“Suppose he had just kept silent, had said nothing at all?” I suggested curiously.
“Oh, I knew he would talk. He had a guilty conscience, you know. It wouldn’t have been human to refuse to talk. He knew his own guilt and hence would try to appear innocent. He was bewildered, too, and was never a practical, quick-thinking man. It was a chance but not a risk.”
There was a long silence. Away down the hall I heard the faint, muffled sound of the breakfast bell. With that I roused myself and thought for the first time of the wing. I rose, picked up my ruined hat, and at the door stopped to look back on that room.
Room 18! What it had held! What it had witnessed!
O’Leary followed me from the room, Maida and Jim, too. Once in the corridor I found that the small, red signal light was still gleaming dully. I returned to Room 18, pulled the light cord, mechanically straightened the bed, and closed the window.
Maida and Jim had disappeared when I returned to the corridor. O’Leary was standing at the south door, looking through the glass with an amused twinkle in his clear gray eyes. Following his glance I saw Maida’s white uniform and Jim’s tweed coat vanishing along the once more sunny orchard path.
“Young idiots,” I murmured. “And before breakfast, too.”
The path recalled to me the Letheny cottage at its other end.
“What about Corole and Hajek?” I asked.
“They were after the radium,” said O’Leary hesitantly. “But after all, I think the best thing to do is to get rid of Hajek and let them leave.”
“This means reorganization, new doctors, new methods—everything.”
O’Leary nodded.
“How true it is,” he said thoughtfully, “that even in one of the noblest professions there are scoundrels.”
“But the proportion is much smaller,” I said loyally. “You’ll find a hundred defaulting bankers for one doctor who is untrue to his trust.”
He smiled at the warmth of my defence.
“You are recovering yourself, Miss Keate. That last remark was quite in your normal manner.”
And at that Olma Flynn tugged my sleeve.
“Will you OK the charts, Miss Keate?” Her eyes were round with curiosity and she cast a speculative glance toward Room 18.
Well, that is about all.
The staff doctors met that morning, and the board of directors, and were most generous in their assistance. It was not long before we were fully equipped with resident doctors and reorganized.
Our new head doctor has a wife of Anglo-Saxon ancestry who has filled the cottage with chintz-covered furniture and muslin curtains and likes to head committees. She has a nosy disposition and we don’t get along well. We have two new internes, too; fresh-cheeked boys whom Miss Dotty pets something scandalous.
Dr. Balman developed an infection in the bruise on his cheek and lived only a short while. Corole and Hajek disappeared and have not been heard of since, though lately a report came to me that a woman much resembling Corole and dressed very beautifully had been seen at a European pleasure resort where she made large sums of money gambling. I judged that Corole was falling into soft spots as usual, unhampered by a conscience.
Maida and Jim left for Russia very soon after the events that I have herein recorded took place. I hear from them every so often, long letters full of news and snapshots.
I see Lance O’Leary once in a while, too, and indeed, have given him some slight help on a case or two.
But for the most part I am still at St. Ann’s, going about my business as usual, save that I miss a pair of steel-blue eyes.
And I avoid the closed, mysterious door of Room 18.
Colophon
The Patient in Room 18
was published in by
Mignon G. Eberhart.
This ebook was produced for
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The cover page is adapted from
The Agnew Clinic,
a painting completed in by
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