Marry Me (42 page)

“The source?” asked Wyatt. “Not the cause?”

“The cause is
Salmonella typhi.
The source might be water or food or–.” He bit off what he’d been about to say, concerned that he was getting ahead of himself. “Maybe both,” he said as if that had been his thought.

“Not vermin? Not filth?”

“No. That’s typhus. Reidsville is hardly a breeding ground for that plague. City tenements. Immigrant ghettos. That’s where you’ll find that disease. The bacillus I’m speaking of was identified only four years ago. It’s the subject of considerable study, and there’s still the question of a vaccine. Something akin to what Jenner discovered for smallpox would be the hope.”

“Your research?”

“No. I’m afraid not. I’ve studied it, of course, but not here. My research is as much chemical as it is biological. I’m formulating and evaluating stains that will show the presence of different types of bacteria. If I’m successful, it’s a step that will further promote the acceptance of germ theory.”

“Sounds like it might be important.”

Cole smiled briefly. “It sounds like I told you more than you wanted to know.”

Wyatt shook his head. “No. You didn’t. This is about the town … about Rachel. I want to know everything. I don’t like feeling helpless.”

Neither did Cole. He stopped walking. When Wyatt turned, moonlight illuminated the tin star on his coat. Cole looked at it and then glanced down at the leather bag in his hand. “We’re both unarmed,” he said after a moment. He hefted the bag. “There’s no cure in here. There’s no cure anywhere. If it’s enteric fever, then it will have to run its course. That’s weeks, Wyatt, not days. Some people will die. I can treat the symptoms, but I can’t treat the disease.”

Wyatt nodded heavily. “If Rachel …” He couldn’t finish. He clenched his jaw and didn’t try to speak again.

“If Rachel contracts the fever,” Cole said quietly, “there’s almost no chance that she’ll keep the baby, or if she does, that it will be born alive. I’m sorry, Wyatt. That’s what you wanted to know, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” His lips barely moved around the word.

Cole suddenly remembered what Rachel told him in confidence. Wyatt had already lost a wife and an unborn child. The weight on the man’s shoulders was visible in Cole’s eyes. “Don’t assume that she’ll be one of the victims. You won’t be able to think straight, and right now I’m depending on your ability to do just that. Until I know the source, you’re going to have to enforce a quarantine on the town. No one in. No one out.” Black humor asserted itself as he set out again. “You might have cause to strap on a gun for that.”

“Find the source, Doc,” Wyatt said darkly, “and I won’t have to use it on you.”

Rhyne and Wyatt sat quietly on stools in one corner of the surgery while Cole prepared glass slides for the microscope. He had collected his journals from the library and occasionally consulted his notes as he worked, fixing each sample to a slide with a small amount of water and then passing it over a flame. Afterward, he flooded the slides with crystal violet, allowing them to set a minute, rinsed them in water, and then flooded them with iodine. After another minute, he flooded them with acetone alcohol, and then tapped out ten seconds on his fingertips before he rinsed them again. He flooded them with the counterstain and waited another full minute before he rinsed them in water and carefully blotted each one dry. His concentration was absolute, and he forgot about his anxious audience once he began working.

The smear of Will’s saliva was inconclusive. He tried several samples, isolating the blood cells for evidence of the obligate bacilli, but could not make out the distinctive rod shape that the stain was meant to help him see. He reviewed his methods and the publication of Hans Christian Gram’s work, wondering if the fault lay in his preparation or the translation from the original.

He began again, this time with the smear from Whitley’s stool.

Watching Cole disappear into his science was a revelation to Rhyne. She knew he approached his work in a careful, serious manner, but what she was witness to now was extraordinary. His attention to every detail, and his ability to take such measured, painstaking steps in the face of a threatening crisis, filled her with awe. His face revealed nothing save for his absorption in the task at hand. There was an economy of motion that she found fascinating, the finely honed skill of a man used to manipulating objects unfamiliar to most people. He held thin glass slides up to the light and studied them as a jeweler might study the facets of a diamond. He put the slides over a flame without burning himself and immersed them in chemical baths without splashing a single drop.

She couldn’t make bread without getting flour in her hair.

Rhyne’s sigh was inaudible. She exchanged glances with Wyatt as Cole sat at his microscope again. Neither expended energy pretending to be hopeful. They waited.

They all felt the vibration from the beating someone was giving the house’s side door. Looking up from his microscope, Cole forgot himself just long enough to allow his annoyance to show. He sucked in a breath, forced back his frustration, and started to rise.

Rhyne was already on her feet and heading toward the entrance. “Stay where you are. Let me see what it’s about.”

Wyatt resumed leaning against the wall, his long legs stretched out from the stool. “We could get lucky,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “Maybe someone broke a bone.”

But no one was that lucky. It was Ted Easter, and he was there about his youngest boy Alexander. Coughing. Sore throat. Fever. And a headache. “At least it’s not Teddy this time,” he told Rhyne after she asked him to wait a moment. “I don’t think he could tolerate another ear infection. I know his mother can’t.”

Smiling wanly, she disappeared into the surgery and shut the doors behind her. Cole and Wyatt were waiting for her. “You heard?”

They both nodded.

“What do you want me to tell him?”

“That I’ll be along directly,” Cole said. “In the meantime,

he should stop by Caldwell’s and get the infusion I asked Chet to start preparing.” He consulted his pocket watch. “Chet’s probably still in his store working on it.”

Rhyne’s gaze dropped to the microscope. “Do you know yet?”

Cole shook his head.

Rhyne opened the pocket doors behind her and backed out of the room.

Wyatt stared at Cole. “Why didn’t you tell her?”

“Because Ted Easter would have seen the dread in her eyes. She’d do better facing a couple of miscreants than a father whose son has typhoid fever.”

Chapter 14

Rhyne took her time getting ready for bed, hoping that she’d hear Cole’s light tread on the stairs before she turned back the covers. When he didn’t come, she stood at the bedside and stared at the neat arrangement of pillows and smoothed over the quilt while debating what she should do. If she crawled into bed now, it would be the first time in their short marriage that he wasn’t within minutes of following. She didn’t like it, and she turned away, unable to bring herself to disturb the bedcovers.

After checking on Whitley one more time, Rhyne padded down the stairs in her nightgown, slippers, and shawl. She ignored the light coming from under the library doors in favor of going to the kitchen to warm some milk. She made enough for two cups and carried them to the library.

Cole was hunched over the writing desk, one hand supporting his head while he tapped out a slow, relentless tattoo on the book opened in front of him. He had removed his band collar and unbuttoned his shirt at the throat. He’d rolled his sleeves as far as his elbows, but the gesture had been an absent or a harried one because the right sleeve was fractionally shorter than the left. Runnels marked his thick hair where he’d pushed his fingers through it, and a muscle worked tirelessly in his cheek as he read. Most telling of his tension, she thought, were the long legs tucked under the chair, not stretched out in front of it.

She placed his milk on one corner of the desk and sat down in the armchair to sip hers. When he finally looked up, she smiled because his surprise was so evident.

“How long have you been there?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Not so long that your milk’s gone cold.”

His eyes strayed to the cup on his desk. “This will not help me stay awake.”

“My intent exactly.”

“Rhyne,” he said, shaking his head. “I need to–”

“Come to bed,” she finished for him. “You need to sleep. You would say the same to anyone else.”

The fact that she was right did not improve his humor. “I need to put it in writing. It all has to be set down in the event that I become ill. You. Wyatt. Chet Caldwell.
Someone
has to know how to proceed if I can’t.”

“I’m sure you’re right, but it seems to me that morning is soon enough to make that start. You’re bleary-eyed now from staring into that microscope, and I reckon your brain is about tuckered out from puzzling. I don’t know that I’d trust anything you put to paper.”

Cole very deliberately pushed the book aside and picked up the cup. He brought it to his lips. “Satisfied?”

She ignored his sardonic tone. “I looked in on Whitley,” she said. “She was sleeping, but I could tell she’d been tossing and turning. I rearranged the bedcovers to keep her from throwing them off.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s no need to thank me for doing for Whitley. I love her, same as you, and I want her well again.”

Cole nodded. “Children usually fare better with typhoid than adults do, especially older adults like Sid Walker or Will’s parents. For someone as young as Alex Easter, the symptoms will probably be less severe. I think it’s safe to expect fewer complications. Whitley, though, she’s …”

Rhyne saw that he couldn’t complete the thought. Perhaps she was wrong to encourage him to sleep. He would never go easily. She couldn’t ply him with enough warm milk to make that happen, not when he was honor bound to care for every life the way he did for his sister’s.

“Whitley’s not quite child, not yet adult.” Rhyne said what Cole couldn’t. “It’s hard to know how it will turn out, isn’t it?”

Cole wrapped his hands tighter around the cup and merely nodded.

To distract him, Rhyne said, “Tell me about those little pink rods again. I heard what you said before, but it’s not easy making sense of it. It doesn’t seem right that something so small can put that no-account Beatty boy off his stride. And Whitley? I thought it would take something like another freight train to stop her in her tracks.”

The image of Whitley as a full-steam-ahead locomotive was an apt one, and it briefly roused Cole’s smile. He appreciated what Rhyne was trying to do, and she wasn’t wrong that his thoughts needed diverting.

After Ted Easter departed and Rhyne returned to the surgery, Cole had explained what he’d found on the slide under his microscope. He’d allowed her to look for herself. Her fascination didn’t surprise him; her doubt did. He had come to expect that she would accept him at his word on all things medical, but she’d questioned him like a true skeptic.

“You’ve had a splinter in your finger before, haven’t you?” asked Cole. “A speck of dust in your eye?” “Of course.”

“It’s an imperfect comparison, but consider the discomfort and irritation both cause. Your finger will throb; your eye will water. Neither the splinter nor the speck is alive,

but imagine if they were. Imagine that unlike you, neither requires oxygen to live. That means they’re able to thrive in places where none exists.”

Rhyne pointed to herself. “Like inside me.”

“Yes. And in the process of living and reproducing, the bacilli … that is, the rods, produce waste that irritates the host. Human beings appear to be the perfect host for
Salmonella typhi.
No one’s yet shown that it exists in other animals.” He watched Rhyne’s eyebrows draw together as she considered what he’d said. There was comprehension this time, and he knew that the reason she’d failed to grasp the implications at first was because he’d explained it badly. “It requires time for the rods to–”

“Bacilli,” she said. “You can say it now. I looked it up. It’s from the Latin for staff or rod.” She pitched her voice lower and evoked Runt Abbot. “I reckon doctors just gotta have their secret language.”

Cole discovered he had the wherewithal to chuckle. He was glad to learn it. “The
bacilli,”
he began again, “require time to do their damage. It can take a week or more for someone who’s been infected to experience the first symptoms. There are people who’ve had the bacteria inside them for several months before they begin to feel sick.”

“So a hostess can pass along the bacilli without even knowing she’s sick.”

“A host,” Cole corrected. “But yes, that’s often the case.”

“That’s why you were so particular that I wash up after caring for Whitley.”

He nodded. “And before and after other things you do as well.”

“I remember.” There was a certain irony, she thought, that Runt Abbot had to surrender his life of grime. “Will we all get the fever?”

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

“First, it’s unlikely that the entire town has been exposed. Contaminated water would be the way something like that could happen, but Wyatt tells me that every home doesn’t have the same source. Some families have wells. Others tap into an underground spring. The Commodore has its own tower that feeds off a spring higher up. Second, even if everyone is exposed, there will always be some people who won’t get sick. I don’t know why. No one does. But it happens in every sort of outbreak. The human race would have died out long ago if it weren’t for those among us who can make a stand. The germs are legion, Rhyne. I don’t like to think how insignificant our numbers are compared to theirs.”

“I like it better when I can see what I’m fighting.”

“You did see,” he reminded her gently. “Most people will never have the same introduction.”

Rhyne sighed softly. “Whitley was right. It would be safer if you could shoot at something.”

Cole thought of his earlier conversation with Wyatt.

“Whitley said that?”