The operating light above Cora began to sway, and its electric buzz grew louder. Although she knew it must be a trick of the mind, she ducked her head.
“But my letters. She must have known I was—” Pain shot through her abdomen, and the room blurred. “You filched them before they were posted, didn’t you?”
He swung the cart back beside the operating table. “Can you imagine the social unrest if your mother had gone public with a campaign to remove you from isolation? Cora, you’re a germ carrier. Rumors spread faster than typhus in those tenements, and we’ve tried so hard to stifle their fear of this sanatorium. When they hide their ill, we cannot prevent contagion. Do you really want an epidemic on your conscience?”
Of course not. Cora felt dizzy and nauseated. She covered her eyes with the crook of her elbow, trapping her tears against her flushed skin. Eleanor’s silence hadn’t resulted from her unwillingness to forgive. Although Cora should have felt relieved, an image of her mam, crumpling to the ground upon learning of both girls’ deaths, pinned her to the metal.
Her mother’s trade required the keeping of secrets; she could have been entrusted with this one. Also, Eleanor was a sensible woman; she would have understood the need for Cora to remain at the hospital until cured. If the doctor had consulted Cora, she would have explained this. How could he have done this to her? Especially before he’d lost his wife and daughter.
She pictured Rolene’s wedding band, now hidden beneath her mattress, and knew that tomorrow she would bury it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He exhaled. “I felt awful keeping it from you, but it was my cross to bear. I feared you’d be upset with me and wouldn’t cooperate.” “You were right,” she spat. “I’m done being your patient.”
The doctor shook his head. “You’re all I have left. I will not lose you, too.” He grabbed her shroud from a hook near the door and tossed it onto the foot of the examining table. “To the rest of the world, you’re dead, and so I’m all you have left. Don’t you see?”
A scalpel, wet with her blood, gleamed from his tray, and she imagined grabbing its ivory handle and driving the blade into his heart. No, she decided, she would stab him in the pancreas so the animalcules would have time to ravage his body before he died.
“Linnaeus will help me, or one of the nurses.”
He laughed, and the sound skittered across her bare skin. “Is that part of your fantasy, that he saves you?”
Cora dropped her gaze to the floor tiles. She hadn’t once mustered the courage to return Linnaeus’s greeting from twenty feet away as he strode past.
“Presuming you could manage a full sentence in his presence, you would risk infecting him?”
“None of the children I saved from the Slocum caught my germs.” Every evening she’d been watching the staff direct the new patients and hadn’t yet recognized a single face from the tragedy. Also, Emmett had been released to his father following two weeks in quarantine, during which he’d showed no signs of infection.
The doctor harrumphed. “That we know of. They could have been admitted to one of the hospitals in the city. Or died in their homes. After what they’d been through, why would their families have allowed them to be sent back here?”
Cora scrunched her eyes shut. For the past month, she’d been trying to block out those scenarios.
“Miss McSorley, I know you’re lonely, but you cannot give in to temptation,” he said as he cleaned his instruments.
“Then I’ll kill myself.” Even as the words passed her lips, she longed to draw them back.
His shoulders slumped. “That would be such an elegant end to this torture, for both of us, wouldn’t it? But we can’t take that easy path.” He packed up his physician’s kit, his daughter’s silver wristlet looped around its handle. “Because if we do, Rolene, Ingrid, Maeve—their deaths will have been in vain. You loved your sister. You still do. So, because of her you’ll endure, as will I.”
A tear seared her skin. She didn’t wipe the tear away. Let him see what he’s doing to me.
“I know the sacrifice is great.” He extended his gloved hand. “Mine is no less.”
Too weak to rise on her own, she begrudgingly accepted his assistance.
Her shoulder blades skidded along the cool metal, and her feet met the ground. To steady herself, she leaned against the table.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said, reaching into his bag, and set a magazine beside her.
He stripped off his protective gear, leaving it in a bin near the door, and donned his boater hat. Without another word, he left the room.
Only after the door had clicked shut did she look down. The Lost Cache. A Tale of Hid Treasure. Otto had given her the ninety-first installment in Beadle’s Dime Novel Series as recompense for his ninety-first procedure on her. Cora gripped two of its opposing corners, ready to tear its pages, yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She cherished these stories. Without them, what would she have left to love?
Squinting to hold back more tears, she pulled on her covering.
The garment landed on her shoulders; through the hood, she glimpsed the bloodied scalpel, forgotten in the corner of the medical cart.
2007
More than four decades since solitary confinement was last prescribed for
Riverside Hospital’s drug-addicted teens
August 7
hat the hell?” Finn said loudly enough to be heard through the glass observation window. “Unlock the door!”
“Chill out,” the scarred woman said from beyond view. “Yelling won’t do you any good. Just like it didn’t help the teenage junkies who were locked in here during the fifties—man, did they scream. So will you.”
His vision blurred, and for a moment he could almost see the rebels surrounding him
