by Amy Stewart
Deputy English had been watching for us. He ran out into the rain, dodging the vehicles and the doctors rushing to pull patients from them.
“Wreck on the train tracks,” he said, leaning in through the window on Sheriff Heath’s side. His eyes flickered up at me and away again. “A wagon loaded up with Italians coming in from one of those factories outside of Newark. Drove right through the crossing. They brought in eight men just now, but it looks like there’s more.”
Rain dripped off his hat and down the end of his nose. He looked at Sheriff Heath expectantly. Behind us a horn squawked and a man yelled for us to get off the street.
“Go tell that man to be civil and to drive around if he’s got business at the hospital,” the sheriff said. The deputy ran off.
While we waited, thunder rumbled in the distance. A crack of lightning illuminated the hospital’s bulk against the sky, but it was so faint that only one chimney came into view and then disappeared again into blackness.
Sheriff Heath shook his head. “I can’t post a man at every crossing,” he said, mostly to himself. “If people can’t listen to a whistle, then I don’t know what else to do about it.”
Deputy English’s face appeared in the sheriff’s window again. “I’d better stay and help sort this out,” Sheriff Heath said to him. “Take Miss Kopp to von Matthesius.”
To me he added, “See what you can find out, and be quick about it. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Find out about what?” Deputy English asked, a little petulant.
Sheriff Heath raised his arm against an onslaught of rain coming through the window. “Just get her in there!”
I gathered the collar of my coat around my neck. The deputy and I dashed through the rain, dodging puddles on the patchy lawn and skirting the nurses and orderlies carrying in the injured. At the entrance we had to duck behind a doctor setting a dislocated shoulder. The patient—one of the factory men, I assumed—was splayed across a stretcher. A nurse had hold of each leg and another had taken his right arm. The doctor gripped the left arm and made ready to pull. We ran behind him just before he made his move. I heard the patient’s screams all the way up the stairs.
After the turmoil on the first floor, it was blessedly quiet on the second. Deputy English marched down a narrow hall lined with wooden benches, all of which were empty, and I hurried to keep up. The doors to the sick wards, each one numbered in gold lettering on a small window meant to allow a nurse to look in, were all closed. Above us, the electric lights flickered in their dusty shades.
“It’s that damn storm,” he said. “We’re going to be stuck here all night.”
At the end of the hall we turned the corner and found a nurse sitting at a desk. “Miss Kopp to see the prisoner,” the deputy said. “Sheriff’s orders.”
The nurse was one of those steely, silver-haired women who tolerated no nonsense from patients or doctors. She looked up at me through wire-rimmed glasses and said, “Hurry up, then. And take him on out of here if you can. We’re going to need that bed.”
We turned the corner and jogged down another hallway to von Matthesius’s room. At the end of the hall were two tall windows, and to one side was a doorway leading to some other passage. An orderly was slumped over on a metal chair outside the prisoner’s door, half-asleep.
Thomas English kicked at the chair and the orderly jumped to his feet. “Get on downstairs.”
He yawned and pushed a lock of sandy-colored hair out of his eyes. “I don’t think anybody’s looking for me quite yet.”
“Then you should go and look for them.” Deputy English spoke through gritted teeth. It was enough to make the orderly jump up and run off, leaving us alone in the hall. “If there’s anything worse than being stuck on guard duty at the jail,” he said, “it’s having to spend an entire afternoon at this hospital, making sure that a man who can’t get out of bed doesn’t get out of bed. What did I bring you here to do?”
“Sheriff Heath asked me to speak to him and then we are to wait.”
“You spoke to him yesterday and nearly knocked the wind out of him.”
“If you can speak German, you can do the translation yourself.”
He turned and spit on the floor. “We should put the Germans on a boat and send them home. This is a waste of my time. I belong down there bringing in the wounded, not standing around with a sick old man and the sheriff’s lady friend.”
“Then go.”
I wasn’t going to let him draw me into a fight. Sheriff Heath should never have given this boy a badge and a gun. He wasn’t ready for it. Boys like him were already sneaking into France by way of the Canadian Army, so eager for a chance to shoot at someone that they would pledge fidelity to another nation to do it. Being hotheaded and careless, they were the first to be killed.
“But you’re the ladies’ matron. You can’t guard a male inmate,” he said, in a simpering, singsong voice, the way a little boy delivers taunts. “Sheriff won’t like it.”
“He doesn’t mind,” I said. “Go on.”
He looked me up and down and then glanced at the door to von Matthesius’s room. His face was all hard angles and calculations. “All right. He’s yours now.”
He turned on his heel and marched off just as the windows rattled at the end of the hall and hail thrummed against the glass. Soon there was another low rumble of thunder, and the lights flickered again. He broke into a run, glancing back only once as he rounded the corner and vanished.
At last I eased the door open and took a look inside. Von Matthesius lay flat on his back in an iron bed. He’d been confined to a windowless room not much larger than a closet. Such rooms were reserved for the insane, the highly infectious, and the criminals sent over from the jail. There was no chair and no table. A suit of clothes hung on a hook. A wool blanket had been kicked to the floor.
When the door opened wide enough to cast a panel of light across the bed, his eyes flew open and darted in my direction. His head didn’t move, and he spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Ich bin sehr schwach auf den Beinen und es zieht sich bis in die Schultern hoch. Ich ertrage das nicht mehr lange.”
It was a litany of symptoms: he couldn’t move his legs, he was having trouble with his shoulders, and he thought he might not live much longer. The strange incantation continued: his toes had gone numb, the blood had left his ankles, his lips were dry, and he had lost the sensation in his fingers.
I leaned over the bed to get a better look at him, taking care to stay just out of arm’s reach. His lips never stopped moving and his eyes rolled around wildly. Drops of sweat sprung from his forehead like leaks in a rubber hose. Something brown and tarry leaked from the corners of his mouth, and there was blood on the pillowcase where he’d been coughing.
“Sind Sie durstig?” I asked. He didn’t stop his chanting or his mad eye-rolling, but he did nod slightly. I looked around for a drinking glass, but saw nothing.
“I’ll go out in just a minute and get you some water,” I told him. “The doctors find nothing wrong with you. What do you believe to be the matter? If you can’t tell me, you’ll go back to jail.”
His eyes rolled up until I saw nothing but the whites, little half-moons laced in red like the hairline cracks in porcelain. A tremor came over him that made his teeth rattle. Then he went limp and his eyelids dropped shut.
I wanted to keep him awake and talking until the sheriff arrived. So I knelt down next to him and kept my voice low. “Isn’t there any sort of treatment that could help you?”
“Es ist zu spat.” It is too late for that.
I sat back on my heels and watched him breathe in the murky half-light. His breaths came in long, shallow stanzas, with rests between them so protracted that I wasn’t sure he was still breathing at all. In his better days he had worn a neatly trimmed silver mustache, but someone at the hospital had given him a crude shave and chopped at his hair to keep it out of his eyes. He looked like he’d aged ten years overnight.
A ra
ttle in his throat turned into the kind of racking cough that can send a man into a fit. “You need some water,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I stepped into the hall but saw no one. There wasn’t a sink or a water fountain in sight. I didn’t dare go looking for one: the door to von Matthesius’s room held a plain glass knob and a keyhole below it, but I didn’t have a key and Deputy English hadn’t said anything about one. I could hear someone running down the stairs just beyond the nurses’ station, but thought it best not to call after them for a glass of water when there were so many patients in worse condition downstairs.
When I went back to his room, von Matthesius had risen up and put one bare leg on the ground. He looked up at me and put a hand to his throat, gasping for breath. It might have been the strange shadows in the room, but I could swear his face was going a little blue.
“Try to be still.” I put a hand to his chest and eased him back into bed. “You can breathe. Someone will be here in a minute.”
He did seem to settle into a raspy wheeze. I stepped back to the door to watch for anyone who might be of help, and I was rewarded almost right away by a clatter outside and the sound of footsteps. A crowd of nurses and doctors rushed past, pushing two carts. I didn’t dare stop them and they disappeared around the corner. Through the window at the end of the hall I heard an even greater uproar from the street below. I closed von Matthesius’s door behind me and dashed over to get a better look.
Beneath me was a scene that could have been a battlefield. The hospital’s circular drive was entirely overrun with motor cars and nervous horses lashed to their carriages. At least another dozen victims must have arrived from the wreckage. Some were being carried in, but others were stretched out on the grass, shielded by umbrellas and makeshift tents. Every nurse, orderly, doctor, cook, and janitor must have been outside, fighting through the crowd to bring the wounded in.
I looked across the street to a row of automobiles and saw the sheriff’s. He was down there somewhere, one of the black hats bobbing in the dark. From above, the rain fell in streaks that caught the light from the hospital windows.
I was back at von Matthesius’s door when another clap of thunder shook the walls and the lights went out. A groan rose up from the crowd outside. They’d have to operate entirely on lanterns and candles.
I opened the prisoner’s door. “Baron? The lights have gone out everywhere.”
He mumbled something and I leaned in far enough to make out his figure on the bed. I could hardly see anything, so with some reluctance I reached out a hand and took hold of a bony kneecap. He jumped and I pulled away. At least he’d stopped coughing.
“I’ll be right outside,” I said, and stood in the darkened hall. There wasn’t even the faintest glow from the window, which meant that the street lamps must have gone out, too, and the rest of Hackensack, as far as I knew.
From somewhere down the hall, a metal tray clattered to the floor and a nurse called out, “Go on! I’ll get it.”
“Leave it,” a man shouted back, and they rushed away. The wheels of another cart rolled past, accompanied by the rumble of more footsteps. I pressed myself against the door and waited. Every few seconds there was the blur of a white uniform dashing by, and then I would hear a door bang open down by the windows, and another set of wheels would roll past.
A man’s heavy step approached and I asked, “What’s going on?”
“We had three surgeries under way downstairs, and men with crushed legs waiting their turn,” he called without slowing down, just a dark figure rushing away.
“Isn’t there anything I can do?” I called, but it was useless to ask. Someone had to guard the door, and I was the only one to do it.
Another roll of thunder was followed by a lightning strike so bright that the hallway was lit for a few seconds. A tray of metal instruments had been dropped and scattered. Some kind of bottle had broken and thrown chips of brown glass across the floor.
I ran across the hall to kick it all under a bench. The lightning was gone and the hospital once again plunged into darkness, so I couldn’t be sure I’d removed everything. For a long while I did nothing but stand at my post, gripping the doorknob to von Matthesius’s room and holding my breath as nurses and doctors ran past and patients cried out from distant rooms.
Finally I heard Sheriff Heath at the nurses’ desk. “I’m down here,” I called, and soon he rounded the corner with a lantern swinging from his hand.
“Watch your step,” I said. “There’ve been a few spills since the lights went out.”
He cast a circle of light around and kicked a pair of scissors and a roll of bandages out of the way. “It’s a real mess downstairs. Where’s English?”
“He went down to help you,” I said.
He was out of breath. A spatter of blood stains ran along the front of his coat, from one shoulder to the other. His hat was gone, probably lost in the commotion. He wore a look of shock I’d seen on him only once or twice before.
“Well, I don’t know where he is,” he panted. “I put him here to guard the prisoner. He shouldn’t have left. I’ve got other deputies down there now.”
“I’m sorry, I . . .”
“Never mind. How’s von Matthesius?”
“He’s resting. He said he’s having trouble moving his legs and that he’s losing sensation in his limbs. He has a terrible cough, too. Now that you’re here, I’d like to get him some water.”
More footsteps pounded toward us and the sheriff lifted his lantern to illuminate the passageway. It was a nurse with a baby in her arms, and two orderlies carrying more bandages and supplies. “We could use that lantern,” she shouted as she ran past.
“I’ll bring it to you,” the sheriff said. Turning to me, he said, “You’ll stay here until English turns up. We don’t know when the lights will come back on. I’ve got a man out checking the wires now.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Let me look in on the Baron again before you take that lantern away.”
My hand was still on the doorknob. I turned and swung it open. The sheriff lifted his lantern and we stared into an empty room.
6
“THIS ISN’T HIS ROOM.”
The bed was stripped. We stared at the mattress’s blue-and-white ticking. There was no blanket on the floor, and no suit of clothes on the hook.
I’d been holding the wrong doorknob. The inmate’s room was next door.
We turned at the same time to reach for the other door. I knew before it opened that the room would be empty, and it was, save for the blanket and the dressing gown tossed across the bed. I’d never felt such horror at the sight of a vacant room.
Sheriff Heath lifted his lantern high and pitched it up and down the empty hall. “Didn’t you see anything?”
“No! I—Of course not. I would have stopped him if I’d seen him.”
“Check the rooms.”
I started at one end of the hall and tried every door. The rooms were stripped bare. There was no sign that von Matthesius had been in any of them. The sheriff worked his way down the other side as I turned back to the inmate’s room. I shook out the blanket and the dressing gown and pulled back the sheets on the bed. I bent down and looked in every corner of the room in case he’d dropped something—a scrap of paper, a button, anything at all. But von Matthesius had been quick and meticulous. Every time I’d stopped in to check on him, he must have been in the middle of readying himself, waiting for the right opportunity. I could picture him now, slipping his clothes on under the covers in case I walked in. When he heard the tray overturn and my footsteps running to clear the broken glass, he must have seen his moment and taken it.
He’d left nothing behind. I tossed the mattress over and looked under the bed. My fingers skipped along the grooves in the floor, as if there could be some trace of him in the dust.
Sheriff Heath and I met again in the hall.
“He’s gone,” I said, pushing down the thick dread in my throat. My
forehead had broken out in a sweat. “I’ll search the first floor in case—”
But he was already turning away. “Just stay here.”
I should have chased after him but I was numb and rooted to the floor. I heard him running down the stairs and calling for his deputies. Then the electric lamps came on and under their glare I could see only the terrible truth of what I’d done: the empty white corridor, every door swung open now, revealing nothing.
The sheriff would be organizing a search party downstairs. I was of no use waiting outside an empty room. I went to the end of the hall and there, at the desk, was Deputy Morris speaking quietly to the nurse. They both looked up when I came around the corner. The nurse started to say something, but Morris shook his head and walked over to me.
So it would be Morris who handed me my fate. I stood and waited.
I couldn’t look him in the face. My eyes were fixed on his feet. It took twenty-nine steps for him to reach me. When he got to me he said it as quietly and kindly as he could.
“Sheriff wants me to find you a taxicab.”
THE HOUSE WAS DARK but they must have only just gone to bed. The charred remains of a log were still shifting and settling in the fireplace grate. I knocked something over as I stumbled across the sitting room: a theater prop of some kind, made from pasteboard and papier-mache. A floorboard groaned upstairs and Norma called out.
“What are you doing home?”
“Go back to bed.” I couldn’t bear to tell her.
She came down in her flannel gown and bare feet. “What’s the trouble?” She stood at the bottom of the stairs with her arms folded over her chest. “You look stricken. I hope you’re not about to tell me that Sheriff Heath has asked you to run off with him, because I’ve noticed him looking at you very strangely and it makes me wonder exactly what he’s got on his mind. If he’s taken any license, I’ll go right over there and—”