I Make a Discovery—and Regret It
I must admit that I went about my duties somewhat automatically that
night and could not help keeping an eye on Maida, not from suspicion,
you understand, but simply because the matters of recent development
troubled me considerably. Indeed, I had plenty to think of that night.
Corole’s dinner party, followed by its terrifying sequel, had taken
place on Thursday night. Early Friday afternoon the body of Dr.
Letheny had been found. Friday night we had taken second watch with
the policeman tipped against the sinister door of Room 18, and
Saturday was the day just past. It was while I was sitting at the
chart desk during second watch of Saturday night—really early Sunday
morning—that the amazing idea occurred to me. I had been staring at
the charts, absorbed in the baffling problems those days had brought,
when all at once I began thinking of the morphine.
Might it not prove something if we were to discover where that
morphine had come from? Morphine is not something that one carries
about in a pocket or vanity bag; it is very difficult to secure and in
St. Ann’s a most rigid check is kept on the quantities of the drug
used. Would the morphine record for that week in the south wing
balance?
With the thought I was up on my feet and starting toward the drug
room. As I passed the door of the diet kitchen I saw Maida standing at
the open window. Why do women bother with silks and laces and jewels
when there is nothing that so sets off beauty as the severe, white
simplicity of the nurse’s uniform? Maida’s face was like a proud young
flower above the white collar of her tailored uniform. The stiff white
cap perched piquantly on top of her head and contrasted nicely with
her soft black hair. Her eyes were a deeper blue, her clear, gardenia
skin and soft crimson lips were still lovelier above that plain white
dress. I sighed, glanced down the corridor to see that there were no
signal lights, and slipped into the drug room, closing the door.
A dose of morphine is a simple matter to prepare; it is the
administering that requires skill. The preparation is a mere mixture
of sterile water with the white morphine tablet, in the amount
prescribed. At St. Ann’s there is a careful check of the amounts used,
and the drug room record must check with the doctors’ orders. It was a
simple matter for me to compare the two records with the remaining
supply of morphine. And it was with a heart that dropped to my shoes
that I found they emphatically did not check. And that the amount of
discrepancy was more than enough to drug a person far more heavily
than was safe.
When had this disappeared and how? A young, strong man might survive
such a dose, or one accustomed to taking the drug. But an old man,
whose heart reaction would be slow—well, it seemed all too apparent
that the morphine that had killed Jackson might have come from our own
south wing drug room. It was not a pleasant possibility.
Maida was still in the kitchen when I passed it again and I stopped.
She was washing her slim, pink fingers vigorously.
“Eleven does get hungry at the most erratic times. He wants beef tea
now and an hour ago he had malted milk,” she said, drying her hands.
“Mr. Gainsay did not leave Friday after all,” I said, coming directly
to one of the things that troubled me.
She glanced swiftly toward me, lifted her straight black eyebrows a
little, and spoke rather coolly.
“Evidently not. He said his boat did not sail till next week. Is this
beef extract fresh?”
“I think so. I suppose he is quite a comfort to Corole.”
“Corole needs friends at a time like this,” said Maida.
“Of course, he was such a good friend of Dr.—Letheny.” For the life of
me I could not speak that name naturally and easily.
“Yes,” agreed Maida briefly. She turned to the stove, lit the gas
flame, and held a small saucepan of water over the blue points of
fire. I could not see her face.
“Maida,” I said abruptly, “when did you last see Dr. Letheny—alive?”
She whirled toward me at that, and—well, it was not nice to stand
there and see her face turn a dreadful, slow white with bluish hollows
around her mouth and nose. But she answered at length, quite clearly:
“I last saw him at Corole’s dinner party. When we said good-night and
left.”
She looked into my eyes for a moment after she ceased to speak, almost
as if she were daring me to deny her statement. And I knew that it
could not be true. Else how could her lapis cuff link have got out of
the snowy cuff in which I had seen her place it _after_ we were safely
within the walls of St. Ann’s, and into Dr. Letheny’s pocket?
“Oh—Sarah,” she cried suddenly, throwing out her hands toward me in a
gesture that was like an appeal and with a half sob in her voice. But
as suddenly she drew her hands sharply backward and turned again to
the stove. To this day the salty, meaty smell of beef boiling always
brings to me a vision of those shining, white-tiled walls and the
enamelled gas stove and Maida’s straight, white-clad shoulders and
beautiful, troubled face.
“Tell me,” I said at last. “Is there anything you know that might help
solve this mystery?”
But Maida turned an unfathomable blue gaze toward me.
“Nothing. Nothing that would help.”
And it was not until she had departed with the beef tea steaming hot
on a tray that I noted her ambiguous wording.
I could not disguise to myself the fact that I was deeply alarmed.
Particularly because I had caught her, and wished I had not, in a
deliberate lie. Either that or that abominable cuff link had simply
jumped itself out of her cuff and into the pocket of Dr. Letheny’s
immaculate dinner coat.
I shall not conceal the fact that I gave voice to several expletives
that made up in fervour for what they lacked in content. And I had
learned quite a vocabulary from my parrot, a nice bird who died last
year on his ninety-sixth birthday, unless the dealer lied, and was
much mourned by those of the nurses whose rooms are at the far end of
the dormitory. Owing to the night air making the dear bird talkative
there was a sort of feeling against him among the rooms within hearing
distance of my own.
However, in this case the utmost of his vocabulary did not relieve my
feelings.
All went as well as might be expected, and we did not once need a
policeman, so it was as well that he had been withdrawn. Of course,
I’m not saying it was a pleasant watch, for it was not. The south end
of the corridor seemed darker than any other portion of it and the
sinister door of Eighteen was somehow black and menacing and
altogether unpleasant. But on the whole the night passed quietly,
which was a mercy, for that was the last night that we pinned on our
caps with any assurance of how long they would stay there. Dawn came
at last, cold and gray, and with it the slow melancholy sound of the
five o’clock bell for early prayers. The north wing of St. Ann’s ends
in a small chapel that is dignified with age and has a pipe organ,
high walnut pews, and old, stained-glass windows. It is open on week
days for prayer and meditation and on Sundays the young assistant
rector from St. B—’s down in the city comes to St. Ann’s to conduct
prayers and confession and church.
The Sunday then dawning was destined to remain long in my memory as a
sort of interlude between what had been and what was to follow.
In the first place, Morgue, the basement cat, who is thin and
ill-tempered and kept for utilitarian purposes only, surprised us all
by having three healthy kittens. For some years the assumption had
been that this was a feat biologically impossible and the news,
brought to the table by a student nurse who had actually seen the
kittens, caused quite a stir and for a moment distracted our minds
from the too-absorbing problems of the last few days.
There were some disbelievers at table, this despite the student nurse
appearing to clinch the matter by quoting Higgins’s opinion that
Morgue had displayed considerable talent in this connection, and after
breakfast we all trooped down to the furnace room to see with our own
eyes.
Higgins was down there, fussing around a grape basket which he had
lined with an old duster, which, by the way, made the baby cats smell
quite distinctly of cedar oil and must have puzzled their proud and
complacent mother. The kittens themselves were not much to boast of,
resembling, indeed, very young and scrawny rats and squirming
vigorously and squealing when the girls picked them up and passed them
from one to the other. There was a heated discussion over their names;
it was felt they should bear some relation to the mother’s name, and
Morgue is not an easy name with which to relate. They settled on
Accident, Appendicitis, and Ambulance. The kittens were all black, to
my mind not a particularly happy or propitious colour, and Melvina
Smith, who is pale and superstitious and would not touch an opal with
a ten-foot rod, exclaimed in italics that trouble was coming to St.
Ann’s. Upon which someone murmured that trouble had already come and
Melvina said, yes, but it always came in Threes and these three black
cats were a sure sign that bad luck would come in threes here. She
pointed out, reasonably enough, that Morgue could as well have had
four kittens, or two, but no, she had had three. And that furthermore,
who ever heard of Morgue having kittens before, and it was certain she
had had them this time just to warn us of the third—er—trouble.
Well, for my part, I felt that Morgue would not go to so much bother,
she being by nature unobliging and apt to mistrust our most friendly
advances. But already the girls were putting the kittens in the basket
and casting rather frightened glances into Morgue’s inscrutable yellow
eyes, and drifting toward the stairway. I could have wrung Melvina’s
foolish little neck, but naturally I followed them.
On the way upstairs Olma Flynn remarked earnestly that it was nice
that Morgue hadn’t had ten kittens. Upon which several of the less
idiotic laughed and Melvina cast a look of pale reproach upon Olma,
who, as a matter of fact, had spoken with single-minded gratitude.
As I reached the top of the stairs Higgins called to me.
“Miss Keate.”
I turned. He was standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up.
“Yes.”
“Can you spare some time now, Miss Keate? There was—something I wanted
to—ask you about.”
I hesitated. It seems to me that when anyone around St. Ann’s has a
complaint it is brought to my ears and I was in no mood that morning
to listen to complaints.
“I was just going to get some sleep, Higgins,” I said. “Will another
time do?”
How often, since then, I have wished that I had stopped then and
there. But I thought of nothing more important than leaky gutterpipes
or the canna bulbs not doing well.
“Well—yes,” agreed Higgins slowly. Something in his tone made me
regard him sharply, thinking that he seemed quite reluctant and
perplexed. However, as I say, I was tired and sleepy and had already
more than enough problems before me, so I took my way upstairs.
On the way I picked up the Sunday paper. The supplement had the
hospital pictures again, groups of nurses, a sort of history of St.
Ann’s, stressing its long years of service but winding up with a lurid
résumé of the past few days, which is the way of Sunday supplements
but not unpleasant. I even found a picture of myself taken some years
ago when pompadours and bosoms were in style. It was not a flattering
picture and neither was the caption below it, which described me as
one of St. Ann’s oldest nurses! Oldest in point of service, it went on
to say tactfully, but the picture dated me indisputably and I flung
the paper in the waste basket and tried to compose myself to sleep.
And, I might add, did not succeed.
I found the noon service in the little chapel remarkably well
attended, with prayer books in evidence and the nurses turning out _en
masse_. The young rector preached a rather nice sermon about “Be ye
not afraid,” which I considered a little too apropos for comfort and
good taste.
Sunday is usually a rather festive day in St. Ann’s but that Sunday
was anything but pleasant. No visitors were permitted, which made the
patients fretful and hard to please. Moreover, we could not prevent an
almost constant stream of morbidly inclined sight-seers whose
automobiles splashed along the muddy road in front of the hospital,
and who stared through the fog and pointed with melancholy
satisfaction.
I drifted uneasily about the dismal corridors for some time before I
found Maida, ensconced unhappily in a cold window seat with a magazine
which she was holding upside down.
She had not been to see Corole yet, she told me, and was dreading the
visit that convention demanded. Wouldn’t I go with her? And though I
had no relish for Corole’s company I found myself following the blue
and scarlet of Maida’s nurse’s cape along that sodden, desolate path,
holding my own cape tight around me and wishing I had brought an
umbrella.
On the porch we met Dr. Hajek, just leaving.
“Bad weather,” he murmured as we passed him. His dark eyes slanted
knowingly toward us; his face was very fresh and ruddy and his square
teeth gleamed under that small black moustache.
Huldah opened the door, her cap very properly on her head this time
but her face sullen.
We found Corole comfortably seated in what had been Dr. Letheny’s
study, a warm fire glowing in the grate and the tea cart drawn up to
the davenport and laden with her best silver tea service and some
fascinating little French pastries that could only have come from
Pierre’s, a very exclusive and high-priced sweet shop. I registered
the impression that Corole was not wasting any time enjoying her newly
augmented income, and gave my cape to Huldah. Corole and Maida were
murmuring polite sentences and, recalling my promise to O’Leary, I
followed Huldah to the hall.
“Miss Letheny feeling any better, Huldah?” I asked.
She gave me an expressive glance.
“H’m!” she grunted. “There’s not much mourning going on in this house!
She—” she jerked her head toward the study—“dresses all up like a
hussy every day and entertains callers. You know as well as I do that
ain’t any way for a lady to do!”
“I noticed she was wearing that green silk thing with her bronze
slippers the other day,” I remarked tentatively.
“She won’t wear them bronze pumps again, anyhow,” said Huldah in dour
satisfaction. “She had to wear them out in the rain and now they are
ruined.”
“Had to wear them out in the rain?”
“Yes, ma’am! The very afternoon we heard the bad news. Not an hour
after them gentlemen was at the house to tell her about the doctor
being dead. Nice gentlemen they was, too—them police officers.” She
stopped, apparently musing on certain blue-coated figures. I had to
prod her gently.
“Where was she going in such a hurry that she didn’t change her
shoes?”
“Goodness knows! As soon as they had gone she grabbed a shawl and ran
out the back door and across the alfalfa field. The last I saw she was
scooting into the apple orchard and she didn’t get back for a full
hour. It was raining, too, and she might have taken an umbrella at
least. But not she! Catch her doing anything like a Christian!”
concluded Huldah resentfully.
“Would you like some tea, miss?” she went on, after a moment’s
brooding. “Some tea and one of my own cakes I made myself yesterday
before she ordered them silly French things? Like as not poison, too,
with all such coloured candies on top.”
“Indeed, I should, Huldah,” I said soothingly, though her cakes are,
as a rule, sprinkled too liberally with caraway seeds. “And let me
have a small anchovy sandwich,” I added, thereby winning her to a
reluctant smile as she departed kitchenward.
I was not much wiser than I had been, and I really could not see that
I could have questioned Huldah any further. Anyway it was likely she
had told me all she knew, for Huldah’s natural disposition is to
spread anything she hears.
I joined the other two in the study in time to catch a strained
something in the atmosphere that made me pause involuntarily and look
from one to the other. Maida was standing very stiff and straight, her
eyes flaming like blue fire, her fingers clutched together until the
knuckles and fingernails were white, and her whole attitude breathing
defiance and anger and—yes, alarm. Corole was lying gracefully back in
her chair, her creamy lace teagown falling softly away from her brown
neck, the topaz on one hand catching light from the fire, and her
strange eyes narrowed lazily in an expression so like Morgue’s that I
almost gasped.
But as to that, resemblance to a cat or other animal is nothing to
hold against a person, I argued reasonably to myself; there is a
cashier in the City National who looks like nothing so much as a mild
and woolly sheep and is yet, as far as I know, an upright and
respectable man.
Neither Maida nor Corole seemed inclined to break that brittle
silence, so I settled wearily into a chair.
“Huldah seems to resent the French pastries,” I said. “Where did you
get them, Corole? At Pierre’s?”
“She resents everything,” said Corole indolently. “Yes. At Pierre’s.
You must try them. I’ll make some fresh tea. Do sit down, Maida. You
make me nervous, standing there so stiff.”
I think Maida was about to say something, but just then Jim Gainsay
lounged into the room, straightened up with interest when he saw
Maida, and she subsided into a chair while he greeted us with every
evidence of pleasure.
It was, however, a very uncomfortable hour, with the conversation
painfully limited to commonplaces, Jim trying in vain to catch Maida’s
eyes, and Huldah slapping down the tea things with venom and making it
distressingly clear that I, alone of the company, was in her good
graces. Corole was almost indecently easy and flippant in her manner,
and Maida very quiet.
As for me, I was reminded vividly of the last time we had been
together in that room, especially after Dr. Balman arrived. His coming
made the gathering begin to seem too much like a party, so I prepared
to leave. But Dr. Balman had come on business, and after speaking in a
low aside to Corole he went to Dr. Letheny’s desk, glanced hastily
through a card index, and noted something in his small notebook. I
remember thinking as he did so that Dr. Balman was not having an easy
time of it; it is difficult enough to step suddenly into the position
of head of a hospital, without having the burden of investigations
into two murders on one’s hands. And Dr. Balman looked as if he were
feeling the strain of his duties, for his mild eyes had circles under
them, his scant eyebrows wore a perplexed frown, and his pale cheeks
were hollow. He looked as if he had not been eating much lately, and
indeed, I didn’t wonder at it. The bruise on his cheek had not
received proper attention, for it was dark and ugly-looking and I
longed to take it in hand.
“Is that what you wanted, Dr. Balman?” asked Corole.
“Yes—yes. This is all.” He was writing busily.
“You must have some tea,” offered Corole graciously.
“What?— Oh, tea?” Dr. Balman compared the notes he had written with
the original and raised his eyes to glance about the room with rather
obvious distaste. He was always a man of keen sensibility and I
daresay he felt much as I had felt on entering this room that spoke so
clearly of Dr. Letheny.
He was about to decline, I think, when Huldah opened the door, said
“Mr. O’Leary,” as if she were firing a shotgun, and Lance O’Leary
entered, his gray eyes twinkling a little at the manner of his
announcement.
It was odd to see how the appearance of this slight, perfectly groomed
young man, with his clear, gray eyes and thoughtful, well-shaven face,
affected us all. Dr. Balman sat down slowly as if after all he had
decided to stay. Jim Gainsay fastened a narrow, enigmatic look upon
the newcomer and lit another cigarette, Maida’s eyes widened a little
and her hands sought each other in her white lap—and Corole adjusted
the lace of her gown, smiled seductively at O’Leary, remembered she
was mourning and sobered wistfully.
“No, thanks,” said O’Leary pleasantly. “No tea, Miss Letheny. I hope
you’ll forgive my intrusion but I came on business.”
Corole blinked but repeated warmly: “Business?” and motioned toward a
chair.
“Yes. Thanks, yes, I’ll sit down.” He drew a chair nearer the glowing
fire. “It’s wet out,” he remarked with a half smile.
“Would you like something besides tea?” asked Corole, her graceful
brown hand on the tiny silver bell that decorated the tea cart. I
could not help noting how pink her palm was, how brown her fingers,
and how purple the shadows on the fingernails.
“No. No.” The high-backed chair O’Leary had happened to choose,
upholstered in needlepoint tapestry, and with slim carved arms of
softly gleaming walnut, added somehow to his natural dignity. “How are
you, Doctor? Not feeling this strain too much, I hope.”
Dr. Balman smiled wanly. “No, thanks, Mr. O’Leary. It is quite a task
though. However, Dr.—Dr. Letheny left everything in perfect order.” He
glanced at Corole apologetically as he spoke, but she was interested
only in O’Leary.
The conversation dragged along very uncomfortably for a few moments,
during which the only person in the room who was thoroughly at ease
was Lance O’Leary. As soon as I decently could I rose to leave, for
O’Leary had said he came on business and I naturally supposed that it
was business with Corole.
Maida rose, too, and of course, the men.
“Just a second, Miss Keate,” remarked O’Leary in a quiet and
commonplace voice. “I only wanted to tell you all that the coroner’s
inquest will be to-morrow morning and that you are all to be called as
witnesses. I’m sorry to have to tell you at such a time.”
It just happened that I had my eyes on Corole as he spoke and thus saw
her soft brown fingers grip the macaroon she held until it fell on the
tea cart, a small, powdered mound of sugar. I looked quickly at
O’Leary, but his gaze was apparently on the log in the fireplace.
It was an uncomfortable moment, there in that room of which the very
books along the wall and the grand piano in the alcove spoke so
vividly of Dr. Letheny. We were “all” to be called as witnesses then.
And a few nights ago we had sat here in this room and listened to the
Prelude in C Sharp Minor played by those strong white hands that would
never touch a piano again.
I shook myself free from such morbid reflections, said a brusque
good-bye to Corole, and left. Maida went with me, and somewhere along
the path Jim Gainsay turned up.
As the path narrowed under the trees and I preceded the other two, I
am sure I heard Jim Gainsay say rather huskily to Maida:
“I had to see you alone. You must do as I say. It is import——”
“Sh! I know!”
“Try to see it my way.” (This in a still more urgent voice.) “It is
dangerous to——”
“Hush!” she interrupted sharply again.
And just then I think that Maida stumbled over a branch that had blown
across the path. At any rate I heard a quick motion and a sort of gasp
and then Maida said rather breathlessly: “That branch—I nearly fell.”
And I turned in time to see Jim Gainsay pick up the stick, bow to it
gravely and say: “Thank you, old fellow,” before he tossed it off into
the orchard. At which Maida turned quite pink and Jim Gainsay gave her
a long look and laughed rather shakily.
Then we were at the south entrance and Gainsay swung on his heel with
a brief “Good-night.”
And it was not fifteen minutes later that I glanced through the
society section of the paper that someone had left on the chart desk,
and my eyes fell on a small news item:
Mrs. J. C. Allen left Tuesday of this week for New York City. She
sailed on the _Tuscania_, Saturday night, June ninth.
On the _Tuscania_, Saturday, June ninth. That was yesterday. And I was
positive that Gainsay had said the _Tuscania_.