“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.
Still dazed by a lack of sleep and the shocks of the last twenty-four hours, I just sat on the edge of the Doctor’s bed as I listened to all this, staring at Kat’s strangely peaceful face and waiting for a couple of men from the city morgue to come and take her body away. The others-excepting Marcus, who’d gone straight from Grand Central to Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street to explain to his bosses that a fugitive was loose in the city-quietly moved around the house, talking among themselves about what should be done next and knowing that it would be best not to say anything to me until I came out of the horrible fog I was in.
This didn’t even start to happen until I heard the sound of the van from the morgue arriving outside. When the two attendants who were driving it entered the house, I began to realize for the first time that they were going to take Kat away, and that the face what, dead or no, still lay in front of me would soon be gone from my sight forever. There wasn’t any way to stop it, I knew that; but in my continued state of confusion I found that what I needed most was some way to say the good-bye what Libby Hatch had robbed me of. Glancing feverishly around the room, my eyes settled on Kat’s worn old bag. I snatched the thing up, praying that it contained the few items in the world what she actually cared about-her dead father’s wallet, her dead mother’s picture, and her train ticket to California-and thanking God when I found that it did. I told the Doctor that we couldn’t let the city plant Kat in any potter’s field without those things, but he told me not to worry, that he’d arrange for her to have a decent burial out in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.
The sound of the word “burial” cut through the last of the strange haze I’d been drifting through ever since waking up, and a pronounced lump began to grow in my throat. Running out to the morgue van in the rain what’d finally started to fall, I stopped the two attendants as they were loading Kat’s body in, then pulled back the sheet what covered her. Touching her cold face one last time, I leaned down to whisper into her dead ear:
“Not maybe, Kat-I did. I do …”
Then I slowly pulled the sheet back up, and stepped back to let the two attendants go about their business. As I watched the van pull away from the house, cold, clear reality swept over me in a terrible wave, one so powerful that when I turned to see Miss Howard standing inside the front door, giving me a look what said she knew just how much Kat’d meant to me and how I was feeling, I couldn’t help but run over, bury my face in her dress, and let myself have at least a couple of minutes of tears.
“She did try, Stevie,” Miss Howard whispered, putting her arms around my shoulders. “In the end she tried very hard.”
“Couldn’t beat the odds, though,” I managed to mumble through my grief.
“There were no odds to beat,” Miss Howard answered. “The game was rigged against her. From the very start…”
I nodded, sniffling away as much sorrow as I could. “I know,” I said.