THE CARBOLIC CASE AND A BROWN COAT
Tommy was very gloomy that night. He went about placing guards, with
his mouth set in a grim line and his eyes hard. A few of the nurses
knew what was going on, but with the exception of the three of us, none
of the patients had been told.
To Tish’s assurance that the trouble was over, that the death of Hero,
the ape, meant the end of the disturbance, Tommy turned a tolerant
smile and a deaf ear. I would have given a good bit to have had Tish’s
conviction, but no theory that was based on Hero at the Zoo could
possibly involve Miss Blake. And Tommy and I knew that Miss Blake was
involved.
I had not told Tish the particulars of Tommy’s visit to the girl’s
room, or about the rosette he had confronted her with. To be candid,
Tish was disagreeable about my having gone with Tommy, and only relaxed
when, at supper time, a package came from Charlie Sands, and proved to
contain the very towel with which the giant ape had been killed.
“Thought you might like it,” Charlie wrote. “I snitched it while the
keeper’s back was turned. Gruesome, but interesting, isn’t it? The
beast was almost human, and as far as I know this may be the towel with
which he performed his final ablutions--or do apes ablute?”
Tish laid it solemnly out on the bed and, going to the dresser drawer,
brought out the one that had, as you may say, suspended Johnson. They
were absolutely alike, even to the position of the S. P. T. which
distinguished them both.
Tommy came into Aggie’s room about eleven o’clock and sat, as usual,
on the foot of the bed. He had lost his customary air of good-natured
raillery, and looked tired.
“I’ve placed them all,” he said. “Counting myself, there are fourteen
of us, and I don’t think a germ could escape from any of the wards
without my knowing it.”
“How about the private rooms?” I asked. “There’s as apt to be mischief
done by pay patients as by charities.”
“You’re right, there. Well, every corridor is under secret
surveillance. The doors into the nurses’ dormitory are being watched on
every floor, and we have a man on the roof.”
“Humph!” said Aggie, from the bed. “You’d do better to have a barrel of
holy water. Things that dissolve under your fingers, just as the clock
strikes midnight--it _was_ midnight, Tish. The clock in the hall is
five minutes fast by my watch.”
“Fiddlesticks!” Tish said tartly. “Then the sun’s too fast; you’d
better have it regulated. No, Tommy, it would have been more to the
point if you’d taken all these precautions last night. You are too
late.”
“I hope so,” Tommy observed and got off the bed. “I’ll come around now
and then and keep you posted.” He started toward the door and stopped,
looking at me. “You haven’t seen--Miss Blake? She has not come from the
dormitory?”
“No.”
He looked relieved at that and went out, and for an hour we saw nothing
of him.
A little before midnight Miss Lewis brought in on a tray three glasses
of buttermilk and some crackers.
“I knew none of you were sleeping,” she said. “This will do you good.
I don’t mind saying _my_ nerves are all twittering. This house is
enough to set you crazy. If you go around a corner unexpectedly, you
come across a figure ducking into a doorway. A nurse from L ward just
fell across one of the moppers squatting in a corner by the pantry and
threw a bowl of chicken broth at him, thinking it was Johnson himself.”
“They might as well calm themselves,” Tish observed, sipping her
buttermilk. “Nothing will happen.”
“Then why don’t you take off your clothes and go to bed?” Aggie asked,
but Tish scornfully refused to answer.
“I’m not expecting anything myself,” observed Miss Lewis, straightening
her cap at the mirror. “These things have a way of petering out--and
yet, on the other hand, things in a hospital usually go in threes. If
we have one burned case, we’ll get two more. Shot cases will come in
threes every time, and as for suicides! Well, I’ve seen three carbolic
acids every time I’ve seen one. And that reminds me,” she said, turning
from the mirror and with a dive thrusting a foot-rest under Tish’s leg,
“a carbolic case has just piped out in one of the wards. There are
things I’d rather do than go up and lay it out.”
And at that instant the hall nurse appeared in the doorway and spoke to
her.
“Miss Lewis,” she said, “you are to go to the mortuary with that case.
Miss Grimes is having an attack of hysteria.”
Miss Lewis turned and surveyed us through her spectacles. “Can you beat
that?” she demanded. “Wouldn’t a self-respecting mongrel pup rebel at
a life like this?” She jerked her head--and her cap fell over her ear
with the facility of long practice. “All right,” she said to the nurse,
“I’m coming, but--” she turned in the doorway and waved her hand to us.
“If I am found strung up with an S. P. T.,” she said, “I’ll not hang
alone, believe _me_.”
An S. P. T.! We all three stared at each other, and Tish tried to call
her back. But she had gone. Could it be, we wondered, that Miss Lewis
knew the meaning of the three letters? And if she did--!
At five minutes of midnight Tommy stopped in to see us.
“Nothing yet,” he said. “Heaven knows, I hope there won’t be anything
at all, but there’s an uneasy feeling in the house--I’ve had to make a
few changes. The man on the roof refused to stay.”
“Naturally,” Tish observed, with the lofty air she’d had all evening.
“If the wind blew he would declare he heard groans.”
“Exactly what he _did_ say,” replied Tommy. “Says he heard groans and
felt eyes looking at him. But we had the roof searched, and found
nothing. I put Hicks, the ambulance man, there instead. He hasn’t any
nerves.”
“I beg your pardon, Doctor,” said the hall nurse, from the doorway.
“But--Hicks wants to see you.”
“Just for a moment,” a voice came from behind the nurse. “I’ll go back
up there, Doctor, if I’ve got to kick myself up, but--”
“Well?”
“Doctor, as sure as I’m a living man, something is singing on the
roof.”
“Singing!” said Tommy.
“Half singing, half chanting. I--I’m going back, Doctor. Nothing ain’t
ever scared me yet. But--it’s singing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’--not
the words. Just the tune.”
“Did anybody else hear it?”
“They heard something in the mortuary. They said it didn’t sound
exactly like singing. But I heard it as plain as I hear you, sir.
It--it’s horrible.”
“Are the nurses still there?”
“No, sir. Miss Lewis was sent to take Miss Grimes’ place, but she
insisted on having her night supper first. Mr. Briggs is in the
mortuary with the--you know, until she comes.”
“I’ll go up with you to the roof,” said Tommy, and went at once.
Aggie had been getting white around the lips during the whole scene,
and when Hicks said “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” she almost keeled over
against her pillows. The moment Tommy had gone, she burst into tears,
declaring that something awful was going to happen, that being the tune
they had sung at the roofer’s funeral.
Tish, however, was stonily calm, although I could see she was shaken.
She had got out her Irish lace, and sat making picots as if her life
depended on it.
“I don’t for the life of me see what you are bleating about,” she
snapped. “If you argue from hearing that tune that _he’s_ coming back
to-night, there will be more ghosts walking than this hospital can
hold. It’s been sung at a good many funerals. And another thing, if
he was as good as you think he was, he’s sitting around with a harp,
learning celestial melodies, not coming back to string up innocent
corpses with roller towels, and break skylights. It’s only the bad ones
that aren’t satisfied where they are and come back.”
It is hard to say just why that line of reasoning made Aggie dry her
tears, but it did, and she sat up and finished her buttermilk.
[Illustration]
It was when I was reaching her the crackers that I heard a creak, and
knew that somebody had stealthily opened the door into the nurses’
dormitory. Tish heard it, too, and put down her crocheting.
All our lights were on, while the hall was dark. This time we saw no
candlelight, but we each felt who it was. I stepped to the door and
looked out.
Miss Blake, fully dressed, was on the narrow staircase to the floor
above, and at the top somebody with an electric flash was barring the
way.
“Sorry, Miss,” said Jacobs, the night watchman. “We have orders not to
let anybody pass here to-night.”
“But I must!” she pleaded. “I can’t endure the suspense another moment,
Jacobs! Where is Doctor Andrews?”
“On the roof, Miss Blake.”
“Oh, no, not on the roof!” she cried. “Let me pass. I _must_ pass.”
“Sorry,” he said, not moving. “My orders--”
Suddenly, from somewhere overhead came a woman’s scream, a shrill note
of horror that left my ears aching, my heart beating madly. It rose and
fell and then rose again, and the silence that followed was the silence
of paralysis.
Immediately after, there was the sound of scurrying feet. Tish and I
never knew afterward how we got up the stairs, or were almost the first
on the scene.
The hall was dark, as on the floor below, but from the mortuary a
bright light streamed down the short, wide flight of steps that served
as its approach.
On one side of the receiving table Tommy was standing. On the other,
Miss Lewis stood, as if frozen, with one hand turning down the covering
sheet. But the body on the table was not wrapped in a shroud. It
was the figure of a tall man fully dressed, and with the head and
shoulders tightly wrapped in what looked like a brown coat.
Tish gripped my arm, shaking so she could scarcely speak. “Johnson!”
she said. “Oh, my God, Lizzie, it’s Johnson!”
But it was not. When they had untied the sleeves, tightly knotted about
the neck, Tommy himself gave a cry of horror.
It was Briggs, the orderly, dead about ten minutes, and with his ribs
crushed in like a broken barrel.
The “carbolic case” was lying in placid peace under the table, its
bandaged hands folded, its jaw relaxed, its half-shut eyes looking
calmly up at the horror overhead.
Tish and I put Miss Lewis to bed that night and Tish sat with her until
morning. It was dawn when Tommy came in. They had found nothing--except
one curious fact:
The brown coat that had covered poor Briggs’ head had belonged to
Johnson. The pockets were full of his private papers.