The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry
Miss Lewis sat back on her heels and shook her head at me.
“He’s a little dazed,” she said. “How in the world did it happen?”
“I was walking on the roof,” said Tommy more agreeably, “and I stepped
on the skylight by mistake. It was dark underneath. It was a darn fool
thing to do!”
The hall nurse and Miss Lewis exchanged glances, and the hall nurse
looked at me and smiled.
“He is still dazed,” she said, smiling. “How could he step on the
skylight? It has a four-foot fence around it!”
We waited for him to explain further, but he let it go at that, and
lay for a little while with his mouth shut hard and a queer thoughtful
look on his face. He roused pretty soon, however, and grunted as if his
shoulder pained him. Then he made Tish get up, and after a minute or so
he sat up himself. He sat there gazing at the skylight, and a few drops
of rain came down through the opening. Tish and I shivered. We were
only partly dressed.
He saw it and was on his feet at once, pretty much himself.
“Now don’t let’s have any fuss about this, please,” he said, addressing
us all. “I forgot the skylight. That’s all. I’m not hurt, Aunt Tish,
and you and Miss Lizzie must go to bed this instant.”
“What are _you_ going to do?” Tish demanded sharply. “Going up on the
roof again?”
“I’ll be down pretty soon,” he evaded. “Jacobs and I will just
straighten this mess a bit.”
I caught a look of intelligence between the two of them, and Jacobs
spoke up.
“If the doctor’ll lend a hand--”
“Tommy,” Tish said suddenly, “the shoulder of your coat is soaked with
blood!”
Tommy put his hand up and felt it.
“I’ve got a scratch somewhere up there,” he said coolly. “It isn’t
going to be touched until the two ladies in negligée and curl papers
are safe in bed with hot-water bottles at their feet. Miss Lewis, Miss
Carberry is using her knee again!”
“I’d use a switch if I had one,” said Tish, almost with tears in her
eyes. But Tommy has the same will that she has herself, and we were
down-stairs between blankets, I on the couch in Tish’s room and Tish
in bed, with our feet against hot-water bottles, and drinking cups of
hot milk, almost before we knew it.
But Tommy and the watchman did not clean up the broken glass in the
upper hall. Whatever they did, that glass was still there the next
morning, and none of us disturbed the general belief that it had been
broken by the hail-storm that came just before dawn.
I was so hoarse the next morning that I could hardly speak, and Tish
kept me on her couch. Her knee was stiff again, too. Including Aggie,
although she had slept through the skylight incident, we were pretty
well used up, and Tish would not let us go home. It was just as well.
She should hardly have faced the events of the next two days without us.
Aggie had her breakfast in bed, but Tish and I had Briggs, the orderly
who carried in our trays, set out a table for us, and were really very
snug. Tish was as cross as two sticks until she’d had her tea, when
she grew more companionable.
“I want to ask you something, Lizzie,” she said as she poured her
second cup. “How, when we saw Tommy go into the mortuary, as plain as
day, could he fall down from the roof?”
“Well,” I said, buttering my toast, “you know about the what-you-call-’ems
in India. They send up a rope into the sky and then a boy up the rope,
and after he has disappeared they give the rope a jerk and he falls,
apparently from nowhere. It’s some sort of optical illusion.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Tish observed sharply. “I’ve been thinking it over
in bed. There must be a fire-escape there somewhere.”
“Oh!” I hadn’t thought of a fire-escape.
“Now, then,” said Tish, “suppose there is a fire-escape, and the Blake
girl went up by it to the roof, and Tommy followed her. Which is what
happened, Lizzie. I’m nobody’s fool; I’ve got eyes in my head. If that
young woman had jumped off the window sill, Tommy Andrews would have
jumped too. Now, then, _why_ did the Blake girl go to the roof?”
“Maybe she wanted air,” I suggested. Tish waved her napkin at me.
“Air!” she snapped. “When you want air, do you generally climb a
fire-escape to a roof, when there’s a staircase up to it, and entice
young men to fall down through skylights and break their shoulders?
Lizzie,”--she leaned over--“Lizzie, that young vixen pushed him through
that skylight and I can prove it!”
“No!”
“Yes.” She got up and, going to the cupboard, lifted down her best hat.
“Look here!” she said, and took from its crown a brass candlestick, the
base bent almost double.
“I was sitting on that when I held Tommy’s head last night. It came
down with the skylight,” she said. “That’s the candlestick the Blake
girl was carrying. What do you make of it?”
I was speechless. Tish unlocked the lower bureau drawer and put
the candlestick in it, beside the roller towel marked S. P. T. and
something else, which I learned later was the bandage Linda Smith
had found in the upper hall, and identified as the one that had tied
Johnson’s hands.
“Now,” she said, locking the drawer again, “I’m going to have a little
chat with Miss Blake. It’s my belief that she let old Johnson die from
neglect, or gave him poison by mistake. And now he’s haunting her--or
she’s haunting him, which is what it looks like.”
But we had no chat with Miss Blake that day. The day nurse, taking her
a tray of breakfast, found her delirious in bed, with a raging fever.
Miss Lewis went over to see her.
“She’s been preparing for this for some time,” she said when she came
back. “She was queer yesterday--you remember, Miss Lizzie--and last
night she did a funny thing. She got the night nurse to give her a
bottle of morphine--enough to kill a horse. And I found it under her
pillow this morning, almost half of it gone!”
“Great heavens!” Tish said. “Why, the girl’s a potential murderess!”
Miss Lewis turned, with a pillow in her arms. “Not a bit of it,” she
said. “There’s something queer about this place lately, and I don’t
care who hears me say it. But folks will have to make insinuations
against Ruth Blake over my dead body!”
She glared at Tish, and Tish at her.
“I have reasons to doubt that Miss Blake is all you think her,” said
Tish stiffly. But Miss Lewis came and stood over her unpleasantly.
“I’m not for making any trouble, Miss Carberry,” she said, “but this
house was calm enough until two days ago, and Ruth Blake has been here
six months, and what’s more, I notice one thing. The most of the
excitement has been around where you are. Maybe you’re psychic, as they
call it, and don’t know it. Maybe it’s--something else. But it wasn’t
Miss Blake who first saw Johnson hanging by his neck, and it wasn’t
Miss Blake the skylight all but fell on, and it wasn’t Miss Blake’s
nephew that fell through the skylight, and it wasn’t in the room of
Miss Blake’s best friend next door that a death-cold foot--”
But Tish put her fingers in her ears and fled to Aggie.
Nevertheless, Miss Lewis had set me to thinking.
CHAPTER VIII
OVERHEARD IN THE DORMITORY
Aggie’s hay fever was bad that morning, and she stayed in bed. Tish
and I went in and sat with her after breakfast, and she was very
disagreeable.
“I shall certaidly tell Tobby whad I thig of hib,” she grumbled. “I
told hib I could dot hold that therbobeter. _That_ is what gave be that
dreab. If it _was_ a dreab!”
“Certainly it was a dream,” said Tish.
“I’b dot so sure!” Aggie retorted.
Well, relieved of the hay fever, Aggie’s story was something like this:
She had been asleep, and was dreaming she had turned into a thermometer
herself, and as she got hotter, having too many blankets on, she said
she felt herself expanding until her head touched something that she
thought was the head of the bed. But she said in her dream she kept on
expanding, and she was just saying to Tommy Andrews, in a fury, that
if it grew any hotter she’d burst, when something gave way at the head
of the bed with a sort of tearing sound, and she wakened. She said it
was a full minute before she was certain she _wasn’t_ a thermometer and
hadn’t expanded right up through the top. Then she reached up to turn
over her pillow, and just beside her was a dead foot. She had thought
she was still dreaming and had actually caught hold of it. But it
disappeared under her fingers, dissolved, as you might say, and there
was no body. Aggie was positive about that. It was then she sat up and
screamed.
Well, we kept the knowledge of what had happened to Tommy from her, and
left her sitting up in bed using a nasal spray. Tish was wonderfully
better after breakfast, and we walked up and down the corridor, she
without the cane and hardly a limp.
It was Tish who suggested that we go into the nurses’ dormitory and ask
how Miss Blake was, and after we had located Miss Lewis, gossiping with
the day nurse in a corner, we slipped in. Patients are forbidden in the
dormitory.
The door to Miss Blake’s room was closed, but somebody was inside,
talking. Tish and I waited outside, and we could hardly help hearing
what was said. It was a woman’s voice, familiar enough, but I couldn’t
place it.
“You must stay in bed, Ruth,” she was pleading. “Oh, my dear, how can I
forgive myself!”
“Let me up!” Ruth Blake’s voice, insistent and querulous. “They are
hanging him up by the neck--” her voice died away in a groan.
The other woman broke into frightened sobbing, and Tish put her hand on
the knob. But I held her back.
“I have killed her!” said the voice. “Always thinking of myself! Ruth!
Listen to me!”
“Through the skylight!” babbled Ruth. “I tell you, he is dead!”
“Ruth!” begged the voice, and more sobbing, growing gradually quieter.
Then silence, as if the sick girl had dropped asleep.
Tish and I slipped away, and back through the connecting door to our
room. Once there, by common mute consent we left the door into the
corridor open and took up such positions as enabled us to watch the
people who passed along the hall. Ten minutes brought nobody. Then we
heard the door open, and brisk steps coming along the hall.
“Well,” said Miss Linda Smith, in her cheerful way, “well, how’s the
knee this morning, Miss Carberry?”
“Better,” Tish replied genially.
“That’s fine,” said Miss Smith and hurried along, humming a bit of a
song. Tish and I looked at each other. In spite of the cheerfulness,
of the eyes bathed in cold water and carefully powdered, it was Miss
Smith’s voice we had heard in the Blake girl’s room.
But when we got to talking it over we couldn’t see that what we had
heard had really any importance. Miss Smith had left the girl alone
in the mortuary, and was reproaching herself for having done it. That
was all. But as Tish said, what did she mean by saying she was always
thinking of herself? It was hardly, as Tish pointed out, an act of
supreme selfishness to go down and get an armful of sheets to cover a
corpse!
Tommy came in at eleven o’clock, freshly shaved and linened, and
apparently as well as ever. He had been over to see Miss Blake first,
but found her sleeping, which he considered a good sign. I noticed that
he kept his right hand in his pocket, and did not use the arm at all.
He said the shoulder was stiff, naturally, and that he must have been
sleep-walking himself to get over that fence and through the skylight
the way he had.
“Sleep-walking!” said Tish sharply. “Do you think that that girl was
sleep-walking?”
“I certainly do,” said Tommy.
“Then you’re a fool,” said Tish. “If she _was_ sleep-walking, so was
the burglar who took my disciple spoons last fall. Sleep-walking!”
“I wish you--”
“You’re wishing me bad luck if you feel the way you look!” said Tish
shrewdly. “Now, Tommy, I’m going to get to the bottom of all this,