And there was the matter of no doctor for Cornelia. Philip had an imperious streak, and it was difficult to imagine him submitting meekly to a diagnosis by telephone, epidemic or not. For that matter, it was hard to believe that not a doctor in the town had been able to make a house call.
Margaret brought Hilary her scrambled eggs, bread and butter because she couldn’t manage toast yet, and a glass of milk that Hilary turned down in favor of ginger ale. Coming back, she said chattily although she knew the answer, “Did Cornelia have a sore throat, too?”
“No, she just had awful pains in her stomach and she threw up all the time. I didn’t see her much, though. I irritated her,” said Hilary primly.
Margaret let that go by. She said presently, “Well, whatever medicine she had fixed her up, and it will you, too.”
“But she had to change hers.”
“She did?”
Hilary nodded, dropping a large cluster of egg on her bedspread and brushing it tidily off onto the floor. “She said it made her sicker, so Philip called the doctor and took it back to the drugstore and got something else.” Careful, careful. “Unfortunately, you can’t take medicine back,” said Margaret lightly. “You’re stuck with it.”
“Well, Philip took it back. I wanted the bottle to keep paste in and he said he had to give it to the druggist. Will you play a game of checkers?”
“Yes,” said Margaret, and she did. Red and black, an occupation for her fingers that didn’t touch her mind. Antibiotics often had side effects, but why had Philip taken the bottle away with him—and why, if the capsules made her so sick, had Cornelia kept one?
“You can’t jump your own man,” said Hilary loudly. “Oh, I guess I can’t. Where was I—here?”
Other people’s problems were always simple to solve; the wonder was that they made such a to-do about them. If it were not Cornelia and Philip involved, if this were a tale told to her by a worried friend of two faceless other people, she would say . . . what would she say?
“If he married the sister because he knew she was going to inherit money, he must have been in the old lady’s confidence. And if he was that close to her the lawyer would know about him, wouldn’t he?”
Yes, he would. Margaret remembered his name, too, because it was the kind that turned up on droll lists of names-and-professions: Eugene Sharp, Torrington, Connecticut.
She allowed her sole remaining man to be hunted down by Hilary’s fleet of kings; then, closing a number of doors in between, she used the telephone in the pantry to call long distance. She consoled herself, through the series of clicks and mapping of signals across the country, with the thought that if Mr. Sharp had never heard of Philip Byrne no damage was done. If he had, she could still cover her tracks by inquiring for an apocryphal relative.
There was no need to cover her tracks. As far as Mr. Sharp knew, Miss Trumbull had been unacquainted with a Mr. Philip Byrne. He added, with a deprecation that made Margaret want to spring at him through the mouthpiece, that perhaps he was hardly in a position to make a positive statement about this because his uncle, the senior Eugene Sharp, had always handled Miss Trumbull’s affairs. Unfortunately, his uncle had passed on a month ago.
So that was that. Mr. Sharp said surprisingly in his faraway legal voice, “If it’s important, as I presume it is, I imagine the nurses would know. Your cousin required two for several months before her death, and I believe I have their names (thank you, Miss Pigeon) right here. Norma Powers and Genevieve DeMaestri.”
He gave her addresses, expressed his hope that he had been of help, and was gone in a dissolving click. Margaret stood with her hand on the receiver, embattled. Understandably, Mr. Sharp had not known which was the day and which the night nurse, and it made all the difference. And how were all these Torrington calls going to look on Philip’s phone bill? But she could hardly call collect, and she certainly couldn’t leave Hilary to seek a public booth.
The mental coin she tossed came down Norma Powers, and she was in luck. Mrs. Powers was not only at home at 131 Elkhart Road; she had been the day nurse, and she was brisk and articulate. After a confusion over a Mr. Bums, who owned a grocery store in Torrington, she said positively that Miss Trumbull had not known a Mr. Philip Byrne, nor had he come or telephoned while she was there. Of course, in the last weeks before her death, Miss Trumbull had been able to see only an occasional old friend, and then for a few minutes at a time. That was one of the reasons Mrs. Powers had gotten the job in the first place; Miss Trumbull couldn’t stand the telephone-ringings and doorbell-buzzings that had accompanied the previous nurse.
“Oh, a gay one, she was,” said Mrs. Powers half-admiringly, “and the old goat she had on the string, somebody she met on night duty at the hospital, bothered your cousin half to death before he was through. Ring, ring, ring. Not that Miss Glidden wasn’t a good nurse—she knew her job, all right—but she had her mind on the men.
