With Every Breath (7 page)

“Please tell me you haven’t been feeding that dog.”

Kate didn’t even glance his way as she continued to dangle the twig. “Of course I fed her. I didn’t realize the hospital provided our meals, and this dog looked hungry.”

The last thing they needed was a vagrant dog loitering outside the hospital, but to his horror it seemed to have lost interest in Kate and began nudging a wet snout on his pant leg. He took a step back, but the iron railing kept him trapped from retreating much farther. He leaned an elbow against the railing and glared down at the dog.

“She likes you,” Kate giggled. The dog left strands of yellow hair on his wool trousers, and swiping only moved them around. This was a mess.

“Dogs carry vermin, scabies, and three kinds of skin rot. This one has bad breath.” But the mutt wagged its tail furiously as it explored his shoe and then darted up to lick his hand. He rubbed it on his vest. Everything would need to be laundered now.

“You haven’t been around animals enough to get comfortable with them,” Kate said.

“Nonsense, I grew up on a farm. Animals are food, not friends.”

“Really?” She tilted her head up at him. “Was that in Scotland?”

He clamped his mouth shut, wishing he could call the words back. Now she was probably going to start pestering him with a barrage of questions he had no intention of answering. Scotland was the last thing he wanted to talk about. He needed to change the subject.

“What are you doing outside? It’s the middle of the day, and I thought you had statistics to calculate.”

“Henry won’t have the data ready until late this afternoon. I had nothing to do, so I gossiped with your nurse for another
hour. Do you know she scans all the newspapers, looking for mention of you?”

“Of course. That’s one of the things I pay her for.”

“Honestly, Trevor, that seems extraordinarily vain, even for you.”

He couldn’t expect her to understand the importance of a doctor’s reputation in the field of medical research. Funding from research institutes depended on his reputation, and with a disease like tuberculosis, it didn’t take much to stir up public fear.

“I need to know what people are saying about me. The more positive publicity I garner, the better my odds of securing additional funding.”

Kate coaxed the dog away from his shoe and gave it a hearty scratching behind both ears. “Then you ought to be delighted, because she found a big story about you in today’s
Washington Post
.”

“What did it say?”

“I have no idea. Before I could read it, a nurse from downstairs brought you a basket of ginger cookies. She was very disappointed you weren’t there. The poor girl looked like Napoleon after being trounced at Waterloo. You have a very devoted following.”

He wished the nurses would stop fussing over him. It was embarrassing, and he never knew what he was supposed to say to them.

“Come on, I need to see that article.” Without waiting, he vaulted up the remaining steps two at a time. “Be sure to scrub your hands,” he tossed out over his shoulder. “We’ll be lucky if we both aren’t dead from the plague after touching that mutt.”

Kate reached the front door before him. “I’ll race you to the top.”

She darted in front of him, pushed through the door, and scurried down the hall to the stairwell. No fair! The blasted mutt was making a nuisance of itself by darting around his knees, and it took an extra five seconds to make sure the dog
didn’t get inside the building. Still, he wasn’t going to let Kate beat him in a footrace.

He knew a back way. The far side of the hospital had a service staircase, but the extra time to get there was worth it. The back staircase had no doors between each floor and was usually empty. He rushed up the stairs, his steps echoing up the cavernous space. Kate was going to be completely bogged down by a crush of people on the public staircase. He grinned as he cleared the second floor and launched up the third set of stairs.

He was out of breath by the time he burst through the rear entrance to the clinic, his lungs heaving. He was desperate for a drink of water. He paused, adjusting his vest and tugging his tie straight before approaching the nurses’ station at the end of the hall.

There was no sign of her.

He hid his smile and strode to the front counter, nodding to Nurse Ackerman and grabbing a ginger cookie from a basket. He affected a casual pose as he leaned against the counter, struggling to control his breathing. It wouldn’t do to look winded after his mad dash up the stairs.

He heard her clattering up the stairs before she flung the door open with a bang. Kate staggered in, her coil of heavy red hair lopsided and slipping down the side of her head in a haphazard tangle.

“You must have cheated!” she said, dragging air into her lungs. “Is there an elevator in this building?”

He raised a brow and looked at the nurse. “Is there an elevator in this building, Nurse Ackerman?”

“No, sir.”

It was hard to keep his breathing steady, but he did. “Sorry, Kate, no elevator. It seems someone has been getting soft over the years. Ginger cookie?”

She was still panting when she reached for the pitcher on the counter and poured herself a tall glass of water. She set the pitcher down with a thud. “You are the worst human being on the planet,” she muttered, then gulped the water.

“So I’ve been told.” He turned to Nurse Ackerman. “You found an article in today’s newspaper?”

Nurse Ackerman looked uneasy. She cleared her throat and didn’t meet his eyes. “Yes, sir.”

The newspaper was folded open to expose the story. He took it to the sitting area, wishing for a glass of water too, but he could wait until after Kate left.

The headline was a shock.

Quack Remedies Applied
in Washington Tubercular Ward

His muscles tensed as he scanned the article. It mentioned the serum patients were given to drink. It lulled them into complacency but offered no hope for a cure. It mentioned the high death rate of his patients.

Of course he had a high death rate! He only accepted terminal cases!

His teeth clenched as he continued scanning the article. Nothing written here was technically wrong, but it put the worst possible implication on everything he did at the clinic. The article was anonymous, but he would find out who wrote it. If he had to tear the newspaper building apart brick by brick, he’d find out who wrote this article and why.

“What does it say?” Kate asked. “You look like you just ate some bad fish.”

He wanted to tell her it was none of her business, but that wasn’t true. Every person who worked in this ward was his responsibility, and they needed to know what was going on. In all likelihood there was a scandal-mongering journalist on the loose who might be pestering the staff for information.

“Someone has begun to resent the clinic.” He handed Kate the newspaper, then poured himself a glass of water. He could feel Nurse Ackerman’s eyes on him while he drank. Setting the glass down on the counter, he clenched his fists and stared moodily at the remnants of lunch on the staff table. He’d need to hound the attendants about cleaning up faster. He’d tolerate no unsanitary conditions in this clinic.

“Is any of this true?” Kate’s voice was thin and wobbly.

“It’s
all
true; it simply throws the worst possible light on what I’m doing. This kind of article is just an attempt to get the hospital to evict me and close down the study.”

Nurse Ackerman rose to her feet, fear on her face. “Can they do that?”

“I’ve paid in advance for the floor for the next two years. There’s no need to fear for your job.” He could see the confusion on Kate’s face and rushed to explain. “I don’t work for the hospital. I lease this space and pay all the employee salaries. The food. Every drop of medicine. This ward is not at the mercy of the hospital and never will be.”

He meant the words to be reassuring, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. Kate’s eyes narrowed as she looked around the ward, then back at him. “You’re paying for all this? Out of your own pocket?”

“Yes.” After all, some good ought to come from the fortune that had been dumped in his lap.

Kate’s mouth thinned, and she looked ready to snap. “I thought you said you were poor, that you needed money.”

“When did I say that?”

“The day you won that scholarship!” She was shaking now, her voice shrill.

“Please keep your voice down. This is a hospital, and there are patients on the other side of that wall.”

She stepped closer and leaned in, speaking in a fierce whisper. “That scholarship was the only chance I had for college, and you didn’t even need the money.”

“I can’t believe you’re bringing up ancient history.” He picked up the newspaper from where she’d tossed it on the nurses’ counter. The first order of business was to find out who wrote the article. This kind of bad news could spread unless it was killed quickly.

“It isn’t ancient history for me.” Her voice vibrated with quiet rage. “Can’t you at least look at me when you talk?”

“Not when you’re being overwrought and foolish.”

“Tell me the truth. Why did you take that scholarship when you didn’t need the money?”

He could tell her the truth, but that would only open up a whole slew of questions he couldn’t discuss, so he attacked where she was most vulnerable. “What was I supposed to do, stand aside and let you win?”

She flinched a little but didn’t back down. “Just that one time, it would have been the decent thing to do, Trevor. The
human
thing.”

He needed to get away from her. The last thing he wanted was for Kate to quit over some old grudge, but he couldn’t waste time pacifying her.

“I suggest you take the rest of the day off and think about how you can relegate what happened to the past. It’s over, Kate. If you still want this job, please be here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

He didn’t look back as he walked down the hall and closed his office door behind him.

* * * *

The following morning, Trevor behaved as if Kate’s outburst had never occurred, for which she was grateful. The challenge of this new position was too exhilarating to quit over an old grudge.

Over the coming weeks they slipped into a routine. Every morning they made the rounds as Trevor performed a quick examination of each patient while Kate recorded the data. Trevor took blood and sputum samples and sent them to Henry in the lab for testing. The results landed on Kate’s desk, where she tabulated the new findings against each patient’s previous data.

It didn’t take long for Kate to notice the trends in patient numbers. She was no physician, but the count of tuberculosis cells in Hannah Wexler’s samples was declining while the hemoglobin in her blood improved.

“That’s a good thing, right?” she asked Trevor.

“It’s too early to tell,” Trevor said, but the flare of satisfaction in his eyes was obvious as he studied Hannah’s chart. “The numbers need to maintain this trend for at least three months before I’ll be convinced the serum is working, but this is a good sign. Very good.”

He flipped the chart closed and passed it back. Kate hid her smile and resumed her work on the other side of the office. This was exactly the kind of challenging, meaningful work she had always hoped to find. Who cared if she had to put up with Trevor and his fussy ways?

And he wasn’t all that bad. He could be prickly, demanding, and his scrupulous insistence for cleanliness bordered on the ridiculous, but they worked together with the speed and precision of a finely tuned clock. She loved watching him work. He was so intense about the way he threw himself into whatever he was doing, and there was something very attractive about that kind of enthusiasm.

After a few weeks, Trevor trusted her to go to the surgeon general’s medical library to scan the new journals for anything relating to blood and nutrition. One day she discovered an entire issue of the
New York Medical Journal
devoted to recent
discoveries in blood research. She pleaded with the librarian to allow her to take it out and show Trevor. Taking the current issue out of the library was forbidden, but after promising the librarian a free week of dinner at her mother’s table, Kate had the prized journal in her hand. She couldn’t wait to show it to Trevor and was practically skipping as she dashed up the hospital steps.

Kate passed through the clinic doors to see one of the pretty blond attendants flirting with Trevor. The girl sent him a dazzling smile, and Trevor seemed unusually kind as he smiled down at her. A cart loaded with covered lunch trays sat neglected a few feet away. The attendant was Bridget Kelly, whose fine blue eyes sparkled whenever Trevor stepped into her line of sight.

“In Ireland I’d be freezing my bum off every morning,” she said in her pretty little Irish accent. “At least here they don’t make me go milk the cow before the sun is even up.”

“Just one cow?” Trevor asked. “In Scotland I had to milk all four of the cows on our farm.”

Trevor’s Scottish accent was back in full force, making her inexplicably angry. While she was squinting over medical journals and cutting deals with librarians, he was flirting with a fetching Irish milkmaid. Bridget reached out and squeezed Trevor on the arm.

“With that arm? I don’t believe it.”

Kate had never milked a cow in her life, but suddenly she wanted to find one and milk it better, faster, and more thoroughly than Bridget Kelly’s wildest fantasies. She jerked the ties of her cloak free and pulled it off.

“If you’re homesick for milking cows rather than delivering meals to the dying, maybe you could go help Butch Muchalski at his dairy on Tenth Street.”

Trevor’s brows raised in surprise. “Good afternoon, Kate.” His thick brogue was gone, which annoyed her even more.

“I thought you might like to see the most recent issue of the
New York Medical Journal
. Apparently other doctors are trying similar techniques for strengthening the blood.” She handed the journal over. A flash of gratitude transformed Trevor’s face, but Kate was too busy scrutinizing Bridget to savor the moment. A flush heated Bridget’s face as she reached for the cart.