Mystery Cases of Letitia Carberry, Tish. Mary Roberts Rinehart
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.
"T-ook 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 tinlocked 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 Car-| berry," 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 blinking.
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 certainly 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!"
'Tret 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