Mystery Cases of Letitia Carberry, Tish. Mary Roberts Rinehart
put down.
"The lights were on, and Briggs was smoking. We had a few words over that, because the orderlies are not allowed to smoke on duty, and tobacco makes my head ache."
Tish leaned forward in her chair and looked at Miss Smith.
"Do you often have words with the orderlies, Miss Smith?"
Miss Smith smiled cheerfully.
"Quite often," she said. 'They're such a stupid lot."
"You don't think it possible that these men may have retaliated by playing a practical joke on you?"
Miss Smith considered.
"No," she said, "I don't. When I found the linen closet up there locked and went downstairs for sheets, they were both at work in the wards. Anyhow, they might be willing to play a ghastly trick on me, but I don't think they would try to frighten Miss Blake. She's very well liked."
"And after you went for the sheets?"
That's all I know. Miss Carberry. The rest you heard Miss Blake tell."
"Are you sure," Aggie broke in suddenly, leaning forward, "are you sure, Miss Smith, that he didn't do it himself?"
Miss Smith stared. "Why, he was dead. Miss Pilkington," she said. "He'd been sick for months, and if he was alive as I am this minute, he couldn't hang himself by the neck, the way he was hanging, with nothing to stand on near, or any chair kicked away. The center of the room was clear when we found him, and the nearest thing was the foot of the bed, a good eight feet away."
"He was a—Spiritualist, I think?"
"Yes— yes, indeed," Miss Smith laughed. "It would have made you creepy to hear him, lying there carrying on whole conversations with nobody near, and raps on his bed until the nurses balked at changing the sheets!"
Aggie shivered. "Gracious!" she said, "I hope they don't send him back here for the dissecting room. I shan't be easy until he is safely buried."
"OK, you needn't worry about that," Miss Smith said cheerfully, getting up to go. "We wouldn't be likely to get all of him anyhow."
Well, as Tish said, she hadn't learned much she hadn't known before, except that Johnson had been left in the ward fifty minutes after he died, instead of ten. But although the people in the hospital seemed disposed to let the affair alone after sending the body away, and to get back to its business, which, as Miss Smith said, is full of curious things anyhow, Tish, as I say, having taken hold, was not going to let go.
Promptly at noon by the traveling clock, Miss Lewis having taken herself off, Tish lifted herself out of her wheel chair and reached for her cane.
"You can stay here, Aggie," she said, "and if Lewis comes back, I'm seeing Lizzie to the elevator."
"She won't believe a word of it," Aggie objected.
"Then think up something she will believe. Lizzie is coming with me."
I wasn't surprised when Tish turned to the left, in the corridor, and hobbled to the foot of a flight of stairs. She stopped there and turned.
"We're going up to see that room in daylight, Lizzie," she said, "but I want you to read this first. You're a practical woman, and if any of your family ever grew a head of hair after they died, at least you don't brag about it."
She took a page of the morning paper, folded small, from the sleeve of her dressing-gown, and pointed to a paragraph.
"Amos Johnson, once a well-known local medium, died last night at the Dunkirk hospital, after a long illness. Johnson was sixty-seven years of age, and had lived in retirement and poverty since the murder of his wife some years ago, a crime for which he was tried and exonerated. The woman's body was found in the parlor of the Johnson home, hanging to a chandelier by a roller towel knotted about the neck."
Tish was watching me.
"Well, what do you make of that, Lizzie?" she asked.
"Coincidence," I said, with affected calmness. "Many a man's hung his wife to something when he got tired of her, and when you come to think of it, a roller towel is usually handy."
We didn't look at each other.
Chapter IV.
The Footprint on the Wall
Well, Tish and I examined the room, and I must say at first sight it was disappointing. It was an ordinary hospital room, with two windows, and a bureau between them, a washstand, a single brass bed, set high and not made up, the pillows being piled in the center of the mattress and all covered with a sheet, and two chairs, a straight one and a rocker. Except that the heavy chandelier was bent somewhat from the perpendicular, there was no sign of what had happened there.
Tish sat down in the rocker and looked thoughtfully about the room.
"Under ordinary circumstances," she said, "if you hang a broadcloth skirt on a chandelier to brush it, you'll have the whole business and half the ceiling about your head in a minute. And yet, look at that, hardly bent!"
The room had evidently not been disturbed since Johnson had been found there. The straight chair had been drawn beneath the chandelier, and Tish pointed out the scratches made by the feet of whoever had cut down the body. Over the back of the chair still hung the roller towel, twisted into a grisly rope.
Tish picked it up and examined it.
"Pretty extravagant of material, aren't they?" she said. "No Ladies' Aid that I ever saw would put more than two yards of twelve-cent stuff in a roller towel. Look at the weight of that, and the length!"
"There's something on it," I said, and we looked together. What we found were only three letters, stamped in blue ink.
"S. P. T.?" said Tish. "What in creation is S. P. T.?"
She sat down with the towel in her hand, and we puzzled over it together.
"It's the initials of the sewing circle that sent it in," I asserted "That S. stands for Society."
"I've got it," said Tish. "Society for the Prevention of Tetanus."
"That doesn't help much," I said. "We could find out by asking; I daresay the nurses know."
But Tish wouldn't hear of it She said the towel was the only clue we had, and she wasn't going to give it to a hospital full of people who didn't seem to care whether their corpses walked around at night or not
She rolled up the towel under her arm, and in the doorway she turned to take a final survey of the room.
"Well," she said;, "we haven't examined the dust with the microscope, but I think it's been worth while It would be curious, Lizzie, if his murdered wife's initials were S. P, T."
"They couldn't be," I said. "Her last name was Johnson, wasn't it?"
But Tish wasn't looking at me. She was staring intently at the wall over the head of the bed, and I followed her eyes.
The wall was gray, a dull gray below, and a frieze of paler gray above. The dividing line between the two colors was not a picture molding—the room had no pictures—but a narrow iron pipe, perhaps an inch in thickness, and painted the color of the frieze. Why a pipe, I never asked, but I fancy its roundness, its lack of angles and lines, had been thought, like the gray walls, to be restful to the eyes.
Directly over the head of the bed, the pipe-molding was loosened from the wall, as if by a powerful wrench, and sagged at least four inches.
"Look at that!" said Tish, pointing her cane. "Lizzie, I want you to help me up on the bureau."
"I'll do nothing of the sort, Tish," I snapped. "You ought to be ashamed with that leg."
But she had pulled out the lowest drawer and was standing on it by that