INSINUATIONS AND RECRIMINATIONS
Miss Lewis had heard the crash and came running, with the hall nurse
from the floor below. Tish was sitting on the floor among the pieces of
glass, with Tommy’s head on her knee, crying over him, when they got
there. He opened his eyes just then, and lay staring up at the hole in
the skylight above, as if he was puzzled. Then he turned his head and
saw who was holding him, and made an effort to sit up.
“You--needn’t look so tragic, Aunt Tish,” he said. “I’m--I’m all
right,” and fell back on her lap again.
Miss Lewis got down and began to feel him for broken bones.
“Skull’s whole, thank goodness!” she muttered. “Can you move your legs,
Doctor?”
Tommy lifted them in turn, making grimaces of pain. Then he lifted his
right arm. It fell as if he couldn’t support its weight.
“I’ve bruised my shoulder,” he said, and lay back with his eyes closed.
“Get his coat off,” ordered Miss Lewis, and I knelt to help her. But
Tommy resisted.
“I’m all right,” he said crossly. “I’ll look after it later myself.”
“Tommy!” said Tish. “Let them take your coat off.”
“I won’t have it off,” he insisted, and when she persisted he was
almost vicious.
Miss Lewis sat back on her heels and shook her head at me.
“He’s a little dazed,” she said. “How in the world did it happen?”
“I was walking on the roof,” said Tommy more agreeably, “and I stepped
on the skylight by mistake. It was dark underneath. It was a darn fool
thing to do!”
The hall nurse and Miss Lewis exchanged glances, and the hall nurse
looked at me and smiled.
“He is still dazed,” she said, smiling. “How could he step on the
skylight? It has a four-foot fence around it!”
We waited for him to explain further, but he let it go at that, and
lay for a little while with his mouth shut hard and a queer thoughtful
look on his face. He roused pretty soon, however, and grunted as if his
shoulder pained him. Then he made Tish get up, and after a minute or so
he sat up himself. He sat there gazing at the skylight, and a few drops
of rain came down through the opening. Tish and I shivered. We were
only partly dressed.
He saw it and was on his feet at once, pretty much himself.
“Now don’t let’s have any fuss about this, please,” he said, addressing
us all. “I forgot the skylight. That’s all. I’m not hurt, Aunt Tish,
and you and Miss Lizzie must go to bed this instant.”
“What are _you_ going to do?” Tish demanded sharply. “Going up on the
roof again?”
“I’ll be down pretty soon,” he evaded. “Jacobs and I will just
straighten this mess a bit.”
I caught a look of intelligence between the two of them, and Jacobs
spoke up.
“If the doctor’ll lend a hand--”
“Tommy,” Tish said suddenly, “the shoulder of your coat is soaked with
blood!”
Tommy put his hand up and felt it.
“I’ve got a scratch somewhere up there,” he said coolly. “It isn’t
going to be touched until the two ladies in negligée and curl papers
are safe in bed with hot-water bottles at their feet. Miss Lewis, Miss
Carberry is using her knee again!”
“I’d use a switch if I had one,” said Tish, almost with tears in her
eyes. But Tommy has the same will that she has herself, and we were
down-stairs between blankets, I on the couch in Tish’s room and Tish
in bed, with our feet against hot-water bottles, and drinking cups of
hot milk, almost before we knew it.
But Tommy and the watchman did not clean up the broken glass in the
upper hall. Whatever they did, that glass was still there the next
morning, and none of us disturbed the general belief that it had been
broken by the hail-storm that came just before dawn.
I was so hoarse the next morning that I could hardly speak, and Tish
kept me on her couch. Her knee was stiff again, too. Including Aggie,
although she had slept through the skylight incident, we were pretty
well used up, and Tish would not let us go home. It was just as well.
She should hardly have faced the events of the next two days without us.
Aggie had her breakfast in bed, but Tish and I had Briggs, the orderly
who carried in our trays, set out a table for us, and were really very
snug. Tish was as cross as two sticks until she’d had her tea, when
she grew more companionable.
“I want to ask you something, Lizzie,” she said as she poured her
second cup. “How, when we saw Tommy go into the mortuary, as plain as
day, could he fall down from the roof?”
“Well,” I said, buttering my toast, “you know about the what-you-call-’ems
in India. They send up a rope into the sky and then a boy up the rope,
and after he has disappeared they give the rope a jerk and he falls,
apparently from nowhere. It’s some sort of optical illusion.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Tish observed sharply. “I’ve been thinking it over
in bed. There must be a fire-escape there somewhere.”
“Oh!” I hadn’t thought of a fire-escape.
“Now, then,” said Tish, “suppose there is a fire-escape, and the Blake
girl went up by it to the roof, and Tommy followed her. Which is what
happened, Lizzie. I’m nobody’s fool; I’ve got eyes in my head. If that
young woman had jumped off the window sill, Tommy Andrews would have
jumped too. Now, then, _why_ did the Blake girl go to the roof?”
“Maybe she wanted air,” I suggested. Tish waved her napkin at me.
“Air!” she snapped. “When you want air, do you generally climb a
fire-escape to a roof, when there’s a staircase up to it, and entice
young men to fall down through skylights and break their shoulders?
Lizzie,”--she leaned over--“Lizzie, that young vixen pushed him through
that skylight and I can prove it!”
“No!”
“Yes.” She got up and, going to the cupboard, lifted down her best hat.
“Look here!” she said, and took from its crown a brass candlestick, the
base bent almost double.
“I was sitting on that when I held Tommy’s head last night. It came
down with the skylight,” she said. “That’s the candlestick the Blake
girl was carrying. What do you make of it?”
I was speechless. Tish unlocked the lower bureau drawer and put
the candlestick in it, beside the roller towel marked S. P. T. and
something else, which I learned later was the bandage Linda Smith
had found in the upper hall, and identified as the one that had tied
Johnson’s hands.
“Now,” she said, locking the drawer again, “I’m going to have a little
chat with Miss Blake. It’s my belief that she let old Johnson die from
neglect, or gave him poison by mistake. And now he’s haunting her--or
she’s haunting him, which is what it looks like.”
But we had no chat with Miss Blake that day. The day nurse, taking her
a tray of breakfast, found her delirious in bed, with a raging fever.
Miss Lewis went over to see her.
“She’s been preparing for this for some time,” she said when she came
back. “She was queer yesterday--you remember, Miss Lizzie--and last
night she did a funny thing. She got the night nurse to give her a
bottle of morphine--enough to kill a horse. And I found it under her
pillow this morning, almost half of it gone!”
“Great heavens!” Tish said. “Why, the girl’s a potential murderess!”
Miss Lewis turned, with a pillow in her arms. “Not a bit of it,” she
said. “There’s something queer about this place lately, and I don’t
care who hears me say it. But folks will have to make insinuations
against Ruth Blake over my dead body!”
She glared at Tish, and Tish at her.
“I have reasons to doubt that Miss Blake is all you think her,” said
Tish stiffly. But Miss Lewis came and stood over her unpleasantly.
“I’m not for making any trouble, Miss Carberry,” she said, “but this
house was calm enough until two days ago, and Ruth Blake has been here
six months, and what’s more, I notice one thing. The most of the
excitement has been around where you are. Maybe you’re psychic, as they
call it, and don’t know it. Maybe it’s--something else. But it wasn’t
Miss Blake who first saw Johnson hanging by his neck, and it wasn’t
Miss Blake the skylight all but fell on, and it wasn’t Miss Blake’s
nephew that fell through the skylight, and it wasn’t in the room of
Miss Blake’s best friend next door that a death-cold foot--”
But Tish put her fingers in her ears and fled to Aggie.
Nevertheless, Miss Lewis had set me to thinking.