Home by Morning by Alexis Harrington

Do you haul it around on your back?” she asked sweetly.
    He frowned at her and bent his knees to lift the trunk. It didn’t budge. He tried again, his muscles tight and burning with the effort. He got nothing but the sound of joints popping in his shoulders. He glanced up at Jess, then tugged at the edges of his gloves and grasped the leather grip on one end of the leather-bound case. Pulling hard, he barely managed to shift it three feet.
    “Jesus, what’s in this thing?” he demanded, out of breath and feeling as if every vein in his head was about to explode.
    “Medical books.”
    His frown turned into a scowl. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that?”
    “You said you could handle it just fine. I’m sure it doesn’t weigh as much as the Percheron, does it?”
    “How did you get this up here?” He lifted his hat and resettled it more firmly on his head.
    “It took three men and a small boy. I hired them at the railroad station.” She looked very pleased with herself.
    By God, but she was sassy. She always had been. How could a woman with such a serious mind and occupation be so sassy? But that had been part of her allure—a mingling of opposites within the same person. Studious and disciplined, but rebellious and daring, knowing yet innocent. Amy was unworldly and uncomplicated. Though he’d known Jessica longer, Cole had never quite figured her out. It was irritating, but it had its appeal. When she wanted to, she could have a man stepping all over his own feet.
    “All right, I’ll have to get someone to help. You go back to the office.”
    “I’m going to stop at Wegner’s Laundry first.”
    He dug around in his back pocket. “Here’s the key. I’ll see you over there after I find another man to—after a while.”
    He wasn’t certain, but he thought he saw an evil gleam of satisfaction in her smile as she left.

     
    “Don’t you worry, ma’am, we’ll deliver these to you later this afternoon, pressed good as new.” Clarence Wegner took Jessica’s creased, wrinkled dresses from her arms. After days of sitting in her luggage, they’d been crushed beyond wearing. He prattled on in a friendly, interested manner. “It’s good to see you again after all this time. I’ll bet you’re glad to be home. Looks like we might see your sister getting married here one of these days.”
    “Um, yes, Mr. Wegner…”
    “It’s a shame that Riley Braddock is off in France. But here’s hoping he’ll make it for the wedding. My brother was best man when I married Mrs. Wegner and…”
    Jessica struggled to concentrate on their conversation. While the sky was clear, it was a cool day. Despite the open door, though, the air in the laundry was stifling and humid. She could see through the gap in the purple drapes meant to separate the working part of the place from the storefront. Steam poured out of the laundry tubs to combine with the hot irons and the mangle. Cooking smells floated in from somewhere. Maybe from Mae Rumsteadt’s café down the street, or maybe there was something on the stove upstairs. Jess knew that Clarence Wegner and his wife lived in rooms over their business.
    In her mind there suddenly rose a vivid memory of the stench of boiling cabbage and rancid pork fat trapped in dark, stifling hallways connected by dark, stifling staircases. Children wailed in the summer heat, and their mothers carped in strident tones or moaned with despair. A cacophony of voices raised in anger, pain, or helplessness, drummed through the thin walls of the tenements. It didn’t matter which building—in New York’s poor neighborhoods they were all alike. Hell on earth. There was a little girl with a broken arm in one room, a stringy-haired new mother barely clinging to life with childbed fever down the hall, and still another lying shrunken and hollow-eyed on a stained, bare mattress with only a ragged quilt for cover, a tumor the size of a lemon in her breast.
    The heat.
    The rats.
    The