CHAPTER 18
The weather had changed dramatically since the night before. Margot stepped out onto the porch with Frank, pulling her collar high under her chin. The stars were invisible, and even the light of a half moon was obscured by the blanket of cloud that rolled in to embrace the city, softening its rooftops and chimneys, wrapping its steeples and the top of the water tower in gray, damp folds. “Will you be able to fly tomorrow?” Margot asked.
Frank was shrugging into his camel’s hair overcoat, throwing a plaid wool scarf around his neck. He carried his Stetson in his hand. “It depends on how low the cloud cover is.”
“It’s so cold, though, Frank.” She moved close to him, loath to let him go. His body felt warm and strong, and she could hardly restrain herself from pressing against him.
“Best for flying,” he said. “Cold air is denser. More lift.”
“You’ll be back soon?”
“Christmas Eve,” he said. “Already have my ticket.” He put his arm around her shoulders and kissed her. “We’ll both do some thinking, Margot.”
“Yes.” She kissed him back, and then, on an impulse, slipped her hands under his coat and hugged him with both her arms. “Although I’ve already—”
He interrupted her by kissing her again, then whispering against her mouth, “I know, sweetheart. Give me a little time.”
“I wish you could just stay in Seattle.”
“Someone has to fly the airplane,” he said and chuckled. “It’s a hell of a lot of fun, Margot.”
She pulled one arm from behind his back and tweaked the lapel of his dinner jacket. “So I gather! You’re like a boy with a brand-new toy.”
He grinned down at her, looking very boyish indeed. “Yup.”
Reluctantly, she released him. As she slid her arm from beneath his coat something papery crackled against her elbow. “I’m sorry we couldn’t have gone out tonight, Frank, had a bit of time for just the two of us, but I didn’t like to leave Ramona to deal with Uncle Henry and Aunt Adelaide on her own. She’s been marvelous since—well, you know, since Mother fell apart. I don’t like to take advantage.”
“I know. It’s all right.”
“My aunt is awful, isn’t she?” she murmured, smoothing his scarf with her fingers. It didn’t need smoothing, but she couldn’t resist touching him, even if it was just with her fingertips. “She looks starved, but you saw her at dinner—she ate everything in sight, even Hattie’s lumpy creamed spinach.”
“Maybe thinness runs in the family,” he said. “Your little cousin isn’t much more than bones herself.”
“You should have seen her when she first arrived! I know I wrote you. She frightened me, frankly, but she looks much better now. The food at Benedict Hall isn’t always the best, but she recently started eating much better.”
“Not tonight,” he said, arching one dark eyebrow.
“No. I saw that, too. I worry that all her progress will be destroyed. As you saw, her mother’s hard on her.”
“It’s rotten,” he said. “Poor kid has no one to stand up for her.”
Margot moved back a little and hugged herself against the cold. “She has me.”
“Good,” Frank said. His eyes twinkled gently in the faint light of the moon. “Lucky girl.”
“There’s a diagnosis, something called anorexia nervosa, though I’d never heard of it until I went looking. The clinical research is awfully sketchy, but it seems some people—especially young girls—stop eating. At worst, they die. At the least, they harm their health, sometimes permanently.”
“Why do they do that?”
Margot shook her head. “I’ve been asking myself that question. There are three different ideas, from three different doctors.”
“You’ll figure it out,” he said with confidence.
She gave a small, tired chuckle. “That’s what Blake said. You both may have placed too much confidence in my skills.”
He kissed her one more time, a lingering, longing kiss. “I’ll see you Christmas Eve,” he said softly. He put his arms around her to draw her close. She pressed her cheek to his shoulder and felt again the crackle of paper.
“You have something in your pocket, Frank,” she said, drawing back.
He frowned, and reached into the pocket to draw it out. It was a long envelope, creased and stained. He turned it over in his hand to read the address. “Oh! Forgot about that.”
“Something important?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. Haven’t opened it.”
“Why?”
He hesitated, looking past her into the dim silhouettes of the shrubberies. “Not sure I want to,” he said.
“Have I—am I intruding, Frank?” They stood a little apart now, Frank with his hat in his hand, Margot with both hands under the fur collar of her coat. She wished she had never mentioned it, let the envelope stay unnoticed—perhaps forgotten—in his pocket.
He thrust his hand back into his coat pocket, and she heard the rustle of the unopened envelope against the silk lining. His jaw muscle flexed, but a moment later he turned his gaze back to hers and laughed a little. “It’s silly,” he said. “Mrs. Volger was holding this for me. It’s from Elizabeth.”
“Oh. Oh, I see.” It was her turn to look away, to gaze at the mist-shrouded water tower, its brick surface nothing but shadow now, all detail lost in the darkness. She would have felt better if he had opened the letter, read it, and thrown it away. The act of keeping an unopened letter seemed to carry some sort of weight, have meaningful implications. Elizabeth’s horror over his ruined arm had been part of the reason he had never wanted Margot to examine it.
She was not so delicate as Elizabeth. She had seen nearly everything, and when she looked at his arm that night in the operating theater, all she could think of was how to repair the wound that was causing him such pain. Did that make her unfeminine? Possibly.
“Margot—I may never open it.”
She turned back to him, and she heard the slight edge that crept into her voice too late to soften it. “Of course you will, Frank. When you’re ready. She was—or is—someone important to you.”
His face, as she watched, seemed to harden. Of course, the memory must still hurt. Elizabeth’s reaction to his wound, while he was still in the hospital in Virginia, had been a nasty moment for him, a cruel punctuation to the suffering he had already experienced. But it worried her, that letter, and the uncharacteristic impulse that made him carry it in his pocket. He must mean to read it eventually. And what would it say? That Elizabeth was sorry, that she wanted to make it up to him? That she still cared?
It hadn’t been so long, after all. Not quite two years since Frank left the hospital and came to Seattle, hurt, bereft, in constant pain and persistent worry. It was all different now. He had a fine job, and his arm was repaired. The prosthesis worked well. He had prospects again.
He said only, “Yes. You remember.”
“Of course.”
He bent to kiss her one more time, a cooler kiss this time, as if he were distracted. Perhaps it was merely that his mind had turned to the flight tomorrow.
Or perhaps, she thought dismally, his mind had turned to the letter, to what it might say, to how he might respond. Perhaps he was thinking about Elizabeth.
She feared the shameful jealousy that burned in her heart. She didn’t want it to show in her face or in her voice. She made herself say, with as much dignity as she could command, “Safe journey, Frank.”
“Thanks.” They gazed at each other for a long, uncomfortable moment, and then he was gone, striding down the walk, out through the gate, off toward Aloha. Margot watched him until he turned the corner and disappeared from her sight into the thickening fog. It would not do, of course, to run after him. Her dignity would truly be in shreds if she did that. She felt the urge just the same, and had to force herself to turn back toward the house and go inside.
The family and their guests were still gathered in the large parlor. Blake was just coming out with the coffeepot, the good silver one. He stopped at the foot of the staircase as Margot closed the front door. “Do you want coffee, Dr. Margot?”
She shook her head. “Thanks, Blake. I think I’ll leave them to it and just go to bed.”
“I could have driven the major home.”
“Father offered that, but Frank didn’t want to trouble you.” She sighed, thinking of Frank on the streetcar and, even more, in the air tomorrow, borne aloft by those preposterously fragile bits of wood and wire and metal.
Blake said gently, “Try not to worry, now. Major Parrish will be back before you know it.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “I know that, Blake, but—” She felt an urge, as irrational as the one she had just resisted, to tell him about the damned letter, to see if he had some idea what it might mean. How strange that she, surrounded by people as she was in Benedict Hall, had no one to talk to about her romantic troubles! What normal woman had no friend to confer with, to turn to for advice? She rubbed her forehead with her fingers. “Never mind,” she said. “I just need to sleep. Could you tell them for me?”
“Of course. I’m sure they’ll understand. Rest well, Dr. Margot.”
“Thank you. Good night.”
As she climbed the stairs, the murmur of conversation reached her from the big parlor. Aunt Adelaide’s voice sliced through the others with the piercing quality of a cat’s screech. It rose up the stairwell to pursue Margot into her bedroom. It was a relief to shut her door and close the sound away.
When she had shed her dinner dress and wrapped herself in her dressing gown, she went to the window. She settled into the window seat, pulling back the curtains so she could gaze out, past the winter-dry skeleton of the camellia, into the shifting mist that hid the park and the water tower from her view. Frank should be back at Mrs. Volger’s by now. She wondered if it was possible for him to feel as lonely as she did.
More likely, she thought, he was eager to return to Sand Point and his airplane, to rise above the trees and the lakes and the houses, to fly off over the mountaintops to the warm California valley full of other men just like him—aviators, engineers, soldiers. He couldn’t know how she hungered for him. Should she have told him? Was that what women did? Or did they instinctively, as she was doing, hold something back to protect that small, tender spot in the heart where love resided?
And why, oh why, was Frank carrying Elizabeth’s letter in his pocket?
She let the curtain fall, rose from the window seat, and crossed the room to her bed. As she extinguished the lamp and pulled the comforter up over her shoulders, she reflected that she was like two different women living in one body. She couldn’t imagine not being a physician. She couldn’t abandon the passion and dedication that had always ruled her life. But she was also a woman in love, in the manner of romantic stories, the most old-fashioned stories of all. That woman couldn’t bear the idea of life without Frank. She longed to find a way to merge both those women into one.
For some reason that line of thought brought her back to Allison. She released her worry over what would happen between her and Frank and fell asleep worrying about what was wrong between Allison and her mother.
She had been asleep for perhaps an hour when she woke to shouting in one of the rooms down the hall. In that first, heavy sleep of the night, she wasn’t sure what she was hearing. Accustomed to responding instantly to the telephone or to her alarm clock, she was out of bed and into her dressing gown almost before she realized she was on her feet. She threw open her door just in time to see Allison, her hair mussed and her cheeks flaming, charge out of her bedroom and down the stairs. The front door banged open, and an icy draft swept into the house and up the staircase.
Margot the physician knew better than to run in an emergency, but she strode so swiftly down the corridor it was almost a run. The door to Allison’s room stood open, and inside, huddled on the floor, wailing like a cornered cat, was Aunt Adelaide. She bent forward from the waist, her legs crumpled beneath her. Her dun hair tumbled every which way, with hairpins spilling onto her shoulders.
Margot reached her. “Aunt Adelaide, what’s the matter? Are you hurt?”
The face Adelaide turned up to her was a mask of bitterness. Her carefully painted eyebrows were smudged, and tears made rivulets through the powder on her cheeks. She sobbed, open-mouthed, and Margot thought she was very near a fit of hysterics. “My arm!” she cried. “That little bitch broke my arm!”
Margot would have said she was long past being shocked by anything she saw or heard, but somehow, hearing her aunt apply such a vicious phrase to her own daughter made her pull back in disgust. Adelaide, still weeping, pleaded with her. “Aren’t you going to help me? You’re a doctor! Help me!”
She was braced, shaking, on her right hand. Margot could see, even from where she stood, that her left arm was indeed broken. She didn’t need to palpate the forearm to know that it was fractured, both the radius and the ulna clearly deformed, and the left hand flopping, useless, over her thigh.
A voice from the doorway said, “What’s happened? Where’s Miss Allison?”
Margot glanced over her shoulder and saw Ruby, wide-eyed with alarm. She wore a thick chenille robe that fell to her toes, and her hair was braided for the night. “Ruby, there’s been an accident. Allison ran out the front door. Could you get your shoes and see if you can find her? I’m going to get Mrs. Benedict up on the bed.”
At this Adelaide wailed louder, and Margot repressed an impulse to slap her. She inched around her to lift her up, one hand under her good arm and the other, gingerly, under the opposite armpit. This caused Adelaide to screech that she was killing her, that her arm was shattered, and other complaints Margot didn’t bother to try to understand. Ruby had run for her shoes. Uncle Henry appeared in the doorway, at least five minutes after he should have, in Margot’s opinion.
“Uncle Henry,” she said in a flat voice. “We’ll need the motorcar. Could you go to the garage and tell Blake?”
She was settling Adelaide, whose sobs were subsiding into a steady, irritating whimper, onto the edge of Allison’s bed. Adelaide was still in her dinner dress, and she had torn the hem of it. She looked down at her legs and moaned something about having laddered her stockings, but Margot ignored this. Loena appeared, and Margot said, “Loena, good girl. Stay with Mrs. Benedict while I change, will you? We’re going to the hospital.”
Loena’s eyes were as wide as Ruby’s, but she looked more excited than alarmed. “Yes, Miss Margot,” she said. She crossed the room and stood beside the bed, but Margot noticed she didn’t stand close enough to touch Adelaide. “Oh, gosh,” she exclaimed, gazing down at Aunt Adelaide’s arm. “That must hurt like blazes!”
Adelaide groaned. Margot was on her way out of the room, saying, “I’m sure it does, Loena. Just keep Mrs. Benedict from falling off the bed, will you?”
“Yes, miss. Gosh!”
Margot was used to dressing quickly. In moments she had on a skirt, sweater, stockings, and shoes. She ran a comb through her hair without bothering to look in the mirror, and went back down the corridor. She encountered Dick in the doorway of Allison’s room. He was frowning, obviously reluctant to go in. He turned with an expression of relief when he heard her step on the hard carpet. “Margot, what’s happened?”
“I’m not sure yet, Dick, but I’m going to have to take Aunt Adelaide to the hospital. Her arm needs setting, and I can’t do it here. Uncle Henry’s gone to call Blake.”
“Ramona’s awake, of course—I’m sure everyone is!—but I told her she shouldn’t get up.”
“That’s right. There’s nothing she could do. Blake and I will manage. I expect Father and Mother are up now, too, and everyone else.”
He nodded and was gone in an instant. Glad, she thought, to get away from Adelaide’s whining. She wished she could. She said, “Loena, I’ll take over now. Could you go to Mrs. Adelaide’s room and find her coat?”
She had been right about everyone being awake. The only person missing, as she maneuvered Adelaide down the corridor and onto the staircase, was her mother. Even Ramona had given up trying to sleep. She stood at the bottom of the staircase, wrapped in powder-pink flannel and wearing knitted slippers. As Margot shepherded Adelaide down the stairs, Ramona said, “The Essex is waiting in front, Margot. I saw it from my window.”
“Good. Thanks, Ramona.”
“Here’s Hattie. I’ll ask her to make some cocoa, calm everyone down.”
Margot cast her sister-in-law a look of admiration. Ramona behaved as if handling a frantic household were just what she had been born for.
Loena, Leona, and a surprised-looking Thelma were gathered in the hall, hugging themselves against the chill. Hattie stepped forward to meet Ruby just coming in. “Did you find Miss Allison? Oh, that poor child!”
Ruby shook her head. “I don’t know what to do now.”
Margot and Adelaide had just reached the foot of the stairs. Margot said, “Get dressed, Ruby, and keep looking. Ask Mr. Dick to help you.” Adelaide cried out as Margot draped her mink coat over her shoulders, but Margot said only, “You need your coat. It’s cold outside.”
Henry was searching the dining room and the two parlors for Allison, but with no success. They all stood in the hall, a shocked audience in dressing gowns and overcoats, as Margot and Adelaide, who was moaning steadily, moved out the front door, across the porch, and down the steps to the gate.
Dickson followed them. He said, “Shall I go with you, daughter?”
“Thanks, Father. Blake and I can manage. I’ll take Aunt Adelaide to the accident room. We should be back in an hour or two.”
Blake held the car door and assisted Margot to seat Adelaide, then went around to the driving seat. Margot, as she climbed in herself, said, “Father, Allison is outside somewhere, all alone.”
“I’ll call the police,” her father said.
Uncle Henry said, from the porch, “No! No police.” Dick, standing beside him, gave him an odd glance.
Dickson scowled but didn’t comment. He closed the automobile door and was back through the gate and up the walk before Blake pulled away from the curb. Margot sat on Adelaide’s right side, and did her best to ignore her aunt’s groans and gasps. She spent the fifteen-minute drive calculating how much codeine phosphate she dared inject into a woman who probably weighed no more than ninety pounds.
His patience had paid off. His instincts must be as sharp as they ever were, which was pretty damned sharp. In the face of a dearth of other things to take pride in, that bolstered his resolve and strengthened his self-respect.
After a revolting dinner at the Compass Center—greasy soup and a roll so stale it could cost a man a couple of teeth—he had felt the tug of his obsession, that intuitive call to come here again, to stand in the cold fog. He had lost count of how many nights he had spent this way, wrapped in his hand-me-down coat, charity scarf obscuring his face, gaze fixed on the windows and doors of Benedict Hall. Waiting. Waiting for his chance.
At first he thought he might have made a mistake. It seemed like any other night, except for having to endure watching Margot and her one-armed cowboy on the front porch. They could at least have had the decency to go to the back if they were going to carry on that way, but Margot had never had the slightest sense of propriety, or even a modicum of consideration for the family name. It had been tempting to follow Parrish down the street, but that wouldn’t serve his purpose at all.
Instead, he lounged against the cold bricks of the tower and waited. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, exactly, but he had a feeling, and despite the chill of the December night, it energized him, kept him rooted there, watching.
His reward came an hour after Parrish left and Margot went indoors. Someone, someone whose voice he didn’t recognize, set up a god-awful caterwauling. It caused lights to flick on in nearby houses and doors to slam at Benedict Hall. He knew what a cry of pain sounded like, of course. He had plenty of experience with pain. These shrieks were caused by pain, but intensified, he was certain, by outrage and resentment. Something dramatic had happened in Benedict Hall, something that had set the house by its ears.
Whatever it was, it was precisely what he had been waiting for. It propelled the young cousin straight out of the house. Pretty little Allison, hatless, coatless, running as if pursued by the devil, flew out the front door, leaving it open to the cold. She dashed down the walk and out the gate, leaving that standing open as well. Hair askew, flimsy dress rippling around her, she barreled across the road.
Straight into his waiting arms.