Pictures of Emily by Theresa Weir Page A

bedside through warm, fever-laden air. Her cheeks were flushed bright red. A scruffy brown teddy bear, the fur rubbed completely away, was tucked neatly in beside her.
    He felt his heart crack a little.
    The scene saddened and frustrated him at the same time. It was like something a person might have witnessed a century ago.
    He placed a hand against her brow. Her skin was hot and dry. Dehydration.
    His touch caused her to stir.
    Her eyelids fluttered open. Her beautiful eyes were glazed with fever and he wondered if she even saw him at all.
    “Emily—” Babbie whispered, coming up beside him, touching his hand for reassurance. “Your prince came back.”
    Emily struggled to focus her attention on the child. “I see that, sweetheart,” she said through dry, barely moving lips. Then her eyes drifted shut again.
    “I gave her Bare Bear for company,” Babbie whispered up at him.
    “Emily’s really sick, isn’t she?” asked Tilly.
    “Yes,” Sonny said. “She needs a doctor.”
    “Papa says doctors don’t know what they’re doing.”
    “He says they’re ducks,” Babbie added.
    “Quacks. He says they’re quacks,” Tilly said.
    Sonny didn’t want to scare them, but the ferry was leaving and he had to be sure Emily was on it. “All doctors aren’t quacks,” he said. “Emily is very sick. She needs a doctor now.”
    He tugged the sheets and blankets free of the mattress and began bundling them around Emily.
    “What are you doing?” Tilly asked.
    “Taking her to a doctor.”
    Tilly’s grasp of the situation amazed him. She quickly dragged out a battered suitcase and started filling it with Emily’s clothes.
    Downstairs, a door slammed. A heavy footfall sounded on the stairs. “I got some cough syrup from the drugstore.” John Christian’s voice, drew closer, along with his footsteps. “Clayton said—” He stopped just inside the room. “Mr. Maxwell… What?” He looked haggard, his eyes red-rimmed. Sonny watched as the man struggled to make sense of Sonny’s presence in his sick daughter’s room.
    “Emily needs a doctor, not cough syrup,” Sonny explained. “My guess is that she has pneumonia. People die from pneumonia.”
    “Doctors!” John Christian raised a broad arm and gestured to something beyond the walls of the small bedroom. “I’ve got a wife lying in a grave on the hillside all because of doctors!”
    “Senseless things happen. That’s no reason to give up on the entire medical profession.”
    Sonny could see the indecision on John Christian’s face, the glimmer of tears in the big man’s eyes. And for the first time in his life, Sonny understood a little of the heavy burden of responsibility a parent must feel. The man’s shoulders slumped. “My God,” he said, more to himself than Sonny. “I don’t know. My Emily. Sara’s firstborn…”
    Precious minutes ticked away. Sonny prayed that Doreen could convince the ferryboat captain to delay departure.
    “I know a doctor in New York,” Sonny said. “He’s a pulmonary specialist. One of the best in the country. He’ll take good care of her.”
    John Christian closed his eyes, his face a mask of pain.
    “There isn’t much time,” Sonny reminded him.
    John Christian’s eyes flew open and he looked at Sonny with anguish. “When a man meets the girl he wants to marry, he thinks his heart can be no fuller. But then he has children.”
    He walked over to the bed and Sonny stepped back.
    “It’s hard to know what’s best,” John Christian said, looking down at Emily.
    “She has little chance here,” Sonny said quietly, kindly.
    The man nodded in uneasy defeat, then bent and lifted his daughter from the bed as if she were a small child. “Come on, Emily lass. We’re takin’ you to a doctor.”
    On the way to the village, Tilly and Babbie were left in the efficient hands of Annie McIntyre.
    In the harbor, the ferryboat was still waiting, and Sonny silently thanked Doreen and her intimidating nature. As they