“That I accept,” she said, smiling. After she’d brushed her teeth and washed in the tiny bathroom, he borrowed her Colgate tooth powder and used his finger as a brush.
In the parlor, she picked up her black leather bag, then they both went downstairs. Cole snagged her coat from the coat tree and held it for her before grabbing his own jacket and hat. They walked outside into the early light and stood for a moment on her stoop. The town was still quiet, and soft mist dampened the air. The last brown leaves lay wet and defeated along the sidewalk gutters, and there was no birdsong to be heard. No traffic rolled past her door, although these days it moved like a wounded animal, even at noon.
Taking her chin between his thumb and forefinger, Cole tipped her face up to his own. “I won’t be able to do this when I drop you off. Imagine what those women volunteers would say.” He kissed her with all the passion he’d shown upstairs the night before, jarring her resolve to remain professional and preserve her personal ethics about their relationship. His warm breath fanned her face and she felt she could have stood there all morning, letting his lips take hers. The spark of unvarnished joy that he had kindled in her heart last night—the first she’d felt in a long time—burned a little higher, a bit brighter.
When he drew back, she looked into his blue eyes and saw the same raw flame burning there. He was so hard to resist.
“Damn, Dr. Layton, we’d better go before I change my mind about all of this and take you back upstairs.”
She laughed. “You mean play hooky? I never did that in my life.”
“Maybe you ought to start,” he replied. Glancing down, he noticed that one tail of his shirt still hung loose and he tucked it in. Jessica caught herself making the very unladylike wish that she could reach into the front of his pants like that.
They walked to the dew-covered truck parked in the yard of his blacksmith shop next door. Just as he was about to help her in, she heard a male voice.
“Fornicators! Aren’t you ashamed?”
Jess jumped and was startled to see Adam Jacobsen approach them. His clothes were rumpled, so different from his usual crisp appearance. Where had he come from?
Beside her, Cole stiffened like a wolf confronted by an enemy. “What the hell do you want, Jacobsen? And why is it every time I turn around, you seem to be there, minding everyone’s business except your own?”
Adam didn’t reply to the questions, but looked them up and down with contemptuous self-righteousness. His hair stuck up in a couple of places and dark circles accentuated the fierce anger in his eyes. “To have fallen so low. I should have known your baser instincts would eventually come out again.” He glared at Jessica. “To fornicate with the man who is your sister’s betrothed.” He spoke in a melodramatic voice that reminded Jess of his father at his most rabid moments in the pulpit. But her hands and stomach turned to ice in the face of this ugly confrontation.
“Watch your mouth, Jacobsen. You’re jumping to a conclusion that you can’t prove. Just take yourself down the road, or I’ll help you on your way,” Cole warned.
“And you,” he went on, pointing at Cole. “Even now, Amy, a fine woman of good character, a shining moral example in this community, is lying helpless in her sickbed, and this is how you repay her trust and devotion?”
Cole knocked away Adam’s index finger. “Don’t point at me. And mind your own business,” he repeated. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you don’t leave, I’ll forget about that Bible you hide behind and kick your ass up into your skull.” He stepped closer to Adam and nudged him with his shoulder, making him lurch backward.
Adam’s contorted face flushed the angry red of a throbbing boil. He stepped forward again, his voice shaking with fury. “Don’t you threaten me! I’ll personally see to it that neither of you can ever hold up your heads in this town again!”
Jessica, unnerved by his behavior, almost expected to see him begin foaming at the mouth.
“To think that I asked you to marry me. You’re nothing but an educated tramp!”
Jessica gasped at his vitriolic insult.
“You son of a bitch!” Cole grabbed Adam by his lapel with one hand and pulled back to swing with his other, but Jess grabbed him. He’d put his weight and shoulder behind the punch, but she was able to throw off his aim.
“Cole, no! He’s not worth it!”
Adam escaped Cole’s grip and danced out of range, his eyes shining with an almost fanatic gleam. “Just you wait!” He turned and walked away at a rapid clip in the direction of his own house. He glanced over his shoulder once or twice, as if to make sure Cole wasn’t chasing him.
“Oh, no,” she groaned, watching him go. “That horrible man! He’ll tell everyone about this.”
Cole was flushed too and drew several deep breaths, then locked his fist in his other hand. He watched Adam’s retreat. “I know he’ll try to make trouble, but what’s he going to tell? That he saw me helping you into the truck? We know what happened last night, but he really doesn’t. He’s just making dirty-minded assumptions. As usual.”
“He probably saw us kiss. Maybe. I’m not sure.”
He turned to look at her. “Did he really ask you to marry him?”
“Yes,” she said in a weary, disgusted voice.
“And?”
“What do you mean, ‘and’?”
“What did you tell him?”
“I guess I never really refused outright. But I told him I wouldn’t make him a good wife. He had it all planned out—he even expected us to go to heaven together. He assumed I would give up medicine and devote myself to his job. Can you imagine me organizing basket socials and quilting bees?”
Cole released his fist and gave a short, humorless laugh. “No.”
“I told him I couldn’t see that, either. And anyway, I realized you were right about him.” He shot her another I-told-you-so look, which she acknowledged with lifted brows and a resigned shrug. “For some reason, though, he began to assume I’d accepted. That was part of the argument you interrupted last evening. I told him we’re not engaged. But I wonder why in the world was he out here at this hour.”
Cole thought for a moment, remembering a couple of things that made cold worry settle in his gut. He nodded toward the passenger seat of the truck and she let him help her in. “Be careful around him.” He didn’t want to frighten her, but he figured she should hear his suspicion. “I think he might have been here, watching, all night.”
She stared at him. “But that’s ridiculous. It’s—it’s creepy!”
“Yeah, well, remember who we’re talking about, Jess. Didn’t you notice he was wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday? And while we were upstairs, I heard Roscoe barking his head off. I think he was barking at Jacobsen. That’s why he seemed to appear out of nowhere. He was already here.”
He saw Jess shiver. “Watching?”
“Yeah. To see who came and left, and when. Or anything else he might spy.” He walked around to the front of the truck and gave the stiff crank a couple of hard turns to start it. When it rumbled to life, he climbed in and fiddled with the choke.
“I’m not afraid of him. He can’t hurt me, and I can’t let his threats get in my way.”
“Just the same, be careful.” Looking out the windshield for a moment, he then took her hand where it lay in her lap. “Jess, if anything comes of last night because of him or anybody else, I want you to know I’ll be right beside you. I’m not sorry or ashamed about anything we did.”
Jess faced him and squeezed his hand. Once again, he knew that she could see the truth of his words because she was looking right into his heart.
For now, that would have to be enough to get him through what lay ahead.
To Jessica, the following two days passed much the way others had since the epidemic began. A blur of sick patients, dying patients, and convalescing patients gave her the sense of time standing still. Her only real indication of time came from sunrises and sunsets.
She had no idea where Adam was, but she was grateful that he’d stayed away from the infirmary since that horrible morning when she’d last seen him. If anyone noted his absence, it wasn’t mentioned.
She hadn’t seen Cole, either, but she knew he was probably busy getting the horses ready for the train.
Health dispatches she received from the Red Cross and other sources spoke of the global proportions of the catastrophe, although it was noted that for the most part, newspapers tended to whitewash the situation, if they mentioned it at all. Doctors and nurses were felled as commonly as their patients, and some areas around the country were left to fend for themselves. Some of her volunteer nurses had ended up occupying sickbeds themselves. What would become of Powell Springs if she got sick?
Due to a mix of guilt and lingering anger, Jessica visited Amy’s bed as infrequently as possible. At first it wasn’t difficult because her sister slept most of the time, and after a couple of brief examinations, Jess was satisfied that Amy was definitely growing stronger. But as she grew stronger, she began to ask questions of the nurses.
The day after her confrontation with Adam, Jessica was tending a patient when she heard Amy ask, “Where is Jessica? Why doesn’t she come to see me? Where is Cole?”
She stood on the other side of the sheets that had been erected to create separate patient cubicles. Like a coward, she sped away toward her desk before anyone noticed her presence. But she knew she was only delaying the inevitable. Yes, blood was thicker than water, but Amy’s blatant betrayal, masked by what Adam had called “good character” and “a shining, moral example,” overrode her filial affection.
Birdeen Lyons tracked her down. Her head was wrapped in a white towel, approximating the look of a British nurse. “Jessica, Amy is asking for you.”
Jess glanced up and shuffled the papers on her desk. “Thank you, Birdeen. Will you tell her I’ll see her soon?”
The woman nodded and tottered off toward Amy’s bed.
Late that afternoon, she was still putting off the visit when Horace Cookson came into the infirmary. Jessica spotted him first, standing just inside the door to the makeshift hospital, unwilling or unable to take another step. Jess hurried forward to greet him. Although he wore his mayor’s clothes—the crooked tie, the vest missing one button, the rumpled suit coat, shiny at the elbows—he appeared so much older, so gray-faced, she worried that he’d finally succumbed to the illness that had taken his wife and son.
“Mayor Cookson,” she said, in a hushed voice. “Are you all right?” The look in his faded, haggard eyes was one of such loss and confusion, it went to her heart. It was a stupid question; of course he wasn’t all right. She tried again. “Are you ill?”
He shook his head. “Jessica, is there a room where we can talk?”
“Yes, I sup—” She thought of the cloakroom-turned-morgue, but that was out of the question. “Let’s find a classroom.” Catching the eye of one of the nurses, she pointed toward the door to indicate that she’d be gone for a moment. She and Horace walked down the hall until they found the empty geography classroom. Its walls were lined with maps of Europe, a world globe sat on the teacher’s desk, and the blackboard still bore a reading assignment from the last class that had met there. He waited for her to settle into the teacher’s chair, then perched on a corner of the desk, one leg dangling.
There was something bothering him, something besides his recent losses. To interrupt the awkward moment, she said, “I want to thank you for the butter and cream you’ve been leaving for me. They’re a true luxury.”
He waved off her thanks. “It’s nothing. You know, farmers get to keep enough of what they produce to feed their families, and now, there’s just me at home.”
She felt so bad for him. “I wish I could have done more. I’m so sorry—”
But he held up a hand. “That’s not why I came here, Jessica. Something is going on that you need to know about.”
She twiddled with a piece of chalk that lay on the oak desktop, waiting for him to continue.
“Adam Jacobsen asked for an emergency meeting of the town council last night.”
The chalk fell from her suddenly nerveless fingers. “Oh?”
“He wanted us to prohibit you from practicing medicine in Powell Springs one more day. At least that was how he put it.”
The colored maps on the walls swam before her eyes for a moment. She looked away from them and set her jaw to regain her equilibrium. “Really. And who does he propose to take care of all those people down the hall?”
“He said that Granny Mae could fill in until Pearson gets here.”
“Ah, yes, the elusive Dr. Pearson. I have begun to doubt that he even exists.” She couldn’t keep a tinge of sarcasm out of her voice.
He shrugged, lifting his baggy, unkempt clothes with his shoulders. “Look, I don’t know what happened with you and Adam, or anyone else. It’s none of my business. Between you and me and the wall, I wish I was back at my farm with the cows instead of doing this job. But he made some pretty harsh accusations, something about moral turp—turpentine? Turpitude, that was it.”
Insulted and frightened, Jessica felt her face sizzle. She couldn’t make herself ask exactly what Adam had told them. “Just what was the outcome of this meeting?”
“We voted against him, of course. We need you here. You’re doing a first-rate job.”
That he still thought so, after losing his wife and son, was very generous, in Jessica’s view. “So I have the support of the town council? They’ll defend me against this character assassination?”
“Sure, for what it’s worth. There are only two of us, me and Roland Bright. Adam is the other councilman.”
Jessica rubbed her forehead with one hand, feeling as if she once again bore the weight of the world on her shoulders.
“I hate to say it—Powell Springs is a good town—but people love this sort of thing. I guess it’s human nature. This is bound to get around. Especially now. It’ll give them something else to think about besides the war and sickness. There’s another thing you should know. Since Adam didn’t get his way, he was pretty sore. He threatened to do something else to have you, well…”
She looked up and gripped the edge of the desk hard enough to make her fingertips turn white and pink. “Run out of town on a rail? Tarred and feathered? Or does he want me executed at dawn? What do you want me to do, Mayor Cookson?”
He sighed, as if this was the very last thing he wanted to be dealing with. “I just thought you should know what’s going on. Him being involved with the American Protective League and all makes things a little sticky.”
She had feared that Adam might cause some kind of trouble. But she hadn’t thought it would be this bad. “Thank you for telling me.” Rising from the chair with as much dignity as she could muster, she added, “I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into a personal matter that Adam has decided to make public. I know you have enough to worry about without this. So do I, in fact.”
He stood too. “How is your sister doing?”
“She’s regaining her strength.”
“There are hardly any families who’ve escaped this—this thing. Your sister’s recovery is good news.”
Jess slanted a look at the weary mayor. “Yes, it is. I can’t wait until she’s back on her feet again.”
On a siding near the train depot, five livestock cars stood under a gray afternoon sky. Wispy, low clouds grazed the nearby buttes and hills, making them appear close enough to touch. October rains had revived Powell Creek, covering its streambed with swift-running water next to the rails. Cole, Susannah, and Tanner and his nephews all worked toward getting the Braddock horses loaded. They’d been here for hours already, and they were tired and hungry. A sputtering stream of grays and duns jostled for position, hooking their necks over one another’s, rearing and balking. At least the end of the job was in sight.
“Damn it all, get that dun gelding up there!” Pop hollered from his saddle on Muley�
��s back.
Cole wished the old man had stayed home. He and Tanner had the situation well under control, and Pop’s bawled orders just made the horses more nervous than they were already. Everyone else simply wore harassed expressions. Susannah threw Pop an impatient look.
“I’m going to the depot office,” she called to Cole. He nodded and she brought her mare around to the back of the line. She had the manifest and other paperwork that had to accompany the shipment. In the meantime, Cole and Tanner led the last of the animals up the ramp to the railcar and slid the door closed.
Cole jumped down and shifted the ramp out of the way. “God, I’m glad that’s over with,” he said to Tanner, who nodded.
Tanner turned to the youngsters. They’d climbed onto their own mounts. “Come on, boys, let’s get back to the farm. There’s still work to be done.”
“Aw, can’t we stay in town for a while and get ice cream, Uncle Tanner?” Wade asked.
“Not this time, son. It ain’t like you two didn’t earn it, but everything’s closed down because of the influenza. I might be able to rustle up some kind of treat on the stove back home.”
Wade and Josh gave each other sidelong glances that weren’t lost on Cole. He’d heard that Tanner wasn’t much good at cooking.
“I have a better idea,” Cole said, untying his own mount, Sage, from the hitching post. “Let’s go down to Tilly’s for a round or two. It’s on me. Pop, are you game?”
“Anytime you’re buying I’m game,” the old man replied.
Cole chuckled. “You boys wait here for Miss Susannah to tell her where we are. Then go on back to the farm with her. I’ll bet she’ll find some cookies in the kitchen for you.”
“How does that sound?” Tanner asked the kids. Wade grinned, and Tanner ruffled his red hair. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
The three men headed off toward Tilly’s. As they rode past the train cars, Cole noticed that his father looked almost pensive. It was most uncharacteristic of him.
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