Marry Me (45 page)

“Let’s see if we can go on that way,” Rhyne said. “Puts me in mind of a mama bird feeding her fledglings.” She took another piece of bread and sopped it in the broth. Whitley took it, dutifully opening her mouth when Rhyne’s hand drew near. “Digger’s been asking after you. I see him nearly every day when he’s doing his outside chores.” His sister was sick with the fever, but Digger hadn’t succumbed. The vagaries of the
typhi
were something Rhyne thought she would never understand. Digger swore to Cole that neither Whitley nor his twin had eaten anything he hadn’t. He’d made a full accounting of their gluttony that night, and when Rhyne saw Cole’s notes she remarked it might have been simpler to ask the boy what they
hadn’t
eaten. It remained to be seen if he would sicken at some later time, or if as Cole suspected now, he would escape unscathed.

“He sure is sweet on you,” Rhyne told Whitley. “I think he lies in wait for me just so he can ask how you’re doing. Your brother would beat him away with a broom if he could, but I like him. He doesn’t help in the surgery any longer. His mother’s afraid to let him, though what she thinks he might come by here and not at home is a mystery to me. She’s a silly woman. Well-meaning, I think, but silly as a custard pie with no crust.”

She pushed another broth-soaked bite of bread between Whitley’s lips and continued chattering in the same vein, distracting her until every last morsel and bit of broth was gone.

Once Whitley fell back to sleep, Rhyne returned to the kitchen and put heartier soup on the stove to heat for dinner. She’d give Cole another half hour, she decided, before she woke him. He wouldn’t thank her for letting him sleep the evening away, not when he’d promised Miss Adele that he would call on the fancy house tonight. One of the girls had fainted dead away in the kitchen, another hadn’t been able to rise from her bed, both signs that they’d probably been suffering in silence for days–and quite possibly passing the contagion along.

Sitting at the dining room table while the soup simmered, Rhyne swept all the recipes she’d collected into a single pile. When Rachel and she had begun, they separated food by location. Salads and soups at the Miner Key. Main courses in the Commodore. Desserts at Miss Adele’s. They’d also made a list of the dishes they remembered seeing that weren’t included among the recipes and placed the name of each on a small card and put it in the appropriate category.

Perhaps, Rhyne thought, if she reorganized them in a different manner, she’d see something she hadn’t before. She’d been so certain she would have something to give Cole that she felt the heaviness of her failure as a real weight on her shoulders. She stared at the pile in front of her and blew out a breath hard enough to scatter some of the scraps of paper.

She picked up the one that had floated closest to the edge of the table and read it:
Cream of Celery
by Mrs. Theodore Easter. It seemed an unlikely candidate. Cole and she had both had a little of it. She found her list of foods that people who were sick reported eating. Ann Marie’s soup was on the list. It could mean something, she supposed, or nothing at all.

She remembered Cole explaining to her that cold foods were more suspect than hot ones. That information barely allowed her to eliminate anything because baked goods like cookies, rolls, and bread could be touched by unclean hands after they came out of the oven. She was only able to place a few recipes to one side.

Rhyne began separating food by the amount of heat ideally used in preparing it. A dish of boiled potatoes seemed straightforward enough to put in the column marked hot, but then she wondered about the butter that had been added afterward. She slid the recipe into the column she thought of as uncertain. The meat dishes were particularly bothersome. She suspected the stews had been thoroughly cooked, but could not help but doubt that the same could be said for the poultry or fish or the beef. The number of recipes and food in the uncertain column began to grow along with Rhyne’s discouragement.

The only category that did not strain her confidence was the one she’d made for the cold and raw foods. She put the iced bouillon there, the consommés, the ice cream as well as their chopped nut toppings. She thought about how the foods might have been handled in preparation and added the dried apple salads and deviled eggs. She placed every frosted cake in this column and foods that had been made more attractive with raw garnishes. She quickly rearranged some of the recipes, eliminating foods that were unlikely to have been touched after they were cooked.

Excited that she may have narrowed her search, Rhyne looked at the list of the sick and tried to find the common threads. After a time with no success, words blurred. Rhyne folded her arms on the edge of the table and set her head against them. A few minutes, she thought, and then she would try again. Only a few.

Her nose twitched. She breathed in the aroma of steaming vegetable soup. She could taste the moist fragrance of beef swimming in broth with corn, carrots, beans, and barley as it came to rest on her tongue. She opened an eye,

stared at the bowl sitting just beyond her nose, and then darted a look upward to see Cole standing beside her.

He made no attempt to hide his concern. “You could have taken a nap with me.” He touched her cheek with the back of his hand and ignored the face she made. “You don’t look as if you can hold your head up.”

Of course she rose to the challenge, lifting her head and straightening her shoulders, and then graced him with a smug smile.

Cole merely shook his head and ordered her to eat.

Rhyne raised an eyebrow at him. She carefully unfolded her napkin and smoothed it across her lap, taking her time in spite of the fact that her mouth was watering.

Cole sat at the head of the table at a right angle to Rhyne. He snapped his napkin open and tucked one corner into the collar of his shirt. When Rhyne looked at him in surprise, he said, “You’re too busy to do more laundry. I thought I’d try to keep my shirts reasonably clean.”

Rhyne continued to stare at him.

“What?” he asked, looking down at himself. “Have I already spilled something?”

“My heart,” she said feelingly. “All over you.”

He glanced up. Her eyes were luminous. He thought it was possible that she loved him more in this moment than she had on their wedding day. Clean shirts and consideration. It was better advice than that no-account Beatty boy had given him.

Rhyne’s vaguely loopy smile didn’t fade until she picked up her spoon and began eating. “Was Whitley still sleeping when you came downstairs?”

He nodded. “I saw she had fresh water at her bedside. Has she already eaten?”

“Bread soaked in beef broth. I tried to get her to drink, but she wasn’t cooperative.”

“I’ll try later. She seems to be able to tolerate the peppermint tea.” He waved his hand across the table to indicate the scraps of paper and cards. “There’s been some change since the last time I looked in on you and Rachel. Did you find something?”

“No. I decided to study it all again but differently this time.”

“And?”

She sighed. “And how do I know that Mrs. Porter thoroughly cooked her lamb or that what was cooked wasn’t handled afterward by hands that weren’t clean.”

“I see your point.”

“I keep thinking about the children.”

“What about them?”

“Have you noticed that there’s more children ill than adults?”

“Do you have the list?” His features revealed his confusion as he extended his hand in Rhyne’s direction. “Let me see it. That doesn’t sound quite right.”

Rhyne found it under her bowl and gave it to him. “I probably explained it poorly,” she said. “What I mean is that if you consider the number of children in Reidsville compared to the number of the adults, the children appear too often on the list. Shouldn’t it be about the same?”

Cole put down his spoon and picked up the pencil that Rhyne had been using. He made a tic beside each child’s name and saw immediately that she was correct. Children were disproportionately represented. He rubbed the underside of his jaw as he considered how that might occur.

“It could be that the list fails to capture all the sick adults.” While he was thinking of it, he added the names of Adele Brownlee’s ill girls. Though not certain, it was probable that both Susan Fry and Raymona Preston had come down with typhoid. “People are a lot more likely to seek help for their children than they are for themselves. If Sir Nigel hadn’t taken it upon himself to report his sick guests,

we might not know about them. And look at Adele’s girls. They tried to hide it until they just gave out. There might be others as well.”

“You told me that the symptoms were less severe in children.”

“That’s right. But I didn’t say they were less susceptible to the bacteria. The truth is, I don’t know. Looking at this list, it would be easy to conclude that they’re
more
susceptible, but that would be hasty, I believe.”

“Look at the things they ate,” Rhyne said. “Pastries, cakes, cookies, ice cream.”

“An overindulgence on the sweets at Miss Adele’s.”

“That’s right.”

“There are adults on this list that swear they were never inside her place.”

Rhyne nodded. “I can’t account for the women or the single men, but it seems possible that the married men might not have been strictly honest. That’s the sort of thing men hide from their wives, isn’t it? Men besides you, that is. Judge Wentworth remarked that you were forthright for telling me you met him at the whorehouse.”

Amused, Cole set the list aside and regarded Rhyne. “Can I expect that you will find ways to mention that particular night for the remainder of our lives?”

“Oh, I hope so.”

“What is it that you imagine I did there that evening?”

“I can’t know, of course, but I’ve always supposed you sat in one corner of the parlor drinking bourbon from a crystal tumbler while Raymona sang and Susan chattered. At least that’s what I’d like to believe you were doing until the judge joined you. He probably had your attention for a time, and then you left.”

“Mm. Fascinating. Other women might imagine something more …” He paused, searching for the right description. “More provoking and carnal.”

“I imagine that, too,” she confessed. “But you’re never with Miss Adele or one of her girls when I do.” Smiling coolly, she plucked the list from table and searched it again.

Cole returned to his soup. He considered asking how she knew that he hadn’t gone upstairs at Miss Adele’s, but he decided he liked not knowing just as well. He had his own imaginings, and one of his favorites was Rhyne confronting the madam. The threat of a broken nose might have been involved.

“What are you thinking?” he asked as he watched her glancing between the list in her hand and recipes and foods that she’d put into the column closest to her. “Those are the raw items?”

She nodded distractedly. “And dishes best served cold,” she said. “Like revenge.”

Chapter 15

They stared at each other.

Cole broke the charged silence. He spoke quietly, intently, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

“I don’t believe it,” Rhyne whispered. But she knew it was more accurate to say that she didn’t want to believe it. “He wouldn’t have. He
couldn’t
have.”

“All right,” said Cole. “Let’s review your lists to see
if
it’s possible. We don’t need to concern ourselves with how it might have been done just yet.”

Rhyne pushed her half-eaten bowl of soup away and tossed her crumpled napkin beside it. She arranged the cards that showed all the cold dishes and raw foods so Cole could see them as well. “The letter at the bottom of each one indicates where the food was served. Rachel and I began organizing that way.
M
for the Miner Key and so on.” She turned one over. “We wrote who provided the dish on the back. We didn’t want to speculate about who might have contributed to the outbreak as we worked. It made us too heartsick to think about it.” Now it just made her sick. “Some women wrote their names as part of the recipe. Here, for instance:
Julia Hammond’s Hot Water Sponge Cake.
Isn’t that just like her? There was no help for that.”

“I see. Why is sponge cake in your cold pile?”

“Because it was sliced up on the platter and drizzled with sugar glaze. It seemed to me that Mrs. Hammond was likely to have touched every piece.”

“Did anyone on your list of the sick eat her sponge cake?”

Rhyne ran her finger down the list. “Only a few.”

“Very well. Let’s put it to the side as unlikely but possible. Besides the fact that you and I have been in the Hammond house and know that Julia would scrub the shine off the sun if she could, one hot water sponge cake wouldn’t have infected so many people. Did she make other dishes?”

“No. Just the one.”

Cole looked over the cards again. “How many of these were provided by Longabach’s restaurant?”

Rhyne lifted the corner of each recipe to see the writing on the back. “There are three here. Estella prepared more than that, though. The others are either in the soup or entrée piles.” Frowning, Rhyne shook her head. “Estella and Henry have been serving folks good food for a lot of years. It doesn’t make sense that there’d suddenly be a problem.”

“Johnny Winslow works for them. He told me Estella lets him cook now and again.”

“You’ve lived here long enough to answer this question: Do you imagine she lets him do anything when she’s not standing over him?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t imagine that she does.” His brief smile vanished, and he regarded Rhyne gravely. “You understand that by defending your neighbors you’re narrowing the list of suspects.”

“I know.” Her eyes left his. She stared blindly at the cards. “I know.”

Cole gave her a few more moments to absorb the consequences before he said, “Let’s look at the food provided by the hotel.”

Rhyne drew in a shallow breath, nodded, and then began turning cards over. “The iced bouillon. One of the apple walnut salads. The pickled beans with the garnish of radishes. Sand tarts. All of the ice cream, nuts, and caramel sauce.”