“I think I’ll go up to see Huldah,” I said, rising abruptly, and feigning a professional interest.
“Do,” said Corole, smiling not at all tenderly into the fire. “You know the way to her room? I’m too lazy to go along.” At my nod she continued indolently: “Huldah highly approves of you, Sarah. She has never quite trusted me, you know.” She laughed again.
I found Huldah very drowsy and her headache worse.
“It is on account of the cloudy weather,” I said, and we talked for some moments very pleasurably of our experiences with neuralgia; my own were much more interesting than Huldah’s but I listened forbearingly to her tale.
“I felt better for awhile after Miss Letheny gave me some medicine she has,” went on Huldah. “I went right off to sleep. She gives it into your arm so it doesn’t take long to—”
“Into your arm!” I cried, struck by the phrase. “What do you mean?”
“Why with one of them—what do you call them? Sort of like a needle.”
“You don’t mean a hypodermic needle?”
“Yes!” Huldah smiled happily. “That is it. I just couldn’t think of what she called it. It is fine. You see, that way the medicine goes directly into your—”
“Huldah! Do you mean to say that Miss Letheny gave you a hypodermic?”
She nodded, pulling up the sleeve of her outing-flannel wrapper and showing me the tiny scar. I scrutinized it closely. It had been most deftly done. There were no skin abrasions, the vein had been carefully avoided, the needle quite evidently had been thrust into the flesh by a practised and unfaltering hand. And that hand belonged to Corole Letheny!
“Wasn’t that all right, Miss Keate? It didn’t hurt at all—”
I recalled myself to the present.
“Huldah,” I said severely, “never let anyone but a doctor or a trained nurse give you a hypodermic. Never!” And as her face turned rather green I added, “That was likely just some headache medicine that Dr. Letheny, or someone, had given Miss Letheny. So it is all right this time.” And, indeed, I could tell that Corole had actually given her only a mild opiate to relieve, most unwisely, her headache.
“Now,” I went on, as I caught sight of my wrist watch pointing to five o’clock. “Can you tell me something that I want to know, and forget that I asked you?”
Huldah is shrewd; she raised herself on one gray flannel elbow and looked at me keenly.
“I can keep a secret, Miss Keate. There’s many a thing I could tell if I wanted to.”
“What I want to know is this: Has Miss Letheny worn her gold dress lately?”
“You mean that green and gold, snaky thing with the scales on it?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see. She wore it last the night Dr. Letheny was killed.”
“Are you sure, Huldah?”
“Yes’m. I remember well. Poor Dr. Letheny!”
“Feeling better, Huldah?” said a voice from the doorway.
It was Corole, of course.
IX
Under the Barberry Bush
I left rather abruptly. But on the darkening path toward St. Ann’s I decided that Corole could not have heard our conversation. Feeling that I must get these last two pieces of news, as well as the occurrence of the previous night to O’Leary as soon as possible, I walked rapidly along through the fog. I crossed the little bridge and was hurrying through the apple orchard when I came face to face with O’Leary.
“You are the very person I want to see, Miss Keate,” he said at once.
Taking my arm he drew me a few steps from the path; he motioned and following his gesture I found I had a view of the south door and small colonial porch.
“Tell me, Miss Keate, exactly where you were standing the night of June seventh when the—er—arrow-like affair was thrown over your shoulder?”
“I had truly forgotten that—I should have told you.”
“That’s all right,” he brushed my apology aside. “Can you recall about where you were standing and the line it took over your shoulder?”
“I think so,” I replied slowly and thoughtfully. “It seems to me it should have fallen somewhere about that clump of barberry. Over there.” I pointed with my finger toward the shrubbery that edges the apple orchard. “I suppose you are trying to find what it was.”
“If no one else has found—or retrieved it yet,” agreed O’Leary.
With O’Leary going ahead and holding back the more importunate branches and shrubs, we made our slow way to the spot I had indicated. I remember that we took some pains not to be seen from the hospital and, bending over as I did, to keep my white cap invisible from those windows, I had an absurd feeling that I was playing a grim game of hide-and-seek. In the excitement of the search I did not notice my soaked shoes and my wet hair, and remember only how I groped along the sodden leaf mold, and around the slippery brown roots of the shrubs and trees. If we had known what to look for, it would have been an easier task, O’Leary informed me, after some twenty minutes’ vain delving in the wet underbrush. He was inclined to be a little pettish about it, implying that I might have noticed the thing more carefully. That remark was made the time he slipped on some wet leaves and flung his hands into a barberry bush to keep his balance. He looked amazingly human and ordinary, picking out the thorns. It was just a few moments after that that I heard him utter a sudden ejaculation of pain. He was on the opposite side of a large clump of barberry bush and I crawled cautiously around to discover what had happened.
I found him squatting on his heels, with his thumb in his mouth and the other hand clasping a small object that, from his glance, seemed to have pleased him inordinately.
“I’ve found it,
