“You pipe down with that,” I said, trying hard to keep my own eyes dry. Maybe it was the long night catching up with me; maybe it was the awful thing what had happened to Mr. Picton; and maybe it was fearful joy at hearing her actually admit to some kind of a deep and pure connection between us at a moment when she was in such desperate pain; whatever the explanation, the thought of losing her just then was the worst thing I could imagine. “You’re gonna be fine,” I went on, drying her face with my sleeve and looking deep into those blue eyes. “We got through this once, didn’t we? And we will again. But this time,” I added with a smile, “after we do, I’m putting you on the damned train myself-and you are getting out of this town.”
She nodded once, then looked down. “Maybe-maybe you’ll come with me, even, hunh?” she said.
Having no idea at all what I was saying, I just whispered, “Yeah. Maybe.”
Looking a little ashamed, Kat mumbled, “I never meant to go back to him, Stevie. But I didn’t hear nothing from my aunt, and I didn’t know what to-”
“Forget that,” I said. “All we gotta worry about right now’s getting you better.”
And then I bolted off into the Doctor’s consulting room to fetch the big bottle of paregoric, what I proceeded to liberally dose Kat with. She didn’t complain at all about the taste, knowing the good effect it’d had on her cramping the last time around; but her problem with swallowing only seemed to be getting worse, and it wasn’t easy for her to get the stuff down. Once she had, though, it appeared to take hold of her pretty quick, easing her pain up enough so that she could stand back up, put one arm around my neck, and start moving up the stairs. But the effect turned out to be temporary: we’d only gotten to the third floor of the house before she doubled over and screamed again, this time in a way what made me afraid to move her much farther. We were just outside the door to the Doctor’s bedroom, and I decided the best thing would be to take her in and get her laid down on his big four-poster bed.
“No!” Kat gasped, as I half carried her along. “No, Stevie, I can’t! It’s his bed, he’ll skin you!”
“Kat,” I answered, laying her out on top of the thin, deep blue spread what covered the bed, “how many times you gotta be wrong about the man before you get it? He ain’t that way.” As her head sank into the Doctor’s big mountain of soft goose-down pillows, I glanced around the room for something to cover her with, eventually catching sight of a comforter covered in green-and-silver Chinese satin what was folded up on a divan by the window. “Here,” I said, spreading the thing over her. “You got to keep warm and let the medicine go to work.”
Even with all her pain, Kat managed to pull the comforter up so’s she could rub the satin against her cheek. “He’s got nice things,” she mumbled. “Genuine satin-hot as the air gets, it still stays so cool… How come that is, Stevie?”
I crouched down on my knees next to the bed and touched her forehead, smiling. “I don’t know. Them Chinamen got tricks.” She winced once more, and I held up the paregoric bottle. “You wanna see if you can get some more down?”
“Yeah,” she said; but, try as she might, she just couldn’t swallow more than a little of the stuff, and finally she gave up trying. Writhing around with her hands on her stomach, she cried out again, then started to gnash her teeth in a frightful way.
It was beginning to occur to me that this might not be something what was going to pass with a dose of paregoric; and so, telling Kat to try to hold on, I ran into the Doctor’s study and opened his book of addresses and telephone numbers, eventually finding the listing for Dr. Osborne, a good-hearted colleague of the Doctor’s what I knew lived nearby, and who’d often done us good turns when somebody in the house was hurt or sick. Racing down to the telephone outside the kitchen, I got hold of an operator and had her connect me; but the maid at Dr. Osborne’s said that he’d gone off to do his rounds at St. Luke’s Hospital and wasn’t expected back for a couple of hours. I told the woman to have him telephone as soon as he returned, and then I went back up to the bedroom again. Breathing a big sigh of a relief when I saw that Kat’s painful spasms seemed to have passed, at least for the moment, I went to kneel by the bed again, and took her cold left hand in both of mine.
She turned her head over and smiled at me. “I heard you down there. Trying to get me a doctor…”
“He’ll come in a little bit,” I answered with a nod. Then I joked quietly, “Figure you can make it that long?”
Kat nodded. “I’ll make it a lot longer than that, Stevie Taggert,” she whispered, still smiling. “You watch.” Glancing around the room, Kat took in a deep, sudden breath. “I ain’t never had a doctor tend to me. And I sure ain’t never had no satin comforter. Feels nice…” Then she lost the smile, and for a minute I got scared that the pain was coming back; but it was only curiosity that filled her face. “Stevie-one thing I never asked you…”
“Yeah, Kat?”
“How come? I mean, you looking out for me all this time?”
I gripped her hand tighter. “That don’t sound like the girl with the big plans what I know,” I said. “How can I expect you to hire me as a servant if I ain’t nice to you now?”
She picked up her right hand and weakly slapped at my arm. “I’m serious,” she said. “Why, Stevie?”
“Ask Dr. Kreizler when he gets here. He’s full of explanations.”
“I’m askin’ you. Why?”
I just shook my head and shrugged a little bit, then turned my face down to look at her hand. “ ’Cause. I care about you, that’s why.”
“Maybe,” she breathed, “maybe you even love me some, hunh?”
I shrugged again. “Yeah. Maybe I even do.”
I looked up when she put a finger gently to my face. “Well,” she said, her mouth playing at a frown but then smiling gently, “it ain’t gonna kill you to say it, you know…” Then she turned toward the window, her blue eyes catching the gray light of the cloud-filled sky. “So Stevie Taggert loves me, maybe,” she whispered, in what you might call amazement. “What do you know about that …?”
The windows shook a little as the storm’s first clap of thunder finally boomed over the city. Kat didn’t seem to hear it, though; with those last words she’d drifted off to sleep, a sign, I figured, that the paregoric had finally taken real hold. Keeping my two hands on her one, tight enough to feel the blood pulsing through her wrist, I lay my head down on the satin comforter and waited for Dr. Osborne to call…
But what woke me wasn’t the telephone. It was the gentle but firm touch of Dr. Kreizler, prying my fingers off of Kat’s dead hand.
CHAPTER 53
If my mind hadn’t been clouded by all the things I felt for and about Kat, I might’ve been able to see what was really wrong in time to help her: that’s the thought that’s haunted me ever since, anyway. I’d been right in supposing that Libby’s letting Kat go from the Dusters’ had been just a little too easy, a little too merciful. When the Doctor and the others arrived at the house at about noon, Kat was already dead, and even before they woke me Lucius, tipped off by Kat’s awful appearance, had taken a sample of the little pool of vomit what she’d spat up at the foot of the stairs on the first floor and performed one of his chemical tests. The result had been definite: the burny what Kat had been blowing ever since leaving the Dusters’ early that morning had been laced with arsenic. There wasn’t any question who’d done the lacing, of course, nor much mystery as to when or how: while Goo Goo Knox and Ding Dong’d been knocking the stuffing out of each other and Kat’d been trying to bust it up, Libby’d got hold of Kat’s bag and slipped the poison into her burny tin, counting on Kat not being able to spot the very slight difference in color between the two powders.