“I’m sorry,” Cora whispered to the doctor’s hunched over form even though he couldn’t possibly hear her over the rising sound of his sobs.
Despite everything else Cora had witnessed that day, Ulrich’s reaction to his father had upset her the most. Partially because she felt responsible. If she hadn’t risen so quickly, that needle never would have snapped.
Neither Ulrich’s initial reaction nor his striking resemblance to Rolene was a reason for the doctor to shun him now. She shook her head. “He’s only a little boy, who’s got to be so scared right now. And he does love you, so much.”
Dr. Gettler straightened to his full height. “We both know that your sister’s death happened for a reason: it shed God’s light on the potential within you.”
Appalled by his abrupt shift of topic and utter cruelty, her mouth fell open. Unable to formulate a response, she simply stared at him. The air drying her lips and tongue felt as thick as a hand clamped over her mouth.
The rubber of his gloves made a scritching sound as he interlaced his fingers. “Similarly, Rolene’s and Ingrid’s deaths were also by God’s design. He wants me devoted to pinpointing the source of your immunities, which will benefit all His children. When Ulrich is older, he’ll understand.”
“Pinpointing? What does that mean?”
He cleared his throat in irritation. “Vaccines that can eradicate diseases; that needs to be my focus. Any effort to destroy your pathogens is time not spent finding a way to harvest and replicate your unique Antikörper—antibodies. The lives I’ll save will dwarf those lost from the fire. My Rolene and Ingrid, they’ll achieve immortality when I become one of the greats of microbiology.”
Cora could hardly catch her breath. Her heart pulsing, she squeezed out her words: “No, no, no! I have to get them out of me.”
“You must stop this selfishness,” he said with a hiss.
She flinched. But even if he were right, she doubted he would succeed before the increasingly potent germs overwhelmed her body’s defenses. “Let the Carnegie Lab help you.”
“They would only slow me down. I’ve made so much progress already.”
“What progress?” she huffed.
He rolled his eyes, suggesting she was too simple to understand.
He wants all the glory for himself, she realized and inhaled sharply. The smell of antiseptic fueled her anger.
“I’m not your prisoner,” she said through gritted teeth.
Surely, after reading about the tragedy at North Brother, her mam would open a letter from her. “At first light, I’ll write to my mother and tell her that you faked my death and forced me to wear the shroud. You’ll lose your position.”
“Coraline, you must put this nonsense out of your head. Eleanor has moved on. She thinks you’re deceased.”
“What?” She tried to sit up, and the dressing bloomed bright red. “No. You wrote her. About a chronic cough.”
He sighed heavily. “Unfortunately, because I filed your death certificate so soon after Maeve’s, the Health Department notified her during a single visit that both daughters had succumbed to typhus.”
The operating light above Cora began to sway, and its electric buzz grew louder. Although she knew it must be a trick of the mind, she ducked her head.
“But my letters. She must have known I was—” Pain shot through her abdomen, and the room blurred. “You filched them before they were posted, didn’t you?”
He swung the cart back beside the operating table. “Can you imagine the social unrest if your mother had gone public with a campaign to remove you from isolation? Cora, you’re a germ carrier. Rumors spread faster than typhus in those tenements, and we’ve tried so hard to stifle their fear of this sanatorium. When they hide their ill, we cannot prevent contagion. Do you really want an epidemic on your conscience?”
Of course not. Cora felt dizzy and nauseated. She covered her eyes with the crook of her elbow, trapping her tears against her flushed skin. Eleanor’s silence hadn’t resulted from her unwillingness to forgive. Although Cora should have felt relieved, an image of her mam, crumpling to the ground upon learning of both girls’ deaths, pinned her to the metal.
Her mother’s trade required the keeping of secrets; she could have been entrusted with this one. Also, Eleanor was a sensible woman; she would have understood the need for Cora to remain at the hospital until cured. If the doctor had consulted Cora, she would have explained this. How could he have done this to her? Especially before he’d lost his wife and daughter.
She pictured Rolene’s wedding band, now hidden beneath her mattress, and knew that tomorrow she would bury it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He exhaled. “I felt awful keeping it from you, but it was my cross to bear. I feared you’d be upset with me and wouldn’t cooperate.” “You were right,” she spat. “I’m done being your patient.”
The doctor shook his head. “You’re all I have left. I will not lose you, too.” He grabbed her shroud from a hook near the door and tossed it onto the foot of the examining table. “To the rest of the world, you’re dead, and so I’m all you have left. Don’t you see?”
A scalpel, wet with her blood, gleamed from his tray, and she imagined grabbing its ivory handle and driving the blade into his heart. No, she decided, she would stab him in the pancreas so the animalcules would have time to ravage his body before he died.
“Linnaeus will help me, or one of the nurses.”
He laughed, and the sound skittered across her bare skin. “Is that part of your fantasy, that he saves you?”
Cora dropped her gaze to the floor tiles. She hadn’t once mustered the courage to return Linnaeus’s greeting from twenty feet away as he strode past.
“Presuming you could manage a full sentence in his presence, you would risk infecting him?”
“None of the children I saved from the Slocum caught my germs.” Every evening she’d been watching the staff direct the new patients and hadn’t yet recognized a single face from the tragedy. Also, Emmett had been released to his father following two weeks in quarantine, during which he’d showed no signs of infection.
The doctor harrumphed. “That we know of. They could have been admitted to one of the hospitals in the city. Or died in their homes. After what they’d been through, why would their families have allowed them to be sent back here?”
Cora scrunched her eyes shut. For the past month, she’d been trying to block out those scenarios.
“Miss McSorley, I know you’re lonely, but you cannot give in to temptation,” he said as he cleaned his instruments.
“Then I’ll kill myself.” Even as the words passed her lips, she longed to draw them back.
His shoulders slumped. “That would be such an elegant end to this torture, for both of us, wouldn’t it? But we can’t take that easy path.” He packed up his physician’s kit, his daughter’s silver wristlet looped around its handle. “Because if we do, Rolene, Ingrid, Maeve—their deaths will have been in vain. You loved your sister. You still do. So, because of her you’ll endure, as will I.”
A tear seared her skin. She didn’t wipe the tear away. Let him see what he’s doing to me.
“I know the sacrifice is great.” He extended his gloved hand. “Mine is no less.”
Too weak to rise on her own, she begrudgingly accepted his assistance.
Her shoulder blades skidded along the cool metal, and her feet met the ground. To steady herself, she leaned against the table.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said, reaching into his bag, and set a magazine beside her.
He stripped off his protective gear, leaving it in a bin near the door, and donned his boater hat. Without another word, he left the room.
Only after the door had clicked shut did she look down. The Lost Cache. A Tale of Hid Treasure. Otto had given her the ninety-first installment in Beadle’s
Dime Novel Series as recompense for his ninety-first procedure on her. Cora gripped two of its opposing corners, ready to tear its pages, yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She cherished these stories. Without them, what would she have left to love?
Squinting to hold back more tears, she pulled on her covering.
The garment landed on her shoulders; through the hood, she glimpsed the bloodied scalpel, forgotten in the corner of the medical cart.
2007
More than four decades since solitary confinement was last prescribed for
Riverside Hospital’s drug-addicted teens
August 7
hat the hell?” Finn said loudly enough to be heard through the glass observation window. “Unlock the door!”
“Chill out,” the scarred woman said from beyond view. “Yelling won’t do you any good. Just like it didn’t help the teenage junkies who were locked in here during the fifties—man, did they scream. So will you.”
His vision blurred, and for a moment he could almost see the rebels surrounding him and his interpreter. That day in 2002, when he’d convinced their leader to allow Finn’s civilian relief team to evacuate Ferkessedougou, still caused him to wake during the night.
Slowly exhaling, he reminded himself that those diplomacy skills could help him here, too. And his street smarts—a trait that had helped him make friends as a skinny, rich white boy in a New York City public high school.
“You certainly know your local history.” He whistled.
“History was one of my favorite subjects,” she replied, still out of sight. “That and grammar, which you already know—knew.”
If I could make eye contact, this would be a hell of a lot easier, he thought. Casually, he moved closer to the glass—the first unbroken pane he’d seen since stepping ashore seven hours ago. “I think both are right.”
“I know that,” she snapped.
“Or knew that?” he said, smiling.
She didn’t respond.
“Irregardless,” he said to even the error count, “you outwitted me. I thought you were by the docks.”
“It’s regardless. And it’s called a diversion. That canoe washed ashore in a storm years ago. I’d been saving it for—” She coughed, that deep, hacking sound.
Years ago? If that were the case, she could be the woman in my mom’s note, Finn thought. Prolonged asbestos exposure would explain the cough.
He had to get himself out of this shitstorm before Lily became so worried that she called Kristian. To buy himself more time, he should text her that the river was becoming too choppy so he’d have to stay until the following night. He slid his phone from his pocket.
“No,” the woman said as if addressing a dog, “I’ll take that, and the knife.”
Finn flinched. Although he could never harm her, the corkscrew would be perfect for digging through the wall if it came to that. “It’s got sentimental value.”
“The dead have no need for sentiment.”
His muscles tensed, and he refused to show any reaction.
Her face appeared in the window.
This close, he could tell that the white marks speckling her tanned cheeks were scars. Yet somehow, they didn’t detract from her beauty. Those spots, coupled with the burned red tinge to her brown hair and slightly upturned nose, gave her an Irish air. And, those eyes. Even through the mesh, he could make out the long lashes that framed them.
The fact that she was so pretty unsettled him. He knew that he would have been equally concerned for her if she weren’t as attractive, yet he still felt guilty for the urge to protect her that swelled within him each time he looked at her.
“Put everything by the door, now,” she said as he noticed a smudge of dirt on her chin. Or chocolate.
“Did you like the Toblerone?”
She responded with a rap on the window.
Without his gear, he would be completely at her mercy. Banking on the fact that it had been a while since her last real meal, he shrugged off his pack. “Sure, but first: I brought you—”
“My scalpel?”
He flinched. It was sitting in the back of his desk drawer. “Sorry. You have so many.”
“That one with the ivory is special.”
Of course it is, he thought, trying not to roll his eyes. “That ivory is why African elephants are endangered.”
She furrowed her brow. “I’ve got nothing to do with that, if it’s even true. For twenty-five years, it was my only one. To get the rest back”—she shook her pouch, and the metal within jangled—“I had to kill.”
He sucked in air through his teeth. Although she obviously couldn’t be that old, he did believe her capable of murder. “If you let me go, I’ll return it, I swear.”
“So, you’re willing to barter.” She crossed her arms over her chest, and Finn averted his gaze from the gaping neckline of her tank top.
“If you tell me where the tunnel is, I’ll let you go. Then you can drop my blade off on the dock.”
“A tunnel? Here?”
“You think I’m that stupid?” she spat and ducked out of sight.
His finger found the power button on his phone.
“C’mon,” he whispered as it stirred to life, his eyes darting.
A dark, hooded figure appeared at the observation window, and Finn reeled backward.
She was wearing a World War II–era gas mask; his heart thudded faster.
I’m too late. This woman had been damaged beyond repair. And now he would suffer the retribution.
The panic rising in his chest demanded air. Finn allowed himself a shallow breath, which triggered a need for more.
“Maybe now you’ll take me seriously,” she stated in a mechanical voice.
The bug eye windows and snout-like mouth filter, connected to a tube that snaked down her chest, made her look alien. Even more disturbing was the wholesale absence of emotion in her eyes as she stared him down.
“I told you, I don’t know anything about that,” he said, sliding the phone back into his pocket as a creeping realization solidified. He did know: when he’d been twelve, the night before July Fourth, he’d visited their storage unit in the basement to retrieve an American flag and had run into his dad. “Get back upstairs!” Rollie barked. Finn bolted, but not before glimpsing what looked like bundles of fireworks—or explosives.
The following day, Rollie left for North Brother Island before sunrise and returned after midnight. Kristian had gone with him, for the first time. Sylvia had taken Finn to the riverfront to watch the fireworks display. Devastated that he’d again been excluded, and irritated that he had no idea what they were doing with that dynamite, he’d barely noticed the fireworks. Sylvia must have been feeling equally distraught; she’d gripped his hand throughout the entire event. Although too old to be holding his mom’s hand in public, where he might run into a classmate, he’d done just that. Because he’d known that she needed him.
Finn hadn’t seen any evidence that they’d used the explosives aboveground. But nothing in the records he’d found supported her claim. “I’ve seen my dad’s map. There’s no tunnel on it.”
“I don’t believe you.” She raised a canister and tapped the glass, indicating he should look up.
Attached to the ceiling was a spigot. Holy shit.
He rushed to the fence that blocked him from the broken windows and gulped the humid air. Frantically, he tugged on the grate, but it wouldn’t budge. The gas would fill the room faster than it could escape through the latticework.
“There’s a major storm headed this way. You won’t be safe here. I brought a raft to get you out of here.”
The woman laughed, and the sound whistled through the tube of her ventilator. “Is that supposed to scare me? Hurricanes are my favorite weather.” She put her face to the mesh, and her ice-cold expression, thro
ugh the bulging eye windows, lacked humanity.
A pins-and-needles sensation seized his limbs.
“There’s got to be an entrance near the shore,” she clipped. “I know it connects to their secret laboratory, probably under one of the ruins. I’ve searched everywhere. It makes no sense.”
The journals hadn’t referenced an on-site facility, although it would be a safer destination for the bats than his father’s lab, in the back room of his medical practice.
She pressed the pages in his sketchbook with the map against the window. “Show me.”
To alleviate the tingling in his legs, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “If I’d known, don’t you think I would have marked it on there? Or better yet: used it?”
Clicking her tongue, she tilted her head. “Fair point, but it’s not my style to quit.” She strummed the canister. “You’ve got ten seconds to put everything, including your hat, by the door. Then put your hands on the fence, facing the forest.”
He touched his lucky cap. Lily had bought it for him during one of the Subway Series games they’d attended, and the Mets had won.
A pinging sounded.
She was tapping the canister.
Reluctantly, he set his stuff beside the door.
“Hands on the fence. Now.”
Clenching his jaw, he pressed his palms to the metal, hot from the direct sunlight.
When that door opened, he would charge her. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched for her to leave his line of sight.
She tapped the canister once more, a clear warning, and vanished from view.
Finn tensed, ready to spin and pounce.
Behind him, the hinges groaned, and he dove toward the exit.
The door slammed shut, and his shoulder met metal. He yelped in pain and frustration.
“I came to help you,” he said in a tone more bitter than he’d intended.
She didn’t respond or reappear.
With nothing else to do, he stalked over to the windows.
Outside, the herons had resettled, and the tree canopy rippled in the gathering wind. He might never walk back through that forgotten world. He might never leave this room.
The Vines Page 10