“I suppose you’ll have to know sometime, anyway,” I said sulkily.
The flicker in his gray eyes was like a ripple across a very calm, deep lake.
“You are right, Miss Keate. So why not tell me now?”
Well, to make a long story short, I told him of the missing hypodermic, which after all, was little enough: barely the fact that Maida’s syringe had been removed and my own substituted, but this without my knowledge. And that Maida had had the opportunity to take my own, and if she had wished to use it, all that she needed to do was ask me for it.
“Which she conspicuously did not do,” commented O’Leary. “Oh, by the way, Miss Keate, have you ever attended an inquest?”
“No.”
“Well, don’t get bothered. Our coroner is a decent old fellow but he does love to be pompous. Just answer what he asks, tell your story as briefly as possible and don’t—er—volunteer anything. You see there are some things that you and I know that will not come up at the inquest.”
“You mean—they would warn the guilty one?”
He nodded briefly as he turned away.
Maida was already in the south wing when I rounded the right angle of the corridor leading from the main office, at exactly twelve o’clock that night.
“I locked the south door,” she said, hanging the key on its customary nail above the desk.
“That was right,” I approved, glancing over the charts. It appeared that Eleven’s digestive apparatus was still doing business at the old stand, so to speak, but otherwise all was well and I settled briskly into the business of second watch.
Midnight temperatures had scarcely been taken, however, when Olma Flynn developed a sick headache, worse when I was within hearing distance, and had to be excused from duty. We didn’t actually need the extra help, as Maida and I had been accustomed to care for the whole wing ourselves, but nevertheless it was a little annoying, especially as, about two o’clock, the little student nurse burned her wrist over the gas flame in the diet kitchen, and the burn had to be salved extensively and the nurse sent to bed with an aspirin tablet.
Thus Maida and I found ourselves alone in the south wing for the first time since those terrifying events of Thursday night. This precarious situation was a matter that was, I think, predominant in our thoughts but neither of us mentioned it; we even manufactured an artificial sort of—not gaiety, that would be asking too much—but of brisk attention to work and a determined avoidance of conversation that might lead back to things we were anxious to forget.
All went well, in spite of our hidden fears, until about three o’clock. I was pouring out a small dose of bromide for Three, who had made up her mind not to sleep that night and naturally was not doing so, when Maida opened the door of the drug room.
Her face was so ghastly white that at first glimpse of it my hand began to tremble and the medicine poured all over the spoon. Blindly I set the bottle down.
“What is it?”
“There’s something in Room 18!” she gasped through ashy lips.
“Room 18!”
“Just now—I saw something go into that room from the corridor!”
“Someone—is sleepwalking.” I grasped at the first rationality that presented itself.
After the light in the diet kitchen the long corridor seemed peculiarly dark and shadowy and the green light over the chart desk was miles away. It never occurred to me to call for help, and we sped along toward that dark end of the wing that we had good cause to fear.
But we stopped stock still as we came close enough to see the door of Room 18, and a cold shiver crept up from my back.
The door of Room 18 was standing wide open!
It had not been opened, so far as I knew, since the police had left that room. It had been shunned by all the nurses. Who had opened it? Who would dare open it?
Who was inside that dark place?
A long, shuddering sigh came from Maida beside me and I felt her cold hand grip my wrist. The contact nerved me and I did what, I afterward realized, was a very foolish thing.
I took a few steps forward, advanced to the very door of that grisly room, reached a shaking arm through the open doorway, groped for the electric-light button, found and pressed it.
The cold white dome on the ceiling flooded the room with light.
There was nothing out of the way to be seen. There were the plain dresser, the bedside table, two chairs, the folded burlap screen and the high, narrow bed—nothing else. Something caught in my throat as I glanced at the bed and toward the closet doors.
“The—closet—” breathed Maida at my side. “Oh! You are not going to open that!” as I took a more decisive step forward.
It was no easy thing to do, for I knew well that those shallow closets were yet large enough to hold—what one of them had held.
They were both unlocked this time. And there was nothing in them!
I turned to Maida, whose white face had been beside me during the ordeal. Without saying a word we retreated to the corridor.
“Are you sure you saw something?” I asked, my voice hoarse.
“I am positive,” whispered Maida. “You see, I was just answering Fourteen’s light, which brought me fairly near to Eighteen. I came out the door and was starting down toward the chart desk when something—I don’t know what—some rustle or sound, perhaps, made me turn around, facing this way, so I could see the south door. And I was just in time to see a sort of movement at the door of Eighteen.” Her hands went to her throat as she spoke and I did not feel very comfortable myself.
“It couldn’t have been one of the patients?” I murmured.
“No!
