“Tell me,” I said at last. “Is there anything you know that might help solve this mystery?”
But Maida turned an unfathomable blue gaze toward me.
“Nothing. Nothing that would help.”
And it was not until she had departed with the beef tea steaming hot on a tray that I noted her ambiguous wording.
I could not disguise to myself the fact that I was deeply alarmed. Particularly because I had caught her, and wished I had not, in a deliberate lie. Either that or that abominable cuff link had simply jumped itself out of her cuff and into the pocket of Dr. Letheny’s immaculate dinner coat.
I shall not conceal the fact that I gave voice to several expletives that made up in fervour for what they lacked in content. And I had learned quite a vocabulary from my parrot, a nice bird who died last year on his ninety-sixth birthday, unless the dealer lied, and was much mourned by those of the nurses whose rooms are at the far end of the dormitory. Owing to the night air making the dear bird talkative there was a sort of feeling against him among the rooms within hearing distance of my own.
However, in this case the utmost of his vocabulary did not relieve my feelings.
All went as well as might be expected, and we did not once need a policeman, so it was as well that he had been withdrawn. Of course, I’m not saying it was a pleasant watch, for it was not. The south end of the corridor seemed darker than any other portion of it and the sinister door of Eighteen was somehow black and menacing and altogether unpleasant. But on the whole the night passed quietly, which was a mercy, for that was the last night that we pinned on our caps with any assurance of how long they would stay there. Dawn came at last, cold and gray, and with it the slow melancholy sound of the five o’clock bell for early prayers. The north wing of St. Ann’s ends in a small chapel that is dignified with age and has a pipe organ, high walnut pews, and old, stained-glass windows. It is open on week days for prayer and meditation and on Sundays the young assistant rector from St. B⸺’s down in the city comes to St. Ann’s to conduct prayers and confession and church.
The Sunday then dawning was destined to remain long in my memory as a sort of interlude between what had been and what was to follow.
In the first place, Morgue, the basement cat, who is thin and ill-tempered and kept for utilitarian purposes only, surprised us all by having three healthy kittens. For some years the assumption had been that this was a feat biologically impossible and the news, brought to the table by a student nurse who had actually seen the kittens, caused quite a stir and for a moment distracted our minds from the too-absorbing problems of the last few days.
There were some disbelievers at table, this despite the student nurse appearing to clinch the matter by quoting Higgins’s opinion that Morgue had displayed considerable talent in this connection, and after breakfast we all trooped down to the furnace room to see with our own eyes.
Higgins was down there, fussing around a grape basket which he had lined with an old duster, which, by the way, made the baby cats smell quite distinctly of cedar oil and must have puzzled their proud and complacent mother. The kittens themselves were not much to boast of, resembling, indeed, very young and scrawny rats and squirming vigorously and squealing when the girls picked them up and passed them from one to the other. There was a heated discussion over their names; it was felt they should bear some relation to the mother’s name, and Morgue is not an easy name with which to relate. They settled on Accident, Appendicitis, and Ambulance. The kittens were all black, to my mind not a particularly happy or propitious colour, and Melvina Smith, who is pale and superstitious and would not touch an opal with a ten-foot rod, exclaimed in italics that trouble was coming to St. Ann’s. Upon which someone murmured that trouble had already come and Melvina said, yes, but it always came in Threes and these three black cats were a sure sign that bad luck would come in threes here. She pointed out, reasonably enough, that Morgue could as well have had four kittens, or two, but no, she had had three. And that furthermore, who ever heard of Morgue having kittens before, and it was certain she had had them this time just to warn us of the third—er—trouble.
Well, for my part, I felt that Morgue would not go to so much bother, she being by nature unobliging and apt to mistrust our most friendly advances. But already the girls were putting the kittens in the basket and casting rather frightened glances into Morgue’s inscrutable yellow eyes, and drifting toward the stairway. I could have wrung Melvina’s foolish little neck, but naturally I followed them.
On the way upstairs Olma Flynn remarked earnestly that it was nice that Morgue hadn’t had ten kittens. Upon which several of the less idiotic laughed and Melvina cast a look of pale reproach upon Olma, who, as a matter of fact, had spoken with single-minded gratitude.
As I reached the top of the stairs Higgins called to me.
“Miss Keate.”
I turned. He was standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up.
“Yes.”
“Can you spare some time now, Miss Keate? There was—something I wanted to—ask you about.”
I hesitated. It seems to me that when anyone around St. Ann’s has a complaint it is brought to my ears and I was in no mood that morning to listen to complaints.
“I was just going to get some sleep, Higgins,” I said. “Will another time do?”
How often, since then, I have wished that I had stopped then and there.
