Hurricane Nurse (12 page)

Donna nodded and said, rather stupidly, she thought, "How much we depend on habits." Mary had said that until this weekend she had kept Hank in her heart. These days during the storm! That meant she had turned her thoughts to Cliff. She wouldn't have done that without encouragement. Donna swallowed, then took a deep breath. Well, that was that.

Mary stretched and wriggled her shoulders. "I'm tired. I guess everybody in this place is. And we've got at least as much time to go as we've already spent. People are always saying modern Americans are soft. I must be. At least I'll be glad to get back into my comfortable bed at home."

"Me, too," Donna admitted. "I've sat up with patients for two shifts and not been as bone-tired as I am now. This storm seems to be something else."

"The low barometer doesn't exactly give you a lot of energy, and there's an excitement in the storm that wears on you, too." Mary spoke thoughtfully, her eyes on the window where rain flowed down in rivulets. She turned back toward the room and smiled. "I came to help with the children and maybe I'd better get to doing just that."

Donna bent over, put on her shoes, and stood up. "
I
came to look after the sick. I'd better get back to
that
. Little Sammy Worth down the hall's pretty sick. I'd better take my thermometer and check on him. Although if he's worse, I'm sure I don't know what I can do for him."

The two girls left the office together. They were hardly into the corridor when the little children gathered about Mary, calling for a story, or a game. She was a good sort, this Mary, Donna decided. She couldn't be friends with her if she was going to marry Cliff. But maybe Cliff was like Hank. If he began to look for a new girl as soon as he realized that Mary was interested in him, she would like Mary for a friend. She really would.

Sammy's nose was running worse than it had been that morning. His throat was at least as sore. And his fever had risen a degree. Donna's hand felt almost cold on his dry, hot forehead. He opened his eyes and looked up into her face, then closed them again. His body lay limp on the pallet.

"Maybe if we bathed him in tepid water—" Donna thought aloud. "That's all we have, anyway. We could use the sink in my office. And he ought to be more comfortable on the cot in there than he is here. You can come with us, Mrs. Worth."

"And me. Me and the rest of the children?" Mr. Worth asked. "Who's going to get us something to eat?"

Mrs. Worth looked at him in disgust that turned to the patience her long knowledge of him engendered. "You could make a sandwich for yourself, and the kids can make sandwiches for themselves. Or Lana will make a sandwich for you, if you can get her out of that crowd dancing at the other end of the hall." A sudden anger shook her, and she added, "Or you can go hungry. I'm looking after Sammy. You pick him up and tote him down to Miss Ledbury's office."

He seemed startled by the command, but he obeyed. And with Donna leading, they started down the corridor, dodging children at play and shooing off children who wanted to know what was the matter with Sammy.

I wish I could tell them, Donna thought to herself. Oh, don't let it be anything that he'll die of. Or anything I could have helped if I had just known what it was.

The storm was unheard here in the center of the building, but the shrieking of children might have drowned it out, anyway, Donna decided. But suddenly an angry voice rose above the shrill hubbub of the place. "He stole it, I tell you. He was here and it's gone. He stole it. I know he did. I'll kill him. He can't steal from me."

Donna could see that the red-faced woman making the accusation was Mrs. Frailey. Her creeping hair had entirely escaped its knot and her face was wild enough to bear out her threat. The man at whom she pointed her finger was someone Donna had seen the afternoon before when she had been registering the crowd, she felt sure, but she could not remember who he was, or anything about him.

He was grinning at the angry woman with a complacence that was surprising whether he was innocent or guilty—an abnormal sort of confidence, plus the sneer of a person who thought himself above the rest of the human race.

Crazy? she wondered as she turned the corner toward her office. Or he could be taking dope. Both we can do without.

Donna stripped the bed and, because she had run out of sheets, covered it with runners of paper towels from the roll over her sink. Mr. Worth put the boy down on it, and Mrs. Worth began to remove his clothes. Donna ran water into the sink, found, as she had known she would, that it was tepid. Gently she lowered the feverish little body into it, dribbling water over Sammy's thin shoulders with a washcloth. She kept him in the water five minutes. Then she dried him vigorously and gave him an aspirin. She hoped that would do it. She had no further means of treatment.

"Does he have clean night clothes?" she asked Mrs. Worth.

The mother shook her head. "He was clean when we come. I never thought of his getting sick. And I didn't think we would be here so long." She sighed. "The men and the kids act like it was some sort of holiday. It's the women who have to make do with things worse'n we got 'em home."

Mr. Worth growled like a goaded animal and turned to leave the room.

"Don't get into no card games now," Mrs. Worth commanded. "Nor no drinking."

He slammed the door.

Donna kept her smile hidden. She had thought at first that Mrs. Worth was somewhat put upon by a lazy husband. Now she wondered which had been short-changed in getting the other.

Almost immediately, Mr. Worth opened the door and stuck his uncombed, unshaven head into the room. "Miss Ledbury, there's a man up here bleeding. Mr. Fincher says will you come and bandage him up?"

Donna rose from her knees beside the limp and drowsy Sammy. "Do you think you can get him to take an aspirin, Mrs. Worth?" she asked.

Mrs. Worth's prim mouth tightened. "All my kids do what I tell 'em. They'd better. No delinquents in my house. Their pop'd let them do anything."

Donna found the aspirin bottle in the cabinet and gave it to her. "One now. Another in a half hour if I don't get back. I think I will."

The stern mother had been replaced by one with pleading eyes. "He ain't as sick as he was, is he, Miss Ledbury?"

Donna always wondered what to say under conditions of this kind and always ended by telling the exact truth as gently as possible. "I don't believe he's worse, Mrs. Worth. Temperature nearly always rises in the afternoon. And children have high fever without it meaning a great deal. But you know that."

She smiled as encouragingly as she could and picked up her bag of bandages.

A crowd stood about the door of room 107, and it was there that Mr. Worth led her. It was Mrs. Frailey's room and Donna had been there earlier. Mrs. Frailey, looking about as belligerent as a woman could, faced the same sinewy little man she had been screaming at when Donna had gone down the hall with the Worths. The woman held a sharp-edged frying pan in her hand and her face looked at least as triumphant as it looked angry.

The man's face was streaked with grease and blood. Donna, with only a casual glance, saw the cut in his hair, curved to fit the edge of the frying pan. "Will somebody bring some water? And some paper towels?" she requested. "Sit down, Mr.—I'm afraid I don't remember your name."

"Frank Eustace, ma'am. You registered me last night." The man's voice was deep and there was the sound of education and a good background in it. Donna's eyes dropped from the scalp wound she had been examining to his face. It still wore the cock-o'-the-walk look it had worn when she had seen him only minutes before.

"Yes, I know," she said, dabbing gently at the wound and wishing she had hot water. Iodine would have to do. She hoped there wouldn't be the germs she suspected there were on that frying pan. When the water arrived, she set about cleaning and bandaging the scalp.

"Now, what's all this about?" Hank demanded. "I know you were shouting at each other and—" Everybody tried to answer him, Mr. Eustace and Mrs. Frailey and those who stood as near the door as possible. Hank held up his hand and spoke firmly. "I'll never find out anything like this. One at a time. We'll begin with you, Mrs. Frailey."

Donna finished her bandage and gave it a final pat. "There," she said.

Mrs. Frailey folded her arms and left the frying pan to dangle, dripping grease down the front of her dress and on the floor. "That scoundrel stole my hundred dollars. He claims he never, and I have to admit he ain't got it on him unless he swallowed it."

"Eustace?" Hank cracked the word at the man like an army sergeant.

Eustace transferred his superior grin to Hank. "Professor, I never believed much in feminine intuition, and feminine intuition's all she's got to go on. She
says
she had a hundred dollars. Because I was standing in her door when she came back from somewhere with her kid, she says I stole it. But if I'd stolen it, wouldn't I still have it?" He made a gesture toward two men standing nearby. "They searched me. I insisted on it. And I haven't got it. Just women. You know how women are, Professor."

"I can't say that I do," Hank told him crisply. "Now Mrs. Frailey, let's hear your side of it."

She still stood with her arms folded, frying pan in hand, feet planted far apart so that Donna thought of women soldiers standing guard on the Arabian-Israeli border. "That one was hanging around this place all morning. I reckon he knew I had a hundred dollars I been keepin' against sickness or my man losing his job, or things like that. Even my man didn't know I had it, but
he
knew."

Eustace's grin had become an evident sneer. "Now I'm the one who has feminine intuition," he said out of the side of his mouth.

"I seen him hangin' around earlier, but I got so worried about gettin' the kids fed an' bedded down an' not fightin', an' I forgot. There he was when I went down to Miss Ledbury's to get the baby. And there he was when I come back." Her voice grew angrier as she went on.

"I'd go on hanging about after I'd taken the money? Seems to me, I'd have got as far away as possible," Eustace snorted. "She hasn't anything except stupid notions, Professor."

"Eustace, you know you don't call a high-school principal, Professor," Hank snapped at the thin little man, then turned back to Mrs. Frailey. "I'm afraid you'll have to offer better proof that Mr. Eustace took your money than that, Mrs. Frailey."

Eustace's lips curled. "Like proving that you ever had a hundred," he suggested helpfully.

Cliff had added himself to the watchers who had gathered about the small drama. Now he edged himself nearer. "Eustace, what are you doing down at this end of the hall? Weren't you assigned a room at the other end?" He sounded like a firm parent reasoning with a refractory child. "Can I help it if Mrs. Frailey fascinates me? Or maybe I don't care for the noise of the younger generation's music. I'm a big boy, Mr. Lawyer. I go where I please. American idea, remember?"

"You go down to your end of the hall, Eustace," Cliff warned him. "Mrs. Frailey, whatever possessed you to bring money here with you? If you had a hundred dollars, you should have put it in the bank."

She shook her unkempt head. "You know our sort of folks, Mr. Warrender. If we need a hundred dollars, we need it fast. Banks, you never know when they'll be open. Afternoons, evenin's, Sattidays, Sundays, they just ain't no use. Our kind of folks got to have their money where they can put their hands on it. Savin' it's been hard, but I done it. Last time the storm come, our roof blowed off an' ever' single thing we owned was wetted and blowed over. Some of it we never seen again. Money, I don't never leave."

He nodded his understanding. "I see. We'll do all we can to find it for you, Mrs. Frailey, but you mustn't go accusing people when you haven't even a shadow of proof."

Mrs. Frailey's underlip came out in a sulky stubbornness. "He's the one done it, Mr. Warrender. He done it to get hisself that dope he takes. You mark my words."

Cliff, Hank, and Donna made their way out of the excited crowd and back toward the girl's office.

She turned to Hank. "Do you think she really had a hundred dollars?"

Hank shook his head doubtfully. "I don't know. Seems unlikely."

"I think she had it," Cliff said firmly. "Nearly all the women in this section of town have a little put by, just in case. Mrs. Frailey's a little more determined than some so I'd say her money would have grown a little more. Besides, she'd never have been so angry just to impress people that she was loaded."

"Do you know Eustace? Do you think he took it?" Hank asked Cliff.

"Sure," Cliff answered. "He's in and out of court and he does take heroin when he can get it. He's had it today. Yes, I would say he's a pretty good suspect. When a man wants a fix, he'll do anything to get it. It's too bad about Eustace. He has an engineering degree from one of the Ivy League colleges. Used to make good money. But somewhere he got off on the wrong foot, and here he is." He sounded deeply regretful. "I tried to get him to go to the government hospital and straighten himself out. He laughed at me and quoted the figures to show how few ever broke the habit."

"I don't see that there's anything I can do about him and the money if he doesn't have it on him," Hank said worriedly.

"There isn't anything," Cliff agreed. "My guess is that he watched Mrs. Frailey cache it away, maybe last night, maybe this morning, came and got it as soon as she left the room and took it to someone up the corridor beyond her, and was on his way back when she returned. I shouldn't have sent him back to his quarters. He might have had the stuff on him and since that wasn't what they were looking for, the men may have missed it. He's had a shot recently, if that cocky air doesn't entirely mislead me. He's like a dog with his tail between his legs in court."

"He was yesterday afternoon when he came in, and his hands shook. I was too busy to do more than wonder about it then, but I was sure when I was bandaging his head a bit ago."

"Dope. Liquor," Cliff said, gesturing toward the room where the card players were still at it. "I've been expecting them to fall off their seats all day, but they go on and on. They're not eating anything, either. It's some sort of record, I think."