The Patient in Room 18 · Chapter 7 (1/2)

VII

The Disappearing Key and Part of an Inquest

“Yes, I saw that this morning,” said a quiet voice beside me. It was Lance O’Leary; I did not know he was near until he spoke. “Our friend Mr. Gainsay seems to be a little confused as to his dates.”

I daresay my eyes reflected a question for he added, leisurely:

“He told me that he intended to sail on the Tuscania next week. I see that he told you the same thing. He is not a very discreet young man, else he’d have known that I should look up the Tuscania’s sailing date without delay.”

I sighed; all those unpleasant little doubts of Jim Gainsay were returning in full force.

“If he has the radium, it is not in his room in the Letheny cottage,” said O’Leary meditatively.

“How do you know?” I inquired stupidly.

“We have searched the rooms and personal belongings of each of those present at that dinner party last Thursday night.”

“What!”

“In fact, I daresay that there is not a room in the whole of St. Ann’s, as well as in the Letheny cottage, that has not been thoroughly ransacked.”

I ran my tongue over dry lips. This was getting down to work with a vengeance.

“Why?” I stammered.

There was a glimmer of impatience in his eyes.

“For the radium, of course. Surely you did not think we were going to let it get away from us without a struggle.”

There was a moment or two of silence during which I studied the polished glass surface of the desk before me without seeing it.

“Did you ask Huldah about Miss Letheny’s errand through the rain last Friday afternoon?” inquired O’Leary after a contemplative pause.

“Yes.” I told him in a few words the little that Huldah had told me. “And there is something else I have discovered,” I went on miserably. “I’ve got to tell you, though I must say I do not want to do so. It is⁠—that morphine. The morphine that killed Mr. Jackson, you know. I⁠—I know where it came from!”

“You⁠—what!” O’Leary was for once startled out of his usual composure.

“I know where it came from,” I repeated reluctantly. “At least, I think that I do. You see⁠—there is morphine missing from our south wing drug supply.”

I had to tell him the whole thing, of course, under his searching questions and no less searching gaze, and even explain our system of keeping account of the drugs. He had to see the drug room and the charts and the records for himself. It was while I was showing him the drawer in which the morphine was kept, that I made my regrettable slip about the hypodermic syringe.

I had started to show him how the needles were fitted into the small mechanism, and I reached for a hypodermic syringe. It turned out to be my own.

“This one is mine,” I said thoughtlessly, fitting the slim, hollow needle into the tiny instrument. “The other one that we were using disapp⁠—” I stopped so suddenly that my breath came out in an explosive little pop and O’Leary’s face hardened slightly. It was an expression that I was growing to recognize.

“You may as well finish. So the other one ‘disapp’-eared, did it? When and how? Whose was it? There is still one in the drawer. What about the one that disappeared?”

“I don’t know,” I said flatly. “Then, you see, we take the sterile water and measure the liquid into⁠—”

O’Leary looked at his watch.

“I haven’t much time,” he said pleasantly. “But I have enough time to wait right here until you tell me about the hypodermic syringe that disappeared. Or if necessary I can dog your footsteps the rest of the night, reiterating my question at frequent and embarrassing intervals. Of course, I can have the whole hospital searched extensively and every hypodermic needle accounted for, especially if missing. I can follow you to your meal⁠—isn’t that the bell?⁠—and keep on asking you.” He added meditatively: “I suppose it might cause considerable interest among the other nurses.”

I regarded him furiously. The thing was that he would be quite capable of doing just that. I began to understand the force of the words of the chief of police when he had said⁠—“Once Lance O’Leary gets his teeth into anything, it is as good as done.”

“I suppose you’ll have to know sometime, anyway,” I said sulkily.

The flicker in his gray eyes was like a ripple across a very calm, deep lake.

“You are right, Miss Keate. So why not tell me now?”

Well, to make a long story short, I told him of the missing hypodermic, which after all, was little enough: barely the fact that Maida’s syringe had been removed and my own substituted, but this without my knowledge. And that Maida had had the opportunity to take my own, and if she had wished to use it, all that she needed to do was ask me for it.

“Which she conspicuously did not do,” commented O’Leary. “Oh, by the way, Miss Keate, have you ever attended an inquest?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t get bothered. Our coroner is a decent old fellow but he does love to be pompous. Just answer what he asks, tell your story as briefly as possible and don’t⁠—er⁠—volunteer anything. You see there are some things that you and I know that will not come up at the inquest.”

“You mean⁠—they would warn the guilty one?”

He nodded briefly as he turned away.

Maida was already in the south wing when I rounded the right angle of the corridor leading from the main office, at exactly twelve o’clock that night.

“I locked the south door,” she said, hanging the key on its customary nail above the desk.

“That was right,” I approved, glancing over the charts. It appeared that Eleven’s digestive apparatus was still doing business at the old stand, so to speak, but otherwise all was well and I settled briskly into the business of second watch.

Midnight temperatures had scarcely been taken, however, when Olma Flynn developed a sick headache, worse when I was within hearing distance, and had to be excused from duty. We didn’t actually need the extra help, as Maida and I had been accustomed to care for the whole wing ourselves, but nevertheless it was a little annoying, especially as, about two o’clock, the little student nurse burned her wrist over the gas flame in the diet kitchen, and the burn had to be salved extensively and the nurse sent to bed with an aspirin tablet.

Thus Maida and I found ourselves alone in the south wing for the first time since those terrifying events of Thursday night. This precarious situation was a matter that was, I think, predominant in our thoughts but neither of us mentioned it; we even manufactured an artificial sort of⁠—not gaiety, that would be asking too much⁠—but of brisk attention to work and a determined avoidance of conversation that might lead back to things we were anxious to forget.

All went well, in spite of our hidden fears, until about three o’clock. I was pouring out a small dose of bromide for Three, who had made up her mind not to sleep that night and naturally was not doing so, when Maida opened the door of the drug room.

Her face was so ghastly white that at first glimpse of it my hand began to tremble and the medicine poured all over the spoon. Blindly I set the bottle down.

“What is it?”

“There’s something in Room 18!” she gasped through ashy lips.

“Room 18!”

“Just now⁠—I saw something go into that room from the corridor!”

“Someone⁠—is sleepwalking.” I grasped at the first rationality that presented itself.

After the light in the diet kitchen the long corridor seemed peculiarly dark and shadowy and the green light over the chart desk was miles away. It never occurred to me to call for help, and we sped along toward that dark end of the wing that we had good cause to fear.

But we stopped stock still as we came close enough to see the door of Room 18, and a cold shiver crept up from my back.

The door of Room 18 was standing wide open!

It had not been opened, so far as I knew, since the police had left that room. It had been shunned by all the nurses. Who had opened it? Who would dare open it?

Who was inside that dark place?

A long, shuddering sigh came from Maida beside me and I felt her cold hand grip my wrist. The contact nerved me and I did what, I afterward realized, was a very foolish thing.

I took a few steps forward, advanced to the very door of that grisly room, reached a shaking arm through the open doorway, groped for the electric-light button, found and pressed it.

The cold white dome on the ceiling flooded the room with light.

There was nothing out of the way to be seen. There were the plain dresser, the bedside table, two chairs, the folded burlap screen and the high, narrow bed⁠—nothing else. Something caught in my throat as I glanced at the bed and toward the closet doors.

“The⁠—closet⁠—” breathed Maida at my side. “Oh! You are not going to open that!” as I took a more decisive step forward.

It was no easy thing to do, for I knew well that those shallow closets were yet large enough to hold⁠—what one of them had held.

They were both unlocked this time. And there was nothing in them!

I turned to Maida, whose white face had been beside me during the ordeal. Without saying a word we retreated to the corridor.

“Are you sure you saw something?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

“I am positive,” whispered Maida. “You see, I was just answering Fourteen’s light, which brought me fairly near to Eighteen. I came out the door and was starting down toward the chart desk when something⁠—I don’t know what⁠—some rustle or sound, perhaps, made me turn around, facing this way, so I could see the south door. And I was just in time to see a sort of movement at the door of Eighteen.” Her hands went to her throat as she spoke and I did not feel very comfortable myself.

“It couldn’t have been one of the patients?” I murmured.

“No! There isn’t a one of them who is able to walk.”

“Then who⁠—”

“Or⁠—what⁠—” said Maida.

A remnant of common sense saved me, I think, from stark terror. I took a firmer hold on my imagination.

“Nonsense,” I spoke decidedly but still, for some reason, in a whisper. “There are no such things as⁠—as⁠—I mean to say, the shadow you saw was either an optical illusion or a living, breathing person.”

“Certainly,” agreed Maida, adding inconsistently: “I don’t see how a living person could have got past us, through this long corridor without one of us seeing him⁠—it.”

My eyes fell on the south door near at hand; the tiny panes of glass winked blackly at me as I crossed to it, grasped the brass latch and pulled. The door swung slowly open, letting in a current of cold, mist-laden air.

“There, you see?” I said to Maida. “Only a real, material thing needs a door to go through.”

Maida was looking at me strangely.

“I don’t see that that helps matters any,” she said. “I locked that door myself, tonight. It just proves that someone was actually here. That the murderer is still about the hospital.”

“Not necessarily,” I said, though my heart was pounding in my throat. “You are sure you locked it?”

“Positive.”

“And you hung the key there on the nail above the chart desk?”

“Yes.”

We both swung hastily around. At the other end of the shadowy corridor gleamed the green-shaded light over the desk. With one accord we started toward it.

The key was not on the nail above the desk!

But even as our frightened gaze took in that amazing fact my eyes fell on the glass top of the desk. There on its shining surface lay the key. We stared at it for some time before our eyes met. Then I picked up the key, my fingers seeming to shrink from the cold, clammy metal, returned to the south door, locked it securely and put the key in my pocket.

And as I did so, a thought struck me. The person who had got into the wing by means of the south door must also have got out again. He couldn’t have gone through the corridor and south door for Maida was, by that time, in the hall.

The light was still glowing in Room 18, and I crossed the room, not without a queer feeling in the region of my knees, as if they would give way with me, without notice. Sure enough, the window was unlocked; it was even open a fraction of an inch at the bottom, though the screen, which has a spring snap, was closed.

I pushed the window the rest of the way down, locked it, not without an unpleasant impression that something was out in that gleaming darkness back of the window pane watching my every move, turned off the light, and closed the door again. Maida was standing in the corridor and we walked slowly toward the more cheerful region of the chart desk and diet kitchen.

“I suppose,” she mused at length, “that someone could have taken the key from the nail and returned it when we were in Room 18.”

“But who? It would have to be someone in St. Ann’s. And that is unthinkable.”

“There are likely ways in and out of St. Ann’s,” she said finally, and with that a signal clicked somewhere. I recalled Three who would be in a tantrum by this time, and we separated.

We were very busy for the rest of the night, and dawn was never so welcome a sight. But during those slow hours I came to the conclusion that there were only two things we knew without doubt. The key to the south door had been removed from the nail and left on top of the chart desk, and the sinister door of Room 18 had been opened and left open.

Who had done this and why was a matter of conjecture, and I resolved to say nothing of it save to Lance O’Leary. I should leave it to O’Leary.

Leave it to O’Leary! I had so far recovered from my fright that I smiled faintly at the phrase, but I could have embraced the day nurses when they came on duty, and the rattle of the dishes in the small, rubber-tired dumbwaiter, as it came up with the breakfast trays, sounded like music to my ears.

On the way to the basement for breakfast, I had time for a word or two with Maida.

“We’ll say nothing about it, save to O’Leary,” I murmured in a low voice and she nodded, just as Miss Dotty joined us with one of her insufferably bright good mornings.

Miss Dotty keeps a book at her bedside, entitled Every Day a Sunny Day, and memorizes verses from it. Her verse that morning was:

If you’re lonely, sad and blue,

Keep smiling.

Luck will bring you someone true

Who understands and loves just you.

Keep smiling,

which seemed not only inane but downright offensive, as coming from one old maid to another.

The inquest was set for nine thirty. We had an early operation and at eight o’clock prompt I was tying Dr. Balman into his white apron and hood and counting sponges in the operating room. The patient’s appendix proving to be elusive, turning up, in fact, on entirely the wrong side, the operation was more interesting than we had expected. Dr. Balman looked haggard from fatigue and worry, his thin hair and beard were dishevelled and his eyes were hollow, but his hands were steady, if rather slow, and every last detail was thoroughly attended to.

The inquest was held in the nurses’ library in the basement. It is not a cheerful room, particularly on wet, rainy mornings. It was chilly in the place; the whitewashed walls looked cold and bare, even the medical books along the walls had none too happy titles. The linoleum rug caught dismal highlights, the chairs borrowed from the dining room were slippery and uncomfortable, and moisture dripped steadily down the small windows. Someone had turned on the lights but they did not improve matters.

At a little table sat a stout, elderly gentleman, whom I had no trouble identifying as the pompous coroner. He wore a pair of nose-glasses attached to a button on his broad vest with an important black ribbon. The board of directors were ranged near at hand, some of them constituting the jury, which would have surprised me had I not known the weight in politics and otherwise that some of those names carried.