First the cook told about the will. It must have been the cook. He thought he did anyway. Kate heard about it from Ethel, and she confronted him in the kitchen where he was kneading bread, his hairy big arms floured to the elbows and his hands yeast bleached.
“Do you think it was a good thing to tell about being a witness?” she said mildly. “What do you think Miss Faye is going to think?”
He looked confused. “But I didn’t—”
“You didn’t what—tell about it or think it would hurt?”
“I don’t think I—”
“You don’t think you told? Only three people knew. Do you think I told? Or do you think Miss Faye did?” She saw the puzzled look come into his eyes and knew that by now he was far from sure that he had not told. In a moment he would be sure that he had.
Three of the girls questioned Kate about the will, coming to her together for mutual strength.
Kate said, “I don’t think Faye would like me to discuss it. Alex should have kept his mouth shut.” Their wills wavered, and she said, “Why don’t you ask Faye?”
“Oh, we wouldn’t do that!”
“But you dare to talk behind her back! Come on now, let’s go in to her and you can ask her the questions.”
“No, Kate, no.”
“Well, I’ll have to tell her you asked. Wouldn’t you rather be there? Don’t you think she would feel better if she knew you weren’t talking behind her back?”
“Well—”
“I know I would. I always like a person who comes right out.” Quietly she surrounded and nudged and pushed until they stood in Faye’s room.
Kate said, “They asked me about a certain you-know-what. Alex admits he let it out.”
Faye was slightly puzzled. “Well, dear, I can’t see that it’s such a secret.”
Kate said, “Oh, I’m glad you feel that way. But you can see that I couldn’t mention it until you did.”
“You think it’s bad to tell, Kate?”
“Oh, not at all. I’m glad, but it seemed to me that it wouldn’t be loyal of me to mention it before you did.”
“You’re sweet, Kate. I don’t see any harm. You see, girls, I’m alone in the world and I have taken Kate as my daughter. She takes such care of me. Get the box, Kate.”
And each girl took the will in her own hands and inspected it. It was so simple they could repeat it word for word to the other girls.
They watched Kate to see how she would change, perhaps become a tyrant, but if anything, she was nicer to them.
A week later when Kate became ill, she went right on with her supervision of the house, and no one would have known if she hadn’t been found standing rigid in the hall with agony printed on her face. She begged the girls not to tell Faye, but they were outraged, and it was Faye who forced her to bed and called Dr. Wilde.
He was a nice man and a pretty good doctor. He looked at her tongue, felt her pulse, asked her a few intimate questions, and then tapped his lower lip.
“Right here?” he asked and exerted a little pressure on the small of her back. “No? Here? Does this hurt? So. Well, I think you just need a kidney flushing.” He left yellow, green, and red pills to be taken in sequence. The pills did good work.
She did have one little flare up. She told Faye, “I’ll go to the doctor’s office.”
“I’ll ask him to come here.”
“To bring me some more pills? Nonsense. I’ll go in the morning.”
2
Dr. Wilde was a good man and an honest man. He was accustomed to say of his profession that all he was sure of was that sulphur would cure the itch. He was not casual about his practice. Like so many country doctors, he was a combination doctor, priest, psychiatrist to his town. He knew most of the secrets, weaknesses, and the braveries of Salinas. He never learned to take death easily. Indeed the death of a patient always gave him a sense of failure and hopeless ignorance. He was not a bold man, and he used surgery only as a last and fearful resort. The drugstore was coming in to help the doctors, but Dr. Wilde was one of the few to maintain his own dispensary and to compound his own prescriptions. Many years of overwork and interrupted sleep had made him a little vague and preoccupied.
At eight-thirty on a Wednesday morning Kate walked up Main Street, climbed the stairs of the Monterey County Bank Building, and walked along the corridor until she found the door which said, “Dr. Wilde—Office Hours 11-2.”
At nine-thirty Dr. Wilde put his buggy in the livery stable and wearily lifted out his black bag. He had been out in the Alisal presiding at the disintegration of old, old lady German. She had not been able to terminate her life neatly. There were codicils. Even now Dr. Wilde wondered whether the tough, dry, stringy life was completely gone out of her. She was ninety-seven and a death certificate meant nothing to her. Why, she had corrected the priest who prepared her. The mystery of death was on him. It often was. Yesterday, Allen Day, thirty-seven, six feet one inch, strong as a bull and valuable to four hundred acres and a large family, had meekly surrendered his life to pneumonia after a little exposure and three days of fever. Dr. Wilde knew it was a mystery. His eyelids felt grainy. He thought he would take a sponge bath and have a drink before his first office patients arrived with their stomach aches.
He climbed the stairs and put his worn key in the lock of his office door. The key would not turn. He set his bag on the floor and exerted pressure. The key refused to budge. He grabbed the doorknob and pulled outward and rattled the key. The door was opened from within. Kate stood in front of him.
“Oh, good morning. Lock was stuck. How did you get in?”
“It wasn’t locked. I was early and came in to wait.”
“Wasn’t locked?” He turned the key the other way and saw that, sure enough, the little bar slipped out easily.
“I’m getting old, I guess,” he said. “I’m forgetful.” He sighed. “I don’t know why I lock it anyway. You could get in with a piece of baling wire. And who’d want to get in anyway?” He seemed to see her for the first time. “I don’t have office hours until eleven.”
Kate said, “I needed some more of those pills and I couldn’t come later.”
“Pills? Oh, yes. You’re the girl from down at Faye’s.”
“That’s right.”
“Feeling better?”
“Yes, the pills help.”