The thought made the pastor sick.
***
Just before dawn, Justus Cooper left Josiah Washington’s house and walked through the silent streets toward the police station. The temperature had dipped during the night, and on the relatively short trek, Coop could see his breath misting before him.
When he reached the station, a tiny clapboard building set apart from the rest, he unlocked and went in, after a moment’s pause; from here, the Carter property was fully visible up on its hill.
A light shone in one window.
Inside, Coop thought of the German. John Murphy said he wasn’t the type who liked visitors. While Coop respected that, he didn’t feel right not meeting a new resident.
Speaking of Murphy, he’d acted mighty strange the day before. Usually he was a gay type of man, but yesterday he seemed melancholy, almost.
We all have our moments, Coop thought. Now, when am I gonna see Mimi Baker?
Coop sighed. He’d have to see her today, just to mollify the old pastor. Maybe he even could.
***
Josiah Washington was asleep when Justus Cooper left, but less than an hour later, he was awake and dressed, sitting in his parlor across from John Murphy, who was pale and gaunt. He listened intently as Murphy told him of the nightmares and the subsequent weakness. In fact, he didn’t make the journey to Washington’s office on his own; apparently, he collapsed on his doorstep, and two passing ranch hands in town on vacation helped him over.
“Do you feel ill in any other way?” Washington asked when Murphy fell silent.
“No,” Murphy replied, “I feel fine, I’m not queasy. I don’t have a headache. I just feel so weak.”
Murphy punctuated this with a cough.
Washington noted the blood on Murphy’s lips.
Consumption.
***
Later, Washington helped Murphy back home and into bed. As he was drawing the covers to the man’s chin, he noted two tiny puncture marks on his neck. Odd.
He ordered Murphy to stay in bed and drink plenty of water, and then went back to his office. He’d check on Murphy periodically throughout the day. If he was consumptive, there was little he could do.
The only problem was Murphy had never shown any signs of having consumption. In fact, he was perfectly hale and healthy until just now. Like most illnesses, consumption gradually progressed, getting worse over time. It didn’t just show up in full force like the army.
***
At noon, Justus Cooper knocked on Mimi Baker’s front door. While he waited, he looked several times over his shoulder, at Pastor Hanskill’s house. If the old man wasn’t at the church, he’d most likely be inside, spying on everyone.
Just as Coop was about to knock again, the door opened, and Mimi Baker smiled. Short, plump, and matronly, Mimi Baker was in her high fifties, and as sweet as sugar. Just looking at her, Coop felt foolish.
“Sheriff Cooper! How nice to see you.”
“Hi, Mimi. Mind if I come in?”
“Of course! Come in! Come in!”
Coop hazarded one last glance over his shoulder, and then stepped into Mimi Baker’s home.
In the parlor, Mimi insisted on serving him tea and biscuits, and he felt rude refusing, so he took them and enjoyed them.
“I have a couple of questions for you, Mimi,” Coop said, “nothin lawmanlike, just neighborly.”
Mimi smiled. “Ask me whatever you want, dear.”
Coop couldn’t help but smile. “Alright. I’ve heard tell there’re lots of people comin and goin at all hours of the day and night since Roy died. You got relatives?”
Mimi smiled again, smaller and weaker this time at the mention of her late husband. “Since Roy died, I’ve been in a way with money.”
Coop nodded.
“And the company won’t even compensate me.”
Coop nodded again. “These biscuits are really good.”
“Thank you. Since Roy died, I been taking in strangers for the night.”
“Boardinghouse?”
She shrugged. “More or less. Mainly friends of friends.”
Coop laughed. “Thank God.”
***
Pastor Hanskill was standing on his porch, his arms sternly crossed, when Coop came out. Sighing, Coop hitched up his belt and walked across the street.
“Well, sheriff?” Hanskill asked.
“She’s boarding folks,” Coop said.
Hanskill snorted. “Harlots.”
“No,” Coop said patiently, “regular folks.”
Hanskill glared. “Sheriff Cooper, you don’t really expect me to believe that, do you? You surely don’t believe it yourself, do you?”
“I do,” Coop said, hardening his voice, “and that’s all I’ll hear on the matter. Understood?”
With that, Coop walked away.
***
When Josiah Washington returned to John Murphy’s house at noon, he found the man dead.
-2-
“I don’t get it,” Washington said.
It was after midnight, and he and Coop were lying in bed, fully clothed, Washington lost in the sheriff’s burly arms.
“He sure didn’t seem like himself the last time I saw him,” Coop said.
“It looked like consumption,” Washington went on, seeming to ignore Coop’s observation, “but it moved far too quickly. Then there were the dreams, and the marks on his neck.”
“You never seen anything like it?”
“No,” Washington replied. “I went through all my books this afternoon, and I couldn’t find anything. Nothing matched. Not exactly.”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I, and that troubles me.”
“Could be some freak thing. Hereditary or something.”
Washington shrugged. “Perhaps. He doesn’t have any family, or else I’d talk to them.”
John Murphy, by his own account, came directly from Ireland in the 1840s, landing in New York City. He left there in 1855 and moved west, landing first in the town of Freedom, Arizona, and then, finally, in Alura in 1858. Beyond that, the man was a mystery. He never married. Never spoke of any grown children or brothers or sisters. The hereditary theory, which Washington himself had thought of, was only that then, a theory, and would remain so in the absence of proof.
“I just hope it isn’t catching.”
“Me too.”
Washington half turned, and smiled at Coop. “Let’s go to bed.”
They did.
Vigorously.
***
The next morning, Coop left with the dawn, and Washington struggled to get back to sleep; without him, the bed was too big, too empty, and too cold.
At six or so, Washington got out of bed and went through his morning routine, dressing in a pair of faded brown trousers and a dark blue waistcoat over a white shirt. In the kitchen, he made a cup of coffee and a plat of bacon, both of which, upon completion, he brought to the parlor.
He had barely finished the first meaty strip when someone knocked on the door, shattering the morning stillness which had, hitherto, be nigh on perfect.
“Come in!”
The door creaked slowly open. “Hello?”
“In the parlor.”
The woman who stepped tentatively into the threshold was tall and almost cadaverously thin, her face white and her features sharp; her black hair was done up in a bun, and her black dress was homespun, and poorly so.
“Hello,” Washington greeted.
“Sir,” she said in halting English, “my son and my husband. They is sick. You must come.” She sounded Italian.
“What’s the matter with them?” Washington asked, setting aside his plate.
“They is sick. Cannot get out of bed. Please, you must come.”
“Alright,” Washington said as he stood. “Let me get my bag.”
***
Sheriff Justus Cooper walked slowly through the post-dawn quiet, thinking of Doctor Josiah Washington. Coop first met
the doctor several days after he arrived in town. A young man, in a fit of lovelorn melancholia, shot the young lady who had rejected his advances, and then shot himself. Coop was the first to arrive on the scene, and held the girl’s hand until the stately doctor appeared, backlit against the pounding desert sun, his trusty cracked leather bag in his hand.
“Sheriff?”
“Yes,” Coop replied, looking up and squinting.
“I’m Doctor Washington.”
The doctor knelt down Coop was amazed at his color. A black man? The doctor?
Black or not, Washington deftly performed on the girl, saving her life right there in the dust of Main Street.
After, when the girl had been taken away to the hospital in Emerson, ten miles across the arid Mojave, Coop and Washington shook, their hands lingering too long, their eyes meeting and holding a tad too intensely.
Something passed between them on that first meeting, a secret knowledge, a mutual understanding. Coop felt himself drawn to the black man in a way he’d never been drawn to any man before.
By the end of the week, they were lovers, meeting clandestinely under the cover of darkness, or on the pretense of business. Coop was acutely aware of what discovery would mean, but, at the same time, he yearned to come out of the shadows, to stop worrying about prying eyes and wagging tongues. He wanted to declare his love for Doc Washington, to let the entire world know.
But that was impossible. Here, in Alura. Maybe they could lose themselves in one of the big cities, San Francisco, Phoenix, even Boston, but not here.
Coop sighed.
By now, the streets had begun to come alive. Coop reached his office just as the first carts of the day appeared on the street, drawn by tired looking steeds.
Coop took out his key and was just about to insert it into the lock when Thomas Rockway, the manager of the Union Inn, shouted from across the way.
“Sheriff!”
Coop turned, and the man, tall and soft-faced, was already on the bottom step, his face flush and slick with sweat.
“Sheriff! Something’s happened! Hurry!”
Coop held up a hand. “Slow down, Tom. What’s going on?”
Panting, Tom spat it out, “Mr. and Mrs. Dixon are dead.”
“What?”
Tom nodded.
Horatio and Sarah Dixon owned the Union Inn; they made one of the rooms their home, and rarely ever left the confines of the hotel.
“Come on,” Tom said. “I think they were murdered.”
***
The Italian woman led Josiah Washington to a haphazard little hovel across town. Inside, Washington found the son and the father on separate beds in the same (sole) room.
“Please,” the woman begged, “help them.”
Washington knelt beside the boy, who was small ad frail under the thin, woolen blanket.
“Son?” Washington asked. “Son? Can you hear me?”
The boy’s eyes fluttered behind his lids, and his bluish lips parted slightly.
Washington touched the boy’s forehead. Cool but not cold. Good. Next, he turned he his head slightly to the side, and gasped at what he saw.
Two angry red puncture wounds, rimmed in pink.
Washington tried to breathe, but his lungs were locked.
It was catching.
***
Sheriff Justus Coop followed Thomas Rockway to the Union Inn, his mind whirling. Murdered? Murder? But why?
Alura hadn’t seen a murder in nearly six months, something upon which Coop placed a great deal of personal pride. Now, however, two people were dead and the man who found them claimed it was murder.
Goddamn.
The lobby of the Union Inn was dark and desolate at this hour, the strategically placed oil lamps low and casting flickering shadows across the shining wood-paneled walls.
“Mr. and Mrs. Dixon rise every morning promptly at five,” Thomas explained as they went. “I was worried when it was five-thirty and I hadn’t seen them yet. At six, I knocked on their door. No one answered. I went in, afraid that something was wrong, and...”
The Dixon’s kept their room on the second floor, last on the left; the door was standing open.
Thomas fetched an oil lamp, and led Coop into the darkened room. In the weak glow of the light, he saw two armchairs, a dresser, a wardrobe, and a bed all tastefully arranged. On the bed, under the quilt, two lumps, unmoving.
“Did you check them before you came running to me?”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “They’re dead.”
Coop went over to one of the bodies and checked for himself. Mrs. Dixon. Her white face was drawn and shriveled; her eyes bulged from their sockets; her mouth was open, and her gums had shrunken so drastically that her teeth looked ten times their normal size.
“Holy Jesus,” Coop muttered.
“They didn’t look like that when I saw them last. Look on her neck.”
Coop did, and saw two marks.
Just like John Murphy.
***
Josiah Washington had just finished with the Italian family when Justus Coop appeared at his door.
“We need you in town.”
“Why?”
“Something’s happened.”
As they walked, Coop told him about the Dixons. Washington in turn told him about the Italians.
“Looks like we got the makings of an epidemic,” Coop noted sourly.
Washington nodded. “Unfortunately.”
In the Dixons’ room at the Union Inn, Washington was taken aback by the condition of the bodies. “It looks like they’ve been completely drained.”
“Doesn’t it, though?”
“They must have contracted whatever this is some time ago. Their condition is astounding,”
“I swear on my mother’s grave, Doctor,” Thomas said, “they were hale and healthy just last night.”
“This is bad.”
***
An hour or so later, after Coop had left, the undertaker, a tall, dour, Lincolnesque man named Millard Foreman, arrived with his assistant, a swarthy Eastern European boy. Foreman, nearly the ripe old age of fifty-five, had been handling Alura’s dead ever since he came to town in 1862; before that, he headed a grave detail for the Union army. He was just as stumped as Washington.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. The boy, at his side, was nervous, and fidgeted the entire time. “Consumption...maybe, but if it is, it’s a new kind I’ve never heard of.”
“First John Murphy and now these two. Plus I’ve seen two more cases just this morning.”
“You’re saying we’re dealing with an outbreak?”
Washington nodded.
Foreman sighed. “I don’t like outbreaks.”
“Neither do I,” Washington concurred; when he was twelve, Washington’s parents and older sister died in a yellow fever epidemic in New York City. Their deaths traumatized him no doubt, but he also remembered the other deaths, dozens of them, men, women, and children succumbing in hours. To a young boy, it felt like the end the world. Armageddon.
He’d dealt with other outbreaks over the years, but he was scared to death each time, struggling to do his duty through a thousand gallons of inexplicable terror.
Now was no different.
Washington was getting scared.
***
Coop had barely made it back to the office when David Hermon, who worked the nightshift at the train station, accosted him in a state of panic.
“Sheriff! I need you!”
Coop sagged. What now?
Out loud, “What’s the matter?”
“My wife,” David breathed, “she’s missing.”
“Missing?”
David nodded. “She was sick last night, but I had to go to work, so I left her alone, and when I got back this morning, she was gone. I couldn’t find her anywhere.”
“You said she was sick. How?”
David looked lost. “I don’t know. She...she just didn’t feel good. Tired
. Weak. I’m afraid she wandered off.”
“Alright. Calm down. I’ll get some men together and we’ll go look for her.”
***
Over the course of the afternoon, Josiah Washington saw nearly a half dozen patients with symptoms similar to John Murphy’s, and with each one his anxiety grew. Thankfully, or so it seemed, none of the people who came into his office were as bad off as Murphy had been, or even the Italians.
Of course, that didn’t mean much.
All Washington could prescribe was bed rest and plenty of fluids.
Hopefully he could stop this thing in its tracks.
***
A team of ten volunteers, including Justus Cooper, scoured the desert around Alura, but, by dusk, none of them had found Mary Hermon.
“We’ll pick it up again tomorrow,” Coop told the searchers, which included Joshua Greene and Barney Parker.
“We can’t just leave her out there!” David protested.
“There’s nothing more we can do right now,” Coop told him evenly. “We have to wait ‘til morning.”
“You can wait. I’m not stopping.”
No one ever saw Dave Hermon again.
***
That night, Coop and Washington decided to sleep apart, lest any midnight patients discover their affair.
They were reluctant to part, and spent several hours in the parlor, chatting by candlelight.
“If this keeps up, we’ll have to talk to the Governor,” Washington said. “They’ll have to send in real doctors.”
“You are a real doctor.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“We won’t be able to handle this on our own. We’ll need specialists. Bigwigs. In the meantime, I think it would be prudent if you closed down the saloons and such.”
“Why?”
“To keep this thing from spreading.”
“We can’t just close down the entire town.”
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