BAG AND BAGGAGE
Tish stared at me the next morning when I told her the story Tommy had
told me, and laid the key of the mortuary linen closet on her breakfast
tray.
“The Blake girl is still out of her head,” I finished up, “and I found
the key, as I tell you, on her dresser, labeled as you see it. I don’t
want you to show it to Tommy, Tish.”
“Tommy!” said Tish scornfully, and pushed away her breakfast untasted.
“I tell you, Lizzie, if _I_ had had charge of things last night, that
poor wretch would have carried in this tray this morning, with the tea
slopped over everything as usual. Tommy is a nice boy, but he’s stupid.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Aggie from the bed. “If you think, Tish
Carberry, that finding the key to a linen closet is going to prove
anything against that pretty little nurse, I’ll tell Tommy about it
myself.”
“Exactly,” said Tish, coldly. “And if you do, I wash my hands of the
whole affair. As far as I’m concerned in that case, she can go under
suspicion the rest of her life.”
“Suspicion of what?” Aggie demanded tartly. “She didn’t kill Briggs,
I suppose. Even if she could have broken his ribs, as Tish says, and
she’s a perfectly respectable girl--you can see _that_ in her face--she
was right on the stairs here when it happened, wasn’t she?”
Tish got up and put the key of the linen closet in the lower bureau
drawer.
“Don’t be any more of a fool than you can help, Aggie,” she said, and
shut the drawer. “I _don’t_ think Miss Blake killed Briggs, or got
up on the wall and made a footprint a foot and a half long near the
ceiling, or hung Johnson by the neck to a chandelier. And if my nephew
chooses to be so head over ears in love with the young woman that he’s
no more capable of logical thought than a guinea-pig, _I_ shall look
into the thing myself.”
“Guinea-pig,” said Aggie. “Now then, that’s another thing, Tish. The
rabbits--”
“Lizzie,” Tish said, snubbing her completely. “Will you see if Miss
Durand is off duty yet? I want to talk to her. Lewis won’t be back from
breakfast for an hour. She can’t Fletcherize and tell that story at the
same time.”
The hall nurse promised me to find Miss Durand and send her to Tish’s
room, and started at once in the search for her. She turned to say,
over her shoulder and with bated breath, that detectives were in the
building now, that Tommy was with them, and that there was a story
that they’d found some curious prints on the wall in the room where
Johnson’s body had hung.
“A foot, and just beside it a woman’s hand,” she said. “I hear they are
going to take impressions of all the hands in the hospital to-day!”
I carried this to Tish, and she affected indifference. But she was
visibly uneasy and at different times I caught her staring fixedly at
her palm.
At eight o’clock Miss Durand came in looking tired and white, Tish
asked her to sit down and offered her a little port wine, but she
refused.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m off to bed soon, and if I can only
sleep--I didn’t sleep much yesterday.”
“Too noisy, I daresay,” said Tish. “Poor Briggs complained of the same
thing in this very room yesterday.”
“Oh, it wasn’t the noise. I--I got to thinking.” She tried to smile.
“There have been so many strange things happening!”
“I should think so,” said Aggie. “That poor Miss Blake! Do you think--”
Tish fixed her with a cold eye, and Aggie’s voice trailed off to
nothing. She looked frightened.
“Miss Durand,” said Tish, suddenly hitching her chair forward, “I
should like you to tell me why you left Johnson to die alone and why
you absented yourself from your ward for fifty minutes.”
Miss Durand turned even paler, and got up. “I didn’t understand that
you--”
“Sit down,” said Tish. “I guess you know I’m chairman of the Ladies’
Committee here, and you’d better tell me than tell the police. I don’t
start with the belief that half the hospital’s guilty and the other
half accessories to the crime, and that’s what the police will do,
according to my experience.”
“You may ask Bates--” she began.
“So I may,” said Tish cheerfully. “And if you are around he’ll say you
were away a scant ten minutes and if he’s alone, he’ll swear to an hour
or more.”
“It was less than an hour, I’d swear to that anywhere,” said Miss
Durand. “It couldn’t have taken so long!”
“What couldn’t have taken so long?” Tish demanded.
Miss Durand looked around at the three of us and seemed to be thinking.
“What do you mean by saying I’d better tell you than tell the police?”
she asked.
“Just this,” Tish said briskly getting out her sheet of note-paper. “I
flatter myself I can see as far through a stone wall as most people,
especially if there’s a crack to look through. I’ve been looking at
this particular stone wall off and on since four o’clock this morning,
and--well, I think I begin to see daylight.”
“Humph!” said Aggie. “Then the least I can say, Tish--”
“Now, Miss Durand,” Tish began, biting a point on her pencil, “we’ll
get at this systematically. Did Briggs have any enemies in K Ward?”
“He wasn’t popular. I guess old Johnson hated him about the most.”
“Ah!” said Tish, and put that down. “Did you know Johnson was dying
when you left the ward?”
“He’d been dying for twenty-four hours and had been unconscious for
six,” she defended herself. “Nobody can tell when that sort will make a
clean get-away.”
“Good gracious!” Aggie ejaculated, and even Tish looked shocked. Miss
Durand was clearly not in Miss Blake’s class: seen in the morning
light, her face looked hard as well as tired.
“I see,” said Tish, and put down “clean get-away.” “Now, Miss Durand,
why had Linda Smith been crying when she came to you at midnight that
night?”
“She said she had had some words with the head nurse. She had missed a
lecture that evening.”
“Why did she miss the lecture?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know or won’t tell?” asked Tish, over her note-paper.
“Don’t know,” snapped Miss Durand, and for all I didn’t like her, I
thought she was telling the truth.
“Now, Miss Durand,” Tish observed, sitting back and fixing her lame leg
on its hassock, “I’d be glad to hear why Miss Linda Smith took you away
from your ward that night, and where you went.”
“She had forgotten to attend to something, and she came back to fix it.”
“What?”
Miss Durand stared at Tish and Tish leaned back, with her pencil stuck
through the knob of her hair, and stared at Miss Durand. As I have said
somewhere else, Tish is a masterful woman, and Miss Durand felt it.
“She had forgotten to turn in Johnson’s clothes,” she said. “That is
always done after a death: the clothes are held in the office for the
friends to get. We went to the basement clothes room.”
“But Johnson was not dead!”
“The chances were he would die that night. The clothes should have been
ready in case relatives had wished to remove the body at once.”
“The trip to the clothes room would take about ten minutes, I daresay,”
Tish said dryly. “Why didn’t she go alone?”
“I--I hardly know. She was nervous and upset. You see, her three years
is almost up, and she and the superintendent are on bad terms. She has
always said that he would make use of any small mistake she made, to
keep her from getting her diploma.”
“When would she get it, everything going well?”
“Next week.”
“Very good,” said Tish, and put something down. “Now then, what
happened in the clothes room?”
“I didn’t go in.”
“Where were you?”
“The morning milk cans were being delivered. I went to the other end
of the basement, past the engine room, and got a glass of milk. I was
thirsty.”
“I see. And that took forty minutes?”
“No,” said Miss Durand. “When I got back to the clothes room, I
couldn’t find Miss Smith. The cellar man, sitting on the stairs, said
she had not gone up. I was worried, and we both searched for her. We
couldn’t find her.”
“But you did find her. You went back to K ward together.”
“I didn’t find her,” said Miss Durand. “When I came back to the stairs,
she was sitting there, with a bundle in her lap. She was white. The
cellar man asked her if she felt sick.”
“How did she explain her absence?”
“She didn’t,” said Miss Durand with her curious smile. “She’s a very
queer woman, Miss Smith is.”
“Humph!” Tish said, and put down a line or two. “Well, I reckon the
next thing to do is to see Miss Smith. She looks pleasant enough, but
you can’t tell by looking at a toad how far it can hop.”
Miss Durand got up and prepared to go. She still wore her curious smile.
“I think it has hopped a good ways, Miss Carberry,” she said. “Linda
Smith has gone, bag and baggage, nobody knows where!”