With Every Breath (23 page)

Silence descended on the parlor, and everyone looked at Trevor. “No one can catch tuberculosis from what’s in that box,” he said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“How can you tell?” a boarder said. “It appears as though you haven’t had much success curing those people at the hospital.”

Trevor looked like he wanted to strangle the man, but he wisely decided not to engage. Justice Bauman was talking to a policeman on the landing, and a few minutes later the police allowed the boarders to return to their rooms.

But the damage had been done.

By the end of the evening, eight of their boarders informed her father they were moving elsewhere. In ten days the payment on their mortgage was due, and their ability to pay it was dwindling by the hour.

* * * *

Kate was unable to sleep as she lay on the sofa and stared out at the starlit night. Trevor was so passionate in seeking a cure for tuberculosis, but he was out of his league now. While she wasn’t sure how to handle things either, her sitting on this sofa and doing nothing was getting them nowhere. If Trevor couldn’t solve the problem, then she would.

At half past three in the morning she heard Tick stirring abovestairs, preparing for his four o’clock shift at the hospital. She was dressed and waiting when he came downstairs.

“I’m coming with you,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” he replied, keeping his voice to a whisper. “You’re going back to bed.” They had been trained since childhood to keep quiet until all the boarders were awake.

She took a step toward him and fastened the ties of her cloak. “First of all, I have a sofa, not a bed. And I’m not setting foot in my bedroom until we figure out what’s going on. I need to go to the hospital with you.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She pulled up the hood of her cloak. “The surgery was ten days ago. I’m perfectly fine now, and I need time in the office without Trevor breathing down my neck.” When Tick still looked uncomfortable, she redoubled her efforts. “Trevor is the most closemouthed and stubborn man alive. He won’t reveal anything of his past to me, and you can be certain he hasn’t been forthcoming with the police either. I need to find out where he
was during a two-year period in his past. I think it’s the source of all these troubles.”

Tick finally relented, and by four o’clock they were at the hospital. No one was about the place this early in the morning, their footsteps echoing in the darkened hallways. After Tick switched positions with the marine who stood the night guard, Kate unlocked the door to the office she shared with Trevor.

She swallowed back a lump of guilt as she sat in Trevor’s chair, telling herself if he weren’t so secretive she wouldn’t be forced to invade his privacy this way. Her heart pounding, she slid open the top drawer.

A tray of pencils, a pair of scissors, some paper clips, and a slim medical dictionary. The rest of the drawers were equally devoid of personal details. She turned in the chair, thinking . . .

The locked file was surely her best clue for wherever he was during the years 1887–88. Another search of Trevor’s desk failed to turn up the key. She ran her hands along the underside of the drawers to see if perhaps the key had been secured there. But after ten minutes of searching, she was certain there was no key in his desk.

Then it came to her. Tick knew how to pick a lock. They had used his skills more than once when boarders had accidentally locked themselves out of a room. She tipped her head outside the office door and saw him standing guard at the back entrance. She smiled, and he gave her a brisk nod in reply.

“Good morning, ma’am,” he said before riveting his eyes straight ahead.

She loved it when he put on his grown-up façade. “Tick, I need a favor.”

He glared at her.

She cleared her throat and tried again. “Private Norton, I need assistance in the office.”

He glanced up and down the halls. All was still except for the night nurse, who was paging through a vaudeville magazine at the front of the clinic. He reluctantly followed her into the office.

She gestured to the locked file drawer beside Trevor’s desk. “I need you to pick the lock on that drawer,” she said.

“Forget it.”

“It’s not like I’m ransacking his files for fun. I just need to find out where he was during those two years. I think it may be behind what’s happening at the boardinghouse.”

“Trevor doesn’t think so. If he did, he would tell us.”

“Can you be sure about that?”

Tick looked back at her, indecision on his face.

She pressed her case. “Our parents owe a payment to the bank on the first of the month, and we just lost a third of our boarders. More people are likely to leave today. We can’t afford not to open that drawer.”

“I don’t have anything to pick it with.”

“This is a hospital ward. I’ll get you whatever you need.” A quick look in the supply closet found some of those shiny metal tools Trevor used to poke and prod the patients. She stood over Tick as he squatted down by the drawer, carefully fitting a slim pick into the lock and lifting it open. The drawer slid open silently.

“Now get out of here,” Kate whispered.

She closed the office door behind Tick, then returned to the file cabinet. All the drawers were empty except the bottom one, which was dense with the same sort of medical files in the other drawers. Scooting off the chair, she knelt on the floor, pulled the bottom drawer out farther, and read the only name printed on all the file tabs.

Trevor McDonough
.

She sucked in a breath. With trembling fingers she rifled through the files. Some were faded and creased with age, others crisp and new, but each file was labeled with a year.

She grabbed one of the older files and flipped it open to see a medical chart inside. She scanned the columns and the numbers, a wave of dizziness crashing in as she realized what she was looking at.

No. Please no, not this . . . not Trevor. But she knew what the charts meant.

Trevor had tuberculosis.

He had sixteen years of records to document his illness. She slammed the drawer shut, a scream tearing from her throat, its echo crashing through the silence of the night.

Tick burst through the door. “What’s wrong?”

She knelt on the floor, clinging to the cold metal drawer handle, unable to lift her head. Tick hunkered down beside her, his hand on her shoulder. “Are you hurt?”

Her heart had just been torn in half, but that wasn’t what he was asking. Her chest hurt so bad it was hard to even draw a breath. “I’m okay,” she whispered.

Everything finally made sense. Why Trevor held her at arm’s length. Why he was so dejected and aloof and so sickly white when they were in school. Why he drank the same medicine he gave the patients.

“I need to get you off the floor. This can’t be good for you.”

Tick lifted her up and guided her into Trevor’s chair. Gently he tilted her chin with his hand so he could look her in the eyes. “Should I get a doctor? You don’t look so good.”

“It’s all right,” she mumbled. “People who don’t want the truth shouldn’t go rummaging through locked drawers. That’s all.”

“What did you find?”

She found that she was falling in love with another man who
was destined for an early grave. “It has nothing to do with what’s happening at home. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry I looked.”

“Do you want me to send for Trevor?”

Another teardrop plopped onto her lap, and she swiped at her face. “No. I’ll be all right.”

But she wouldn’t be all right. All summer she had been battling an irrational attraction to Trevor, and she had been losing. Beneath his aloof demeanor he had an immense zeal for life. He kept it tightly under wraps, but she had seen it . . . on the rooftop, in the lab, even when he caught her gaze across the dinner table there was an answering flare of awareness before he could snuff it out. They both felt it, but now she understood why he’d been too honorable to act on it.

A few weeks ago she had sat in this very office, laying her heart at his feet. He looked desperate for her, but he pulled away.
“Kate, I’m not
a good bet,”
he’d told her.

Now she understood what he meant by those words.

18

E
ver since he was a boy, Trevor did his best strategizing while walking. Whether it was hiking through the misty Scottish highlands or the glittering streets of Berlin, a vigorous full-bodied stride was the best way for him to tackle a problem. It helped to burn off the tension so that he could focus all his attention on the perplexing problem at hand.

Bypassing the morning streetcar, he walked to the hospital as he obsessed over who could be trying to destroy him. It was bad enough when he was the target, but the image of Kate with her shattered expression—sitting there on the staircase of her parents’ boardinghouse as the police searched their home—had haunted him all night.

Once inside the hospital, he vaulted up the stairs two at a time and then burst through the door to the clinic, strode down the hall, and flung open his office door.

What was Kate doing here? Why was she sitting at his desk?

The chair squeaked as she swiveled the seat to face him. Her face was pale and tear-stained. His breath left him in a rush when he saw the file on her lap. He sagged against the doorframe.

“Oh, Kate, I wish you hadn’t seen that.”

Her lower lip wobbled, and tears pooled in the bottoms of her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Because tuberculosis was such a foul, horrible disease, and he didn’t want anyone treating him differently because of it. From the day he first met her, Kate had relentlessly teased, tormented, and challenged him. Since they began working together, she looked at him with excitement. With admiration. With the spirited joy of competition. He didn’t want those things to be replaced by pity.

“You don’t seem sick,” she whispered. “You aren’t like the patients in the ward. I don’t understand.”

He didn’t either. There were so many things about tuberculosis that were still a mystery. He closed the door so they could speak privately, then grabbed her desk chair and pulled it across the room to sit next to her. It hurt to look at the despair in her face.

“Talk,” she ordered.

That made him smile. How typically Kate. She always confronted problems head on, while he buried them, kept them hidden under layers of secrecy. It was easier to solve problems on his own without entangling others, while she wanted to spill them to the world.

“I was diagnosed when I was thirteen,” he said.

“Was that why your father sent you away?”

His laugh came out harsh, but he quickly stifled it. “No, it had nothing to do with that.” His thirteenth year was the most miserable of his life, beginning with his being placed on a ship and sent away from Deirdre and every other person he knew in the world, and then just a week later to be clobbered with the news of a terminal disease.

“I was on the ship headed for Washington when my cough became so bad the ship’s doctor wanted to see me. He said I
had all the symptoms of tuberculosis and told me I probably had two, maybe three years to live.”

He didn’t tell Kate how the doctor had ordered him to stay in his cabin and keep away from others. That if he coughed on others or became friendly with them, it was as good as sharing his terminal disease.

“When I arrived at Senator Campbell’s house, I didn’t tell anyone. The ship’s doctor warned me they might turn me out of the house if they suspected. I couldn’t go home to my father, and I didn’t know a single person in America, so I stayed quiet. I hated it, but I had nowhere else to go and I was afraid. Mrs. Kendall figured it out pretty fast. She recognized the rattle in my lungs because she’d been battling the same disease.”

Mrs. Kendall backed up what the ship’s doctor said. She had been keeping her disease a secret too, for what logical man would let a tubercular woman supervise his kitchen if he knew? Or welcome a sick boy into his home? Mrs. Kendall taught him how to hide when the coughing seized him, how to get sunlight to offset the tubercular pallor. She taught him to drink honeyed tea by the gallon to ward off the fits of coughing. But the most important thing she provided was a person for him to confide in. They were two people who shared a terrible secret. In his desperate and storm-tossed world, Mrs. Kendall became his safe harbor.

School was a special blend of torture and release. All the other kids were normal and happy, but he couldn’t befriend any of them, because if he started coughing it would put them in danger. They were always laughing and cheerful. It hurt to be around them when his world was so bleak. But Kate was different. He didn’t need to befriend Kate to compete with her. For a few hours each day he was released from worrying about the plague growing in his lungs and could indulge in the thrill of matching his wits against the smartest girl he ever met.

“After a few years, I started feeling better. Mrs. Kendall swore it was her cooking. She always made me eat second helpings of beef and milk. She insisted it was good for tuberculosis. I ate because it was hard to keep weight on. Senator Campbell used to joke about his soaring grocery bill. He must have written something to my father, because that was the month the Black Angus steer was delivered.”

Kate winced. “I’m so sorry I teased you about that.”

He clasped his hand over hers. Her hand was so slim in his palm, and he traced his thumb over the back of it. “Don’t worry about it, Kate. Anyway, I think there was some truth to Mrs. Kendall’s idea about diet. When I left for college, my lungs were clear. I went to a specialist in Boston, and he said I showed no signs of tuberculosis. I was finally able to gain some weight, and my skin started to hold its color. My strength returned. During those years I felt . . .”

It wouldn’t be fair to tell Kate what going to Harvard felt like. The return of his health at the same time he was able to bask in the joy of rigorous academic study was exhilarating. He was among the tiny fraction of tubercular patients who’d been liberated from a death sentence. The world stretched out before him like an endless feast of learning, discovery, and opportunity. It was as if every blessing in the world had been simultaneously showered on him.