hands, a little shiny and wrinkled and none too steady. He said, “Well, that’s what I’m afraid you can’t do.”
The state trooper turned abruptly to look down at the doctor. He didn’t ask why, and the doctor fidgeted a little and said, “You see, the bullet was thrown out-accidentally; and the gun is gone. Nobody knows what happened to it.”
Again the state trooper said nothing but simply waited, watching the doctor and looking very tall and formidable in his trim uniform. Dr. Chivery said, “In the excitement somebody must have picked up the gun without remembering. It will turn up. But it hasn’t yet.
He waited for an answer again and this time the state trooper obliged. He said, “Ah.”
It was just then, by the way, that I discovered an odd thing about Dr. Chivery, and that was his habit of looking at the edges of things. For he glanced at the left corner of my cap, at a post of the bed, at my patient’s brown hair (so inordinately neat and wetly plastered that I surmised Anna’s fine firm hand) and at the trooper’s coat buttons. He said, “You know me, Lieutenant. Or perhaps you don’t. But the fact is, if I had had reason to think it wasn’t an accident (which is simply absurd on the face of it) perhaps I wouldn’t have been quite so frank and prompt about reporting it. Ha,” said the doctor, still whispering vehemently. “Ha.”
It was intended to be a laugh and his mouth twitched upward nervously to accompany it. The trooper’s face was as grave and untouched as a stone image. He said, “Now let me be sure I have the facts straight. It happened last night at eleven?”
Dr. Chivery, eyeing the bedpost, nodded.
“The butler, Beevens, Mrs. Brent’s brother, Nicky Senour, and a guest, Peter Huber…”
“You talked to them yourself,” interrupted Dr. Chivery.
“… Yes, were in the library when it happened; the butler was locking up and looking at the window catches and Mr. Huber and Mr. Senour were reading the papers. They heard the shot and then heard his”-he nodded once toward the man in the bed-“call for help. They went to the garden, found him and-and no one else. They brought him to this room…”
“And telephoned for me,” said Chivery nodding.
“At the time of the shot, so far as you know, Craig Brent was alone in the garden?”
“He was alone,” said Dr. Chivery. “I was at home, reading in my library. My wife was upstairs, writing letters. I mention us because we are-ha, ha,” he interpolated painstakingly again, “almost members of the family here. Mr. Conrad Brent-Craig’s father had gone to bed. Mrs. Brent was likewise in her own room; she had said good night to the others and gone upstairs only a moment or two before it happened. The servants…”
“I’ll question them. Thank you. You don’t know of any family disagreements…”
Dr. Chivery interrupted indignantly. “My dear fellow-really-this is not an inquiry into murder.”
The trooper looked at Craig. “Well, no-not yet,” he said somewhat pointedly.
“But,
Dr. Chivery glanced at my right eyebrow. Preoccupation sat like a gray mask on his face; yet it seemed to me that behind that mask there was a kind of flicker of disapproval directed at me. The trooper had looked at me too. It was the trooper who moved quietly to the door and, incredibly laconic to the last, nodded and disappeared. The doctor hesitated, looked at the pin on my collar and said, “Miss…”
“Keate,” I said.
“You found my orders?”
“Yes, Doctor. And I wanted to ask you…”
One pink hand fluttered. “I’ll return later and we’ll go over the situation. Just now, has our patient said anything?”
“No, Doctor.”
“Oh. Umm. Well,” he said, “he may be a little delirious, rambling; pay no attention to it. But-er-Nurse…” He glanced nervously over his shoulder toward the door and lowered his voice. “I trust I don’t need to remind you that anything said in a sick room…”
I drew myself up and almost, but not quite, forced him to look into my eyes. “I am not a gossip,” I said with some energy.
Again I saw the flicker of disapproval behind that curtain of preoccupation. I could almost hear him think, I’ll get rid of this nurse as soon as I get around to it. He said suavely, “Not at all. Not at all. I’ll be back presently.” With that, and a slanting look at my Oxford ties, he went away.
It left me alone again in that big gloomy bedroom with the rain whispering against the window and a sick man, a man who’d been shot, on the bed.
I was a little shaken. Shootings, guns and bullets. Police and a doctor who wouldn’t look at me.
To complicate it, Drue with her loveliness and her honesty linked so strongly with that dreary, secretive house and everybody in it. Especially the man who had been shot.
The dark panels of the door reflected a dreary light from the windows opposite. My patient gave a kind of weak chuckle and said quite clearly, “Nice going.”
It gave me rather a start. I hurried to the bed. His eyelids fluttered and opened; there was a gleam of laughter in his eyes and the corners of his mouth twitched. Otherwise he hadn’t moved. He made a great effort and said, “Nurse…”
“Yes. You’d better not talk.”
But there was something he had to say. I watched him struggle for the words, his bright eyes seeking into mine. “Thought-there was a girl. Here…” he said laboriously, and waited for me to reply. I hesitated. His hand still lay outside the cover and it moved a little and he said, watching me intently, “Somebody I know…”
“There is another nurse,” I said then. “You must sleep now.”
“Another-nurse…” he said and, as a wave of drugged sleep caught and engulfed him again, his voice drifted away. I waited. He’d gone back to sleep, I thought; but as I started to move away he spoke again. And he said quickly, in a jumbled rush of words, something that ended with the words “-yellow gloves.” That was all I could understand, for the rest was only a blurred mumble and he was overtaken by sleep like an avalanche while I stood there watching him and wondering what yellow gloves had to do with anything at all.
Well, in the end I decided he was rambling and it meant nothing. Although his recognition of Drue had been sensible enough, unless it was merely deeply instinctive.
That, when I thought of it, was queer-that he’d known she was there.
As I have indicated, my encounter with the doctor and the state trooper was not exactly conducive to a quiet state of mind; there was also the matter of the missing gun, and the bullet that had been thrown out. I am a sensible woman. It is my nature, and I see no reason to hide my light under a bushel, to enjoy a certain poise. Master of my fate and captain of my destiny, under even the most untoward circumstances. But I won’t say I didn’t feel uneasy, for I did. And the story Drue had told me, naturally, added to my uneasiness.
For when I had considered everything I had heard and observed (not much, perhaps, but enough), it all summed up to just one conclusion. I’m not sentimental or unduly sympathetic; quite the contrary. But I liked Drue Cable and even if I hadn’t it was obvious that she had no friends in that household. It was as obvious that she was determined to stay.
And I didn’t like the look of things.
So I had to stay with her. There simply wasn’t anything else for me to do. And if they sent her away I still had to stay. No question of that.
While I was very reluctantly reaching that conclusion, Craig Brent continued to sleep heavily, without stirring or saying anything more. After a while, finding it difficult to sit still, I drifted to the deeply recessed bay windows and looked out through the streaming rain. That was how it happened that I saw Drue go to the garden and return.
It was by that time fairly late in the afternoon. The room and the whole great house seemed perfectly still, except for the rain. Once somewhere away off in the distance a radio was turned on-apparently for a news bulletin. I wondered what fresh turn the war had taken, and wished, as I’d wished so many times, that they would take me. I nursed all through the other war. I am twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier but, as they say of an old work horse, I’m sound in wind and limb. And I want to go to war. In a swift poignant wave of memory I could see the mud of France, feel the rain and cold, and smell the sweet, sickly odors of ether (until it ran out) and of
