“We all do.”
Dr. Barker leaned in and kissed her neck.
Wolfgang wanted to crash through the window, but Susannah jumped up from her seat on the couch.
“How dare you?” She held her manuscript tighter.
“You’re making a fool of yourself, Susannah.” Dr. Barker stood, red-faced and seething. He pointed to the door. “You’re in love with a man you can’t have.”
Susannah paused and then hurried to the door. Wolfgang didn’t have time to leave now or he’d be seen. He stayed in his spot on the side porch of the cottage as Susannah burst out the front door. He watched her hurry toward the footpath. She stopped as if she had forgotten something and then looked up into the dark sky. Wolfgang looked up as well. Past the main sanatorium, thick, heavy clouds of billowing smoke hovered over the horizon. It hung over the colored hospital down the hillside.
Susannah turned and shouted. “Dr. Barker!”
A few seconds later, Dr. Barker stood on the front porch, hands on the railing, his eyes focused on the same smoke Susannah had seen. “Jesus.”
“I think the colored hospital is on fire.”
Susannah and Dr. Barker took off into the woods.
***
Wolfgang gave them a few seconds’ head start before heading off in the same direction. He quickly fell behind, feeling himself sober up, planning to tell them he saw the smoke too from the sanatorium. He limped quickly over the main road and hurried across the frozen mud and sloping grounds. He saw Abel standing next to the entrance portico on the south side of the sanatorium, dazed.
“Abel, what are you doing up?”
Abel didn’t answer. He stared into the woods, shivering. Wolfgang hugged the frightened boy and rubbed his back to warm him. “You need to go inside right now. Do you hear me, Abel? Go inside and warm yourself.”
Abel nodded. The wind ripped into Wolfgang’s face as he moved downhill, brushing aside tree branches in a rickety, ominous song. After another twenty yards Wolfgang heard footsteps. Branches moved and cracked. Lincoln emerged from another cluster of trees, huffing his way down the hill toward the smoke below. Wolfgang did a double take—the right side of Lincoln’s face was swollen, and a cut had scabbed beneath his right eye. “What happened to you?”
“I was attacked in the chute,” he said as they continued down the hill. “Someone knocked me out. I just came to and found the coffin empty.”
“What? They took a body?”
“No, Wolf. I was on my way up with another batch,” said Lincoln. “They broke the bottles. Must’a known when I get my stuff.”
When they finally burst into the clearing around the colored hospital, the wind blew a thick haze of smoke into Wolfgang’s face. Lincoln stormed ahead. Susannah was bent over in the grass, coughing. Wolfgang helped her up.
She looked at him. “I stopped by your cottage.”
“I was at the sanatorium.” Wolfgang crouched and shielded his eyes. Smoke swirled low as they stood on a slope overlooking the hospital. Nearly a hundred patients huddled in groups along the tree line as three men from the maintenance staff shot water from hoses toward the front of the hospital. The flames had been put out. Thick, dark, billowing smoke stretched up past the tips of the trees. The fire hadn’t been as bad as the smoke had made it appear, touching only the front entrance of the hospital. He searched the crowd for Smokey and found him sitting on the ground next to the tree line, his baseball bat resting on his thighs, staring at the smoke.
Dr. Barker stood about ten yards from the building, ushering an old black woman up the hill toward the others. Susannah watched. Soot and smoke darkened Susannah’s wet cheeks. She coughed again into her hand, still clutching the manuscript to her chest. When she saw Wolfgang looking at her pages, she started to offer an explanation of why she’d run through the woods with her prized book but then lowered her head and said nothing. Her chest rose and fell with deep gasps. This air was stifling.
Wolfgang touched her shoulder. “Susannah, go back up the hill. Check the sanatorium. Every bed. Every room. If anyone’s missing, we’ll know the reason why.” She nodded and ran back into the woods. “Start with the fourth floor,” Wolfgang shouted, watching as she disappeared into the darkness. Then he caught up with Lincoln, who was consoling a young boy who couldn’t find his mother. Only then did he realize that he’d just sent Susannah into the woods alone.
“Wolfgang?”
It was Rufus, hobbling up the incline, his boots crunching.
“Rufus, was anyone hurt?”
“No.” His breathing was labored. “We were lucky.” He held the flute in his left hand. Behind him, Wolfgang could see the damage to the charred front of the building was extensive. Water dripped from the eaves. The wooden posts had splinted and snapped in half. The roof had separated from the main building and drooped toward the ground. It would all have to be repaired quickly. “Dr. Barker was down here in a flash.”
Another question hit Wolfgang suddenly. “Where’s Fifteen?”
Rufus surveyed the surrounding woods. “Haven’t seen him.”
Lincoln approached. “Where’s Big Fifteen, Wolf? He would have been down here.”
“Yes, I know.” Wolfgang turned toward the woods up the hillside. “He would have…”
“What?” Lincoln asked.
Wolfgang’s eyes lit up. “They’ve stolen alcohol. Fifteen is missing. I think the fire was a diversion.”
Wolfgang hurried up the hillside. The alcohol in his body had worn off. He moved in fits and starts around the trees, unsure where to go but following Susannah’s general direction. A pungent odor emanated from somewhere in the woods, a nauseating but familiar stench. “You smell that, Lincoln?”
Lincoln wiggled his nose. “Smoke.”
“No, something more.” They continued on. They checked Big Fifteen’s dormitory but found it empty, everyone apparently down with the fire. Wolfgang moved farther up the hill, bouncing from tree to tree, he and Lincoln calling Big Fifteen’s name into the wind. Wolfgang sniffed, the sweet odor becoming more noticeable. “Ether. Lincoln, it’s ether.”
“I can smell it now. A whole truckload of it. And bourbon.” Lincoln grabbed Wolfgang’s arm. They stopped and listened. Someone was crying. Wolfgang followed the sound. It was a child.
Lincoln found him first, sitting with his back against a tree trunk, and called out to him. “Abel?” The boy’s face was muddy. Tears streaked the grime on his cheeks. His teeth chattered.
Wolfgang knelt beside the terrified boy and clutched his small shoulders. “What happened? Abel, what are you doing out here?”
Abel pointed to his left.
Lincoln darted off toward the trees to their right. “Oh my god.”
Big Fifteen’s massive bulk hung from the strained limb of a white oak. Fingers of light bled down from the moon above, spotlighting his body with light and shadow, darkness and blood. The ether and bourbon permeated Big Fifteen’s entire body as it rotated slightly from the tree limb. His red eyes bulged and his wet body trembled beneath the noose as empty bottles of bourbon littered the grass below.
Wolfgang felt nauseous. An ether-soaked towel rested on the grass next to the base of the tree, where another bottle leaned, half empty. Knocking him out with ether would have been the only way to move Big Fifteen’s body to such a position. But still, the strength it must have taken to get him up into the tree. How many men were responsible for this?
Lincoln ran to Big Fifteen, grabbed his swaying right foot, and tried to support his weight. Abel leapt from Wolfgang’s arms, ran to Big Fifteen, jumped up, and caught the swaying left foot. The tree limb cracked, then broke. Big Fifteen collapsed in a heap to the forest floor.
Wolfgang remembered cutting Rita down weeks ago, but this was no suicide. Wolfgang squatted beside Big Fifteen’s body, which reeked of ether, bourbon, and urine,
and felt for a pulse—and found one! His neck was a bloody mess, and wadded socks had been stuffed inside his mouth. Wolfgang pulled them out and draped his lab coat over the man’s waist. Big Fifteen moaned, his breathing shallow.
Lincoln knelt beside them. “They were gonna light ’im on fire, Wolf.”
Wolfgang remembered Big Fifteen carrying McVain’s lifeless body into the sanatorium the other night. Had that been the final straw? Was that his crime?
Big Fifteen’s eyes focused on Dr. Wolfgang Pike. “Boss?”
Wolfgang grinned. “Yes, Fifteen, it’s me. Boss.”
Big Fifteen smiled. His face and chest had been lacerated with slashes as if by whips or chains. How long had they tortured him?
“Boss…”
Wolfgang gripped both of his hands now. “Don’t talk. Lincoln, run for a stretcher and a couple of men—four men—to carry it. Find Jesse. Look in the chapel.” Lincoln ran off.
Just then Susannah emerged from the trees. Abel ran to her and hugged her. Susannah saw Big Fifteen’s body and dropped to the ground, crying.
Wolfgang checked Big Fifteen’s pulse again but felt almost nothing. He’d stopped fighting, stopped moving. His eyelids blinked. “My…my papa called me Boss… I…I respected my papa…” He choked, his chest rose from the frozen ground, and then his body settled. His eyes no longer moved.
Wolfgang, out of desperation, rolled Big Fifteen onto his stomach and positioned his friend’s head to the side, resting on the palms of both hands. He applied upward pressure at Big Fifteen’s elbows, slightly raising his upper body, hoping that the pressure on the back would force air into his lungs. But the attempt at resuscitation proved futile. Fifteen’s body was too big, the dead weight too heavy, the heart beat long gone. Wolfgang pounded the hard ground with his fist, closed Big Fifteen’s eyes and prayed over his body. Then he stood, weak-kneed and stiff, and hobbled over toward Susannah and Abel. His right foot was numb. He embraced them, and Susannah cried into his chest.
Moments later Lincoln arrived with Jesse and three men from the maintenance staff. Jesse peered from the shadows. “Dr. Pike. Is he dead?”
Wolfgang looked up from Big Fifteen’s body. “Yes, Jesse. He’s gone.”
Only then did Jesse move out of the darkness, stretcher in hand.
Chapter 28
Wolfgang stood at the private cemetery at the bottom of the hillside, where a dozen headstones stuck up from the ground, chipped and cracked, protruding like uneven teeth from the grassy gums of the earth. Every ambulatory patient from the colored hospital was there, as were many of the staff and a few of the white patients from the top of the hill. The sunlight shone brightly for Big Fifteen’s funeral. He would not go down Lincoln’s Death Tunnel.
Wolfgang said a prayer. Susannah knelt down and placed a handful of flowers over the grave, then slid her hand inside the bend of Wolfgang’s arm. Wolfgang watched her stare at Big Fifteen’s grave, crying quietly. He held her close, knowing that Dr. Barker stood watching them in the crowd.
“We will remember Big Fifteen wheeling his supply cart up and down the hillside three times a day, in the heat, in the cold, in the snow. We will remember his kind smile. His generosity. His big feet for which he was so appropriately named.” This drew laughter from the crowd. “Yet he had an even bigger heart.” Nodding from the onlookers. “His last moments will not be what we remember of him. Instead, they will be replaced by the memory of him running down Fourth Street toward Uncle Frank’s new Cadillac with Tad McVain draped over his shoulder.”
More laughter. Susannah squeezed his hand. They all stood silent, and then Wolfgang started the procession back up the hillside.
Susannah said, “When I was a little girl, my mother was robbed by a black man. It scared me. For years I had nightmares.” She glanced at Wolfgang before going on. “I loved Fifteen as you did. Just was afraid to show it.”
“I know,” said Wolfgang. “And Fifteen knew as well.”
Susannah smiled as they all walked up the hill.
Abel had seen nothing in the woods last night, and Susannah had no luck searching the sanatorium for missing patients. Because of the smoke and the noise down the hillside, most of the patients had been out of their beds gawking from the solarium porches. So either the murderers had been fast to get back or Wolfgang’s theory about their being patients was shaky. They’d found no white Klan robes, no whips or chains, only broken booze bottles up and down the steps of the chute. No guilty faces anywhere. The police came briefly to investigate the fire and Big Fifteen’s death, but they left the grounds quickly. “No dying patient could have done this,” they’d said.
“Not everyone here is dying,” Wolfgang had told them.
“Even so,” said the lead cop, a burly, yellow-haired man with a toothpick between his lips. He couldn’t stop glancing at the sanatorium’s façade the entire time.
They’d turned to leave, but Wolfgang wasn’t finished with them. “If Big Fifteen had been white, would you have tried harder?”
“Don’t push us, Father.”
***
Wolfgang walked back up the hillside, kicking various twigs from the footpath. The grass in the clearing was wet, soaking his black shoes. He opened the sanatorium’s front doors and entered the Grand Lobby, which was busy with nurses pushing new patients in wheelchairs, visitors talking, and a red-haired, middle-aged woman in a long beige coat standing with her hands clutching a blue purse. The woman looked up, noting Wolfgang with interest.
“Wolfgang.”
He stopped. She stepped forward hesitantly. He didn’t move. The woman reached out and grabbed his right hand.
“Wolfgang, it’s good to see you.”
Wolfgang slid his hand from her grip. “Mother, what are you doing here?”
“Is there somewhere we can talk?”
He studied her hands. They’d aged slightly in ten years. Her red hair was longer, curlier, and streaked with gray. Her eyes were marked with crow’s feet. She was still a pretty woman, though, and part of him wanted to embrace her, hug her as tightly as she used to hug him. Instead he motioned toward the front doors. “There’s a bench outside…in the sunshine, where it’s warmer.”
Outside, a black Model T was idling near the main road, with a dark-haired man in the driver’s seat. The man waved to Wolfgang, but Wolfgang ignored him. He assumed the man had come with his mother. Her driver? He didn’t want to know. Wolfgang led her to a wooden bench near the tree line. They sat together, with space between them. She squinted as she unbuttoned a few of her coat buttons. “The sun feels nice.”
Wolfgang nodded.
“You look good, Wolfgang.” He watched her from the corner of his eye but didn’t face her. “I like the beard. It’s very becoming.”
“What do you want, Mother?”
She folded her hands on her lap. “You used to call me Mom.”
He shot her a glance and then faced the sanatorium again. Her idling car puffed clouds of smoke from an annoyingly loud muffler. The sun glistened off the windshield, smearing the man’s face in a prism of blinding light. “Rose died years ago.”
“I know, Wolfgang…”
“You didn’t come to the funeral.”
“I…” She sighed, flicked the handle of her purse with her thumbs, and turned toward Wolfgang on the bench. “Why did you turn against me, Wolfgang? I needed you after your father passed away.”
Wolfgang finally looked at her. His eyes were moist. “I know what you did.”
Doris Pike’s face sagged. Her wrinkles became more pronounced.
“Are you going to deny it, Mother?”
“Wolfgang…”
“I saw you lock the door. I saw his feet, Mother. You stood on your tiptoes for more leverage.”
Doris wiped tears from her eyes. “How—” she started.
“I used to wat
ch your bedroom,” said Wolfgang. “There was a hole in the wall. I saw him hit you with his inkwell.”
“Your father was a troubled man, Wolfgang.”
“Was that the only time he ever hit you?”
“Yes…”
“Is that why you did it?”
Doris folded her arms and bit her lip. “Wolfgang, I didn’t murder your father.” She scooted closer on the bench.
Wolfgang had nowhere to go except to stand up. He remained still.
“How could you wait twenty years to bring this up?” she said.
“I had nightmares for years. You came to my bed and smothered me with a pillow.”
Doris’s hand covered her mouth.
“Every night, when I was unable to move because of the polio.”
“He asked me to, Wolfgang.” Her hands trembled. The gold bracelets around her wrists clanked together like wind chimes. She clutched her purse to keep her hands from shaking. “He begged me to do it.”
Wolfgang stared at her.
“Of course, I resisted, and we prayed together. Finally, God told us it was time, Wolfgang. He told—”
“God would never—”
“He had cancer,” she said. “It started in his stomach and ended up in his liver. He was in so much pain. You saw him. You heard how much pain he was in. When it became too painful to even hold a pen…he didn’t want to live anymore. He begged me for days. He didn’t want you to see him like that. He wanted you to remember him as a strong man.” She paused. “So I got myself drunk enough to do it and…I did.”
Wolfgang remembered her tears. It made sense. And Charles had held the Bible in his hand as if in preparation. He let out a breath. Euthanasia, the “good” death. Several patients had asked Wolfgang to do the same over the years, but he’d refused.
Wolfgang placed his hand on his mother’s. He looked at the idling black car. The sun had moved on the windshield and the man’s face was visible again.
“I don’t regret it,” she said. “God did not want him to rot from the inside out. He was losing his mind. That was not the man…” she trailed off.
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