Carrie rolled her eyes. Dulcy took the stairs—she’d push herself into a mood that matched the weather instead of life. As she walked up Second Avenue in the cold, fresh air toward the pharmacy, she thought of ways that they could leave despite Walton’s condition, places to go in California or the Southwest. Henning would help now; they all understood there was no choice.
The druggist handed over the morphine with an intense look, eyebrows arching left to right and back again. “The lady with the wiry hair fetched two for him yesterday,” he said. “Keep an eye on the breathing.”
“He says she spilled it,” said Dulcy.
He rolled his eyes. “I’m surprised he can even talk.”
Every other errand was about ginning up some happiness: the florist’s for something bright, the library so that Walton could identify his dream animals, the markets for veal and shellfish, cheese and vegetables for the next few meals, all to be charged to Victor and delivered. She needed three or four days to make Walton strong enough for a train; she needed to talk to the doctor about ways to keep him alive long enough to die in a better place.
And then, some disquiet, thinking of the doctor, thinking of medicine: she’d never seen Walton take more than a spoon of morphine at a time, and Bottlebrush wasn’t the spilling type, or an addict. Maybe she sold it to someone, or maybe Walton wanted to give it to someone, or maybe he’d just wanted her out of the apartment.
She thought all this while standing in the wine and tobacco store, looking for the right bottle of champagne. He never drank champagne. She’d stopped listening to the clerk, who made a clucky sound of annoyance as she turned for the door.
Dulcy reached the sidewalk, skin crawling, and broke into a trot. She was only a block away when she looked up and saw Walton in the open window. She began to run, morphine bottle bobbing in her coat pocket, and saw him step forward and fall, a small and strange and fragile figure. He dropped slowly, nightshirt twisting, arms and legs outstretched. In the very long moment while he was still in the air, sprinting the way she had when she was a little girl, she must have believed she could catch him.
She reached him a moment after he hit the ground, before anyone else came close, and she crouched next to him on the sidewalk. His lips opened and his eyes shifted from cloud to cloud, moving to keep the light while people craned in to watch him die. Blood spread under his head, and a butcher-shop smell floated through the air. She didn’t believe that what he felt was pain, but Walton couldn’t speak, for the first time in her memory, and as people surrounded them and jabbered and blocked his view, she leaned down and whispered things in his bleeding ear: that she loved him, that all pain would be over, that he’d been a great man, a poet, a scientist, a wonder. She pulled his shirt down to his legs and tried to shield his face from the crowd’s view with her body, but people kept bending low, shadows around her head while she watched Walton’s skin stop moving. When she turned, there was a shape just above them, blocking the dim sun: a dark-haired man was holding his bowler hat out to give them privacy from the crowd, his back to them as he thrashed the onlookers: What in the fuck are you looking at here? Go to the roof, if you’d like a view. Piss off and let her love.
???
She persuaded the police to bring him to the apartment instead of to the morgue: poor confused old man, look at the open window, he’d been Mr. Maslingen’s guest. Someone had gone to find Mr. Maslingen now; someone else had told Carrie, because Dulcy heard screams from above, and she left Walton while the police waited for the stretcher.
Upstairs, Dulcy wrapped Carrie into bed and headed for Walton’s room. The bedclothes were tossed to one side, and the tall French windows were still open; two drained morphine bottles lay on the carpet. She did not look out and down. He’d always left a note before, when he’d run away in any sense, and she found it in a scrawl on blotting paper under his specimens, the gold, copper, and silver lumps: That’s that. I can’t bear the wait. My love to all.
She scooped up his notebooks and papers, carried them to her room, and came back for his briefcase. She felt through the drawers and his shoes, checked under the pillow and the bed. She couldn’t find the plain leather book of accounts, and she tried not to imagine it flying away while Walton smashed into the street. Her windows were open, too, and between the racket of passing trolleys Victor’s frantic foghorn voice floated upward and began to dig away at her brain.
Dulcy lay facedown on her own bed. She should go back down and sit with Walton—she’d left him alone for so much of the time in Seattle, and now she was doing it again. She was horrible, and she wept, tears pooling on the pillow. When she floundered for a handkerchief on her bedside table, it took her a moment to focus on Walton’s eyeglasses, folded on top of the brown money book, curved from being worn against his bony chest.
???
The police lowered Walton onto his bed, and Victor wept with his hands over his face until a maid arrived with a bowl of warm water and soap and Henning pulled him down the hall. Carrie helped at first, then sat stunned and sick while Dulcy stripped away what was left of the nightshirt and the strange bandages, draping a towel over each section of skin while she dabbed away at blood and the magic pen markings. Though his face was unbroken, the rest of his body felt like it was stuffed with loose gravel. Dulcy stopped trying to clean the body when she realized that his ribs had forced their way through the skin of his back.
Two hours later, she took the side stairs all the way down to the service entrance. She slid past the stain and hooked north until she reached the Gold Building, and she looked for Schaub on the elevator list. This Schaub was a cousin of Walton’s New York banker, and when she sat down across from him, she showed him the next-to-the-last note in the leather book:
D—close the special accounts with Schaub. He may take revenge. Do as the notebookssay.
Walton had listed accounts at four banks in Seattle. “What do the notebooks say?” asked this thinner, less trustworthy Mr. Schaub, reaching out to pat her gloved hand.
Dulcy shook her head. “Nothing that makes sense.” She kept her eyes on the hunting-scene wallpaper, the gray marble floor, the tall buildings across Second Avenue (no one else falling, currently—how often did someone jump?), and only gradually became aware of the man’s confusion.
“I don’t, though, understand. I’m not sure what Mr. Remfrey had in mind here, asking you to protect these accounts. Mr. Maslingen doesn’t have any access to these funds.”