Читать книгу Mystery Cases of Letitia Carberry, Tish - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 18

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As I have said. Tommy came in about dawn. Miss Lewis had dropped into an uneasy sleep, and Tish was dozing in the chair beside her, Aggie was stretched out on the couch, with a cubeb cigarette burning in a saucer beside her, and was resurrecting her mother's sister again when he came in. He beckoned me out into the hall after he had told us about the coat.

"Miss Blake is ill again," he said. "The second shock, after the first, you know."

"Not seriously. Tommy?" I asked, putting my hand on his arm.

"I don't know," he said miserably. "People don't go from one fainting attack into another without—I guess you've seen how it is. Miss Lizzie. I—it would kill me if any harm came to her!"

"No harm is coming to her," I reassured him. "If the strain has had this effect on Miss Lewis, who has about the same nervous system as a cow, of course it would go hard with a finely organized girl like Miss Blake. And —don't be foolish, Tommy. No finding of surgical knives in that girl's room, or of rosettes where they don't happen to belong, is going to make her guilty of anything wrong. If she's in trouble, it's not of her own making."

He fairly put his arm around me and hugged me, to the horror of a passing nurse.

"Blessed are the spinsters!" he cried, "for they are the salt of the earth! Do you really think that?"

"I do," I said firmly. "And shame on you, Tommy Andrews, for having thought anything else. I shall stay with her for an hour or two."

"If you will," he said gratefully, and we started toward the dormitory.

On the way over. Tommy told me more clearly what had happened. The body of the "carbolic case" had been taken to the mortuary by Jacobs and Briggs, Marshall, the other night orderly, having refused to go. On the way up, Jacobs, who was running the elevator, complained that it was out of order. It was an old-fashioned lift, moving always very slowly, and built on the familiar cable and wheel principle. Twice during the ascent the cage stopped entirely.

Near the top floor the cage began to vibrate wildly and Briggs had been obliged to steady the wheeled table containing the corpse.

Jacobs, who had told Tommy the story, said that both he and Briggs were alarmed, fearing that one of the cables had broken; while he worked with the lever in the cage, Briggs looked up apprehensively through the metal grill in the center of the cage. The car was still shaking from side to side, and refused to obey the lever. Jacobs turned to Briggs and threw up his hands.

"It's stuck!" he said. "Either it's going to drop, when it gets ready, or—"

He said Briggs wasn't listening, but was standing looking up at the grill with his face blue-white. Jacobs looked up, too, but he was a second too late. He had a sense of something white moving just out of his range of vision, and then the car ceased vibrating.

Briggs was still staring up and the car was moving again as if nothing had happened to it. At the mortuary floor he had touched Briggs on the arm, and he shivered and helped him wheel the table out of the cage. Then Briggs asked him to lower the cage until he could see the top, but there was nothing there. After that they took the body to the mortuary.

"What did Briggs think he saw?" I asked nervously, holding to Tommy's arm. The hall was dark.

"It's rather fantastic," Tommy said, "but— he declared there was a bare foot planted directly on the grill of the cage."

"A foot!" I gasped.

"A foot," said Tommy soberly. "And I'm going to tell you what I wouldn't care to tell Aunt Tish or Miss Aggie, I've been on top of the cage myself, just now, with a candle. There are innumerable footprints in the dust, distinct marks of a naked foot. But it is always the right foot!"

I shivered. "Tommy!" I quavered. "The mark on the wall where Johnson was found was—the print of a naked right foot."

"I know," he replied, and fell to thinking. "Well," he said, after a moment, "I'd better go on. Jacobs moved the cage down, but there was nothing on it, or in the shaft over their heads. It ends just above that floor, and as the doors to the shaft were all locked, if anything had been above the cage, it could hardly have got away. Briggs himself said that he thought it was an optical illusion, and was apparently not nervous when Jacobs went down to get Miss Lewis. He was gone some time, Miss Lewis, as I have said, having insisted on being fortified with food before she went up."

Finally, as we knew, he had got Miss Lewis and they went back to the mortuary. Briggs was sitting there quietly, with his pipe lighted and a newspaper on his knee. But he was neither reading nor smoking and Jacobs said he was staring overhead, with a queer expression on his face, as if he were listening to something.

He started to say something to Jacobs, but Jacobs signaled him to be cautious and pointed to Miss Lewis. Briggs had nodded and resumed his pipe. Everything was quiet and peaceful, Jacobs insisted. Tommy and Hicks had appeared sometime before and had gone up the stairs to the roof. The man who had been sent to guard that corridor, one of the laundry men, was dozing in a chair half way down. Jacobs, not being needed in the mortuary, went down to him and roused him by shaking. He and the laundry man were talking when Miss Lewis came down to the empty ward across from them, and turning on the lights, went in search of something she needed.

Jacobs was positive there had not been a sound from the mortuary, except that a gust of air from its open windows had swept along the hall, and the glass-topped doors slammed shut. There had been no outcry, no struggle. When Miss Lewis went back briskly, and opened the doors, she found Briggs apparently gone, and the sheeted figure on the table as before.

It was only when she turned down the sheet that she discovered the truth—the body of the murdered orderly on the table and the corpse not to be seen. It was then she screamed.

"We have sent for the police," Tommy finished. "We didn't want any publicity, but now it has to come. It's beyond us. The Strange thing is," he said, "at the time it happened, every corridor, every ward, every possible means of access to the mortuary was guarded."

"Yes, and with the one nearest it sound asleep!" I commented scornfully. "And goodness knows how many of the others!"

"Jacobs was in the upper hall," he contended, "and whoever was asleep beforehand, none of them was asleep after Miss Lewis shrieked. Miss Lizzie. There are only two means of access to the mortuary, one is the fire-escape and the other the steps. Jacobs was just beyond the steps all the time, and Hicks and I were on the roof near the fire-escape. Nobody left by those two exits. That's positive."

"There is another door in the mortuary," I said. "What is that?"

"Mortuary linen closet," said Tommy. "Always kept locked, and still locked."

"You haven't examined it?"

"The linen room woman carries the key, and she is away over night."

"Nobody was missing in the house?"

"We made a tally immediately, with the guards all watching every door and window. Two internes and I made the count ourselves, not a soul was missing.'

"He was—strangled?'

"No. That's one of the queerest things about It. He had been squeezed —his chest is caved in, and I think the autopsy will show that a point of one of the ribs entered the heart. Death was almost instantaneous."

"And the brown coat?" I asked. "How did it get there?"

"God knows," said Tommy, and rapped at Miss Blake's door.