A wheezing breath sounded behind her as Jean shifted position on the hard sidewalk. From the corner of Mirielle’s eye, she spied the policeman less than a block away, strolling back in their direction.
“Wait!” she said.
The cabbie turned around, and she stepped down from the curb. “I can’t pay you up front, but I promise once we arrive, I’ll get you your money.”
He shook his head. “No deal.”
Mirielle opened her purse and raked her fingers along the satin lining, hoping to somehow find a stash of bills she’d missed before. Instead, her fingers brushed against the St. Christopher medal. “What about this?” She held it out by the chain for him to see. “It’s pure silver.”
The cabbie drew close and examined it, fingering it with callused, tobacco-stained hands. His pungent breath made her cringe. He brought the medal to his mouth as if to bite it, but Mirielle yanked it away.
“Well?”
“Nah. I couldn’t get more than ten clams for a piece like that. And Carville’s at least a thirty-mile drive. Got anything else in that pretty little purse of yours?”
Mirielle shrank back. “No.”
“Too bad.” He jutted his stubbly chin in Jean’s direction. “Looks like she could really use a doctor.”
“If you were a decent sort of fellow, you’d take us then.”
“Yeah, but I ain’t.”
“That’s for doggone certain.” As she shoved the St. Christopher medal into her purse, the back of her hand scraped against something hard tucked inside the inner pocket. Her empty stomach clenched and twisted. But one glance at Jean and Mirielle knew what she had to do.
“What about this?” She slipped Irene’s ring from her purse. The ruby glinted in the lamplight.
“Now we’re talkin’.” The cabbie moved close again, his dirty hand reaching out. Mirielle winced in anticipation, as if he were not only taking the ring but a piece of her flesh with it.
Before he could pluck the ring from her palm, a voice sounded some distance behind her. “Whoa there.”
CHAPTER 65
Mirielle closed her hand around the ring. A man, backlit by the yellow glow of street lamps, reined his horse and wagon to a stop beside her. Shadow obscured his face. A fresh rush of panic skittered from the tips of Mirielle’s fingers to her core. Was he part of the police dragnet out to find her? She glanced back at Jean, calculating how far the two of them could make it before this man overtook them. Considering Jean could hardly stand, let alone run, they wouldn’t make it far.
“This gal giving ya trouble?” the man said to the cabbie. The familiar timbre of his voice lingered in Mirielle’s ear.
“We was just engaged in a little business deal,” the cabbie replied.
“Like the devil we were!” Mirielle thrust Irene’s ring back into her purse alongside Sister Verena’s medal. “Extortion is more like it.”
The cabbie scowled at her, then turned to the man in the wagon. “She and the girl are lepers. Tried to get me to take ’em to the colony at Carville.”
“That so?” the man said. “Best ya run along then. I’ll take it from here.”
“You gonna report ’em?”
“Something like that.”
The cabbie eyed Mirielle’s purse as if he had a mind to snatch it and run. Her fingers tightened around the straps. She was tired and hungry and damned if she wouldn’t smash his toes with the heel of her shoe if he took a step closer.
Perhaps he read the defiance in her eyes, for he turned and sauntered toward his taxicab. Mirielle waited until he was a safe distance away before turning back to the wagon. Whether the man meant to report her and Jean or shackle them in chains and drive them back to Carville himself, she didn’t care to find out. She took a backward step toward the sidewalk where Jean sat.
“You fixing to walk back to Carville, Polly?”
Mirielle stopped. The man took off his bowler and ran a gloved hand through his mop of wavy hair.
“Frank?” She rattled her head and stared up at him. “What the devil are you doing here?”
“Good to see ya too.” He hopped down from the wagon and handed Mirielle the reins. “Keep him steady while I get Jean.”
What Mirielle had thought to be a horse hitched to the wagon was actually a donkey. The same donkey she’d seen a hundred times carting supplies and gnawing on clover at Carville.
“Where’s the ambulance?”
“Didn’t have enough gas to make it here and back.”
Frank hurried to the sidewalk and scooped Jean up in his arms. She moaned when he laid her down in the wagon bed but otherwise didn’t stir.
“She don’t look good.”
“I found her like this yesterday near Cote Blanche Bay. I think it’s a leprous reaction. She’s got a fever, new lesions, inflamed nerves—”
“Cote Blanche Bay?” He regarded her with an expression Mirielle couldn’t read. “What the hell made ya think to look there?”
“It’s a long story.” She climbed into the wagon. Frank sat beside her and took the reins, giving them a shake to spur on the donkey. They rode in silence through the city, Frank deftly navigating down one street and the next. Mirielle hazarded a glance in his direction but still couldn’t read his face. The day’s worry seeped out of her, leaving behind emptiness and exhaustion. She longed to rest her head against his shoulder. To close her eyes and forget—for a few fleeting minutes—all the day’s trials and those yet to come. But Frank’s tight jaw and stiff posture kept her away.
“How come you came and not one of the orderlies?” she asked as they passed the last of the city’s street lamps and turned down the River Road.
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“No, it’s not . . . I’m so grateful I could kiss you.”
“Best ya didn’t,” he said without humor.
“It’s an expression.”
“Ya might catch more of the gazeek.”
“Stop it, Frank.”
“Just a friendly warning.”
But there was nothing friendly about it, and Mirielle almost wished she’d taken her chances with the cabbie. “What I meant was, how did you know to find us at the station?”
“Two escapees decide to give up life on the lam and come in. Ya think that’s gonna stay secret long?”
“Jean didn’t have much say in the matter.”
Frank glanced over his shoulder at the bed of the wagon where Jean lay. “No, I reckon not.” He turned his gaze to Mirielle. “But you did. Thought ya’d be long gone to California by now.”
The mention of home made her insides ache. She could have left Jean to his care, and stayed in Baton Rouge until she found her way to Los Angeles. But then what? Until she was cured, the risk to her daughters—be it from the disease or the stigma—was too great. “I guess a life on the lam wasn’t for me.”
Frank stared at her for several more seconds, the intensity of his gaze making her skin prickle. Then he turned his eyes back to the road. He explained that he’d heard about Mirielle’s telegram from the Rocking Chair Brigade, who’d heard from Madge who’d overheard the sisters discussing it in the infirmary. He saw Sister Verena leave with one of the orderlies in the ambulance just before supper.
“But they was back before I’d even finished dessert,” he said, navigating the donkey around a pothole. “Guess they ran into someone along the way who warned them off going. Said there wasn’t gas to be found anywhere in the city. The ambulance couldn’t make it there and back without refilling, so they turned around, them.”
“They were just going to leave us stranded there?”
“Nah. Mr. Li heard from Billy who heard from Norma that Sister Verena planned to see about borrowing Doc Jack’s car in the morning. But I figured, why fuss about with gas when we got this perfectly good ass and wagon.”
Mirielle smiled in spite of herself. For once, Carville’s voracious rumor mill had worked in her favor. The city lights had fallen away behind them. Forest cro
wded one side of the road and the sloping levee the other. The wagon’s headlights swayed in time with the donkey’s plodding step, casting a roving pool of light before them. “Sister Verena gave you her blessing to come get us?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that. But with everything going on, I figure she won’t be too cross about it.”
Mirielle snaked her arms around her midsection. Things would have to be pretty bleak for Sister Verena not to mind.
One of the wheels hit a bump, and the wagon listed. Jean groaned.
“How’d ya manage to find her?” Frank asked.
Mirielle told him the entire story—from her decision at the train station in New Orleans, to finding Jean’s father, to her trek along the waterways and bayous with Mr. Jessip. She could tell from Frank’s questions he knew the area, at least by reputation, and was surprised a city gal like her had managed so well on her own.
In turn, Frank described how he’d snuck the wagon past the gatehouse right under Watchman Doyle’s nose.
“But why?” she asked.
“Why what?”
“Why you?”
“Like I said, sorry to disappoint.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
He turned away, fixing his gaze on the levee that loomed alongside the road. “Water’s high high. Highest on record, they say. Rose four inches just in the last day.” He talked of sand boils, weakened levees, flooding in the parishes to the north, and Mirielle didn’t press further about why he’d come. She didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation until he mentioned that two barges had been anchored a few miles upriver from Carville in case the levee failed and the hospital flooded.
The wagon tottered over a rut in the road, and Mirielle clutched the sideboard to keep from falling out. “That could really happen? The hospital flood?”
Frank shrugged, but his tight grip on the reins betrayed his worry. “They say our levees are among the best along this whole course of the river.”
“But if they break?”
“If it happens upriver a ways, we should have a few hours to evacuate. If the levee breaks at our peninsula, the water will sweep away everything.”
“Including the colony?”
Frank nodded. “Including the colony.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence.
CHAPTER 66
They arrived at Carville well past midnight. Watchman Doyle startled awake when Mirielle rapped on the guardhouse window. He rattled his head and rubbed his eyes, not seeming to recognize her. Had she changed so much in the past week? She patted down her frizzy hair and nodded to the wagon waiting in the drive. “It’s me, Pauline Marvin. I’m back with Jean.” She hoped by not mentioning Frank, she might save him a month’s punishment in the clink. Mirielle hadn’t such hopes for herself, but once Jean was safely to the infirmary, she didn’t care.
Watchman Doyle opened the gate as Mirielle clambered back into the wagon. They drove straight past the administration building without a backward glance, following the road on the staff side of the reserve until they reached the lawn that abutted the ladies’ infirmary. Frank carried Jean inside with Mirielle hurrying beside him.
Sister Loretta had the unlucky assignment of night shift and was seated at the nurses’ desk when they burst in.
“Put her here,” Mirielle said to Frank, pointing at a vacant bed. She turned to the sister, whose expression waffled between shock and alarm. “She’s been feverish for a day and a half, maybe longer. I think it’s a reaction.”
Sister Loretta drew close to the bedside. After a quick examination, she nodded.
“Shall I draw up some potassium antimony?” Mirielle asked.
“Yes, good idea. I’ll go fetch Sister Verena.”
Mirielle hurried to the sink to scrub her hands while Sister Loretta scurried out.
“Anything I can do?” Frank asked.
“No. You’d better go before Sister Verena arrives.” She finished washing her hands and grabbed a towel to dry them. When she turned from the sink, he was already striding toward the door. “Frank.”
He stopped and looked at her expectantly.
“I . . . um . . . thanks for the ride.”
Disappointment flashed across his face, and she regretted not saying the words that had first come to mind. I love you. He gave a curt nod and was gone before Mirielle could rally her courage.
She watched the door close, aching to follow him. Instead, she drew up the medicine into a syringe and returned to Jean’s bedside. She removed Jean’s clothes, revealing the full extent of her ghastly illness. Many of the lesions that covered her arms and legs had erupted and oozed milky fluid. Her inflamed nerves jutted like strung rope beneath her skin. When Mirielle pulled back Jean’s eyelids, the pink mucosa of her sockets was dry and the whites of her eyes just as red as they’d been that morning.
She readied some betadine and cotton squares so Sister Verena could give the injection as soon as she arrived, then hurried to the medicine cabinet to mix some antiseptic solution for Jean’s eyes.
Before Mirielle had finished, Sister Loretta returned with Sister Verena. Sleep crusted at the corners of her eyes, and her winged hat sat askew. She glanced at Mirielle with only a flicker of surprise, then turned her attention to Jean. “What’s her status?”
“I think it’s an advanced reaction. Fever. Neuritis. Iridocyclitis. Ulcerating lesions of the limbs and nasal passages. I’ve drawn up three cc’s of potassium antimony and am mixing up an antiseptic wash for her eyes now.”
“Good, very good, Mrs. Marvin. I’ll take over from here.”
“Shall I wake Dr. Jachimowski?” Sister Loretta asked.
Sister Verena laid her hand across Jean’s forehead, then probed along her swollen nerves. “Not yet. Just keep an eye on the other patients.” She turned to Mirielle. “Finish with the antiseptic, then fetch a basin of cool water and a sponge. We need to bring down the fever.”
Mirielle nodded. She knew the situation was urgent, but Sister Verena’s steady presence helped settle her nerves. They worked in concert for several hours, speaking little. Mirielle wetted Jean’s eyes with antiseptic and sponged down her feverish body. She cleaned her oozing lesions and mixed a thin paste of trichloracetic acid to smear over them. When there was nothing left to do but watch and wait, she pulled up a chair alongside the bed and cradled Jean’s hand in her own. Sister Verena sat beside her.
“She won’t go blind, will she?” Mirielle whispered.
“It’s too soon to tell.”
“And her neuritis?”
“She’ll need surgery to strip off the nerve sheaths if the swelling doesn’t go down. Dr. Jachimowski will decide about that in the morning.”
Mirielle looked out the infirmary window. The night sky was a pale predawn purple.
“You should get some sleep,” Sister Verena said. “And a shower.”
“But I—”
“You can come back and help again when you’re rested.”
“You’re not gonna throw me in jail for absconding?”
Sister Verena’s lips twitched in what might have been a smile. “Not tonight.”
Mirielle stood and retrieved her purse from beside the sink where she’d left it. She was halfway to the door when she stopped and turned around. Withdrawing the St. Christopher medal from her purse, she walked back and handed it to Sister Verena. “Thank you.”
“I’m glad he saw the two of you safely home.”
“How did you know I’d go in search of Jean, not back to California?”
“I didn’t.” Her long, slender fingers closed around the medal. “I just had faith.”
Mirielle nodded slowly. Maybe that was the best any of them could do. Too bad her own faith was in such short supply. She started for the door, making it only a few steps before Sister Katherine rushed in.
“Another bulletin from Dr. Ross,” she said, panting and waving a piece of paper above her head.
Sister
Verena scowled, stalking over and plucking the paper from the sister’s hand. “There’s no need to cause a scene.” But as she read the bulletin, her expression darkened.
The sisters gathered around. Mirielle inched closer too.
“What does it say?” Sister Loretta asked.
“The levee at Plaquemine Point is about to break.” She handed the paper back to Sister Katherine, her gaze fixed on the distant wall. The others stared at her expectantly. One of the patients several beds down from Jean gave a wet cough. Another stirred and moaned.
“We need to ready the patients,” she said at last. “Everyone must have a pillow, blanket, and change of clothes set aside should the order for evacuation be given.” She took a few steps toward the door, the other sisters following behind like goslings, then stopped abruptly. “We’ll need several days’ worth of food and medicine set aside too. Stretchers arranged for blind and bed-bound patients. A ramp built from the road to the top of the levee for those in wheelchairs. And then there are our patients in the infirmary. Someone needs to remain here and—” She turned and collided with the gaggle of nuns behind her.
Mirielle would have laughed, had the situation not been so dire.
“Sister Katherine, wake the rest of the personnel and inform them of Dr. Ross’s bulletin. Sister Loretta, you . . .”
Mirielle listened as Sister Verena doled out orders, noting how the infirmary staff grew fewer and fewer. At this rate, no one would be left to care for Jean and the others.
“I’ll help,” Mirielle interrupted. “I can spread the word among the residents.”
Sister Verena regarded her with a wary expression, but at last nodded. “Take care not to start a panic.”
CHAPTER 67
Panic had already taken root without the residents even knowing about the perilous conditions at Plaquemine Point. The early risers whom Mirielle passed on the way from the infirmary were so concerned with the swelling river that they didn’t even ask where she’d been and why the devil she was back. Under normal circumstances, gossip like that was better than being first in line for Christmas dinner. Heeding Sister Verena’s words, she didn’t say anything about the bulletin but told them to go back to their rooms and expect an update from their house orderlies soon.
The Second Life of Mirielle West Page 36