A Lady Under Siege(54)
“Charity can’t be bad, m’Lady.”
“But it can, I fear. No soldier can afford it, once war’s declared and the battlefield bloodied. War was made against my husband, and though I be a woman, I feel myself the last man standing of his ragged little army. Except for you, dear Mabel, I’m all alone. Alone and unarmed, but I haven’t yet given up the fight. I need a knife, Mabel. Bring me the knife.”
26
Derek opened the front door to find Meghan on his step, carrying a heavy leather satchel. “Can I come in for a minute?” she asked.
“On one condition—you say nothing about the squalor.”
“I’ll hold my tongue.”
“And possibly your nose.”
She followed him down the hallway toward his living room. “I can only stay a minute, so I’ll say this quickly and without a lot of—” she stopped in her tracks, struck speechless seeing his living space for the first time. It looked like an indoor version of his back yard. A pigsty.
“Now remember what you promised,” Derek said. “As you can see, I’m a packrat, I can’t stand to throw out perfectly good trash.”
“It’s not that,” she replied. “No matter how it looks, it’s a bit disconcerting, to come into a place with a floor plan just like mine next door, and see how someone else uses it.”
“Which is a polite way of saying you couldn’t live like this. I know what you mean about identical layouts, though. A dozen near-identical houses run cheek by jowl up this side of the street, and in every one of them the walk from the bedroom to the toilet is three steps north, seven steps east, two south, drop your drawers. I bet at rush hour, seven in the morning or eleven at night, all sixteen toilets flush simultaneously. We might as well all be rats in a Skinner box. Now, what exactly can I do for you?”
“A couple of things.” She sat herself down on Derek’s old couch, opened up her satchel, and spread several medical books on his coffee table. “These are for you to read,” she said. “I’ve saved you some trouble and marked with Post-It Notes the pages that look promising—there are a bunch of conditions I think might apply to Daphne. They’re all cross-referenced. I hope you can read my handwriting on the notes, sometimes it gets pretty tiny. I’ve been insanely busy with work so I haven’t had time to sit down and go through them properly. You, on the other hand, seem to have all the time in the world, so I’m hoping you’ll have a look at least. Ideally you should read them out loud—I think if Thomas hears them spoken, he’ll be more likely to understand. Thomas, if you hear me, it’s no slight on your intelligence, me saying this to Derek. It’s just there’s a ton of medical terminology, some of which I don’t understand myself.”
“I thought his daughter was getting better,” Derek said.
“She is. She actually got up and walked, which is like a miracle. But I still want to cover every angle. She still hasn’t been properly diagnosed.”
“Speaking of daughters, yours has stopped coming out to the back yard.”
“I know. She’s been shunning you because of how you treated her the other morning, and now she’s giving me the silent treatment too, brooding in her room. Her father told her he’s going to have a new baby. She’s not taking it well.”
“I didn’t know that part. I thought you two are still married, that you’d just recently split up.”
“That’s right.”
“Guy moves fast.”
“Guy moves sloppily, is more like it.”
“And the mom to be? It’s not your former best friend or something sordid like that, is it?”
“Not exactly. A student of his.”
“Does Betsy know her?”
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t know. I do, a little. I like Betsy. I am sorry I growled at her.”
“I think she feels she’s been replaced, and her dad’s going to abandon her. And I’m dealing with deadlines and don’t have time to deal with it. Right now I have to run to a meeting, which if it goes well will give me a chance to catch my breath and pay some attention to her. God knows she needs it.”
Derek nodded, but said nothing in reply.
“It’s nice of you to worry about her,” she added. “Especially since you told me the other day worry is maggot food.”