AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Sickness worse. Tuberculosis, in advanced stages. Doctor advises rest, sea air, and a full-time nurse. Gone to Windward Hall. Please come.
She read the brief message once more, searching for additional information that never appeared. A full-time nurse. He couldn’t mean ... her?
Certainly, retreating to their summer home in Maine to grant his lungs rest from the polluted New York air was a reasonable measure. But Luther Cavendish had the means to hire a nurse from the city to accompany him.
But something in her knew. Her reclusive, bookish father wouldn’t trust his care to a stranger, not when his own daughter had just graduated from nursing school.
They’d studied tuberculosis, of course. It was the second leading cause of death in the nation, barely surpassed by influenza. Unlike the flu, however, sufferers from tuberculosis often lingered for months, even years, racked by terrible coughing and pain. But there was no cure.
If Father expected her to tend to him for the duration ... she’d miss the war, the reconstruction of Europe, everything she’d worked and trained for. But how could she say no if her own father was dying?
She crumpled the note and threw it into the bin with Oliver’s photo.It’s not his fault, part of her—the part that still had her mother’s compassion—whispered.You can’t resent a dying man.
But she found that she could, and did.
Louise slammed the lid of her steamer trunk and, with effort, held in a cry of frustration.
Inter Arma Caritas. They’d had their fair share of war, she and Father. And now duty demanded that she supply charity along with her freedom.
What more could he possibly take from her?
Notes from the Blackout Book Club—June 27, 1942
Taken by Lt. Freddy Keats, Pilot (Army Air Forces), Amateur Detective, and Finest Minutes Recorder Ever Seen in This Library
Members in attendance: Ginny, Gio, Louise, Delphie, Avis, Martina, Rosa, Earl Bell, Arley Lokken, Carol Ann Hoper, Diana Follett and kids, and Hamish and Eva Murray. (I invited them. Turns out Eva is mad for mysteries.)
Book under discussion:Evil under the Sunby Agatha Christie
Look out, Blackout Book Club, Freddy’s got the secretary role now! And there’s no censor looking over my shoulder, making me watch what I say. Who knows what could happen?
Ginny had everyone go around and name who they’d pegged as the culprit at the halfway point of the book. She, Eva, and Delphie insisted they’d known it almost from the start. I called their bluff by asking how, and Ginny tried “women’s intuition.” Mr. Bell heartily agreed when I said that was the excuse every female used when they retroactively decided they were right all along. That little comment earned us the ire of every woman in the room.
We are outnumbered. Must invite more fellows to the club, or else not say things like that out loud. (Hamish doesn’t count; he didn’t support me at all. Didn’t say a word the entire meeting, although he grunted once, which his wife seemed to take for a whole speech.)
Avis moved along to theories on why murder mysteries are so popular at the moment. Delphie compared it to crossword puzzles and “the way a person feels when they find just theright word to fill in the boxes.” This was widely applauded as an excellent answer. Never seen Delphie prouder, not even when I complimented her coq au vin.
I talked about Poirot’s methods, especially his claim that the most important step was to learn more about the victim—why they might have been murdered—and move backward, which I thought was brilliant. Avis said it wasn’t as convincing to her as Sherlock Holmes’s analysis of the details of a crime scene, but when we took a vote, Poirot won 9–4. (Biased because we just read Christie? Probably. But a win’s a win, I say.)
When Ginny asked if Miss C was disappointed that Ecclesiastes didn’t factor much into it, she responded cryptically, “Of course it did. It was everywhere.” Instead of explaining herself, she took a Bible down from the shelf and read (chapter 6, verses 1–2, copied here): “There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men: a man to whom God hath given riches, wealth, and honour, so that he wanteth nothing for his soul of all that he desireth, yet God giveth him not power to eat thereof, but a stranger eateth it: this is vanity.”
This gave the club a somber tone. She’s a puzzling one, Miss C. Hard to get to know, and, believe me, I’ve tried.
The subject was soon changed to what to read next. Mr. Bell waxed positively poetic about some play calledPygmalion, which he took his wife to see performed at Park Theatre the year they married. We agreed to read it next, mostly to keep him from summarizing the whole plot along with the full itinerary of the other places they visited on that trip. Nice fellow, but Hamlet had nothing on his soliloquies.
Best news of all: Ginny said she’d come back to read aloud to Gio and me while we garden. Gio pretends he’s only interested in the nickels he’s getting from weeding, butI know he’s hanging on to every word. Last week, he raked over the same part of the pumpkin patch three times during one of Poirot’s interrogations. Can’t say as I blame him; Ginny’s got a captivating reading voice and really makes the stories come alive.
nineteen
GINNY
JUNE 28
Something about Methodist preaching must attract better cooks, Ginny decided, going back for a second helping of Indian pudding, thick with layers of molasses.
Over the past few months, she’d shown up at a Presbyterian Seventy-Fifth Founding Day Celebration, two Baptist potlucks, and an ice cream social sponsored by the Congregationalist Church, and none of them had a spread like this.
She paused to wave at Mrs. Dougherty, the grocer’s wife, who had invited her to the Sunday-school picnic. The older woman beamed from a distance as she poured lemonade for her brood of children, sure she’d done a wayward young woman good by having her sit through a sermon on ... something or other.
