When he had finished, still without any results that I could see, he went to Maida.
“Miss Day,” he began, “you took a loud speaker exactly like this one”—he still carried under his arm the instrument that I had so futilely treasured—“from Sonny’s room last night. What did you do with it?”
Maida put back a wisp of black hair that had strayed from under her immaculate cap; her blue eyes regarded us steadily from the weary, dark circles about them.
“I put it on the table in Room 18,” she replied at once. “It was out of order somehow, and I thought likely Room 18 would be unoccupied. So I simply exchanged the speakers.”
“Thank you, Miss Day. You did not—er—examine it closely to see what was wrong with it?”
“No,” she said. “I know nothing of such things; I couldn’t possibly have repaired it.”
She went on about her errand.
“A strange case,” mused O’Leary, his clear, gray eyes following the slim, white-clad figure moving away from us. “The speaker in Room 18 was the right one, after all. The question is, was the radium in it and if so who took it? Who has it now? When we know that answer we will know who shot poor old Higgins.” He went to the window over the chart desk, flung it up to the sash, and took a deep breath of the fog-laden air. His intent young face, his curiously lucid gray eyes, showed no hint of a night without sleep.
“A strange case,” he repeated absently. He turned from the dripping gray orchard beyond the window, fingered idly the bronzed surface of the loud speaker there on the desk.
“Another thing, Miss Keate—did you notice that when Dr. Hajek came from his room tonight, presumably from his bed, he wore trousers under that bathrobe that he held so tightly to him? And that those trousers had fresh, wet mud stains about the cuffs?”
I murmured something, I don’t know what, and O’Leary met my shocked gaze quietly.
“And furthermore,” he said softly, “I found fresh mud stains on the window sill of his room. Really, Miss Keate, this hospital of yours should have been built with its first floor higher from the ground. Entrances and exits are too easy.”
XIII
The Radium Appears
How true it is that time, in retrospect, is measured by the events occurring therein. By which I mean, of course, that while the whole sequence of mysterious and shocking events that so deeply troubled us there at St. Ann’s really occurred during a period of only a few days, when I look back at the affair it seems to have extended over weeks. It was true, too, that every day seemed to bring its problems and those before yesterday’s problems were solved. In fact these problems so crowded each other that the only way in which I can recall their exact sequence is by referring to the days on which they took place. For instance, I see that in my account book where I have an orderly habit of noting certain things such as birthdays of relatives, dates when my insurance falls due, and such matters, I have noted several items under Wednesday, June 13th:
Higgins killed in Eighteen during second watch, last night. No clue so far as I know. Wish J. G. would go on about his bridge building. Whole hospital much upset; several nurses threatening to leave. Police underfoot everywhere and suppose it means the whole thing over again. Sent laundry this a.m. Am getting nervous about second watch. Twelve pearl buttons. Wish this affair were safely over.
The “twelve pearl buttons” entry, of course, referred to the fact that I had forgotten to take them out of one of my uniforms before it went to the laundry and must remember to telephone the laundry about them. It was owing to these buttons, however, that one of the most singular and troublesome facts of the whole week came to my attention.
If the second watch of the previous night had seemed like a repetition of a bad dream, then that day, Wednesday, was its continuation. The directors, irate and fussy and hysterically horrified, descended upon St. Ann’s. There were the police, O’Leary, and newspaper men just as it had been before. The only difference was that this last development seemed more terrible than that other—if that were possible. There was a rather grisly fear stalking through the hushed hospital corridors: Who would be the next victim?
The inquest was held at once, that very morning. It was a brief and formal affair, held in the main office with only a few present. Nothing was proved beyond the immediate fact of Higgins’s death and nothing was mentioned that I did not already know. It was evident that O’Leary regarded Higgins’s death as another piece in the puzzle that confronted him and not as an isolated crime.
Shortly after lunch Lance O’Leary called me into the office.
“Why did you not tell me that the key to the south door disappeared last night?” he began abruptly.
“I forgot it. I ordered a new key to be made for that lock and will have it before night. But of course I had to leave the south door unlocked last night.”
“It seems to me you forget rather important things.” He spoke sharply.
“I have certain duties to think of,” I responded as sharply. “And anyway you didn’t ask me.”
The tightness around his eyes relaxed somewhat but he did not smile. He rose, went to the door, and after a dissatisfied glance into the main hall he beckoned me into the inner office, shut the door and sat down at the desk. For a moment he sat there silently, his face in his hands.
“Sit down, Miss
