by Linda Hilton
“Well, you’re damned close to it.” He came up behind her, but she didn’t move. “What time is it, anyway?”
“A little past eleven o’clock. And must you stand so close to me?”
“When you’re blocking my door, yes.”
She jumped out of his way.
“Thank you.” He sidled past her into the hallway and headed for the stairs. “I don’t suppose you fixed my breakfast or heated my shaving water, did you.”
“I most certainly did not,” Julie snorted. “I’m your nurse, not your…your wife.”
She drew in a sharp breath, but of course by then the words were already out and beyond recall.
“I’m sorry,” she quickly apologized.
He stood at the bottom of the stairs and hung one hand over the banister. Very slowly he raised his head and looked at her. If her words hadn’t brought enough of a blush to her cheeks, that steady gaze of his burned like a brand.
“I’ll just bet you are,” he said softly.
She froze, both mentally and physically, until he turned and strode toward the kitchen. Then, embarrassed and afraid he would dismiss her from the job she had barely begun, Julie ran after him.
“I am sorry,” she called, following him through the house. “I was angry and I said something I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been so furious with you.”
“You were furious? What the hell for?”
“Because you were drunk again. But now I—”
“Haven’t I got a right to a drink or two now and then? Even a doctor is entitled to a glass of whisky.” A glass, maybe, but not a whole bottle, and Morgan knew that as well as she.
“Yes, I agree, and after yesterday I should have realized that you’d be tired and want to sleep late.”
She stopped in the arched entrance between the parlor and the kitchen. Morgan, still barefoot, tossed a handful of kindling in the stove and struck a match on the top. He moved too quickly and the tiny flame went out before he could touch it to the shavings and torn paper. He swore again, using slightly less offensive terms but muttering them quite clearly.
Julie didn’t protest, because she suspected he was trying to anger her further and she wasn’t about to take his bait.
The second match flared and the kindling caught instantly. After adding a few small sticks from the woodbox, Morgan straightened and spun to face the girl.
“After yesterday it’s a wonder I got up at all.”
“I know it must be terribly frustrating to spend so much time and effort on a man only to have him die, but surely after all this time you must be somewhat accustomed to it.”
She knew she had once again said the most wrong thing possible. His eyes told her, their green turning to black and the little spots of gold catching fire like the crackling tinder in the stove.
“I don’t ever get accustomed to death, Miss Hollstrom. The man who does doesn’t deserve to practice medicine.” He took a step toward her, his eyes rendering her immobile. “It is because I can’t get used to it that I opened that bottle of scotch last night, a bottle that I might add I got from Horace’s bedroom. He may have treated himself to more expensive liquor than I could afford, but he was no teetotaler, believe me.”
He stood so close now that she could look up and see each individual black whisker on his chin. His bare toes just touched the hem of her skirt. Yet try as she would, and she did, she couldn’t back away from him. She knew he would only follow her.
“I do believe you,” she whispered.
Just as abruptly as he had stormed toward her, he retreated, leaving her breathless and gasping.
He opened a cupboard and took down a small can of coffee. After lifting the coffee pot from the stove and feeling it full, he took it to the back door and tossed the contents into the yard. Julie heard him jerk the pump handle up and down several times before the water splashed out. When he came in again, the pot was full and his feet and pant cuffs were wet. He left dark footprints on the tile.
“If you’ll just tell me where the key to the office is, I’ll leave you to your breakfast,” Julie said in as calm a voice as she could command at that moment. She was having a very difficult time finding a direction to fix her gaze, for no matter where she looked at Del Morgan, she saw things she didn’t want to see.
He didn’t turn from his task of measuring coffee into the pot.
“It’s in my coat pocket. Upstairs in the bedroom, on the back of the chair.”
“Thank you,” she mumbled as she finally regained the use of her legs and left him.
If she had thought for half a second before scurrying out of the kitchen, she wouldn’t have had the nerve to enter his bedroom, but now she was there and there was nothing to do but find the key and get out of his house.
The coat lay where he said it was, and in the semi-darkness Julie fumbled through each of the many pockets until she found the heavy key that belonged to the front door of Dr. Opper’s house. She dropped it into her own pocket and then put the coat back exactly the way she had found it. It should have been hung up; it would be wrinkled when he put it on again. But that wasn’t any of her concern, she told herself sharply. She was, as she had said earlier, his nurse, not his wife.
She walked over to the toppled bottle and picked it up. If she had had a wet rag, she would have mopped up the sticky spill, but saving Morgan from injury on the bottle, which he might have tripped over in the dark, was enough. She set it on the table beside his bed.
The photograph lay in a worn cardboard frame, and even as Julie reached for it, she knew she shouldn’t. Though her eyes had adjusted to the shadowy light and she removed the annoying spectacles, she could see very little, but even a little was enough. More than enough.
No doubt he had stared at that picture while he drank last night. It was a wedding portrait, the bride smiling radiantly in her satin dress and filmy veil. Her hand, which displayed a new gold band, covered her husband’s, which rested protectively on her shoulder.
Morgan hadn’t changed much, she decided. He looked just as tall and rangy, perhaps a bit heavier. The moustache made him look older then than he did now without it, and Julie wondered why he had shaved it off. Had Amy asked him to?
Julie might have hated another woman who looked like Amy Morgan, or at the very least been painfully envious. Even in this small portrait, viewed in miserably inadequate light, the woman’s beauty could not be missed. Dark hair was swept up in a mass of curls that tumbled almost freely around her face. She had lovely hands, small with elegant fingers, and her eyes fairly sparkled on the paper. Julie knew the smile that flickered on Amy’s lips, restrained for the portrait, was as genuine and fresh as the roses that lay on her lap. Red roses, even in the dull sepia tint of the photograph.
Julie carefully put the picture back where she had found it and turned to leave the room. She had just reached the door when Morgan appeared at the head of the stairs.
“Did you find it?” he asked.
“Did I…? Oh, the key. Yes, I found it,” she stammered, uncomfortably aware of the little lump in her throat.
“You were up here so long I thought maybe I had put it somewhere else and you couldn’t find it.” He went back down the stairs but halfway to the bottom, he stopped suddenly and turned. Julie, following, nearly ran into him.
Looking down at him was a thousand times more disturbing than looking up at him. She tried to back away, tripped on the stair and her skirt, and sat down painfully and humiliatingly on the top step. Morgan didn’t move, not to prevent her fall or to help her to her feet again.
He stared blatantly at her face.
Aware of his scrutiny, Julie touched quivering fingertips to her cheeks and asked, “What’s wrong?”
His eyes roved her features anxiously, but his voice carried no emotion.
“You’ve lost your glasses again, and you’ve been crying.”
She turned a deeper crimson, but by then Morgan had rushed past her and couldn’t see.
&nbs
p; Julie scrambled to her feet and dashed down three or four of the stairs before she stopped, realizing she couldn’t leave. If she went home without the glasses, there would be too many explanations, not only of how she’d lost the spectacles but of why she couldn’t seem to stop crying. Slowly, she remounted the stairs to the balcony-like corridor.
As she had done when she first entered the house, she waited in the doorway and watched him. He must have felt her gaze, for he spun around almost instantly, and she saw he was holding both her forgotten spectacles and the portrait.
He threw the glasses at her. She caught them easily, relieved that they were neither broken nor bent, but she did not put them on.
“I don’t know which makes me more angry, that you lied to me or that you were spying on me.”
“I wasn’t spying,” Julie protested. “I didn’t want you to fall on the bottle and get hurt, so I picked it up and—”
“And there was my wife’s picture, so you thought you’d just look at it a while.”
“She’s very lovely.” Tears flooded the great round brown eyes. “I’m sorry, really I am. I didn’t mean any harm.”
He lifted the photograph and let it bring back the memory of that day. No tears came to his eyes.
“That’s what they said when that kid shot her. ‘He didn’t mean any harm.’”
Julie’s knees melted, then solidified again as she grabbed the doorframe for support. She doubted Morgan would have noticed if she fell.
“Please,” she begged, trying to bring him out of his gloomy memories. With the spectacles once more in her possession, she could have fled the house and gone home, but there remained still her tears to be explained. And she could not have left Morgan alone.
He pulled a match from a hip pocket and struck it on the wall, chipping a piece of stucco in the process. Without letting the picture out of his hand, he lit the lamp and set the chimney down over the low flame. When he was certain it would hold, he turned it up, bathing the room in harsh light.
“You want to know about her, don’t you, Julie.”
“Yes,” she admitted, too numb to think straight, then she stammered, “No, please, don’t talk now. I’m sorry, for everything. For coming here, for looking at her picture, for lying about the glasses. I’ll leave, and I won’t come back, and I—”
“Stop it, Julie.”
His free hand gripped her shoulder firmly, though she wasn’t aware of having approached him until that instant. She must have walked toward him while she babbled her frantic apology, for Morgan hadn’t moved from his place by the table and Julie now stood directly in front of him.
The tears continued to drip down her cheeks and a warm longing grew inside her. She wanted to comfort him, to hold him in her arms and console him for the loss that left such pain in his eyes. And she wanted to be held, too, to feel more than just his hand on her shoulder. Other needs, other wants, could not be so clearly defined, but she felt them and recognized them just the same. As forbidden as they were, she could not deny them.
Angrily, as though he had seen those shameful desires in her brimming eyes, Morgan shoved her away from him. She fell back a step or two and buried her face in her hands as the silent tears changed to sobs.
“Damnit, Julie!” he shouted. “I don’t like living like this. I want to go back to the way it was, back to forgetting, back to all the nothingness.” He looked about him for something to throw, not at her but just to feel the satisfaction of destroying something. There was only the whisky bottle.
“Yesterday was our wedding anniversary,” he went on. “Twelve years ago, on the first day of July, Miss Amalia St. Rogers and Dr. Delbert Morgan were united in holy matrimony. Cincinnati rocked with the celebration, and with the shock. Adam St. Rogers was one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the city. Still is. Banker, industrialist, war hero, manipulator of politics and politicians throughout the state of Ohio. And yet he let his only daughter marry me. He gave her away proudly to the son of a Welsh coal miner.”
“But she loved you, didn’t she.”
“Yes, she did. And I loved her.” He stared down at the portrait again and shook his head. “Or at least I thought I did. But how can a man love a woman and then bring her out to a place like this to die? I should have stayed in Cincinnati, let her father put me in some silly office in the bank, and Amy would still be alive, still be happy.” He sighed, but none of the anger left him. He picked up the whisky bottle and flung it across the room.
Glass shattered and sparkled, but neither the man nor the woman moved. When the last little twinkling had faded, Julie turned to leave.
“No!” Morgan shouted at her.
She froze.
“You wanted to hear this; now you’re going to listen. And look at me when I’m speaking to you!”
Julie was thankful for the thick adobe walls. If this had been an ordinary frame house like her father’s, every word of this conversation would have gone through the walls. Here, the secrets remained.
“Amy died out in the street, right in front of your house. Some miners had just come into town after hitting a big strike and they were celebrating, dancing, shooting, not hurting anything. But some fool kid on the stage thought it was a hold-up. They said he thought he would be a hero and save the town from the robbers. Truth is, it’s just sheer damned luck when a marksman can hit anything but air when he fires from a moving vehicle, but this kid acted like it was the first time he’d ever held a gun in his hand. He shot twice. One of those shots hit Amy.”
“No, no more,” Julie pleaded. “I can’t stand it, and neither can you.”
“Can’t I?” he asked, his voice gentle now and quiet. “I’ve been standing it every day, every second, for damn near six years. I was sitting in front of McCrory’s, waiting for her, watching her come towards me. She just crumpled like a puppet whose strings have been cut. I ran to her, even though I knew I couldn’t do anything. I don’t think—and I’ve prayed a million times that I was right—that she felt anything. I’m sure she was dead before she fell.”
Julie didn’t think; she couldn’t. Pain and memories of her own welled up in her chest and spilled over with a harsh cry. She could see the street, the dust and the sun and Amy Morgan lying in her blood with her husband kneeling beside her. It hurt too much to bear.
He was warm and he was strong and he was shaking when Julie’s arms went around him, drawing him into an embrace she could not prevent. Where his shirt gapped unbuttoned, her cheek rested against his bare chest, the dark hairs coarse and irritating on her skin. But she felt only the essence of the man, not the small elements.
“Amy was eight months pregnant when she died. I carried her to the surgery myself, not trusting anyone else, and I tried for two days to save the baby I had taken from her body. I couldn’t even go to her funeral because I was trying to keep that tiny bit of her alive, but in the end I failed. I buried him myself. I opened up her coffin and put him in her arms.”
Chapter Thirteen
He could not weep, as if all the tears had finally been shed and there simply were none left. Only the sharp pain remained, and even it seemed to have lessened.
He held her, not remembering when his arms had circled themselves around her slender body and drawn her to him. He rested his gaunt, rough cheek against the smooth silk of her hair. He felt no stirring of forgotten emotions, no rising of lost hungers, only the warm comfort of the girl’s nearness and her tears on his chest.
For whom do you cry, Julie? he wanted to ask, but he knew no words would come from his constricted throat.
When her sobs subsided and her tears slowed to a mere trickle, he loosened his embrace and gently freed himself from hers. He shivered, deprived of her warmth.
“I never told anyone before,” he said. “And I thought you knew.”
She shook her head slowly.
“I wanted to ask you, but I didn’t want to pry.”
Her voice, like her embrace, was soft, and kind, and comfor
ting. When she looked at him, which she did only cautiously, he saw how deep the pain ran in her eyes. Tears had darkened her lashes and stuck them together in long, thin triangles above and below those brown eyes that reminded him so much of a terrified deer. Yet Julie Hollstrom hadn’t run away.
He wondered again what she was so afraid of.
He lifted a hand with intentions of wiping away the last tear that slid down her cheek, but he thought better of it.
“You go downstairs and pour us both some coffee while I get dressed a bit more decently,” he suggested. “Then we’ll go over to Horace’s and get to work, all right?”
In the kitchen, Julie found cups and saucers and poured the black bitter coffee into them. It was far too hot to drink, but the act of holding the cup and blowing gently on the mirrorlike surface calmed her.
She could think clearly now, without clouds of memory to obscure her rationality.
The senseless waste of Amy Morgan’s death would have driven another man insane. Julie considered it a mark of Morgan’s strength that he had merely turned to drink. Under the circumstances, madness would be expected and suicide hardly surprising. She remembered his words about being unable to accept death, and perhaps that was what had kept him from more disastrous reaction to losing Amy.
“Yoo-hoo, anybody home?”
Julie jumped at the sound of Winnie’s voice. Before she could call a greeting and invite the neighbor in, Winnie had already walked through the house and entered the kitchen.
“I saw you come up here a little while ago, but I was in the middle of making beds or I would have come sooner. Oh, good, the coffee’s hot. Don’t get up, Miss Hollstrom, I know where the cups and the sugar are. Dr. Morgan takes his black, but he makes it too strong for me. Or did you make this?”
“No, he did.” Julie sniffed as quietly as she could and hoped Winnie didn’t notice.
Winnie took a sip of the coffee and laughed, “I can see he did! I think I could write a letter to my sister with this!” She pulled out the other chair and sat down across the table from Julie. “Sure was a shame about that old miner dying yesterday after you worked so hard to keep him alive. No wonder Dr. Morgan took to his bottle again last night.”