Mystery Cases of Letitia Carberry, Tish. Mary Roberts Rinehart
Says she's all right, and if people don't stop bothering her she is going out somewhere in the country where they have a dog and kittens! That's what she said! Not cat and kittens—"
Sensible girl," said Tommy, happy again. She-hasn't changed her mind about seeing me?"
"No, nor about locking the door. And what's more—" She stopped and glanced at Tommy. "I'd like to speak to you a moment in the hall, Doctor."
"What sort of shilly-shallying is that?" demanded Tish. "Can't you speak to him here?"
"I can not," said Miss Lewis, glaring back at Tish, her thumbs inside her apron belt. "It isn't considered shilly-shallying in this hospital for a nurse to make a report to a doctor, and if you'll read the rules on that door—"
"I'll speak to you in the hall," said Tommy. "Miss Lewis is right. Aunt Tish. If it's in line with what we've been discussing, I'll tell you."
But Tish isn't a woman to take chances. Afterward, she justified her looking through the keyhole on the plea that she was making a scientific theory to fit the case, and if it were not for keyholes many a murderer would have gone unhung to his grave. At the time, however, I was rather horrified.
She had plenty of time to tell me what she saw, as it happened, for Tommy did not come back until late in the afternoon, after the guinea-pig incident.
Tish says that when she'd got them in focus, as you may say. Miss Lewis was pulling something out of her sleeve. It was a knife, Tish says, with a short, thin blade that looked as sharp as a razor.
"One of the knives from the operating-room, Doctor," Miss Lewis said. "I thought I'd better not let the old ladies see it."
I daresay that was when I saw Tish's back stiffen.
"Great Scott!" said Tommy.
"I found it on the floor under her bed," Miss Lewis went on. "She didn't see me pick it up.
Tommy was staring at the blade.
"It's been used," he said. "Look at this!"
"Exactly," said Miss Lewis. "It's from the operating room, Doctor, and they don't put away their knives in that condition."
"What do you mean by that?" Tommy demanded sharply. But Miss Lewis only looked at him.
"I don't mean anything against Ruth Blake, if that's what you are indignant about," she said. "But I'm glad I found that knife. There's enough talk. Doctor."
They moved down the hall then, so that was all Tish heard. But she added, "Knife, bloodstained," to her sheet of paper.
Aggie being half drowsy and altogether sulky, we took a little time to go over the notes Tish had made, and they pointed as many different ways as a porcupine—Johnson, with his raps and his talk about coming back, taken from the mortuary and hung by his neck with a roller towel marked S. P. T.; the coincidence of Johnson's wife murdered a few years before and hung up the same way; Miss Blake wandering around at night with a brass candlestick and a blood-stained knife from the operating room, and Tommy Andrews falling or being pushed through a skylight and coming out of the excitement with a bite instead of a fracture! And then there were smaller things, though strange enough—the twisted pipe-molding and the footprints on the wall up-stairs in the room where Johnson's body was found; the loosened molding in Aggie's room and her story about the foot; the fact that Johnson was left to die in the care of a convalescent typhoid and the ward left alone for fifty-five minutes; Linda Smith and her speech to Miss Blake, not to mention the darkish bundle.
It was Tish who advanced the gigantic ape theory. She'd been reading The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and some of the clues seemed to fit, especially Tommy's shoulder. The loosened molding helped out the theory, and as Tish said, also the stringing up of Johnson's body, which, if you left out the supernatural, had apparently been done by something tremendously strong, but without intelligence.
Well, the more we thought of it the more certain we felt. The footprint part of it, too, we considered corroborative evidence, until we got the encyclopedia and learned that the great apes have the equivalent of four hands, and not a foot at all.
But Tish was undaunted. "Mark my words, Lizzie," she said, "they've lost a chimpanzee or a gorilla from the Zoological Garden—not that they'll acknowledge it. You remember when the lion got loose and ate a colored woman out the Ralston road, and how the papers denied everything until they found the beast dead of indigestion in a cellar? But that is what has happened."
Well, I thought it likely enough myself, and Tish called up Charlie Sands, who is on a newspaper and is another of Tish's nephews.
Lizzie and I," said Tish over the 'phone, have reason to believe that there is a great ape—a-p-e—ape! Monkey, monkey—yes. A large monkey loose, and we want you to trace it."
There was a long pause. Tish said afterward that Charlie claimed to have fainted at the other end of the wire, and to have had to be restored with whisky and soda. However, which is more to the point, he promised to find out for us what he could, and Tish hung up the receiver.
"He'll do it, too, Lizzie," she said, "although he spoke to me gently, as if he thought my reason had entirely gone. But, as he said, it won't hurt to scare up the Zoo people anyhow. They're very casual about their animals."
Now, two things were discovered that afternoon, neither of them to be explained by anything we knew. The first one was that Tommy Andrews and Mr. Harrison, the superintendent, making a careful examination of the roof, found a spattering of dried blood leading from the broken skylight to the ridge pole, where it ceased abruptly. The second one was made by Aggie and myself.
About three o'clock that afternoon Aggie got into her clothes and insisted on coming into Tish's room, which was inconvenient, Tish expecting the message from Charlie Sands at any moment. Aggie was nervous, but her head was clearer. She'd been thinking things over, and she knew now that what had happened the night before had been a message from the roofer.
"Then the least said about it the better!" Tish snapped. "If he hasn't any better sense than to materialize his foot, and you a woman of your years and respectability, he'd better go back where he came from."
For heaven's sake, Tish," Aggie pleaded, looking over her shoulder. "He may be listening to us now!"
"I don't care if he is," said Tish recklessly. "If he'd materialize a will, now, leaving you that house in Groveton! But a foot!"
"I'm not so sure it was a foot," Aggie said restlessly. "I've been thinking, Tish—he was a large man, you know. It may have been a hand."
Now at that moment the telephone bell rang, and Tish signaled to me to take Aggie out at once. I got up and took her by the arm.
"I'll walk up and down the corridor with you, Aggie," I said. "You need exercise."
"I don't care to walk," she objected, trying to sit down. "See who is at the telephone, Tish. I expect my laundress is through washing and wants her money."
"I'd like you to see the hospital," I said desperately as the 'phone rang again. "The—the guinea-pigs, Aggie." Miss Lewis had told me about them.
Now, Aggie loves a guinea-pig. It's a queer taste, but she says they neither bark like dogs nor scratch like cats, and they have a nice way of wiggling their noses.
"Guinea-pigs!" she said in an ecstasy. "Where?"
"In the laboratory," said I, and led her out of the room.
She put on all her wraps and Miss Lewis took us to the laboratory, which is a small brick building set off by itself in the hospital yard, with Aggie cooing in anticipation and wanting to send out and buy a cabbage for them. Doctor Grim, who was the surgical interne, met us as we were crossing the yard, and volunteered to let us in.
"You know," he said, feeling in his pocket for the keys, "they're not attractive as some guinea-pigs and rabbits I have known under happier circumstances. They scratch a good bit—some think it's fleas; some say it's germs."
"Germs?" Aggie asked, puzzled.
"Oh,