“Oh—then you came by the side road?”
“Yes. Thought I’d save time by not going around by the main entrance. I didn’t expect this.” He fingered the spot cautiously.
“Put iodine on it,” I advised.
“I’ll sleep here in the hospital for a while,” he said. “I’ll be there on the couch in the inner office. So if there is anything wanted I shall be right here.”
I nodded approvingly and went on, but while hurrying through the corridor I became conscious of something about the casual sentences that affected me disagreeably. What was it? Ah! “I bumped it while running through the apple orchard.” To be sure he had followed the words immediately with a very reasonable explanation, but wasn’t that in itself suspicious! On the other hand, however, I had been quite sure that the man with whom I collided had been Jim Gainsay.
Well, there was no way to make sure. And I resolved that I must not allow myself to become suspicious of anything and everything. The affair was strain enough on one’s nerves as it was, without adding the horror of suspecting one’s nearest associates.
Immersed in my own not too pleasant thoughts I passed the door of Room 18 without seeing it, an occurrence that I was to find unusual. On the porch stood a policeman, his broad back to the door, but he made no effort to stop me when I descended the steps. Once in the path the trees dripped steadily on my head, the wind blew the light slicker so that it was difficult to hold it around me, and I bent my head and ran through the damp welter of leaves and small sticks, with the branches of the trees sweeping so low as to brush my hair and cap, and the shrubbery reaching out thorny twigs to clutch at my white skirt. It was shadowy there in the orchard and the hospital soon disappeared behind the intervening shrubbery and trees and gray mist. It was nearing five o’clock by that time and already growing dark so that the path was not an altogether agreeable place in which to linger.
I turned another little bend that sloped rapidly down to the bridge and almost ran into a tall figure that was leaning upon the railing. At my startled exclamation it turned to face me. It was Jim Gainsay, a sodden hat pulled low over his eyes and the collar of his capacious tweed coat turned up. He was smoking (it was a pipe I noted, thinking of the cigarette case) and casting pebbles across the water, which is not a rainy day pastime.
“Oh. It’s you.” I said.
“Miss Keate! Say, you are the very person I’ve been wanting to see. Can you tell me something of poor old Louis?”
“Louis? Oh, you mean Dr. Letheny.” I suppose I paled a little at the name. At any rate Gainsay glanced sharply at me.
“I didn’t mean to—disturb you,” he said apologetically. “You see, I only heard of it an hour or so ago, and only what that fellow O’Leary told me. Don’t talk if you would rather not.”
“Then I know no more than you, for the detective, Mr. O’Leary, told me of it, too. Of course, it was a shock.”
Jim Gainsay nodded, his gaze again on the little stream that, swollen by the night’s rain, swept in a bubbling current almost to our feet.
“Poor old Louis,” he muttered.
“You have known him a long time?” I said absently, my eyes too on the water.
“Since university days,” said Jim Gainsay slowly. “I always liked Louis though I can’t say I understood him; no one ever did. In the last few years I have seen him only a few times. It was terrible to—go like that. Do they have any idea as to who—who killed him?”
“Not that I know of,” I said and shivered at the thought of the black night so recently past and of the unknown and ghastly presence that Room 18 had held. And I had taken that futile little candle and searched the room for the thing that some sixth sense warned me was there! I shivered again and caught my breath and Jim Gainsay turned to me again.
“Don’t let me keep you out here in the storm. You are cold in that slicker thing.”
“A little. I am going to see Corole. How does she take it?”
Jim Gainsay’s frown deepened.
“I hardly know. I can’t understand her any better than I could understand Louis. She looked—sort of bad—this morning. Tired, you know. And kept saying Louis would return. But she was terribly nervous. Prowled over the house like a cat.” He shrugged in distaste. “Fairly gave me the creeps to watch her. Then when they came up to the house to tell her that—that they had found him she just sort of froze all up. Hardly said a word.”
“Wasn’t she dreadfully shocked?”
“Well—I don’t know. You never can tell how Corole is feeling or what she is thinking about. Of course, she and Louis sort of got on each other’s nerves a little. That is—you know what I mean—” He glanced at me uncertainly.
“I know.”
“I suppose St. Ann’s is awfully upset?”
“We are trying to keep everything going as well as possible. It is a bad situation, naturally. The nurses are doing their best but there is a sort of undercurrent of hysteria.” My mind on Corole, I did not immediately note where his inquiries were leading.
“Miss Day was with you in the south wing last night, was she not?” He knocked his pipe carefully against the railing.
“Yes.”
“How—er—Is she feeling any bad effects from the fright?”
“I have seen her only for a few moments at lunch,” I replied; at another time I should have smiled at his elaborately impersonal air.
“I—don’t suppose I could see her? For a little while?”
“She will be free between six and seven o’clock. But we are allowing no visitors for a
