Cate Campbell

B
ENEDICT
H
ALL

CATE CAMPBELL

KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com

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Table of Contents

For my father,
F. M. Campbell, M.D.
In memoriam

Frank Parrish went down the steps of the Alexis Hotel and turned toward the Public Market just as the shopkeepers were opening their shutters for the day. He walked with deliberate steps, trying not to hurry, though his need was urgent. Thin sunlight glistened on the gray waters of Elliott Bay. A sharp breeze chilled his face. He turned up the collar of his greatcoat, but he drew deep lungfuls of salt-scented air, wishing he could cool the fire burning in his arm. His shoes clicked on the Market’s wooden walkway as he passed the high stalls, where fishmongers would soon shout their wares, and the day stalls, where farmers were setting out potatoes and squashes and onions. Following directions from one of the hotel’s bellboys, he climbed a short set of stairs that led to the café on the upper level. The café jutted over the pier, an establishment of one room, with ironwork tables and chairs and a zinc counter stretching along one side. White cotton curtains filtered the morning glare from the bay.

The café was open, but empty of customers. A woman in a long bib apron looked up with an automatic smile when Frank stepped through the door. “Good morning, sir.”

He took off his hat, and nodded to her. He saw her glance, first at the major’s insignia sewn into the cuff of his coat, and then, inexorably, at the empty sleeve folded into the opposite pocket. Her smile softened into one of pity, an expression he had come to dread. She put down the glass she was polishing. She said in a gentle voice, as if he were as fragile as a child, “Get you something, sir? Coffee?”

He fiddled with the brim of his hat, hesitating. He hadn’t come for coffee.

The army doctors had told him some pain was to be expected. In the hospital in Virginia they dosed him alternately with laudanum and morphine, but both made him feel slow and stupid, and did little to quell his pain. The kindest of his doctors prescribed whisky. It was corn whisky, shipped in from Canada, the only legal stuff they could get, and the nurses measured it out in careful doses. It was harsh and sour, the way medicine should be, but it was strong. It was the only thing that worked.

Frank was damned glad to be away from the hospital, but he still craved whisky. The bellboy had whispered that everyone in Seattle knew how to get around Prohibition because they’d had four extra years to figure it out. He had recommended this place. Frank could only hope what they sold here wouldn’t make him go blind, or give him jake foot.

He avoided the barmaid’s eyes as he dropped his hat on a table by the window. The humiliation of his need was nearly as bad as the pain. But not quite. He muttered, “Do you have—uh—any-thing stronger, ma’am?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Wait just one moment, sir,” she told him and disappeared through the swinging door behind her.

Frank sat down, stretching his long legs beneath the little table. He fought the urge to knead his arm with his fingers. That only made it worse. In fact, any touch—fingers or towels or bedsheets—further inflamed the knobby ends of his amputation. Even the sleeve of his shirt, gently folded over it and tucked into his pocket, chafed against the rough red skin.

The barmaid returned with a thick white mug in her hand. She plucked a cotton napkin from the zinc counter, and crossed to Frank, the long hem of her apron fluttering around her ankles. “Here you go, sir.” She set the napkin on the table, the mug on the napkin.

The liquid in the mug was most definitely not coffee. The pungent smell of peat rose from it, and Frank’s mouth watered in anticipation. He nodded his thanks, and made himself wait till she had gone back behind the counter before he took his first swallow.

The whisky burned in his throat, a welcome fire that nearly made him groan. His second swallow sent warmth radiating into what remained of his left arm. The third flowed on, like a river running to the sea, washing away the pain of mutilated flesh, shattered bone, severed nerves. It went farther, to that space where there was no flesh or bone, where it soothed the phantom pain that had tortured him half the night.

He couldn’t help himself, though he knew the barmaid was watching. He closed his eyes, and sighed his relief.

Frank had spent the previous night pacing his hotel room, gritting his teeth against the agony in his arm. It was a small room, the least expensive the Alexis had to offer. There were six steps to the door, three to the window, four more to the bed. He had walked those steps over and over again, counting the hours until the slow winter dawn lightened the sky beyond the window. Now, three fingers of whisky in his belly brought respite at last. He could have wept with gratitude.

The barmaid reappeared at his elbow. She picked up the empty mug, and set another in its place.

He kept his gaze on the slice of glassy bay he could see through the drawn curtains. “Thanks,” he said, his voice rough with the bite of the whisky.

She lingered beside his table. “Beautiful morning for January, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He forced himself to lean back, lift his chin, and look into her face.

She was plain, and no longer young, with tired eyes and a sad mouth. She said, in a tentative way, “Lost your arm over there, sir?”

He hated saying the words. He lifted the mug, and drained half of its contents in a gulp.

She persisted. “Was it France?”

Frank set the cup down, and said in a flat tone, “Jerusalem.”

Her expression of sympathy turned to one of confusion. “Jerusalem?”

“Yes.” Most Americans knew little of the war with the Turks, Frank knew.

She twisted her apron. “I guess it was awful.”

Frank shrugged. The movement loosened the sleeve from his pocket, and he shoved it back with his right hand. The barmaid turned from him to pull the curtains back, giving him a view of the bay. A black freighter with angled stacks was steaming out to sea, trailing twin clouds of smoke. Seabirds dipped and soared above the fishing boats docked at the pier, and Chinamen in shapeless pants trotted to and fro, carrying tin buckets of shellfish and wicker baskets of salmon.

The barmaid came back to the table. “Can I bring you some food?”

“No.” Frank drained his cup and handed it to her. He came to his feet, reaching for his hat. “I’ll take my check, please.”

She took two steps backward, a mug in each hand. “I’m sorry. I guess I talk too much,” she said, her homely face flushing. “Don’t go, sir. I’ll leave you be.”

Frank said, “It’s all right,” but he knew his voice sounded angry. He reached into his pocket for his money.

She took another step, shaking her head. “No charge for our men in uniform, sir. My boss says, any man who went to fight the Huns deserves his drink.”

“Kind of him.” Frank dug for a quarter, and dropped it on the table. “For you, then.”

He jammed his hat on his head and hurried away before she could thank him. His boots clattered down the stairs and echoed on the wooden planks of the walkway.

People were beginning to gather in the Market. At the fishmongers’, two women in long winter coats haggled over pink slabs of salmon. Housewives straggled past the vegetable stands, fingering turnips and spuds. The morning air rang with the sounds of gulls crying into the wind, of the clopping of horses’ hooves on pavement, and the harsh whine of an automobile motor. Frank left it all behind, and wandered up First Avenue in search of breakfast.

The scent of frying bacon enticed him into a short lane called Post Street. It was too narrow for much traffic. The buildings were small, and a bit dilapidated, jumbled together like a set of bad wooden teeth. He passed an Italian grocer setting out trays of greens, a barbershop with a striped pole, a shoe repairman with blackened fingers who tipped his grimy cap as Frank went by. He found a tiny diner with a chalked sign in its window proclaiming BREAKFAST, 75¢. He stepped around an iron rooster doorstop and into the smoky haze of the interior. He had to duck his head to clear the lintel.

There were just two tables, and the cook and the waiter were the same man, but the food was hot and filling. Frank tucked into scrambled eggs and thick sausages and potatoes fried with onions. He sat on when he was replete, drinking black coffee, gazing at passersby through the greasy window.

He leaned forward to watch a tall woman stride up the street toward the diner. She carried a black leather satchel in her gloved hand. Her coat, something short with a drooping fur collar, fell away to show a low-waisted, loose-fitting dress. It reached only to the middle of her calves, showing strong, slim ankles. Her hat was some sort of bucket-shaped thing, and her hair was bobbed in the new style, leaving her neck bare. Her small breasts, unfettered by corset or stays, moved with her purposeful steps.

Frank tried to imagine Elizabeth dressed like that, but he couldn’t do it. When he had seen her last, her skirts brushed the high tops of her boots, and her shirtwaist buttoned to her chin. Her hat had been wide-brimmed, with a posy of flowers at the crown.

The cook appeared beside Frank to lift his empty plate. He nodded toward the woman as she passed by. “These modern girls,” he growled. “Bare legs, cropped hair. Smoking. And that one’s a doctor. It’s indecent. Makes you wonder what you fought for, don’t it?”

Frank looked up at the man, a big-bellied, whiskered fellow in a stained apron. He wanted to speak a denial, but in some obscure way, the cook was right. The changes Frank found in his country, and in himself, disturbed him. He had gone off to war in search of glory and honor, but had found only filth and waste. The lifeless corpses of the enemy gave him no more joy than did the bloody bodies of his own men lying in the dirt of the hills. Somehow, out there, he had lost more than his arm. Some other part of himself had gone missing.

It wasn’t just the war. He had mustered out of the army into a society he barely recognized. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth amendments passed while he was in the Virginia hospital. His new job had evaporated without a word of warning. And Elizabeth—well, perhaps it was asking too much to expect her not to have changed. Nothing was as it had been.

These thoughts stole his tongue. The cook turned back to his kitchen, and Frank knew that he had, again, failed to say what was expected of him. In the past year this had happened too many times. The high-spirited Montana boy he had once been had vanished. The Great War was over, but it had left Frank to wage a new war, with himself as the enemy.

He groped in his pocket for the money to pay for his breakfast, and the cook came back to scoop it up without a word. Frank spoke a monosyllabic thanks, and ducked out of the diner, turning back toward his hotel.

 

Just three days before, Frank Parrish had stepped down into the broad expanse of Seattle’s King Street Station after a long train journey from Virginia. He stood in the terminal for an hour, his valise in his hand, while the bustle of a thriving city swirled around him. He saw faces of every color, bodies of every shape, clothing from a janitor’s overalls to a mink stole with bright dead eyes that glinted at him under the brilliant lights. He put down his valise for a time to rest his fingers, then picked it up again, worried someone would steal it.

All he had in the world was in that valise. His discharge papers, his medical records, his old uniform, his medal in its little black box. A packet of letters from Elizabeth.

His mouth twisted at the thought of those letters. Nurse Gregorio had offered to burn them. He couldn’t think, now, why he hadn’t allowed her to do it. It was stubbornness, he supposed, or perhaps simple disbelief. Elizabeth had been part of his future since he was seventeen.

The ranch in the Bitterroot Valley had also been part of his future, but that was pointless now. What could a one-armed man do on a cattle ranch? It might have been different if he had been able to tolerate the prosthesis, but every attempt to fit it caused such ghastly pain that both he and the army doctors had given up.

After waiting another hour, and watching two more trains deposit their travelers, Frank had to accept that no one from the Alaska Steamship Company was coming to meet him. It would be all right, he told himself. He had Eccles’s letter in his pocket, assuring him of his new position and suggesting a hotel to stay in. No doubt someone had mixed up the dates of his arrival, or gotten the train number wrong. His arm hurt, as always, but it would feel better if he walked for a bit, got himself moving after days of being cooped up. He stopped a porter and asked directions, then forded the crowd to make his way out of the station.

Frank’s first impression of Seattle was of grayness. Sky, streets, mist-shrouded buildings, all were painted in drab shades. Automobiles mingled with horse-drawn carriages and slow-moving oxcarts. Walkers carried umbrellas and wore boots against the dampness of the streets. As Frank turned down Yesler, a streetcar clanged by, its scarlet paint the sole spot of color.

Ahead, Frank could see the dull gleam of the bay. Behind him, the hills were thickly forested. A spatter of rain freshened the air as he walked, and all of it worked together to create a kind of frigid charm. He was cheered by a spurt of optimism. He found the Alexis Hotel at the corner of First and Madison. He set down his valise for a moment so he could straighten his collar and wipe raindrops from his hair, then picked it up and went inside to secure a room.

 

By ten o’clock the next day, Frank’s good mood had evaporated. At the Alaska Steamship Company, Eccles blustered an apology for his broken promise. He blamed the general strike of the year before, the influx of returning soldiers, the depression that had sucked the energy out of the wartime boom. He didn’t offer to pay for Frank’s travel expenses, and Frank was too proud to admit he had spent most of his savings on his train ticket. Eccles, avoiding his eyes, shook his hand, wished him luck, and said good-bye. Frank spoke no more than a dozen words throughout the whole encounter.