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  Guilty feelings or not, she continued in the same vein.

  “I could not even think of leaving Mama until her arm is healed and she can handle some of the housework.”

  “That is only five more weeks. She said so herself. Surely you could speak to your papa and at least start to make some plans for the wedding,” Hans said in an almost whining tone.

  Julie turned to walk towards home. She didn’t particularly want to go back there, back to waiting on her mother and listening to her father, but neither did she wish to spend any more time with Hans. Especially not with Del Morgan to watch her with his leering green eyes.

  “I will think about it,” she told Hans, feeling her spectacles start to slide again. “But you must remember that my mother is not well and she needs me to help her. And I owe my parents much more than I can ever repay. It would not be right for me to walk out on them suddenly. I must not be ungrateful or put any more burdens on them.”

  As she pushed her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose, Hans mumbled an apology.

  “I have been unfair,” he said as they stopped just outside the fence enclosing the Hollstroms’ yard. “But it is six years since I first spoke to your papa about our marrying, and that is a long time to wait for a wife. Promise me it will not have been in vain.”

  Julie remained silent for a dozen heartbeats or more, trying to devise a promise that could be honorably broken. There had never been a formal betrothal all those years ago in Minnesota. Julie had given Hans no promise then and she had no intention of doing so now.

  “I will abide by my father’s wishes,” she told him finally. “I will do what is best for all of us.”

  It was a weak vow, one she worried he would easily see through, but Hans seemed happy to accept it. With a clumsy flourish, he took both her hands in his and clasped them tightly. A broad grin lit his face, and Julie thought he intended to dance with her right here in the street. She glanced quickly to see if anyone in her own house or those nearby might be watching, but all the windows were curtained against the heat.

  When Hans planted a wet kiss on her cheek, Julie resisted the urge to wipe it off, not with her hand but with a handkerchief or the corner of her apron.

  “Now I am happy,” he sang, reluctantly releasing her hands. “You talk to your papa, and next Sunday, when I come for dinner, we will have it all decided. Good-bye, Julie!”

  He looked as though he might give her another kiss, but he only smiled with a bright blush on his cheeks. Twice he turned as he walked in the direction of the hotel and waved to her, and Julie forced herself to wave back the second time, but with little enthusiasm.

  She passed through the open gate and walked up the steps to the porch, never realizing she had wiped her hands vigorously on her skirt before Hans was even out of sight. Nor did she see Del Morgan walk through the cemetery gate and shut it quietly behind him.

  He squinted in the sudden brightness and quickly clapped his beaten hat to his head. His knee hurt from a small stone that had somehow gotten under it while he was visiting the graveyard, and he rubbed the sore spot with a relatively clean hand. Other aches were not so easily disposed of, like the one that stung his eyes and another that tightened in his chest. Much as he disliked sitting home with no other companion than a full bottle of cheap whisky, he had no choice. The Castle was closed on Sunday, and none of his drinking cronies allowed him in their homes.

  He watched the girl, noted the way she rubbed her hands against her skirt as though to rid them of something unpleasant or dirty. Then he let his gaze follow the blond, heavily built farmer who had disturbed the cemetery’s solitude with his outburst. Morgan shook his head. Hans passed the hotel and walked into the narrow alley between the Olympia House and the boardwalked shops of Plato, and if Julie Hollstrom didn’t know where her future husband was headed, Del Morgan did.

  Chapter Three

  Julie hefted the big wicker laundry basket to her hip and trudged toward the house. Her spectacles slipped; she pushed them back where they belonged and sighed with Monday morning weariness.

  But the morning was almost over. The kitchen smelled of fresh bread, frying sausages, and potato pancakes. Julie dropped the basket onto the table and hurried to check her father’s lunch. The sausage had just browned and the potato pancakes, set over to the side of the stove, were barely golden on the underside. It hadn’t been easy to do the laundry, bake bread, and wait on Mama, but Julie had accomplished it all and not so much as burned her father’s lunch.

  She fixed the usual tray with silverware wrapped in a napkin, coffee cup, and a small pot of freshly brewed coffee. She wondered how he could drink the stuff on a day like this. Already she had downed four or five glasses of water and still felt thirsty.

  As soon as she had delivered Wilhelm’s meal, she could come home to her own lunch. Katharine had breakfasted late and was back asleep, and Willy had gone fishing with some of his friends. Julie dared to hope she might sit down and eat her meal undisturbed. If the heat left her any appetite.

  Not that there wouldn’t be plenty of work waiting for her after lunch. Her bed and Willy’s needed to be made with these clean sheets, and she hadn’t even started the dusting, a daily ritual in this land of arid winds and clouds of fine grit. Of course she’d have dishes to wash and supper to cook. If Willy brought home a mess of fish, she’d scale and gut them before she fried them nice and crisp for tonight’s meal, but she wasn’t sure the luxury of fresh fish was worth the gruesome task of preparing them.

  It would be much better if he came home empty-handed. Then there’d be no gory dressing of the catch, as well as no congratulations. Willy would be praised for enticing a stupid fish to swallow a dead cricket and thereby impale itself on the hook, while the lightly seasoned breading with which Julie coated those fish would be taken for granted and not a single word of praise ever come her way. Besides, she wanted that brand new fishing pole to fail.

  She picked up Wilhelm’s lunch tray and pushed her jealousy of the fishing pole out of her mind. She had envied Willy his possessions before and she probably would do so again quite frequently in the future, so there was no sense ruminating about it now when work waited.

  The dining room was as cool, on the shaded north side of the house, as the kitchen was steaming, but Julie walked quickly through to the front door and out to the porch. She blinked to adjust her eyes to the brightness of noon sun on white dust, and then she stepped sturdily down the stairs and towards the street. Just as she kicked the gate open, the boys came running.

  “Julie, Julie, Julie!” Willy wailed. His short legs pumped unsteadily as he charged through the trees behind the cemetery. “Help me, Julie!”

  She saw the blood first, the smeared red streaks that covered nearly all one side of his face and the spatters that had turned brown with dust on his white shirt. From the healthy sound of his cries and the way he ran, she took immediate reassurance that his injury could not be life-threatening, but the amount of blood frightened her. She set her father’s lunch tray on the ground. Without hesitation, she ran to Willy, scooped him up in her arms, and carried him, still screaming, into the house.

  “Clancy, go find Dr. Opper,” she ordered Simon McCrory’s youngest son when he and his companion gathered on the porch. “If you can’t find him, get that Mr. Morgan. I’m sure your father will know where he is.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Miss Julie. C’mon, Donnie, we’ll go get Doc.”

  She heard their bare feet slap on the wooden steps and pound in the dust before they ran up to Opper’s house two doors away. Relieved that the boys could carry out simple instructions, she began a closer examination of Willy’s wound.

  He lay on the sofa, moaning softly, his eyes squeezed as tightly shut as he could get them. There was blood everywhere, more than she had thought, and it still trickled steadily from the cut above his eyebrow.

  “Willy, I’m going to the kitchen for water and a rag to clean this with. Just lie still and I’ll be back i
n a minute, all right?”

  “Am I gonna die?” he whined.

  “Not hardly, but I think you may need some stitches.”

  That was the wrong thing to say. The boy set up a wild keening and rolled about on the sofa, getting blood stains all over it.

  She tried to settle him and calm his fears, but to no avail, and the bleeding didn’t stop. She had to clean him up and see just how much damage had been done by the fishhook still embedded in the skin. Thankful that she had plenty of hot water from the morning’s laundry, she filled a basin from the reservoir and grabbed a clean towel from the laundry basket. Willy started fresh moaning the instant she knelt on the floor beside him.

  “Put your hand down and let me see it,” she ordered gently, prying his cupped fingers away from the cut. “Maybe it won’t need stitches after all, but I can’t tell until I get it cleaned up.”

  That seemed to calm him, and he took his hand away. Using the utmost care not to disturb the implement, Julie dabbed as close to the fish hook as possible with a damp corner of the cotton towel.

  The point had entered at the inside edge of the right eyebrow and then been pulled upward diagonally to leave a jagged gash more than an inch long. Head wounds always bled worse than anything else and invariably looked worse than they were, but Julie knew this was not just a scratch, as her mother’s arm had been. Stitches, probably five or six from the looks of it, would be necessary, and even then there’d be a scar.

  “Am I gonna need stitches?” Willy asked, still moaning but with less real pain in his voice.

  “We’ll have to wait until the doctor gets here and let him make that decision.”

  She got from her knees to her feet and had taken a couple steps towards the door when she heard the voices approach. The children’s were unmistakable.

  “It’s really horrible,” Donnie Kincheloe said with all the drama of an eight-year-old, putting excessive emphasis on the last word. “I think he took his whole eye right out of his head.”

  “Oh, he didn’t neither,” the McCrory boy insisted. “He just got blood all over hisself.”

  “We’ll see, we’ll see,” the physician grunted, his own voice strained and breathless.

  Horace Opper came to the foot of the porch stairs and stopped. Watching him from the doorway, Julie was struck by the man’s age. He looked so much older than he had just a week ago, when he had puffed and panted his way through setting her mother’s broken arm. Now he gasped, and he could hardly open his eyes.

  “Another accident, Miss Julie?” he asked. He put one foot on the bottom step and hoisted himself upward.

  “Willy’s caught a fishhook in his eyebrow.”

  It seemed to take Opper forever to reach the door, and then he leaned against the frame, neither in nor out of the house.

  “I practically ran all the way from Nellie’s.” He pulled out an already soiled handkerchief to wipe his dripping face and the deep creases of his neck. Julie turned away, half sickened by the glimpse of his filthy, sweat-stained collar. “Oh, beg pardon, Miss Julie. I oughtn’t to speak of that place, I know. Probably oughtn’t even to go there myself, but one of the girls got beat up a bit the other night, and Nellie pays me to take care of them. I can’t afford to turn away a patient who pays.”

  “I…I told you I’d pay you some every week until it was taken care of. I have a dollar to give you today right here in my pocket.”

  The physician tried to laugh, but the sound turned to a wheeze and his face purpled.

  “I don’t worry about you, Miss Julie. I know your pa’ll pay me as soon as he can. Now, let’s see this young man with the fishhook in his eye.”

  Opper pushed himself away from the door frame and went into the parlor where Willy waited. Julie followed, and as she passed the stairway, she saw her mother at the top, her face registering the grogginess of one just wakened from sound sleep.

  “Is something wrong, Julie?” Katharine asked sleepily.

  Julie glanced from Willy, terrified and still very bloodstained on the parlor sofa, to her mother. Julie climbed the stairs quickly but without panic and put one arm around Katharine’s shoulders before she explained what had happened.

  “Willy’s been hurt, Mama, but it’s nothing serious. He’ll be fine in no time,” she said softly. “The doctor’s here and will take care of him.”

  Katharine seemed to lose some of her strength and slumped a bit, but Julie held on to her and gently guided her back to her room and the bed she had just left. She must not see Willy as he was now, panicky and covered with his own blood. Katharine wasn’t the sort of woman to take things like that easily, and with the victim her only son, Julie knew it was best to keep her mother away until the doctor had finished.

  “It wasn’t your fault, was it, Julie?” Katharine asked.

  “Of course not! I was here at home, and he was out fishing with the McCrory boy and Donnie Kincheloe. I was on my way to—”

  Willy’s shrieks of terror and pain cut her off and she was out the bedroom door and down the stairs like a coyote after a rabbit. For the second time in less than half an hour, she completely forgot her father’s lunch.

  When she saw the cause for Willy’s cries, she reacted instinctively, without any thought at all.

  Horace Opper, breathing in heavy gasps, sat on the edge of the sofa with Willy pressed against the back cushions. One of the physician’s pudgy hands held the boy’s wrists flat on his stomach, so that only Willy’s head and legs were really free to move. The doctor’s free hand held a large threaded needle and was poised to strike the boy’s pale face.

  “For the love of—. Whatever are you doing, sir?” Julie demanded. “Are you planning to beat him or sew his wound?”

  She grabbed at that threatening arm and caught a handful of woolen coat cuff, enough of a hold to bring the arm and the terrifying needle down. Willy did not stop his struggles, though some of his hysteria left.

  “Then you sit on him,” Opper grunted, “so I can get these stitches in. The little hellion won’t hold still.”

  “He’s hurting me, Julie,” Willy whined, but there was more fear than petulance in his tone now. “And he’s gonna poke that big needle into my head.”

  The needle was indeed huge, as big as the one Julie used to darn socks. And the fishhook was still stuck in his flesh.

  “Have you nothing smaller?” Julie asked.

  “Smaller? I had a hell of a time getting this one threaded. Now here, you hold his hands and his head while I sit on his legs so we can get this done and over with.”

  Opper’s hand shook uncontrollably, and the image flashed into Julie’s brain of the old man’s hand missing its mark and poking the enormous needle into the boy’s eye. The end of the cut was barely half an inch from the eye itself, and even a slight slip could spell disaster. She hadn’t been to blame for the accident, but Julie would never be able to rid herself of guilt if she didn’t stop this man at once.

  “Dr. Opper, sir, I think perhaps you had best leave this to me,” she told him as sternly as she could. Her knees shivered under her petticoats, and her palms began to perspire from something other than the midday heat.

  Opper snorted angrily but did not get up from the sofa.

  “Do as I say, girl, and we’ll have this done. You called me in, so settle down and get to work.”

  Her heart pounded. Horace Opper was a figure of some considerable authority, and Julie remembered all the times she had gone against authority and suffered for it. Defying the doctor was something she could not do without careful consideration of the situation and a lot of courage.

  “I called you in, and I can send you away. Please, I was wrong to have bothered you for something so minor as this little scratch. You may return to whatever you were interrupted at, and I will take care of my brother.”

  She heard the thudding of her pulse in her ears and the nervous knocking of her knees, but she did not hear the footsteps on the porch or the slight squeak of the front door
as it opened.

  “What is going on here, Julie?” Wilhelm asked. “Where is my lunch?”

  If she had been unsure of herself and frightened when she ordered the doctor out of the house, Julie trembled with real terror when she faced her father. It didn’t matter that she was a full inch taller than Wilhelm; she felt as small as one of the spiders she squashed under her foot in the kitchen or the privy, and every bit as defenseless.

  “Willy’s been hurt, Papa.”

  Wilhelm’s face paled, then reddened, but he did not waste time venting anger. He rushed past his daughter into the parlor and knelt beside his son. Willy’s tears returned full force.

  “Gott in Himmel, he’s bleeding to death!” the father thundered. “Do something, Herr Doktor. You must stop this bleeding!”

  “I was just preparing to do that, Mr. Hollstrom. Your daughter here seemed to think she could do it better herself, but I think this requires professional treatment.”

  Julie sickened. It wasn’t just the thought of those quaking hands holding the needle that curdled her empty stomach; there was a glint of greed in the old man’s eyes, and a smile of pure avarice on his puffy lips. Worse yet, she knew exactly what she had to do, and the very thought of searching for Del Morgan brought an unpleasant taste to Julie’s mouth.

  The McCrory boy and his companion had settled themselves on the top step of the Hollstroms’ porch to await the outcome of the medical drama within, and Julie turned to them for what assistance she could get.

  “When I sent you for the doctor,” she asked patiently, “did you happen to locate Mr. Morgan? I know it took you a long while and I thought maybe….”

  She had trouble finding the right word, but it didn’t matter. Clancy McCrory answered quickly.

  “Del’s over at the Castle. I seen him go in this morning, just before we went fishin’, and he don’t never come out ‘til they carry him out or he runs outta money.” He paused, then asked, “You want me to go get him?”