The Vines by Shelley Nolden (ebook and pdf reader .TXT) 📕

now to watch Ulrich and the last of the crew climb aboard. The captain blasted the horn, and the men cheered as the ferry began backing into the currents.

Through the crowd at the bow railing, Ulrich emerged and stared at the morgue roof.

Even though he couldn’t possibly see her, Cora sensed those arctic eyes fixed on her. If she tried to murder him and failed, his rage would be animalistic. And to punish her further, he could find victims in Manhattan who wouldn’t be missed.

Ulrich put his hand to his mouth and then left the bow.

He just blew me a kiss, she realized. An urge to dry-heave rose from her stomach, and she forced the sensation back down.

“I will kill him,” she said, her attention fixed on the receding ferry. Until the ship disappeared, she couldn’t be certain he was truly gone.

How and when he would return, she had no idea. The sensation of heavy water, pressing down, stole her breath. In staccato gasps, she sucked in air.

When the boat passed under the Hell Gate Bridge, she was alone. Truly alone.

Her breathing slowed, and she stood up. A breeze whipped her hair across her face, its whistle filling the silence. Riverside Hospital existed no more.

Eventually New York City would reclaim its land. Whether the campus would house the sick, the insane, or soldiers preparing to fight a third world war didn’t matter. For now, North Brother Island belonged to her, Cora McSorley.

“Cruadal, my friend, cruadal,” Mary seemed to whisper inside Cora’s head.

Repeatedly over the years, Mary had told Cora that it wasn’t her fault Ulrich had turned out the way he had; Cora owed him no compliance or forgiveness. In response, Cora had always nodded to appease her friend. As hard as she’d tried to believe Mary, a niggling doubt had remained.

Now, fully understanding her deceased friend’s often repeated advice to muster courage, Cora nodded as if Mary were standing beside her. “You were right,” she whispered.

Turning to the abandoned grounds, she yelled, “I do have the blood of a Celtic warrior. And I will show no mercy. Ulrich Gettler, you are not my fate: I sentence you to death.”

The wind blew her voice across the atoll, and Cora cringed at her boldness.

Reflexively, she curled inward to protect herself from a beating. The first time she’d rebelled against him after their reunion in the meadow had been her last.

The memory of Susie’s small fingers, frantically clawing at the tiny air holes drilled in the wood, and at Cora, throughout the hour that Ulrich had kept them locked in a coffin together, still made her squirm. The girl had been the six-year-old daughter of a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, whom Cora had beseeched for help.

Cora pressed her hand against the pocket of her satchel, where she kept the bunny barrettes Susie had been wearing that day, then looked across the river. Somewhere behind the glare of the sun stood the Gettlers’ new brownstone, which she suspected had been paid for with Ulrich’s share of the valuables stolen from the prisoners at Dachau.

She knew he was relying on the lasting trauma from Susie’s death to keep her in submission. Picturing an armored Celtic chieftain, she decided to instead use that memory against him.

Cora turned to face the four-story tuberculosis pavilion. Although the building had become the wellspring of her disgust with this island, avoiding it would be shortsighted. The most modern of the structures, its ventilation would make it the coolest place during the summer’s peak heat, and in winter, without that backup battery, she would have to rely on the thicker insulation within its walls.

Also, she needed to control the pavilion so that Ulrich couldn’t. She would make it so that he could never operate on her in there again.

She rotated to survey the rest of her twenty-acre domain. The campus had become a ghost town.

Wistfully, she stared at the fenced-in tennis courts across the street from the nurses’ residence. The shouting of players and thwacking of balls had practically been constants on the island. Their absences now were deafening.

In 1916, O’Toole had taught her the game, and she’d picked it up quickly. She could still remember the exhilaration of beating him for the first time. From the porch of her nearby bungalow, Mary had shrieked in celebration.

After Mary’s death in 1938, her “germ-infested” hut had been razed.

Now even the nets were gone. Cora turned away from the clay courts and headed down the stairwell.

Moving through the gloomy hallway, she passed the pathology lab, stripped of equipment, and recalled the original Dr. Gettler, bent over his microscope. Cora could almost hear him repeating his favorite quote from Pasteur: “It is in the power of man to make parasitic maladies disappear from the globe!”

While he’d been operating a centrifuge or cleaning his equipment, she’d often kept him company in the hopes of hearing an update that would enable him to shift his focus to ridding her body of the germs. Occasionally, using a pair of forceps, Otto would dip a chocolate bar in honey and give it to her. He never kept a piece for himself: protocol dictated that he didn’t eat in the lab.

Her mouth watered at the memory.

She might never taste chocolate again.

Cora hurried past the morgue and stepped outside. She shielded her eyes from the brightness and leaned against the wall. With too few trees to conceal her from passing ships, she would have to limit her movements between buildings to dusk or night.

The setting sun’s reflection danced on the river, in sync with the sound of water lapping on the beach below the seawall. Without the bustle of human activity, it seemed much louder—and more grating on her ears.

Across the river, a train rattled past. When its clacking subsided, Cora registered the rumbling of truck engines and beeping of horns.

Civilization was so close, yet it might as well have been on the moon. NASA had a better chance of achieving President Kennedy’s goal than she