“Well, we shall have some disclosures in another night,” said the chief comfortably. “And mark my words, this Letheny has had something to do with it. A man don’t disappear like this for nothing. In the meantime we’ll guard Room 18 and keep everybody away from it. And let nobody leave or come into the hospital.”
“No visitors?” I inquired, with the first shade of approval I had felt for the chief so far.
“No visitors,” he agreed.
“And in the meantime,” said Dr. Balman, “business as usual. Eh, Miss Keate?”
“By all means. But Dr. Balman—you don’t think that Dr. Letheny killed Mr. Jackson and got away with the radium—”
“Certainly not,” said Dr. Balman. “There is nothing upon which to base such a conclusion.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” muttered Chief Blunt from the depths of the telephone transmitter.
It took a few moments for Dr. Balman and Dr. Hajek to arrange between them to take over Dr. Letheny’s work in case, we were careful to say, Dr. Letheny did not come to St. Ann’s that day, while Chief Blunt put the telephone to such good use that at the end of a few minutes he assured us that Dr. Letheny would be found within twenty-four hours. This I thought to be a somewhat sweeping prophecy but said nothing.
Leaving the office, I walked thoughtfully down to the south wing. It was a compliment to St. Ann’s routine that, with the exception of a certain nervousness on the part of the nurses, all was quite as it should be. Morning baths had been given, breakfasts were all over and rooms dusted, and discipline in general had been maintained. However, there is no use saying things were just as usual for they were not. It was dark and cold that morning, with one of those quick changes of temperature for which our part of the country is famous. The electric service had not yet been repaired and there were lamps at intervals along the corridor. Miss Dotty, wisely for once, had doubled the number of girls on duty, and blue-striped skirts and white aprons of training nurses, as well as the severe white of graduate nurses, glimmered everywhere.
So far we had been successful in keeping the news of the murder from the ears of the patients, but of course they were aware of some kind of disturbance during the night, and several of them were quite fussy and upset and demanded to be moved to another wing, which naturally we could not do. We kept the newspapers from them, too, but one of the minor troubles of the day was the continual telephone calls from anxious relatives, which began as soon as the morning extras were out.
Oh, yes, the newspapers got out extras with all kinds of pictures and the most absurd statements that made St. Ann’s appear to be something between a boarding school and a den of iniquity. This unfortunate impression was helped by the pictures of nurses in conjunction with the murder and radium theft.
And in spite of our efforts to carry on work the same as usual, in spite of cleaned rooms and spick-and-span corridors and careful charts, there lingered, somehow, pervading the very old walls of St. Ann’s, a certain gloom, a sense of foreboding, that centred in the south wing.
Room 18 was closed and guarded by a stalwart policeman, who sat uncompromisingly in front of the door, but that end of the corridor was shunned as if there were live smallpox there, and when one of the nurses had to go to Room 17, opposite, or to the next room, Sixteen, she quite frankly sought the company of another nurse.
Old Mr. Jackson’s lawyer had been notified immediately of the tragedy, I learned, and he, in turn, had notified the dead man’s only relatives, a cousin and a nephew, living somewhere in the East. Along in the middle of the morning a rather impersonal telegram came from them to Chief Blunt, bidding him spare no expense and keep them informed of developments.
What with one thing and another I had very little time of my own until about two o’clock in the afternoon when, after firmly getting rid of Miss Dotty, who evidenced a distressing disposition to cling and whisper in horrified italics, I sat down at the south-wing chart desk, drew a blank chart toward me, and presenting as forbidding a back against interruption as I could, I tried to think. Until that moment the whirl of events had so caught me that I had had to act and had had literally no time in which to consider the matter.
I began, logically enough, at twelve thirty, the time I had last seen Dr. Letheny. In spite of my defence of Dr. Letheny before Chief Blunt, I felt in my heart that his absence at such a time was, to say the least, rather strange.
It had been a queer night, even before its shocking development; that strange dinner at Corole’s, where everyone had seemed strung to such a singular pitch of excitement, our walk home through the suffocating heat, Maida’s preoccupation, my own disquiet, the storm—And now a memory recurred to me with such force that I almost jumped—that man with whom I had collided there at the corner of the porch! Who was he? What had he been doing?
And then, of course, I recalled the flat, smooth object I had found at the edge of the orchard, there below the kitchen window.
It took only a moment or two to hurry to my room and dive my hand into the pocket of my soiled uniform. Then I sank down on the edge of the bed, staring at the thing in my hand.
I recognized it at once.
It was Jim Gainsay’s cigarette case.
The engraved fraternity shield winked at me as I turned it over in my hands and snapped it open; inside were two or three cigarettes; dazedly
