“Detail for me, Miss Kelly, your observations about this patient.”
Una blinked and rattled her head, her surroundings sharpening back into focus. The ward around her was quiet, lit with morning sunlight. The nutty aroma of oatmeal gruel, fresh from the kitchen, wafted through the air. A fire crackled in the stove. Even so, Una shivered. She set down the cloth she’d been using to wash the patient’s face and hands and turned to the head nurse. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Imagine I’m the physician about my morning rounds, and this is my first time seeing this patient, what would you report?”
“Her pulse rate is normal. No fever or chills. Her breathing—”
“From the beginning, please. Remember, there are many important things the physician must know, which only the observant nurse can tell him.”
Una nodded. “This is Mrs. Riker, she’s thirty-nine years of age, married with—”
“Stand up, Miss Kelly. You mustn’t address a physician while seated.”
Una swallowed a sigh and stood. She much preferred Head Nurse Smith to Miss Hatfield but already was weary of her exacting standards. “This is Mrs. Riker, she’s . . .”
For the next several minutes, Una described everything she could remember about the patient—her condition and weight and drinking habits, her previous bouts of ill-health and the health of her family members. She described her skin: color, perspiration, location and duration of eruptions, redness, and swelling. She described the quality and rate of her pulse, the frequency and regularity of her respirations.
“And her alimentary canal?” Miss Smith said when Una had finished. “You forgot to mention anything about the state of her hunger and thirst, her bowel habits and evacuations, whether she has passed any gallstones or worms.”
“There was nothing of note, so I figured—”
“It is not for you to decide what is or is not of note. You must relay everything to the physician and leave him to decide.”
Una looked down and nodded. Half the time, it seemed like the doctor was hardly listening to her. Other times, he rushed her through her report with an exacerbated wave of his hand. But she knew better than to argue the point with Nurse Smith.
She hoped that the interrogation was over, but just as Nurse Smith turned away, the patient gave a weak cough, which brought on a whole new round of questions about the character, frequency, and duration of this “worrying symptom.” Una stumbled through her answers. Her thoughts had been so far away this morning that she couldn’t recall whether the woman had coughed like that before or not.
After a further lecture on the importance of correct observation, Una was sent to air out the blankets on the balcony. The new ward Una had been assigned, ward twelve, was a female medical unit on the second floor. A bank of five tall windows lined one side of the room, opening onto a narrow wrought-iron balcony.
Una raised the sash of one of the windows and clambered out with an armful of blankets. The brisk morning air stung her cheeks. Tendrils of fog rose off the river and crept across the lawn. Five days had passed since the coppers’ visit to Bellevue on account of the suspicious suicide in the Insane Pavilion. She’d kept careful watch for their return, but so far they had not. She’d kept an eye on the papers too. Whatever Warden O’Rourke had paid the coppers hadn’t been enough to keep the story from leaking to the press. The New York World had run a shamelessly titillating piece two days ago
—“Mysterious Suicide in Bellevue’s Lunatic Ward”—but mentioned nothing of the police investigation. Instead it suggested the woman had hanged herself with a leather belt, which her cellmate, the bird woman, had mistaken for a worm and afterward eaten.
Rumors flitting about the hospital were less absurd. The laundry women speculated that the dead woman had used a blanket to hang herself. Natural that her cellmates would have untied it from the window bars and used it to keep warm, seeing how drafty that ward was, they said. Others speculated that the night attendant had found the woman dead and removed whatever it was she’d used to kill herself, hoping that the death might be ruled natural. The attendant had, after all, been fired the very next day on account of negligence.
Una flapped the blankets to remove any dirt or lice and laid them over the iron railing. Already the gossip about the hospital was dying down. So why couldn’t Una focus? The coppers hadn’t come on account of her and likely wouldn’t be back to do more snooping into the case. A simple suicide. Even the New York World thought so, and they’d be the first to run with more nefarious rumors. Una was safe. Her plan to hide away here was working perfectly. No one suspected she was anything but a charitable- hearted girl from Maine.
Except maybe the day attendant in the Insane Pavilion. Una had thought about her as much as the coppers these last few days. She smoothed the last of the blankets out over the railing but lingered outside in the cold, misty air. People mistook strangers for acquaintances all the time. That was why confidence schemes worked. Some thieves made their entire living by it. If you could find out someone’s name and a bit about them—where they grew up, where they studied, where they had family—you could greet them like long-lost friends. Rather than admit they didn’t know you, the poor sucker would smile and buy you a drink. Before the night was over, they’d convince themselves that yes, they did, in fact, know you and happily lend you ten, fifteen, twenty dollars to buy your poor, sick child medicine. A sum you promised to pay back the very next day, but of course, never did.
Was Una being taken by such a scheme? What did the day attendant have to gain from saying Una looked familiar? Maybe it was all just a mistake. Una couldn’t keep worrying on it, otherwise she’d worry herself right out of her position at the training school. The woman hadn’t recognized her, and that was that. Besides, in the end, it would be the attendant’s word against Una’s. Who would believe such a coarse, unkempt woman over her?
She climbed back through the window and headed to the stove to warm her hands. No more letting her mind wander. Between maintaining the cleanliness of the ward and keeping track of each patient’s intake, output, and cough frequency, she had more than enough to focus on. She was about to return to her tasks when her gaze caught the flickering flame behind the stove grate. The night of Traveling Mike’s murder flashed back to her—the brief light as Deidre struck a match. She couldn’t shake the eerie similarity between his strangling and the woman’s suicide. A belt, the attendant had said. That was exactly what she had seen around Traveling Mike’s neck—or at least thought she had. Everything had happened so fast. Could there be a connection between the two deaths?
Una gave a hollow laugh and turned away from the stove, smoothing her apron and glancing at the long row of patients awaiting her care. Of all the far-fetched ideas she’d entertained, this was the most absurd. What was she thinking? That the disheveled attendant had murdered Traveling Mike and then the woman in the Insane Pavilion in the exact same way? It would explain why the attendant had recognized her, but she hadn’t been on duty when the woman died. Besides, the person she’d seen crouching over Traveling Mike’s body in the alley had been a man.
Right?
She pressed her fingers against her eyes and laughed again. The stress of the past few days was making her question her memory. She shrugged off the notion and got back to work, ignoring the lingering chill beneath her skin.
