The Doctor's Undoing. Allie Pleiter

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СКАЧАТЬ meet the rest of the children then, although I suspect Miss Martin will have told half of them about you already.”

      “Gitch has a big mouth,” Donna confided.

      “Well then, she’s my kind of gal. I like conversation, and lots of it.”

      Daniel took a breath to ask Donna to help with Miss Landway’s cases, but the nurse had already plucked the pair of them off the floor. She squared her shoulders at the teen before he could get a word out and commanded, “Lead on, my dear Miss Forley.” The pair of them marched from the room, bright as sunshine and chattering already.

      However had the army managed the likes of Ida Lee Landway? More to the point, how would he?

Chapter Two

      Ida took a small bit of time to explore the Home as she made her way to the dining hall for her first dinner. Her few visits to Charleston had shown her that the Home’s buildings were ordinary by the city’s standards: three stories high with a few of the requisite columns and shutters framing the windows. Still, the compound held none of the ornamental grace for which Charleston’s buildings and residences were famous.

      The front entrance led into the center wing of the U-shaped main building. This segment housed a half-dozen classrooms on the upper floors, while what few offices there were shared the main floor with the dining hall. On one end of the main wing sat Dr. Parker’s office and a small receiving parlor. Ida presumed his living quarters sat beyond the French doors at the far end of that parlor, but didn’t dare investigate. On the other end of the wing sat a library and a common study room. Her infirmary was just around the corner from the library, at the beginning of the girls’ residential wing. The boys’ wing sat sensibly on the other side of the main building.

      It was the thing that struck her most: the sheer sensibility of the place. The overwhelming practical, even institutional feeling of the whole structure. It felt off, wrong somehow. Too sensible. For someone coming from an atmosphere of the highly practical US Army, well, that was saying something.

      She ventured out to explore the courtyard formed by the U of the buildings. A tidy, functional little play yard sat with swings, a teeter-totter, groups of benches and other diversions shaded by a large tree. True to Gitch’s word, there were also small plots that looked as if they had once been flower beds. She’d enjoy having flowers to look at again if the gardens could be coaxed back into life—sandy, scraggly Camp Jackson wasn’t ever known for its pleasant landscaping.

      Knowing all the children were gathering for supper, Ida crossed the courtyard into the boys’ wing, which was a predictable mirror of the girls’ wing. She found an outward-facing window, and peering through it, found the side gate she should have used this morning. To her left, at the boys’ end of the common buildings, she saw what was likely the kitchen, for there were pots and shelving and washtubs outside as well as another neglected garden—this one looking more as if it had hosted vegetables rather than flowers. The clang of pots and pans and the smell of what might have been bread met her senses and reminded her she’d not had much of a lunch.

      To her right was the back of the compound, where several outbuildings of various sizes stood. A garden shed, a storage shed and a third building Ida guessed to be the bathhouses. A friend had told her about the Home’s most unusual “luxury”: a set of small square bathing pools under gazebo-like roofs. Given that the children couldn’t easily be shipped off to the cooler beach or up into the dryer mountains, they seemed an unusual but practical way to battle the hot, humid days that made a low-country summer such torture.

      Beyond all these lay the wrought iron fence that enclosed the entire Home. Simply put, Ida didn’t like it. Wrought iron fences could be beautiful—delicate, even—but this was hardly either of those things. It was a useful fence. Actually, if Ida were to put an adjective on the thing, she’d have chosen mean.

      Not that the Parker Home for Orphans was an unpleasant place. Ida found she could be thankful for the small comforts and luxurious sense of space her quarters now had. Compared with the army, it was downright palatial. Three rooms, all to herself!

      Still, the place wasn’t what she had been expecting. The feel of the whole compound simply stumped her, and she couldn’t work out why. All she could put a name to was a low, constant thrum in her stomach that it could be so much more.

      A clue to her impression came to her as she came up on what had to be the dining room by sheer virtue of location, though definitely not by atmosphere. It was the quiet of the place that unnerved her.

      Ida had found army mess halls to be loud affairs, and had expected dinner at the Home to be just as earsplitting, if not more. These were children, after all, and even her limited experience had taught her that young ones were noisy critters. Right now, the only thing that met her ears as she walked down the hallway toward the dining hall was an unnatural quiet. Children? Over fifty of them? This quiet? Ida had never known such a thing in all her days.

      She turned the corner to view row upon row of noiseless children hunched over tin plates. A young boy gasped out a “Huh?” at her appearance, followed by a wave of swiveling heads. One would have thought these children had never seen a nurse before. Some of their mouths gaped, midchew, the youngsters astonished beyond whatever meager manners they possessed. Fond as she was of attention, Ida wasn’t accustomed to being such a cause of amazement. Whatever friendly greeting she’d rehearsed to give upon entering left her mind with the “whoosh” of pivoting heads.

      “It’s her!” Gitch chirped, standing so quickly to shoot a waving hand in the air that it knocked a fork to the ground. The clatter rang like a fire bell in the quiet hall. Ida waved back, glad for a friendly face, only to watch an older child yank Gitch back down onto the bench and produce a “Shh!” nearly as blaring as the fork.

      “Nurse Landway.” Dr. Parker’s voice came from where he’d obviously been waiting at the other end of the room, producing an equally massive wave of turning heads in his direction. Ida had the ludicrous thought that, were they to attempt a conversation like this, someone might end up seasick. “Children, please say hello to our new nurse.”

      The “Hello” Ida received rang so hollow and obligatory that her insides echoed like an empty canyon. A gulp fought its way up her throat, and she stifled the urge to turn right around and repack her bags. It was the one voice, Gitch’s delightfully loud “Howdy!”—resulting in another yank back down onto the bench—that tugged Ida farther into the room instead.

      They were like little soldiers. Sad, drab little soldiers lined up in unhappy rows too much like the rows of beds in Camp Jackson’s rehabilitation wards. Ida had expected sadness, had anticipated unhappy little frowns, but nothing on the order that faced her at this moment. She folded her hands in front of her, suddenly wishing she had a chair or railing beside her to clasp. “Hello, children.” She hated the lifelessness in her voice, but it was as if the room tamped down joy upon contact.

      “Please come and join us in the staff dining room,” Dr. Parker said, motioning to the door behind him. They didn’t eat with the children? That made some sense if the children were noisy, but they clearly weren’t.

      As she walked down the dining hall’s center aisle, Ida’s feet seemed to grow shoes of stone as every eye followed her. At Camp Jackson, such an entrance—a nearly bridal-aisle walk down the center of a room—would produce a flurry of whispered commentary. As a woman amid hundreds of lonely soldiers, Ida was no stranger to turning heads and loud, often ill-mannered commentary. Truth be told, she rather enjoyed such attention. It showed that the men were aware of and engaged in the world around them, СКАЧАТЬ