Читать книгу The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart - 25 Titles in One Edition - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 85

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Miss Lizzie's narrative stops here. My Aunt Letitia, during her convalescence in the hospital, having been discovered poring over books of aerial navigation, and having written to the Wrights, offering to turn over a second-hand automobile of standard make, a thirty-foot motor launch, and an equity in money, for one of their model biplanes. Miss Lizzie and Miss Aggie hurriedly took her to Mount Clemens for a series of baths.

"I shall take up Miss Lizzie's narrative with the story told to my Aunt Letitia by Miss Blake, now my wife. Miss Blake was young, only nineteen, and had been in the hospital only six months. Miss Smith was the head day nurse in K ward, with Miss Blake as her assistant. Miss Smith had almost completed her three years' course, and was not popular with the officers. She was, however, a good nurse, and unlike Miss Blake, was dependent on her earnings for her support.

"On Tuesday evening, trouble between the two medical internes and the hospital superintendent, Mr. Harrison, reached a climax. The three men had a wordy argument on the staircase near K ward, and Linda Smith (who was not over-scrupulous) had shut herself in a small supply room near to listen. The ward was in charge of Miss Blake, who was serving the patients' suppers from a table in the center of the long room. Behind a screen, in the second bed from the far end of the ward lay Amos Johnson, peacefully dying. Beyond him, in the end bed, lay a delirious patient named Wesley Barker, an Englishman, who had been sent in from the Zoological Garden, badly injured by the great ape, Hero, since dead.

"Barlcer was tied down. Two long towels, one over his arms and one over his legs, were knotted beyond his reach under the edge of the bed. His fractured ribs had healed, but he was still delirious. His delirium in the last day or two had taken on an acuter form, and was mania. Articulate speech had changed to noisy ape-like chatterings. He made strange facial grimaces, and being tied, had more than once tried to bite his nurses.

"Miss Blake filled a feeding cup with broth, and having attended to the other patients, went behind Johnson's screen to feed the maniac in the last bed. To her horror, the bed was empty!

"Nervous, but not excessively alarmed. Miss Blake called Linda Smith, and they searched the ward. Barker had gone, perhaps by creeping behind the heads of the beds to the doorway, and there, watching his chance, escaping to the fire-escape by a hall window near. Although only late September, it was cold, and he wore only the clothing he had worn in bed, a hospital nightshirt.

"Miss Blake wished to raise an immediate alarm, but Linda Smith refused. She was responsible: an investigation would show she had been absent from her ward without reason, and for some time. She was in disfavor already, and she could not risk losing her diploma. She had an invalid sister dependent on her. By threats and tears she made Miss Blake promise to say nothing of Barker's escape and to help her find him.

"It was almost dark by that time, and the girls were in despair. Linda Smith went down the fire-escape to the courtyard, and found the gate man staring through the bars at the river.

"I dropped a rubber sheet out the window," she said, "but I don't see it. What are you looking at?"

"The gate man pointed to the Center Street bridge, which crosses the river near the hospital. There's a woman out there in white,' he said, 'and she looks as if she might be thinking—there, look at that!'

The bridge was practically deserted. She and the gate man saw the figure move back a step or two, run forward and dive over the rail. The gate man unlocked the gate and ran out, but the toll house is at the east end of the bridge, and by the time he had raised the alarm there was nothing to be seen. Linda Smith went back to Miss Blake, and had hysteria in the K ward linen room.

Discovery meant disgrace to her, so she made up her mind not to be discovered. Barker had had no family and no friends. No one had visited him except the assistant keeper, and he had not shown any particular solicitude. Linda Smith thought she saw a way out, and half frightened, half coaxed Miss Blake into helping her. Remember, they both thought Barker was dead, and Linda Smith threatened in case of discovery, to throw herself off the roof. Miss Blake's part, therefore, was the acquiescence of a young and terrified girl, in a situation that would have shaken older and stronger nerves.

The two medical internes left at seven o'clock, as a result of the dispute with the superintendent. At ten minutes past seven, Linda Smith sent down a dismissal card for one Wesley Barker, with the forged signature of one of the departed internes. At twenty minutes past, the yellow ticket came back from the office, the ticket which would permit Wesley Barker to pass the door man and leave the hospital for good. Linda Smith destroyed it.

At seventy-thirty the night nurse. Miss Durand, was told that one of the heaviest burdens had been taken from her, and went to work cheerfully. But at ten o'clock that night Linda Smith, lying awake in bed in her room in the dormitory, saw Wesley Barker climb up the fire-escape outside her window, stopping now and then, monkey fashion, to swing out over the dizzy height by his hands.

The girl was almost frenzied. She got up and dressed and went to the roof. To her horror she found the superintendent, Mr. Harrison, smoking there and she almost fainted when she got back to her room. But the superintendent was not molested. There was no alarm.

At midnight she formed the resolution of getting Barker's clothes from the basement clothes room and putting them on the roof, in the hope that he would put them on and go away. Properly dressed, even if he went back to the Zoo, she could claim that he had been taken away by somebody in a carriage, and might still put through the deception. In any event,-his clothes could not be left there. Their discovery meant her disgrace.

She had forgotten, however, that Barker had been brought in in the ambulance, and had no clothes. Afraid to go to the basement alone, she asked Miss Durand to go to the clothes room with her, giving as an excuse that she had forgotten to send Johnson's clothes to the office, a rule in case of death, and on finding nothing there in Barker's name, she did the only thing she could think of— took Johnson's old brown suit, which, with his worn shoes and not very clean linen, was tied in a bundle with a piece of bandage and marked with the dying spiritualist's name.

Miss Durand had disappeared, carrying the bundle. Miss Smith searched the far comers of the basement, but found nothing. Finally, she and Miss Durand went up-stairs again, to find that Johnson had been dead for some time. Bates, the convalescent, had seen them go and saw them return. He had, however, been detected a day or so before by Miss Durand selling cocaine to a colored man in one of the wards, and later, under Miss Durand's eye, he said she had been absent ten minutes. As a matter of fact, it had been fifty.

Linda Smith went back to her room at once. She knew she and Miss Blake would be called to attend to Johnson in the mortuary, and she waited for the summons. The ghastly trick of hanging the poor old body to the chandelier followed in due course.

Thinking Barker still dead, it had been as great a shock to Ruth Blake as to the others. It was not until the next morning that Linda Smith told her Barker was still alive, and somewhere in the building. There was only one comfort: Linda had put the bundle of clothing on the roof, and it had disappeared.

The other things followed in quick succession. Miss Blake, half frenzied, conceived the idea of putting food heavily doped with morphia, on the roof, along the fire-escape, anywhere that the maniac might find it. She hardly knew what she hoped to do by this: she was in an abnormal frame of mind by this time: ill, sleepless and unable to eat. The food disappeared, but if the morphia had any effect, it was in daylight, when he probably slept, hidden away under the roof or in the linen closet

The following night, she searched the fifth, or mortuary floor, carrying a candle. She had suspected, from the night before, that Barker was hiding in the linen closet, and Linda Smith got the key. The plan had been that Miss Smith should go with her, but she was given a special case that night, and Miss Blake, courageously enough, went alone.

Barker was in the closet, and when she opened the door he seized her arm in a murderous grip that left it blue and swollen. She tried speaking to him, and releasing his hold, he darted out through the closet window and leaped to the fire-escape. Miss Blake pluckily followed him to the roof, but he had disappeared. As Miss Lizzie has told, I followed Miss Blake. Just before I reached her, she cried out and flung her brass candlestick at something behind me. The next instant I was grasped from behind and thrown head first through the skylight.

I did not know I had been bitten in the shoulder. I thought I had been stabbed, until Jacobs and I together cauterized the wound that night in the laboratory. Probably during the time we were there, the door being unlocked. Barker entered and hid in the building. Miss Blake was there at the same time, having watched Jacobs and myself enter, and being fearful of further harm. She did not see anything of Barker, however, and went back to the roof, where she sat huddled until dawn, waiting for Barker to appear again. But he did not come, and at daylight, shaking with cold, she went back to her room. There she had a chill, followed by violent fever and delirium, and there I believe Linda Smith came, bringing a surgical knife stained with blood, that she had found on the roof, and which Miss Lewis subsequently found in Miss Blake's room.

The condition of the two girls by that time was pitiable. Miss Blake, younger and more nervous, had entirely succumbed: Miss Smith, sleepless and unable to eat, was still making a fight to cover the whole thing and to drive Barker away from the building. They could not discover where he hid in the daytime, but at night evidences of his ape-like mischief were everywhere apparent. He swung by his feet from the pipe-molding of the walls, squatted on the foot-board of the bed in private room thirty-six, making hideous grimaces—a story which caused the nurse in charge to mark 'delirious' on the record of a perfectly rational woman—leaped at giddy heights about the fire-escape and the roof, and alarmed Miss Aggie into her story of a ghostly; foot. The man's strength was almost superhuman.

Johnson died on Tuesday night, and it was on Wednesday night that I was thrown through the skylight Toward dawn of Thursday morning. Barker went to the Zoo, distant about a mile from the hospital. By that time he had donned Johnson's trousers, but remained in his bare feet Access to the monkey house proved easy. The assistant keeper, sleeping in a small room just inside the entrance, was not aroused until too late. The key to Hero's cage hung over his bed, it being his habit to go in to see the ape several times during the night. On that night, he opened the cage at one o'clock, and spoke to the ape, who had been sulky all day. He locked the door and went back to bed, hanging the key up again on its nail. It was still there in the morning at six o'clock, but the ape was dead. In spite of his tremendous strength and length of arm, he had been literally crushed to death, and then hung to the top of the cage by a roller towel which did not belong to the Zoo.

The police were put on the case, and had already arrested the assistant keeper, who had been heard to say that either the ape would get him or he would get the ape.

On Wednesday night, Briggs, who had been most unpopular with Barker, met his death in an almost similar manner, his ribs being crushed in. In this case, however. Barker's ingenuity utilized the useless brown coat, the two towels being gone. Previous to that time, he had rocked the elevator in impish mischief, or possibly wrath. It was this incident which caused my Aunt Letitia to suspect a space under the roof at the top of the elevator shaft, as a hiding place.

The result of her courageous investigation is well known: mounted on top of the cage, she was taken to the upper position of the shaft, and there found what she had been looking for, an unboarded spot behind the elevator wheel. She was disappointed, however, in finding the space too dark for inspection, and in hearing or seeing nothing suspicious.

Being a courageous woman and convinced that what she sought was there in the cavelike recess, my Aunt Letitia threw her slipper with all the strength she could summon, and was answered by a growl.

My wife has just read this and confirms most of it. She suggests, however, that I have omitted our theory of how Briggs was murdered without discovery, while Jacobs was in the hall nearby and I myself guarded the only other means of exit, the fire-escape.

Barker probably took refuge in the linen closet, arriving at the mortuary floor ahead of the slow progress of the cage, by scurrying up the cable. He hid in the closet, and by throwing the coat over Briggs and squeezing him in his muscular arms, he prevented any outcry. Immediately after, he locked himself in the closet again, where he smoked Briggs' pipe, perhaps in itself the object of the attack.

On the alarm being raised. Hicks and I came in through the window, and Jacobs through the door. This left the fire-escape and the roof unwatched, and he climbed out the window of the linen closet, swinging himself easily to the fire-escape.

"The rest of the story we know. Barker was found, exhausted and half starving, and was promptly put in a padded cell, where, a week later, he died, probably from an infection, having cut his left foot badly, possibly with the very knife that killed the laboratory guinea-pigs. The injured foot, which he had crudely bandaged, probably explains why only prints of a right foot were discovered. With the removal of suspense Miss Blake recovered, and is now with me, enjoying the lilies and onion fields of Bermuda. My Aunt Letitia is at Mount Clemens, taking a series of baths and—I am informed by Miss Lizzie—carrying on what she believes is a clandestine correspondence with the Wright brothers. Miss Aggie's hay fever left with the first frost. I am sorry to say that Miss Linda Smith has never been heard from."