The Prisoner of Hell Gate by Dana I. Wolff

Author:Dana I. Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781250089717
Publisher: Picador

Mary

SHE HAS SENT the students to the boiler house, where she lights her fires, with instructions on how to proceed. They stumbled out with a box of wooden matches—the City workers left behind endless quantities of matches in the pantry—and she hopes they have enough wits about them to find the place and get the fire lit. They talked a lot of nonsense over dinner, almost like they were drunk. Maybe the island is affecting them. Maybe the Soper girl has brought an affliction upon herself and everyone about her.

But never mind any of it; Mary knows she won’t lose them.

The ice cream containers lie spread out before her like a revelation. Häagen-Dazs, they say, whatever that means. She strains her memory but concludes that she never heard of it. Yet she loves it at first sight, caresses the containers, opens one, runs a dirty finger through it and licks off every drop of ice cream, finding the taste silky sweet and flowery with vanilla. Her eyes fall closed in ecstasy.

Oh, what luck that it is still cold, that she can do it right!

In a rush she goes to the pantry, casting aside everything in her search for the canned peaches. Every time she laid eyes on them until now, the pictures on the labels of these cans reminded her of what she had lost. So she hid them away, would not touch their contents. Now, oh, but it is too delicious!

The last time she made peach melba was for a group. That was 1915. How many years ago, she does not know, but a lot. She was cooking for the staff at the maternity hospital on Twenty-third Street. There were glass bowls with polka dots that called to her, almost insisted upon being filled with peeled fresh peaches, vanilla ice cream, and raspberry sauce. Her specialty. She had always been great at making it. Everyone who tasted her peach melba ate it up, smacked their lips, cried out for more.

That peach melba proved her undoing, though. Soper sniffed it out, concluded that was the primary source of infection because it went unheated, no killing of the germs.

Nevertheless she had peach melba on the menu every Friday at the staff cafeteria in the maternity hospital. A nice bit of sweetness and silk to follow the fish course. The doctors and nurses and other staff scarfed it down as thoroughly as the families she once served, the Warrens and the Robinsons and all the others.

“You make the best desserts, Miss Brown.” They knew her as Mariah Brown; she could not very well use her own name after Soper tainted it. “You’ll have to give my wife this peach melba recipe one day.”

“Oh!” She laughed. “I couldn’t possibly reveal my secret, Doctor. Just know you’ll always have something extra to carry you into the weekend.”

Something extra indeed. That man died, he did. A delightfully horrible death, nosebleeds and terrible rashes and intestinal pain like he had glass inside him and all the rest.

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