Marry Me (46 page)

Cole gently removed the patient list from Rhyne’s hand. Halfway through her search, her fingers had begun to tremble. She understood very well that the variety and quantity of dishes offered by the Commodore meant more people would have sampled them. “What about the hot dishes? You may as well turn over those rocks.”

Rhyne swept the entrée cards toward her and turned them all over at once. She separated out the hotel’s offerings and then gave them to Cole without looking.

“The roast lamb with mint jelly. Chicken and dumplings. The braised beef and roasted potatoes.” He tossed the recipes back in the pile. These cooked dishes were unlikely contributors to the outbreak. “Sir Nigel was certainly generous.”

“It’s not his fault,” said Rhyne.

“I agree.” Cole leaned back in his chair and looked at his wife. She had no fight in her. She wasn’t angry; she was defeated. It was a terrible thing to see. “It’s not your fault, either.”

She darted a sideways glance at him. “No? Explain that to all the folks suffering right now. Try explaining it to their families.”

“We’re one of those families,” he said gently. “No one in this house blames you.”

Now Rhyne’s gaze lifted toward the ceiling, her mind’s eye seeing beyond it to the room above where Whitley lay. She groped for her napkin and quickly pressed it against her eyes.

“You’re not responsible,” he said again. “I’ve
always
been responsible.” She fisted the napkin, her knuckles turning white. “Always.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves. We don’t know with certainty that he did anything.”

Rhyne scowled at him. “Don’t pretend what
is,
isn’t. We know. The puzzle that’s left is how he did it.” She stared at the damning evidence in front of Cole until her eyes blurred a second time. She forgot about the napkin in her hand and swiped at the tears with her fingertips. Embarrassed by what she still thought of as a woman’s frailty, she turned her head away so Cole couldn’t see her and tried to summon Runt Abbot.

The hell of it was, somewhere inside her he was crying too.

“Tell me what you’re thinking, Rhyne.” She was so long in answering that he thought she wouldn’t. When she did, he hurt for her.

“I don’t know that I ever understood how much he despised me. It seems plenty clear now. I suppose it always was to other folks, but I must have been fitted with blinders at birth. Nothing else accounts for not seeing it for myself.”

“He was all you knew, Rhyne. All you had.”

She shrugged. “I should have known better.”

“You should have
had
better. Do you understand what I’m saying? I can’t speak to what he did for your brothers, but he was no father to you.”

Rhyne shook her head. “That’s not true,” she said quietly. She turned to look at Cole again, her eyes clear, her features composed again. “He wasn’t a father like yours, like most people’s, I expect, but he kept a roof over our heads, took work when he had to, and he read to us. Read to us a lot, mostly things that were hard to understand at first, but he had a fine voice and it wasn’t the worst thing that he liked the sound of it. I didn’t go to school, but you know I didn’t grow up ignorant. That was mostly Judah’s doing. He could have raised me to be as stupid as a stump,

but he didn’t. Maybe he thinks I owe him for that. Could be I do.”

Cole didn’t know what to say, and because there was nothing to be gained taking an opposing view, he kept silent.

“I don’t love him,” she said. “But I can’t quite bring myself to a place where I can hate him. It must seem strange to you, what with you knowing what he did to me. And I’m sure not telling you that I understand it myself, but it’s just not inside me to feel that way toward him. Could be what I’m afraid of is showing all that ugly.”

The expression in her slate gray eyes grew troubled. She pressed her lips together, worried the underside. “It doesn’t mean I couldn’t kill him, though. I could. It surprises me a little that I can say it, but not so much as it probably surprises you. There’re folks that are going to die. You said it would happen, and I believe you. I figure you should know I could kill him for that. It wouldn’t be for hate; it’d be for justice.”

Cole put out his hand and covered hers with it. “Don’t think about that.”

Now it was her turn for silence. She didn’t tell him that she couldn’t think about anything else. She’d already said too much of what was on her mind. Managing no better than a wan smile, she removed her hand from under his and drew it to her side.

Cole regarded his extended hand before slowly retracting it. “We still don’t know how,” he said.

“He got himself hired as cook at the Commodore, that’s how.”

“I don’t think Sir Nigel would have hired him.”

“Not knowingly. Judah knows a thing or two about making himself into someone else. He’s been Macbeth, Othello, Caesar, Volpone, Cyrano, and those are the roles that come to mind immediately. You could meet him on the street and think you were making the acquaintance of a stranger.”

“Does he need the walking stick or not?”

“I suppose that depends on whether he’s in a mood to beat something.”

Cole gave her a stern look. “You know what I mean.”

“You’re asking if he needs it to get around.” She shrugged. “Sometimes, yes. Changes in the weather bother him the way they do Sid Walker. Leastways, that’s how it seems.”

“Where did he get the stick? It’s an unusual piece. The carvings … I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“My mother gave it to him. Those are chess pieces whittled into the wood. Pawn at the bottom, king at the top.”

“I noticed.”

“My brothers remembered her telling them about it. Judah never said. Is it important?”

“Not the provenance of the stick,” he admitted. “I’ve always been curious about it. What I really wanted to know was whether he required it. Wyatt and Will weren’t certain. After my first examination, neither was I. I’m beginning to think he gave a fine performance the second time I saw him. The symptoms he affected … it’s hard not to suspect now that he was making it all up. Setting the stage, so to speak.”

Rhyne’s faint smile was wry. “That’s Judah.”

“He must have reasoned that no one would suspect him of traveling to town in his weakened condition. It seems likely that he asked to see me for the purpose of supporting his situation.”

“You realize he’s already back at the cabin, don’t you? If he worked for Sir Nigel, it was only briefly. Wyatt saw him yesterday.” Rhyne screwed her mouth to one side as she considered what Cole had said. “What would make Judah believe anyone would suspect him in the first place? Doesn’t it seem unlikely?”

“I think he’s faced suspicion before,” said Cole.

“Here? In Reidsville?”

“No. At least not that I’ve heard. I don’t know what Judge Wentworth told you, but he mentioned to me in passing that back in Philadelphia, Judah left his position after some sort of incident. It might have been anything, so perhaps I’m making too much of it, but if Judah’s a typhoid carrier–and I think he must be–it would explain a great deal. The judge was fairly certain that Judah tried his hand at cooking several different times as he moved your mother and your brothers west. It’s reasonable to assume people got sick along the way.”

“But they wouldn’t have known about germs.”

“That’s right. They wouldn’t have understood the specific cause. Not that many years ago.” He rubbed the underside of his chin with his knuckles. “That doesn’t mean the people he cooked for didn’t come to some conclusions about the source. You said it yourself, Rhyne. He’s like a snake. The poison’s inside him. I didn’t understand until now how accurate you were.

“People would have looked for an explanation for the fever. Judah cooks. People get sick. More important, he never suffers as they do. It stands to reason that now and again he was accused of doing something to the food.” Cole shrugged. “Then again, maybe he moved on because the people around him got sick, and he was trying to protect his family. It might have taken him a long time to understand what part he played.”

Cole made a steeple of his fingers and tapped the tips lightly together. “What I think is that your mother figured it out. She couldn’t explain it, but she
knew.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she was infected with the fever at one time. It’s hard to believe she could have escaped it. She would have worried about your brothers as well. I suspect that’s how they came to believe that Judah was poison, that what he touched or cooked was also poison. She must have explained it to them in the only way she thought they could understand. Later, they told you.”

“They told me,” she said, grimacing. “They enjoyed telling me. As early as I can remember, they were scaring me stupid with stories about Judah poisoning his other children.”

“His
other
children?”

She nodded. “I was ten or thereabouts before I knew for sure there were only ever the three of us.” She saw Cole’s mouth twitch. In spite of the gravity of their discovery, she also felt the urge to laugh. “It wasn’t easy for them to tell me different, but I was going to set Randy’s hair on fire so they had to tell me the truth.” She turned up her palms helplessly. “That’s the kind of boys we were.”

Now Cole did smile. He was certain she hadn’t caught what she’d said. “Their stories worked. You believed them.”

“About Judah? Always. If he started working in the kitchen, I’d usually pretend I was feeling poorly. But it was rare for him to do much besides put the kettle on the stove. Like I told you, it was Rusty, Randy, and then me that did the cooking chores. That’s just the way it was.” She pressed one hand to her temple and massaged the dull ache that was forming there. “It’s like you said, Judah must have known something about the part he had in the sickness. It would have followed him everywhere he went.”

“Everywhere,” Cole repeated softly, trying to take it in. “I wonder when he got the idea about getting hired on at the Commodore.” He realized the answer was unknowable. “Getting ahead of myself again. We should confirm first that he
was
hired.”

“Is Sir Nigel well enough to answer questions?”

“I intend to find out.”

“You’re going yourself? Wouldn’t it be better to let Wyatt do that?”

“I have half a dozen patients at the hotel now, but I’ll ask Wyatt to go with me if you think that will help.”

“He knows Judah,” she said. “He might think of things to ask Sir Nigel that you wouldn’t.”

Cole agreed. “Very well. I’ll speak to him in the morning.”

“In the morning? Shouldn’t you go now?”

“Rhyne, everything’s already been set in motion. This is a runaway train. I can’t stop it tonight. I can’t stop it tomorrow. As long as Judah’s at the cabin–and you said Wyatt spoke to him there yesterday–then he’s no danger to anyone. Wyatt will want to prepare the case carefully. I admit to no expertise in matters of law, but what we believe Judah’s done might not be a crime.”

Rhyne blinked at him. “Not a crime? How is that possible? People are sick; some will die.”

“Even then.” He held up his hands to forestall her argument. “Let’s wait to hear what Wyatt has to say. I doubt he’ll venture an opinion until he speaks to Sir Nigel. The Commodore is the place to begin.”

Whitley slipped into the typhoid stupor the following morning. Rhyne had been warned to expect it, but she hadn’t been able to prepare herself to face it. Cole was already gone when Rhyne carried breakfast to his sister and found her unresponsive. As little as an hour earlier, Cole had been gently teasing Whitley about Digger Hammond as he took her temperature and listened to her heart. It didn’t seem possible that Whitley’s smile could have faded so quickly or so completely since then.

The stupor marked the beginning of the worst stage of the fever. While the victims lay still and largely insensitive to what was happening, the toxins from the
Salmonella typhi
were poisoning the liver, the spleen, the intestines, and the heart. The extent of the damage could not be known or predicted. One could only wait and see. If the bowels ruptured, death was certain. Other organs could be compromised to a state of such weakness they failed to function properly. Dehydration remained a fierce enemy, but getting liquids into a patient was no small undertaking.

“Swallow, dammit.” Rhyne made no apology for her harsh whisper. She wanted Whitley to know her desperation. She spooned more tea between Whitley’s lips and massaged the young girl’s throat. Whitley coughed as some of the tea slipped down the wrong pipe. Tea bubbled up from her mouth, staining her chin and dripping onto the pillow. Rhyne wiped Whitley’s face with a damp cloth and began again, this time using a small bit of bread dipped in the tea to feed her fledgling.

It took nearly thirty minutes to empty the cup into her patient. Looking at the stained pillowcase, Rhyne wasn’t certain how much of the liquid she’d truly managed to get down Whitley’s throat. Even the neckline of her nightgown was spotted with tea.

After cleaning Whitley and making her as comfortable as she thought was possible, Rhyne carried the breakfast tray back to the kitchen and began her daily chores. No matter how hard she applied herself to the tasks of washing, polishing, or kneading, her mind was never eased for long.

What she wanted to do was shoot something.

Her mind wasn’t particularly eased by that notion either, especially when she thought that her most satisfying target might not be
something.

The knock at the front door startled her enough that she burned her fingers as she was pulling loaves of bread from the oven. She set the pans down, pushed the oven door closed with her hip, and still blowing on two fingers, she went to see who the visitor was.

Elijah Wentworth stood on the porch, his hands thrust in the pockets of his black wool coat and his shoulders hunched against the cold. He quickly stepped into the entryway when Rhyne invited him inside.

“Hard to believe spring’s coming,” he said as he removed his snow-dusted hat. He tapped it lightly against his leg before he gave it to Rhyne.