Twin of Fire Read online

  “It’s clean. Houston won’t let me out the door without an inspection.”

  She didn’t answer his attempt at levity, but just turned away from him and blew her nose.

  He reached across the desk and picked up the paper of accounts. “This what was makin’ you cry?” He barely glanced at it. “It’s seven cents off,” he said, as he put the paper down. “Seven cents make you cry?”

  “If you must know, I got my feelings hurt, that’s what. Plain, old-fashioned, got my feelings hurt.”

  “Care to tell me about it?”

  “Why? So you can laugh at me, too? I know your kind. You’d never go to a woman doctor, either. You’d be like all the men and most of the women! You’d never trust a woman to cut you open.”

  His face was serious. “I ain’t never been to any doctor, so I don’t know who I’d want cuttin’ on me. I guess, if I hurt enough, I’d let anybody work on me. Is that why you were cryin’? Cause nobody is here?”

  Blair put her hands down on the desk, her anger, and energy, leaving her. “Lee once told me that all doctors were idealistic, at first. I guess I was worse than most. I thought the townspeople’d be thrilled to have a clinic for women. They are—if Leander is here running it. They see me and they start asking for a ‘real’ doctor. My mother has been here for three ailments in two days, and a few women I’ve known all my life have come. And, now, to add to my grief, the Chandler Hospital Board has suddenly decided that they really don’t have enough work for another doctor.”

  Kane sat there and watched her for a while. He didn’t know much about his sister-in-law, but he did know she usually had the energy of two people, and now she sat there with a long face and eyes with no light in them.

  “Yesterday,” he began, “I was in the stable without a shirt on—don’t tell Houston—and I rubbed up against the back wall and got a lotta splinters in my back. I can’t reach ‘em to dig ‘em out.” He watched as she lifted her head. “It ain’t much, but it’s all I can offer.”

  Slowly, Blair began to smile. “All right, come into the surgery and I’ll have a look.”

  The splinters weren’t very big, or in too deep, but Blair treated them with great care.

  As Kane lay on his stomach on the long table, he said, “How’d your doorbell fall off? Somebody mad at you?”

  That’s all it took for Blair to tell him about the woman wanting opium, how she’d said everyone was laughing at her. “And Lee’s worked so hard for this clinic, and it’s been his dream for years, and now he’s always on one case after another in the mines, and I have charge of this place and I’m failing him.”

  “Looks to me like the sick people are failin’ you. It’s their loss.”

  She smiled at the back of his head. “It’s nice to hear you say that, but you wouldn’t have come unless…Why did you come?”

  “Houston’s rearrangin’ my office.”

  He said it with such fatality that Blair laughed.

  “It ain’t funny. She puts the silliest little chairs everywhere, and she likes lace. If I get back and my office is painted pink, I’ll…”

  “What will you do?”

  He moved his head to look up at her. “Cry.”

  She smiled at him. “She paints it pink and I’ll come over tomorrow and we’ll repaint it. How’s that for a deal?”

  “The best I’ve had all day.”

  “All done,” she said a minute later and began to clean her instruments, as he put his shirt and coat back on. She turned to look at him. “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve made me feel much better. I know I’ve been unkind to you in the past, and I apologize.”

  Kane shrugged his big shoulders. “You and Houston are twin sisters, so you’ve got to be somethin’ alike, and if you’re half as good at doctorin’ as she is at runnin’ things, you must be the best. And I have a feelin’ things are gonna change for you. Pretty soon, ladies are gonna be beatin’ down your door with all kinds of diseases. You’ll see. You just stay here and clean up this place real good, and tomorrow I bet there’ll be some patients here.”

  She couldn’t help grinning at him. “Thank you. You’ve done a world of good for me.” On impulse, she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

  He smiled at her. “You know, for a minute there, you looked just like Houston.”

  Blair laughed. “I think that may be the highest compliment I’ve ever received. I guess I do have some work to do. If that shoulder bothers you, let me know.”

  “I’ll bring every broken bone to you, Dr. Westfield, and all my pink walls,” he said as he left the clinic.

  Blair began to whistle as she started clearing her desk of paperwork, and immediately realized that she didn’t know whether the account list was seven cents over or under and had to add it herself. The rest of the day, she felt better than she had in days.

  Once, she stopped and thought how kind Kane had been in trying to cheer her, after the way she’d treated him. Perhaps there was reason for Houston to love him.

  At home, in his dark panelled office, Kane turned to his assistant, Edan Nylund. “Last week, after I bought the Chandler National Bank, didn’t they send us some papers?”

  “About a twenty-pound stack,” Edan said, pointing, but not looking up, as Kane took the papers and thumbed through them.

  “Where’d Houston go?”

  He had Edan’s interest now. “To her dressmaker’s, I believe.”

  “Good,” Kane said. “Then we’ve got the rest of the day, maybe the rest of the week.” He strode out of the room, papers in hand.

  Edan’s curiosity got the better of him and he found Kane in the library, using the telephone. Since the system only connected one house in Chandler to another, and Kane’s business dealings were usually out of state, Edan’d never seen Kane use the instrument before.

  “You heard me,” Kane was saying to the person on the other end. “The mortgage on that ranch of yours is due next week, and I have every right to call it in. That’s right. You get an interest-free ninety-day extension if your wife shows up at the Westfield Infirmary tomorrow and is treated by Dr. Blair. She’s about to have a baby? Good! She drops it in the office in my sister-in-law’s lap and I’ll give you a hundred and eighty days. Damn right, you can send your daughters. Yeah, all right. Another thirty days per daughter that shows up tomorrow with somethin’ wrong with her. But if Blair gets wind of this, I foreclose. You understand me?

  “Damn!” he said to Edan, as he put down the receiver. “This is gonna cost me. Look in there and see who else has a loan due or’s been turned down for an extension, and then I want you to see how much whoever owns the Chandler Hospital will sell it for. We’ll see if their board of directors will refuse to hire the owner’s sister-in-law.”

  By the next morning, Blair’s good mood was gone, and she had to nearly drag herself to work. Another long day with little to do, she thought, walking the distance rather than driving her new carriage. But when she was half a block from the clinic, Mrs. Krebbs came running.

  “Where have you been? The place is overrun with patients.”

  For a moment, Blair couldn’t move, but then she ran to the door. The waiting room was a mess: children screaming, mothers trying to quiet them, and one woman groaning with what looked to be labor pains.

  Fifteen minutes later, Blair was cutting the umbilical cord of a newborn girl.

  “180,” the mother murmured. “Her name is Mary 180 Stevenson.”

  Blair didn’t have time to ask any questions before the next patient was brought in.

  The next afternoon, a woman brought a little boy to the clinic, an undersized eight-year-old who looked six, a boy who’d already spent two years inside a coal mine. He died in Blair’s arms, his frail little body having been crushed by coal falling from a train car.

  Blair called Nina, said, “I’ll do it,” and hung up.

  Chapter 30

  Blair drove her carriage down the road, away from the Inexpressible Mine and back to