Under a Gilded Moon(15)

Flipping the sleeve inside out, she wrapped the softer, cotton-lined side firmly around the wound. Felt for a pulse just below the reporter’s jawline. “It’s there. But shallow.”

Still no movement.

Up on the platform, the woman in mauve from the train was swaying in place. The too-shiny silk of her dress glinted as her body teetered under the light.

McNamee knelt on the other side of the reporter and gently smacked Berkowitz’s cheek. “You all right, mister?”

Footsteps, the suck and thump of boots on the leaves and mud, sounded in the dark. Faces of local villagers appeared from out of the mist like actors unsure if their roles were required on stage. All of them, staring down.

Madison Grant appeared from the shadows of the train station and came to stand beside Cabot.

Kerry scanned the scene, what little she could make out from the gas lamp on the platform and in the light from the stationmaster’s lantern, spilling in dissipating pools to the edge of the trees. At the edge of the woods, nothing stirred in the ragged fringe of dark green.

Beside the body was a scuffle of footprints, Kerry saw—mostly the narrower, sharper prints of shoes such as Cabot and Grant wore, with harder heels, sharper lines, and the defined left and right slopes of shoes made to fit opposite feet. But there, too, approaching the body, were the wider, uniform prints of shoes with no left and right: homemade boots.

Now the villagers were closing in, obliterating any hope of distinguishing prints that had been there before from those made by the encroaching crowd.

Ling Yong approached, his knuckles white on his bicycle’s handlebars. To his right stood Robert Bratchett, who’d dropped the reins of his horse. He removed his hat and held it over his heart.

“That’d be about far enough,” the stationmaster said to the crowd. But his eyes rested on Bratchett.

Stepping back, Bratchett scanned the crowd warily now. As if at any moment it might turn on him. Start reaching for things: dogs or guns or ropes. His right hand went reflexively to his bad arm.

The telegrapher, Farnsworth, was calling across the crowd. “You. Ling. Make that contraption useful. Go find Dr. Randall!”

The stationmaster added his voice. “And for God’s sake, somebody see if Wolfe’s at home.”

Ling threw a leg over the bicycle’s seat and, with a small lantern swinging from its handlebars, rode back into the dark.

The stationmaster turned to Cabot, then Grant. “Don’t got a doctor here in the village. Closest one’s over to Asheville. ’Bout three miles away. Might be a good stretch of wait.”

As if, Kerry fumed silently, anyone owes an explanation to outsiders.

Her head ticked back toward Rema. “This wound. It’s—”

“Serious,” Cabot put in. “We need a doctor. Quickly.”

Rema leveled a look at him. “Ain’t a mountain woman that’s lived past her first bleeding that don’t know a thing or two about healing arts.”

Kerry cringed, mortified at the shock on Cabot’s face from the word bleeding. Grant cleared his throat.

Rema, though, wasn’t done. “Kerry here, she beat back death for her momma, poor frail little thing, for years.”

Still kneeling but his back straightening, Cabot took in the crowd—and then Kerry herself. “Do you people here have a problem with thieves lurking around the train station?”

Kerry settled a look on him. “We people,” she said, “do not.”

McNamee was shaking Berkowitz’s shoulder now. “Can’t get him to come to. Anybody want to fetch some cold water?”

Kerry focused on the reporter’s face—its pallor. His lips. Now a tug on her sleeve.

“Is the nice reporter man all right?” Tully’s voice had gone tight with panic.

Kerry reached for her sister, shivering in the cold. Lifting the remainder of her coat, Kerry draped it over Tully’s blue homespun.

“But, Kerry, you—”

“Shhh. Don’t fuss with me. You’re cold and I’m not.”

Tully opened her mouth to argue.

Kerry shook her head. “It’s how everyone wears them in New York now, trust me—with only one sleeve.” She drew a deep breath to hide a shiver.

McNamee lifted the reporter’s wrist. “She’s right. Awfully shallow.”

Kerry bent again over the unmoving reporter, the kind face gone so still. The cold wet of the mud and the pine straw seeped through Kerry’s skirt all the way to her skin.

Waiting there, listening, feeling, she could sense the crowd watching her. From up on the platform, the woman in mauve said, “Surely she doesn’t have medical training.”

Kerry lifted her head just long enough for their eyes to meet. Kerry would not list for this woman the bodies she’d bent over in her short life: the passed-out ones and the ones passing on. She and drunken stupors and death were none of them strangers.

She kept all this to herself. But let it show in the set of her jaw.

“Perhaps,” the woman added more meekly, “with no doctor up in their hills, the natives here learn to cope. I wonder, couldn’t this have been nothing but an unfortunate little accident? Perhaps the man slipped off the platform, maybe hit his head on a rock?”

The crowd silent, no one answered the woman. Kerry saw John Cabot, watching as she felt again for the reporter’s pulse.