With Every Breath (21 page)

Kate tried not to laugh; her stomach was still too tender. “You’ll have to get in line. I think half the patients want to kill him over the cod liver oil he makes them drink.”

Her parents weren’t allowed to touch her. Instead they sat on stiff-backed chairs on the opposite side of the room, looking out of place and ill at ease in the stark hospital setting.

“How’s everything at home?” she asked.

There was an awkward pause before her mother jumped in to reply. “Fine,” she said brightly. “Everything is fine.”

But it wasn’t fine. She could tell by the glances that flew between her parents, and the way her father’s hands clenched and flexed.

“What’s wrong? Is someone sick?”

“No one is sick except you, Kate,” her father said with too cheerful a smile.

“Tick? Is Tick all right? I haven’t seen him since the surgery.”

“Tick is fine,” her mother soothed.

“What about Charlie? He always gets a cold this time of year.”

“Charlie is fine and kicking up a ruckus on the floor of Congress,” her father said.

Kate ran through the names of all the other boarders, but her parents were determined to assure her everything was perfectly fine and she shouldn’t worry her head for a single second. Still, she knew something was wrong.

They left after their allotted one-hour visit, but when Tick came later that afternoon, she wasn’t about to tolerate being brushed off. Still wearing his uniform after completing his shift at the clinic, Tick’s handsome face was bursting with excitement at seeing her again. She would have none of it.

“What’s going on at home?” she demanded. “And don’t try to deny it, because I can tell when Dad is lying, and he lied through his teeth all during their visit this morning.”

Tick sat in the same hard-backed chair on the far side of the room, rubbing his hands on his thighs and looking like misery itself. “We aren’t supposed to talk about it until you’re feeling better.”

“I’m feeling better. Talk.”

Tick continued to hedge, but when she threatened to get out of bed to shake him, he finally relented.

“It seems having the guards stationed in the hospital scared away whoever planted the mercury. There hasn’t been any more trouble upstairs, but now they’re planting stuff at our boardinghouse.”

She was dumbstruck, and her blood ran cold as Tick provided the details. Two days ago the cleaning girl took a load of sheets down to the first floor to launder them. She found a box filled with thin glass plates in the washtub. At first she didn’t know what to make of them, but their father did.

They were medical slides, filled with samples of diseased lung tissue. A label attached to each slide was coded with the same numbering system Trevor used for his patients.

They called the police immediately. Trevor came to the house to examine the slides and confirmed they were human tissue samples common in medical research. The glass plates were the same type used in his Baltimore study, although Trevor said the slides were new, not six years old.

The police took the slides away and questioned every person living in the house. No one had noticed anything unusual or spotted a stranger in the house, but with so many people coming and going, it would have been easy for someone to slip inside without attracting attention.

Mr. Zomohkov and his wife both moved out the following day.

“They had already paid through the end of the month and wanted their money back,” Tick said. “Mrs. Zomohkov is convinced the slides were soaked in tuberculosis germs, even though Trevor said the slides weren’t dangerous. Even so, Father gave them their money back. I doubt we’ll be seeing them again.”

Their boardinghouse built its reputation on her mother’s fabulous cooking and the powerful network of alliances that could be found around their dining room table. She clutched the sheets, feeling suddenly cold. Surely a single incident wouldn’t ruin a reputation that took more than a decade to build, could it?

“I have permission from my commanding officer to begin spending the night at home,” Tick continued. “A couple of other guys from the barracks are donating their spare time to keep an eye on the house when I can’t be there. Nice to have friends, you know? Besides, Mom’s cooking is much better than what they feed us at the barracks.”

Kate sagged against the pillows. This was all her fault. She had brought this trouble to their home. Whoever was out to ruin Trevor was now polluting her own home and trying to drag her parents down as well.

“They’ve picked the wrong house to attack,” she said, her voice vibrating with anger.

She almost bit Trevor’s head off when he came in to check on her later that afternoon. “When were you going to tell me what has been going on at home?”

He continued scanning her chart with the detached expression she knew so well. “We have a team from the local police department investigating the incident, three private investigators, and the US Marines on the case. There’s nothing you can do that isn’t already well covered. I need you to calm down.”

“Believe me, I’ve tried!”

“Try harder.” He flipped her chart closed and headed for the door.

“If you walk out that door, I’m following you.”

He froze. Every line of his back went rigid as he gripped the doorknob. Slowly he turned to face her, his face looking as if it
were carved from stone. “If you try to get out of bed, we have straitjackets.”

She threw a pillow at him.

He caught it, but the pillow messed up the alignment of his tie and vest, and his perfectly groomed hair was knocked into disarray. He looked stunned, like no one had ever thrown a pillow at him and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with it. Finally a little starch went out of his spine, and he dragged a chair to the bedside and sat, the pillow resting in his lap. He scrubbed a hand over his face and swallowed hard.

“Kate, I’m sorry about what’s happened,” he said, staring at the floor. “I’ve dragged your family into this whole disgusting mess, and I swear to you I will find out what’s going on. Just give me some time.”

He told her that his private investigators in Baltimore had already interviewed the hospital staff and most of the family members of the patients involved in the mercury study, and they could find no evidence that any of them harbored a grudge against him.

“Is it possible this has nothing to do with the mercury study?” she asked. “Is there someone else you offended over the years?” He glowered, but she rushed to explain. “Look, most of your life is an open book, because you can’t resist seeing your name in the newspaper. But right after that mercury study in Baltimore, you were missing for two years. Where were you?”

He sighed. “Not that again.”

“Maybe all this is related to what you were doing during those two years?”

“Nice try, but I can assure you it does not.”

She wanted to jump out of the bed and shake him, but even pushing herself higher against the pillows made her abdomen ache. She straightened the sheets over her lap and adjusted her nightgown.

“Why are you so secretive about that time? Maybe you were a lush and spent two years drunk under a coconut tree?” His withering glare was answer enough, but she decided to keep digging. “Or you were robbing banks out west somewhere. Why don’t you just tell me where you were?”

“Kate, I’ve been conducting the study upstairs and doing your share of the statistical work for the past three days. I really don’t have time for nonsense.”

“You don’t have to be so frosty.”

A memory kept tugging on the fringes of her mind. Trevor drawn up close to her bedside, leaning over her with a wistful smile, stroking her hair as if he couldn’t bear to tear himself away. Surely that was just a dream? His face had been gentle as he leaned over her. Maybe the drugs had fed her overactive imagination, because the man who comforted her in those strange, hazy hours had all the warmth and tenderness of the world blazing in his eyes. It was hard to look at Trevor without remembering that man. He’d been so gentle. Still teasing and overbearing, but also kind and patient and . . . loving.

A nurse tapped on the open door and then pushed a metal cart with Kate’s evening meal into the room. One wheel wobbled and squeaked, while her stomach growled in anticipation. As the cart came closer, she sighed as she smelled beef broth. They’d given her nothing but clear broth for days, and she was famished.

Sometimes it was so much fun to tease Trevor, especially when he was acting all formal and professional. She needed to crack through that reserved demeanor and find the passionate man who loved nothing more than matching wits with her.

“What’s wrong with the kitchen in this hospital? Can’t you do better than beef broth?”

“You could probably handle something a little heavier,” Trevor said. “What are you hungry for?”

“Black Angus steer,” she said without missing a beat, but she spoiled the effect when a giggle escaped.

“You are really pushing it, woman,” he said. He looked at the nurse. “You can give her some oatmeal with a little milk. Let me know if she gives you any trouble and I’ll get that straitjacket.”

* * * *

It had been almost twenty years since Trevor handled a shotgun, but his old training picking off rats at his mother’s farm came in useful today.

Joseph Barrow, the surgeon general for the navy, asked Trevor to accompany him to the country for a day of shooting clay pigeons. Why a grown man would find pleasure standing in a field, getting chewed on by gnats while shooting a piece of clay launched from a spring-loaded trap was beyond him. Shooting the varmints off his mother’s patch of land served a purpose, but today’s outing seemed entirely pointless. The weight of a shotgun against his shoulder brought back old unwelcome memories of another life in Scotland, but his muscles remembered how to cock and angle the gun to trace the flying clay disk until it slowed near the top of its arch. He squeezed off a round.

“Well done,” Barrow said as the clay disk shattered and fell to the ground. He nodded to the young marine at the trap to launch another clay pigeon.

How much longer was he going to have to do this? It was obvious why the surgeon general had dragged him out here. For whatever reason, men liked to do business on golf courses or hunting fields, which was a colossal waste of time.

“What’s the state of the nonsense with the
Washington Post
?” Barrow asked as he knelt to reload.

Trevor clenched his teeth, feeding another round into the shotgun’s chamber. “No progress,” he replied. “They gave me
a lot of blather about freedom of the press. It seems more like ‘freedom to slander’ to me.”

“Hmmm,” said Barrow. He stood with his freshly reloaded shotgun and nodded to the marine to release another clay pigeon. Trevor winced at the loud blast and watched the clean hit shatter the target to pieces. The acrid scent of gunpowder tinged the air. “I’m going to need you to do better, Dr. Kendall.”

“I’ve been informed that murdering the editor of the newspaper is not an option.”

Barrow affected a polite smile as he rested the butt of the shotgun on the ground and turned to Trevor. “Pity. Nevertheless, I’m starting to take heat for this, and I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like it either. I don’t like that these people will do anything to drive me out of the hospital. I don’t intend to let them win.”

“Fine,” Barrow snapped. “But get on with it. The newspaper articles are bad enough, but what happened last weekend at that boardinghouse went beyond the pale.”

Trevor shook his head. He’d hoped that incident would have escaped the surgeon general’s notice, but apparently the man had his ear to the ground. Barrow was still on his rant.

“The president is gearing up to ship the marines to Chile, and I’ve got enough on my hands without this drivel about an incompetent doctor on my payroll. Find out who’s behind the rumors. I don’t care how you do it, but get it done. Otherwise you’ll need to clear out of the hospital and find another source of funding. I can’t have this sort of thing stinking up my reputation.”

Trevor blinked at the steel in the man’s voice. For over a decade the surgeon general had done nothing but lavish praise and funding on Trevor’s research, and now his career was threatened because of a
journalist
?

His lawyer had effectively squashed Superintendent Lambrecht’s attempt to get Trevor evicted from the hospital, but if the surgeon general pulled his support, Trevor’s last line of defense would be gone.

The image of Jack and Amy standing beside him on the crest of that mountaintop rose in his mind. Their memory fueled him through sleepless nights, propelled him through docksides and whorehouses and tenements on a quest to find and help other suffering people.

But not if he was driven out of his profession by a bitter coward who didn’t even have the spine to face him. He hoisted the shotgun to his shoulder.

“I’ll put a stop to it,” he said.

* * * *

Kate came home a week following her surgery. A temporary sickroom had been arranged in the front parlor because her mother didn’t want Kate on the fourth floor where there was no water closet or anyone to hear her call for help. Tick helped Kate get situated on the sofa, and her mother brought a little bell to ring if she needed anything.

During the day, the house emptied as most of the boarders headed off to work. Kate had nothing to do but worry over who planted those revolting slides in their house and why. She spent hours gazing out the front window to watch passersby on the street, paying extra attention when one of them paused before their house or seemed to linger for no apparent reason. She didn’t like being this paranoid, but there was no doubt that someone had slipped inside and escaped notice once before, and she wasn’t going to let it happen again.

Irene Bauman often flitted around, bored out of her mind. For the first time, Kate realized half of Irene’s problems probably
stemmed from having nothing to do all day but ogle the male population of the city. Near dinnertime people began returning home. Charlie Davis presented her with a big bouquet of flowers, and Justice Bauman brought a jar of candied orange slices.