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you meant it.”
    Cook smiled his first smile in three hours. “Rooms available.” Hoisting Fraser’s bag, he brushed off the road dust with his free hand.
    Cook’s wife, also fair-skinned but looking ten years younger than her husband, waited at the door. She led them into the parlor. Its furniture, also tired, did not quite fill the room. The woman stretched out on the divan had to be Rachel Lemus. Fraser pulled aside the window curtains to let in more light, adjusting to the way the floorboards bent to his step. Fat raindrops began to hit the window. Mrs. Cook turned up a lamp on the wall. In the light, Rachel looked to be on the far side of sixty, heavy-set, and feverish. Fraser helped her sit up and pulled a chair over. He unwound the cloth strips that held a short piece of molding to her right forearm.
    â€œMr. Cook’s done a good job,” Fraser said as he felt around the break. It wasn’t puffy, didn’t look infected. “I’m going to move it a bit to help it heal.”
    â€œDo it quick,” she said. She grunted when he aligned the bones, sweat standing out on her forehead. He rewrapped her arm, using the same piece of molding as a splint. Then he mixed some powder in a glass of water from a side table and made her drink it. She screwed up her face. “Ee-yew. Mighty bitter. What’s it called?”
    â€œIt’s called aspirin. It’s new. It should help you rest.”
    â€œThat laudanum works good for me, you know.” She gave him a hopeful look.
    â€œLet’s see how the aspirin does. I’ll be here a bit longer, what with the rain.” He pulled out a cloth to rig up as a sling for her arm and tied it behind her neck, then pointed to the wall behind her head. Muffled voices, sometimes shouts, were coming from the other side. “Does that racket bother you?”
    Rachel eased back, supporting her slinged arm with her good hand. “That’s just the dice game,” she said. “Don’t bother me none, not how I’m feeling.”
    When Fraser emerged from the parlor, the street was slick with rain. It soon would be a mass of mud. He accepted Mrs. Cook’s invitation to supper, a stew featuring meat he could not quite identify. The biscuits were exceptional. Fraser praised them, probably too much. Unexpectedly, the Cooks talked of their college days. They both attended Oberlin, some years apart, though Speed admitted he’d loved baseball more than school, loved it all the way to the pros. Fraser had heard about another Negro who went to college, a lawyer in Cadiz.
    After supper, Fraser found Rachel asleep on the couch. Her fever was down. He woke her long enough to administer more dissolved aspirin.
    Mrs. Cook showed him to a narrow room on the upper floor. She explained that she would ordinarily place him at the back, away from the street noise, but on Saturday night the rear of the hotel could get noisy. The bed was hard, but he saw no bugs. He was tired.
    In the bright, warm morning, Fraser found the Cooks in the rear yard, seated with his patient at a table carried out from the house. There was no sign of another hotel guest.
    Rachel looked clear-eyed and alert. She was feeling better, she said, the arm sore but not so bad. That aspirin, she added, tastes like the devil but works like a miracle.
    The eggs were on the runny side, but the coffee was strong and the bacon thick, the way Fraser liked them. Even though Cook’s hotel was empty, the man had to have income from somewhere. From his ballplaying days? The dice game? Sopping up the egg yolk with toast, Fraser spoke the question he had choked back since Cook first spoke Rachel’s name.
    â€œRachel,” he started, “I was wondering. Are you the one worked for Mary Surratt? In Surrattsville? You testified at her trial?”
    Rachel drew back for a moment, then shrugged. “That I am. That trial, my Lord, I was scared to death there.