I ran back over toward City Hall Park to hire a cab, picturing in my mind Kat all huddled up where she’d hidden once before, in among the hedges what ran along the border of the Doctor’s front yard. She’d looked pretty awful then, and what with Betty’s strange report I didn’t expect her to appear much better when I found her this time: her sudden exit from the Dusters’ probably indicated another lack of burny, from which she was now feeling the effects. We’d have to repeat the treatment what’d helped her the last time around, though it would cost me another lecture from the Doctor; but at least I’d be able to help her once I got her into the house.

I found her just where I’d figured to, balled up like a newborn kitten in among the greenery to the side of the front yard, wearing the dress she always did in summer: an old, light job that showed off the curves what were still forming in her young body. She was asleep, clutching her bag tight to her stomach and breathing in quick little gasps. There were a couple of pools of vomit-really not much more than bile, given that she’d been retching for so long-lying on the ground behind her curled back, and her face was the color of old ashes. Big charcoal-colored circles had formed under her eyes, and as I took her hand I noted that her fingernails were starting to turn a strange and disturbing sort of color, like they’d been stepped on.

Even I could see that she was much sicker than she’d been last time.

As I wiped a few sweat-drenched strands of blond hair out of Kat’s face, I noted that her skin was strangely cool to the touch; and when I tried to get her to wake up, it took a good minute of gently slapping her palms and calling her name to do the job. As soon as she started to come around she grabbed at her gut especially hard, then retched again, bringing up nothing at all this time. Her head swaying as I helped her to sit up, she seemed to have trouble focusing her blue eyes.

“Stevie…” she breathed, falling against my chest. “Oh, God, I’ve got a awful pain in my gut…”

“I know,” I said, trying to pull her up so’s I could get her inside. “Betty told me. How long you been without the burny, Kat?”

She shook her head as much as she could, which wasn’t but a little. “It ain’t that. I’ve got a whole tin of the stuff, and I been blowing it all morning. This is something else…” As she stood up, the pain in her midsection seemed to ease a little bit, and she looked up to really see my face for the first time. “Well,” she whispered, with a small smile, “I ain’t generally at my best when we see each other, am I?”

I smiled back at her as best I could, and brushed some more hair out of her face. “You’ll be fine. Just got to get you inside and fixed up.”

She tightened her grip on my shirt, looking very worried and maybe a little ashamed. “I tried, Stevie-I told your friend Mr. Moore I’d look out for the kid, and I really did try, but the pain got so bad-”

“It’s okay, Kat,” I said, holding on to her tighter. “You done good-we got somebody else watching the place now. Somebody Libby won’t be able to get away from.”

“Yeah, but will he be able to get away from her, Stevie?” Kat said hoarsely.

“Won’t need to,” I answered. “This mug’s different, Kat-he can match her play for play.”

Nodding and then stumbling a little as I pulled her toward the front door, Kat tried to swallow: an action what appeared to give her a lot of difficulty. “He must be good, then,” she said, coughing some. “ ’Cause I’ll tell you, Stevie-that woman is the end of the damned world…”

Taking out my key, I opened the front door and guided Kat into the warm, stale air of the house. Just as soon as we’d reached the bottom of the staircase, she doubled over again, vomiting up some yellow bile and then screaming once in agony. But the shrieking itself seemed to call for more strength than she had, and as she fell out of my arms to sit on one of the stairs she just began to weep quietly.

“Stevie,” she managed to say, as I sat next to her and held her tight, “I know you ain’t supposed to, and I don’t want you to get in no trouble-”

I’d forgotten all about the paregoric. “Right,” I said, leaning her against the stairway wall and then standing up to head for the Doctor’s consulting room. “You wait here, I’ll get the stuff.”

As I tried to move down the hall, I felt her clinging to one of my hands, like if she let go I might never come back. Turning around, I saw tears still streaming down her terribly pale face. She was staring at me in a way what sort of seemed like she’d never really seen me before. “I ain’t never deserved your being so good to me,” she whispered; and something in the words made me rush back to her for a second and hold her as tight as I thought she could stand.

“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?”