Would you have tried to talk me out of marrying her?”

  “Jesus H. Christ, I did try! I told you what I thought. Does anyone around here listen to me? A man my age ought to get some respect in his own house and—”

  This was getting Cole nowhere. Exasperated, he said, “Did you do anything else, like send a telegram?”

  Pop looked just as exasperated and completely mystified. He squinted at Cole and blared, “Why the hell would I do that? I live under the same roof with you! Would I ride all the way into town with my joints creaking like a rusted windmill and send you a damned telegram when I could bawl you out to your face for free?” He pushed himself out of his chair again, obviously finished with the conversation. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were getting addled.” He tottered off, muttering and arthritic, to his chair in the parlor, passing Susannah as she returned for more dishes.

  Cole checked Pop off his list of possibilities. The old man might be cranky and opinionated, but he wasn’t much good at chicanery. Nothing about him was subtle.

  “Are you going to
eat?” Susannah asked.

  He glanced at his half-consumed eggs and pancakes. “Maybe I’ll catch something at lunch.”

  She nodded. Just as she reached in front of him to take his plate, Cole tugged lightly on her sleeve. “I didn’t mean to bark at you earlier. We’ve all been worried about Riley.”

  She sat down, as if her legs wouldn’t support her. Her long, dark ringlets, which curled of their own accord, even seemed limp. “How much more can we take?” She looked into his face, her expression earnest and searching, as if he had an answer. “First the war, then the influenza. Now I don’t know where my husband is, and Amy is sick.” Her eyes welled up and she rubbed a fingertip over a gouge in the tabletop, as if she could erase the scar.

  Cole had been so caught up in his own worries and concerns, it hadn’t occurred to him that Amy’s illness would come as such a blow to Susannah. “Jess is taking good care of her.”

  “Oh, Cole, she looks so frail and helpless lying there in that bed. She’s my dearest friend. She’s been such a good companion with Riley gone, and we spent so much time together after her father died.”

  It was true. Somehow the two women had become friends just about the time that the family had learned that Jessica would be delaying her return from New York. Although he’d known Amy since childhood, it wasn’t until then that he’d really noticed her.

  Had Susannah come to believe that Amy was a better choice for his wife? Had she believed it enough to send a forged wire? God, he had to get a handle on this. He was turning everyone into a suspect.

  “I don’t know what I’ll do if she doesn’t get better. I don’t know what I’ll do if Riley—I just don’t know…” Her voice trailed off.

  He squeezed her shoulder but didn’t answer.

  Cole himself felt as if he knew less and less with each passing day.

  Jessica sat at her desk in the infirmary, trying to catch up with the mountains of patient notes she’d acquired. Her system of organization was sketchy at best; time and lack of help didn’t allow for more. She had three stacks of papers for three types of patients: actively sick, recovering, and deceased. The “recovering” stack contained only a few pages. All three were held in place with fist-size rocks that served as inelegant paperweights.