VI
I Make a Discovery—and Regret It
I must admit that I went about my duties somewhat automatically that night and could not help keeping an eye on Maida, not from suspicion, you understand, but simply because the matters of recent development troubled me considerably. Indeed, I had plenty to think of that night.
Corole’s dinner party, followed by its terrifying sequel, had taken place on Thursday night. Early Friday afternoon the body of Dr. Letheny had been found. Friday night we had taken second watch with the policeman tipped against the sinister door of Room 18, and Saturday was the day just past. It was while I was sitting at the chart desk during second watch of Saturday night—really early Sunday morning—that the amazing idea occurred to me. I had been staring at the charts, absorbed in the baffling problems those days had brought, when all at once I began thinking of the morphine.
Might it not prove something if we were to discover where that morphine had come from? Morphine is not something that one carries about in a pocket or vanity bag; it is very difficult to secure and in St. Ann’s a most rigid check is kept on the quantities of the drug used. Would the morphine record for that week in the south wing balance?
With the thought I was up on my feet and starting toward the drug room. As I passed the door of the diet kitchen I saw Maida standing at the open window. Why do women bother with silks and laces and jewels when there is nothing that so sets off beauty as the severe, white simplicity of the nurse’s uniform? Maida’s face was like a proud young flower above the white collar of her tailored uniform. The stiff white cap perched piquantly on top of her head and contrasted nicely with her soft black hair. Her eyes were a deeper blue, her clear, gardenia skin and soft crimson lips were still lovelier above that plain white dress. I sighed, glanced down the corridor to see that there were no signal lights, and slipped into the drug room, closing the door.
A dose of morphine is a simple matter to prepare; it is the administering that requires skill. The preparation is a mere mixture of sterile water with the white morphine tablet, in the amount prescribed. At St. Ann’s there is a careful check of the amounts used, and the drug room record must check with the doctors’ orders. It was a simple matter for me to compare the two records with the remaining supply of morphine. And it was with a heart that dropped to my shoes that I found they emphatically did not check. And that the amount of discrepancy was more than enough to drug a person far more heavily than was safe.
When had this disappeared and how? A young, strong man might survive such a dose, or one accustomed to taking the drug. But an old man, whose heart reaction would be slow—well, it seemed all too apparent that the morphine that had killed Jackson might have come from our own south wing drug room. It was not a pleasant possibility.
Maida was still in the kitchen when I passed it again and I stopped. She was washing her slim, pink fingers vigorously.
“Eleven does get hungry at the most erratic times. He wants beef tea now and an hour ago he had malted milk,” she said, drying her hands.
“Mr. Gainsay did not leave Friday after all,” I said, coming directly to one of the things that troubled me.
She glanced swiftly toward me, lifted her straight black eyebrows a little, and spoke rather coolly.
“Evidently not. He said his boat did not sail till next week. Is this beef extract fresh?”
“I think so. I suppose he is quite a comfort to Corole.”
“Corole needs friends at a time like this,” said Maida.
“Of course, he was such a good friend of Dr.—Letheny.” For the life of me I could not speak that name naturally and easily.
“Yes,” agreed Maida briefly. She turned to the stove, lit the gas flame, and held a small saucepan of water over the blue points of fire. I could not see her face.
“Maida,” I said abruptly, “when did you last see Dr. Letheny—alive?”
She whirled toward me at that, and—well, it was not nice to stand there and see her face turn a dreadful, slow white with bluish hollows around her mouth and nose. But she answered at length, quite clearly:
“I last saw him at Corole’s dinner party. When we said good night and left.”
She looked into my eyes for a moment after she ceased to speak, almost as if she were daring me to deny her statement. And I knew that it could not be true. Else how could her lapis cuff link have got out of the snowy cuff in which I had seen her place it after we were safely within the walls of St. Ann’s, and into Dr. Letheny’s pocket?
“Oh—Sarah,” she cried suddenly, throwing out her hands toward me in a gesture that was like an appeal and with a half sob in her voice. But as suddenly she drew her hands sharply backward and turned again to the stove. To this day the salty, meaty smell of beef boiling always brings to me a vision of those shining, white-tiled walls and
