The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry
better do as Aggie says and come home. You’re a wreck this morning,
and I’ve telephoned for Tommy Andrews.”
Tommy is Tish’s doctor, the son of her cousin, Eliza Peabody Andrews,
a nice enough boy, but frivolous. He is on the visiting staff at the
hospital, and makes rounds once a day, I believe, with an attentive
interne at his elbow and the prettiest nurse he can find carrying the
order book.
Tish set the sweetbread on the bedside table with a bang and looked at
me for an instant over her glasses.
“Don’t be a fool, Lizzie,” she said. “Do you think Tommy Andrews can
make me do anything I don’t want to? Do you think the entire connection
could move me one foot if I didn’t want to go?”
“You can’t spend another night here,” I put in, somewhat feebly.
“Can’t I?” she said grimly. “Not only I can, and will, but you and
Aggie are going to take turns here with me, night and night about,
until this is cleared up. Mark my words, last night was not the end.”
She turned over on her side then, and proceeded to have her back rubbed
with alcohol. And while Miss Lewis rubbed, she told us the story.
“Miss Lewis wanted me to go back to bed,” she said, when she had
reached that point, “but I refused to go. (You needn’t take the skin
off, Miss Lewis.) I stood there in my gown, and I watched them making
up their minds to go to the mortuary. That’s up a narrow flight of
stairs from this end of the hall, not far from this very room. Nobody
was anxious to lead off, but Miss Blake seemed determined to go back
and prove she hadn’t been asleep, and at last they moved off huddled in
a group and left me there. (You haven’t got a spite against my right
shoulder, have you?) Miss Lewis followed them.”
“I didn’t,” said Miss Lewis sourly. Tish turned and looked up at her
over her shoulder.
“You looked as if you were going to, and you know it,” she asserted.
“And don’t interrupt me. Miss Lewis followed, and seeing I was going to
be left alone, and feeling somewhat creepy along the back, I followed
her.”
“Really--!” Miss Lewis began.
“We went up the staircase, and if you and Aggie go out and look, you’ll
see how it leads. There’s a hall up there, with a few private rooms
along one side, and a small ward across. The mortuary is up a flight of
about eight steps, at the far end.
“The hall was dark, and all the light came from the mortuary. The door
was open, and it seemed bright and cheerful enough. I was feeling
pretty sure the black-haired girl had dozed and had a dream, when I saw
Miss Smith, who was in the lead, stoop and pick something up, and hold
it out to the other nurses.
“‘That’s queer!’ she said, and her eyes were fairly starting out of her
head.
“‘What is it?’ said I, limping forward.
“The nurses were staring at the thing she held.
“‘It’s impossible,’ she muttered, ‘but--that’s the bandage I tied
Johnson’s hands together with!’ Miss Lewis, will you let Miss
Pilkington sniff that alcohol for a moment?”
“Fiddle!” Aggie protested feebly. “I’m not at all upset.” Then she put
her head back on her pillow and fainted, as Tish had arranged, with
decency and order.
Well, to go on, it seemed that Tish began to lose her courage about
that time, and when one of the braver nurses came running back, after
a hasty look, and said that Miss Blake was right, and there was no
body in the mortuary, there was almost a stampede. And then it was, I
believe, that heavy steps were heard on the staircase, and it proved to
be Jacobs, the night watchman.
Now, Tish was in her nightgown, and I fancy, although she never
confessed it, that she fell into some sort of a panic and darted into
one of the empty rooms. She herself says Miss Lewis pushed her in, out
of sight, and closed the door, but Miss Lewis indignantly denies this.
“I stood inside the door, in the darkness,” Tish said. “The night
watchman was just outside, and I could hear everything that was said,
plainly. He didn’t believe the body was gone, and said so. I heard him
go toward the mortuary door, and the young women followed him. I could
feel a chair just beside me, and my knee was jumping again, so I sat
down.
“That was when I saw I’d stepped into an occupied room. There was a man
in his night clothes standing not ten feet away, in the middle of the
room, and I jumped up in a hurry.
“‘Good heavens!’ I said, ‘I didn’t know there was anybody here! You’ll
have to excuse me.’”
Tish is an extraordinary woman. She was apparently quite cool, but I
happened to glance at Miss Lewis, and she was pouring a small stream
of alcohol into the lap of Aggie’s black broadcloth tailor-made. She
was a pasty yellow-white.
“The man didn’t say anything, although I could see him moving,” Tish
went on, “I thought he was rude. I got the door open and stepped into
the hall, almost into the arms of the Blake girl.
“‘Well, were you right?’ I asked her.
“She nodded.
“‘Absolutely gone, without a trace!’ she said with a catch in her voice.
“‘Maybe he wasn’t dead,’ I suggested. ‘There’s a lot of catalepsy
around just now.’
“‘He was dead,’ she insisted. ‘Quite dead. He’s been dying for a week.’
“Well, what with the watchman and lights moving around, I wasn’t so
nervous as I had been, and I was pretty much interested.
“‘There’s one thing sure, my dear,’ I said, ‘he won’t go far in that
state. I’ll just hobble down and get my wrapper on and we’ll have a
search. I stepped into that room in my nightgown and I daresay the man
in there nearly died himself--of the shock.’
“‘The man in _there_!’ she said. ‘Why, all these rooms are empty, Miss
Carberry!’
“We stood staring at each other.
“‘There’s a man in there,’ I repeated. ‘He stood up and stared at me
when I went in.’
“She got very white, but she walked right over to the door and pushed
it open. I saw her throw up her hands, and the next minute she had
fallen flat on her face in the doorway, and the night watchman was
running toward us with a lighted candle.”
Tish leaned over and took a drink of water.
“This bed’s full of crumbs, Miss Lewis,” she grumbled. “It’s queer to
me that the only part of this hospital toast that is crisp is the part
I get in the bed!”
“For heaven’s sake, Tish,” I said impatiently, “I suppose she didn’t
faint because there were crumbs in your bed!”
“No,” Tish said, hitching herself over to the other side of the
mattress. “She fainted because the body of the missing spiritualist was
hanging by its neck to the chandelier, fastened up with a roller towel.”
“Dead?” Aggie asked, opening her eyes for the first time.
“Still dead,” Tish replied grimly.
CHAPTER II
THE LITTLE NURSE
Aggie was really frightfully upset. Aggie is rather emotional at any
time, and although she herself is a Methodist, her mother’s only sister
had been a believer in Spiritualism. (They dug her up ten years after
she died, to make room for somebody else, and Aggie’s mother said her
hair had grown to be fully ten feet long, and was curly, whereas in
life it had always been straight. We may sneer at Spiritualism all we
want, but things like that are hard to account for.)
Well, of course, Aggie declared that no human hand had strung poor
old Johnson to the chandelier by a roller towel around his neck, and
although Tish ridiculed the idea, she had to admit that the fourth
dimension had never been accounted for, and that table levitation was
an accepted fact, and even known to the ancients.
We sat there gloomily enough while Miss Lewis fixed Tish’s hair and
massaged her knee. In the middle of the massage Tommy Andrews came in,
whistling.
“Morning, Aunt Tish,” he said. “Morning, Miss Aggie, morning, Miss
Lizzie. How’s the knee? Looks as handsome as ever.”
“She’s been walking on it,” said Miss Lewis sourly, and giving the knee
an extra jab.
Tommy gave Tish a ferocious frown over his glasses.
“Humph!” he said. “I told you to keep off it! Miss Lewis, if she is
obstreperous again, just tie her down with a half-dozen roller towels.”
“Roller towels!” Tish ejaculated. “Why, it was a roller towel
that--that--”
“So you said,” Aggie said somberly, and we stared at each other, we
hardly knew why.
Tish told Tommy the whole story as he strapped her knee with adhesive
plaster. He hadn’t heard it, and he was as much puzzled as we were.
It was Aggie who remarked afterward how his face changed when Tish
mentioned Miss Blake.
“Blake!” he said, glancing up quickly, “not the little nurse with the
dark hair?”
“Yes,” Tish said.
“Damn!” said Tommy. “To have left her alone, like that!” And to Miss
Lewis: “Is she ill to-day?”
“She’s in bed, but she’s not sleeping,” said Miss Lewis, with more
feeling than I’d have expected. “I was going to ask you if you would
see her, Doctor. Since the shake-up yesterday, we have no medical
internes, and the surgical side is full up.”
“She--she didn’t ask for me!” said Tommy, with his brown eyes kindling.
But Miss Lewis shook her head.
“She’s hardly spoken at all. She just lies there with her eyes wide
open and her face white, watching the door. An hour ago one of the
nurses pushed it open quietly, for fear she was asleep. Miss Blake lay
and watched it moving, and when Linda--Miss Smith went in, she fainted
again.”
Tommy took a turn up and down the room. “She’s had a profound shock,”
he said. “I’m not afraid of it, unless--” He stopped at the window and
stood looking out.
“Unless what?” said Tish, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he stalked
over and rang the bell.
“I’ll have the hall nurse relieve you, Miss Lewis,” he said. “We can’t
leave my aunt alone, and somebody must see to Miss Blake. There’s some
natural explanation for what happened last night, and we must find it
and tell her.”
Aggie began to tell about the aunt with the hair, but before she had
even buried her, the door opened and Miss Blake herself came in.
“Did you ring?” she asked. She was dead white, lips and all, with deep
circles around her eyes, but her step was brisk and her voice cheerful.
As Tish said, if you could only have heard her and not seen her, nobody
would have believed what had happened.
Tommy gave her one look, and hauled a chair forward.
“Sit down,” he ordered. “You are not fit to be on duty.”
“Thank you, but--I am all right again,” she said, hesitating.
“Please sit down,” said Tommy, with a note in his voice which I never
heard him use to Tish. And she took the chair, glancing around at all
three of us and then at him.
“Miss Blake,” he said, “I have decided to become your medical adviser!”
“Thanks very much!” she said, with the ghost of a smile.
“On one condition,” he went off, polishing his glasses very hard with
his handkerchief. “You will have to obey orders.”
“That’s the first lesson in the training school,” she assented, the
smile deepening. “Always obey the doctor’s orders.”
“Stuff!” said Tommy sternly. “If I order you to bed this minute,
you’ll not go! The trouble is, Aunt Tish and Honorary Aunts Lizzie and
Aggie,” he said, addressing us each in turn, “the trouble is that in a
hospital medicine is a drug on the market. It’s too accessible. So are
doctors. They’re always on tap, like city water, plentiful and free and
therefore subject, like the said water, to the scorn and contumely of
the beneficiaries.”
“Indeed, Doctor,” Miss Blake began, but he interrupted her.
“Now, Miss Blake,” he said, “at your earnest solicitation I am about to
undertake your case, and the first condition is--”
“Obedience?” She shot a glance at him from under her long, dark
lashes, and Aggie raised her eyebrows across the bed at me.
“Exactly,” he said. “The three aunts, actual and honorary, are
witnesses. You have promised obedience. The first condition is--you are
to leave the hospital immediately and go to a place I know just out of