Part 4
Nell did not sleep that night.
She searched until her hands were gray with dust from places Mrs. Whitcomb would have been horrified to know existed. She took the drawer out of the washstand and found only a hairpin, a dead moth, and two pennies that must have belonged to the maid before her. She checked the laundry basket, the hallway corners, the kitchen shelves, the servants’ back stairs, and the ash can behind the house.
At dawn, the city began moving outside, and Nell still had nothing.
She almost accused Alice.
The words sat behind her teeth through breakfast as Alice complained about the way her hat had been packed and asked whether the lake house would be dull if the Harrisons could not come. Nell watched her hands, her face, the small changes in her expression when Miss Mercy’s name was mentioned.
But Alice only frowned. “That ugly thing? I haven’t touched it.”
Mrs. Whitcomb gave Nell a look over her coffee cup. “What have you lost?”
“My doll, ma’am.”
“A childhood keepsake?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
There was a small pause. Mrs. Whitcomb was not sentimental by nature, but she was not heartless. “We’ll have the attic swept again before we close the house. Perhaps it slipped somewhere.”
Nell knew it had not slipped. A thing could fall. A thing could be misplaced. A thing could be stolen by a careless hand. But Miss Mercy had vanished from the center of a bag, out of a wrapped handkerchief, in a room with a closed door.
Still, she climbed into the automobile that afternoon and rode north with the Whitcombs, leaving the Pittsburgh house locked behind them.
The lake house should have been beautiful to her. It had screened porches, a sloping lawn, white curtains that moved in clean wind, and water so wide it looked like the edge of the world. For two days, Nell performed her duties with the mechanical precision of someone trying not to feel anything. She made beds, carried trays, brushed crumbs from tablecloths, and lay awake at night with one hand under her pillow, touching only sheet.
On the third morning, her throat hurt.
By evening, she was coughing.
By the next day, she could not stand without gripping the bedpost. Mrs. Whitcomb came to the attic room and pressed a hand to Nell’s forehead. Her expression changed at once.
“Thomas,” she called, sharply enough that the professor came running.
The summer of 1918 had already filled the newspapers with unease. Soldiers were sick in camps. Families were losing sons to an enemy no one could shoot. Every cough seemed to carry rumor. Professor Whitcomb summoned a doctor, and the doctor stood at Nell’s bedside with a cloth mask over his mouth and worry in the corners of his eyes.
“She needs to be moved,” he said.
Mrs. Whitcomb folded her arms. “Moved where?”
“Hospital, if they’ll take her. Isolation if they won’t. You have children in this house.”
Nell heard the words through a haze of fever and humiliation. You have children. As if she were not somebody’s child. As if Martha Carter were not eight miles up a snowbound road in Nell’s memory, bending over a bed with her hands raw from washing cloths in cold water.
“I lost her,” Nell whispered.
Professor Whitcomb leaned close. “Lost what?”
“My Mercy.”
He did not understand, but he heard the terror beneath the words. “We’ll look again when you’re well.”
Nell turned her face to the wall.
She was taken to a hospital in a wagon because no one wanted a coughing servant girl inside an automobile longer than necessary. The road jarred her bones. Mrs. Whitcomb sent blankets, a small purse of money, and a note stating that Nell was employed in her household and should receive proper care. That note may have saved Nell’s life. She knew that later.
At the time, all she knew was that Miss Mercy was gone and the hospital smelled of carbolic acid, boiled sheets, sweat, and fear.
The ward was too full. Beds stood close enough that patients could hear one another dream. Nurses moved like ghosts in white aprons and masks. Somewhere, someone was always coughing. Somewhere, someone was always praying. Nell drifted in and out of fever while the world broke into pieces: a basin of water, a nurse’s cool hand, a man crying for his mother, the squeak of wheels carrying another covered shape away.
On the worst night, Nell woke with the old tightness in her chest.
She knew it. She remembered being eight years old, pinned beneath fever while a little man in a red shirt stood at the foot of her bed and scolded her back toward life. With what strength she had, she moved her foot beneath the sheet.
No tickle came.
The space at the end of the hospital bed remained empty.
Nell tried to say the old thank-you her mother had taught her, but her lips cracked around the words. There was no stove here. No saucer of milk. No cabin walls that remembered Martha’s hands.
Just rows of iron beds and strangers dying under electric lights.
A nurse passed and stopped. She was young, with exhausted eyes and a mask tied too tightly across the bridge of her nose.
“You still with us?” she asked.
Nell barely nodded.
“Good,” the nurse said. “Stay that way.”
She tucked the blanket around Nell’s feet with a firm, almost irritated tenderness.
For one wild second, Nell thought of the little man.
Then the nurse moved on.
In the morning, Nell was alive.
The fever did not break all at once. It loosened. It retreated inch by inch, leaving her weak, hollow-eyed, and angry in a way she did not know where to put. She had survived without Miss Mercy. That should have comforted her. Instead, it made the loss feel more permanent, as if the doll had done her work and slipped away.
After three weeks, Nell could sit up. After four, she could walk the length of the ward if she held the wall. In September, Professor Whitcomb came to collect her in person.
He looked older. Everybody did that autumn.
“We went back through the house,” he said, before she could ask. “Your room, the laundry, the trunks, all of it. I’m sorry, Nell. We didn’t find her.”
Nell nodded because she did not trust her voice.
“The girls said they never touched it,” he added.
She looked at him then. “Do you believe them?”
He removed his spectacles and cleaned them slowly. “I believe people often touch things they don’t understand.”
It was not an answer. It was also more answer than she expected.
When Nell returned to the Whitcomb house, her attic room had been stripped for cleaning. Her bag was placed neatly on the bed. The handkerchief lay folded on top.
Empty.
Beside it was a red thread no longer than her finger.
Nell picked it up and closed her fist around it until it hurt…
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