The Patient in Room 18 · Chapter 6 (1/2)

VI

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 sightseers 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.