The Drifter. Сьюзен Виггс

it meant when a girl like Carrie was “adopted.” Pimps were always on the lookout for new, pretty girls. Brother Anthony and Brother Brandon were always on the lookout for ways to line their pockets.

      What happened next came back in broken images, shattered by the violence that followed. Sharp fragments of remembrance stabbed at the back of his mind.

      He had lunged at Brother Anthony, seized the portly man, shoved him against the seeping wall of the corridor. “Where is she, you son of a bitch? Who took her?” Jackson’s fierce, boyish voice echoed through the cavernous hallway of the tenement.

      “Long…gone, damn you to the eternal fires,” Brother Anthony choked out, his eyes bulging as Jackson’s thumbs pressed on his windpipe. Jackson was a strapping boy despite the poor diet and poorer treatment he’d suffered over the years.

      “Where?” he persisted, feeling an ugly pressure behind his eyes. Rage swept over him like a forest fire, burning out of control. The fury was a powerful thing, and his young mind absorbed its force. This, he knew then, was what drove men to murder. “Where?” he asked again. “Where? Where?”

      “Already heading…down the Big Muddy—” Brother Anthony stopped abruptly. Strong arms grabbed Jackson from behind. Fists clad in brass knuckles beat him senseless. He’d awakened hours or days later—he couldn’t tell which—in a windowless cell in the basement. One eye swollen shut, a constant ringing in his ears, broken rib stabbing at his midsection. It had taken him days to recover from the beating, and still longer to ambush the luckless boy who brought him his daily meal. Then Jackson had burst out into the street—to freedom, to danger, to the desperation of an outlaw on the run.

      He drifted from town to town, from logging camps in the northern woods to army forts and outposts in the West, from little farming villages where people pretended not to see him to big dirty cities where everyone, it seemed, was part of a confidence game. Jackson had mastered the trade of a cardsharp and gunfighter. He crewed on Lake Michigan yachts in the summers, learning the way of life that had captured his imagination. He was like a leech, finding a host, sucking him dry, moving on.

      A six-day card game had taken place on an eastbound train, and without planning to, Jackson had found himself in New York City. He had no liking for the city, but a force he didn’t understand and didn’t bother to fight had drawn him inexorably eastward along the low, sloping brow of Long Island.

      He’d gotten his first glimpse of the sea on a Wednesday, and he’d stood staring at it as if he beheld the very face of God. The following Monday, he signed on a whaler as a common seaman. The next three years consisted of equal parts of glory and hell. When he returned, he knew two things for certain—he hated whaling beyond all imagining. And he loved the sea with a passion that bordered on worship.

      But the unfinished quest for Carrie held him captive. Eventually, he had traced her. In New Orleans, while celebrating a tidy sweep at the poker table, he’d found himself a whore for the night, oddly comforted by the mindless, mechanical way the services were rendered and received. But in the morning, he’d opened his eyes to a shock as disturbing as a bucket of ice water.

      “What the hell’s this?” he’d demanded, yanking at the silk ribbon around the whore’s neck. “Where’d you get it?”

      The whore had clutched the object defensively. “Lady Caroline left it behind, said it was a good-luck charm so I took to wearing it.”

      He grabbed the charm, stared at it for a long time. It was the dove he’d carved for Carrie so long ago. “Lady Caroline,” he said, hope burgeoning in his chest. “So where is she now?”

      “Gone to Texas, last I heard, with Hale Devlin’s gang.”

      Texas. And that had only been the beginning.

      The shattering of glass jarred Jackson out of his reverie. With a curse, he looked at the framed tintype he’d been holding and saw that he’d broken it. An ice-clear web of cracks radiated from the center, distorting the picture of Leah and her father. Her smiling mouth was severed as if by violence; the father’s hand on her shoulder had been detached.

      Painstakingly, Jackson removed the broken glass. The picture went back to normal—Leah, smiling, aglow with pride. Her father cold, distant. The scroll of a paper diploma clutched in her hand.

      An educated woman. But could she save Carrie?

      He shuddered from the memory of what he had found in Texas.

      Could anyone?

      Bone weary, bloodied to the elbows and filled with self-doubt, Leah peeled off her patent rubber gloves. She pressed her forehead against the damp wall of the surgery and closed her eyes.

      Nearby, she could hear Sophie’s movements as she placed soiled sheeting and gowns into a pail of carbolic solution, then emptied a large porcelain container into a waste pail.

      “You did your best. I watched you like a hawk on the hunt,” Sophie said. “Those fancy city doctors in Seattle couldn’t have done better.”

      “Try telling that to Mr. Underhill,” Leah whispered. “Oh, God, God.” She forced her eyes open, made herself look at Sophie.

      Her assistant was broad of face; she had wise dark eyes and an air of serenity that governed every move she made, every word she spoke. Half Skagit Indian and half French-Canadian, Sophie had been educated in boarding schools that taught her just enough to convince her that she belonged neither to the white nor the native world, but stood precariously between the two. It was an uncomfortable spot, but Leah, a misfit herself, felt sometimes that they were kindred spirits.

      “It is the great curse of doctors,” Leah said, “that while most people have to die only once, a doctor dies many times over, each time she loses a patient.”

      Sophie pressed her lips into a line, then spoke softly. “But it is the great reward of healers that each time you save a life, you yourself are reborn.” She looked down at the unmoving, pale face of Carrie Underhill. “Yes, you lost the baby. But you also saved Mrs. Underhill from bleeding to death. She’ll live to thank you. Perhaps to bear other children.”

      Leah swallowed the lump in her throat. She knew some babies were never meant to be, especially when the mother suffered such precarious health. There was something puzzling about Carrie Underhill’s condition, something besides the pregnancy. A chronic complaint, perhaps. But what?

      Did she drink calomel? Leah wondered. The purgative was still a popular folk remedy; it had been her father’s favorite prescription. This was the sort of thing he caused, she thought resentfully. She intended to keep Carrie under close observation.

      The task at hand was more pressing, though. She had to face this woman’s husband. The baby’s father.

      With a leaden heart, she helped Sophie finish clearing up. After Carrie was clad in a clean gown and lying on clean draperies, Leah went to the door and opened it. “Mr. Underhill?”

      His head snapped around as if someone had punched him in the jaw. Weariness deepened the fan lines around his eyes and mouth, yet a beard stubble softened the effect; he appeared deceptively vulnerable. “Is she all right?”

      Leah nodded. “She’s sleeping, but will probably awaken within the next hour.”

      He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Good,” he said between his teeth. “Damn, that’s…good.” He opened his eyes. “Jesus. I feel like I just got dealt four aces.”

      Leah cleared her throat. “She might suffer a headache, possibly vomiting, from the ether. You must watch her closely in case the bleeding starts again, but I don’t think it will.” She forced an encouraging smile. Something tender and desperate lived in Jackson Underhill’s haggard face. She wished she knew him well enough to take his hand, to hold it tight for a moment. Instead, she said, “I believe your wife will be fine. She needs plenty of bed rest and good food, and we’ll see to that.”

      “Yes. All right.” His eyes closed again briefly. His knees wobbled.