by Helen Wells
“Thank you. I’m really obliged to you. Now the home feel has soaked in!”
CHAPTER IX
Clues
THE HOSPITAL WAS ELECTRIFIED. THE STAFF PEOPLE were shocked and buzzing with excitement. There had been a robbery in the medical storeroom!
Cherry sought out Sal Steen at six-thirty breakfast in Officers’ Mess. “Tell me all you know,” she demanded sleepily. For Sal, an old-timer here, always was well informed. Even about a theft that occurred in the middle of last night.
Sal’s colorless face was almost animated, for once, over this excitement.
“It’s that new and special amino acid medicine. You know—that rare and valuable drug. Someone took it out of its locked compartment in the medical storeroom.”
Cherry asked, “The place you called Nephalogy and sent me for a joke?”
“Yes. Only it isn’t such a joke, as it turns out. We need that medicine to speed up our patients’ recovery. A lot of them need it—only there isn’t nearly enough. And now some has been stolen into the bargain.”
Cherry shook her dark curls. “Aren’t there any clues? Any theories?”
“Plenty of theories but no clues. That medicine is kept locked up in the storeroom and guarded like the crown jewels. The Army pharmacist is there all day and at night there’s a watchman.”
“Who has keys?” Cherry asked carefully. “Or who could get hold of keys?”
“The pharmacist has the keys, naturally, and so has the Principal Chief Nurse. Also a few head doctors and a few head nurses who use special medicines have duplicate keys. And the whereabouts of each key is carefully accounted for at all hours to the main office.”
“But it must have been done by someone who somehow has access to a key,” Cherry concluded. “Also, obviously, it must have been done by someone here in the hospital, not an outsider.”
“Obviously, huh?” Sal sniffed. “It’s not so simple as that. There’s something else funny. The thief, whoever it was, opened the outside door to the storeroom with a key. He got hold of that key somehow. But he didn’t use a key to open the particular compartment where this medicine is kept. I suppose that key’s so doubly precious he couldn’t get hold of that one. The lock to the compartment was picked.”
Cherry stared wide-eyed at Sal, who was obviously enjoying her role as the dispenser of such sensational news.
“And if you want extra complications,” Sal continued, “try thinking about the thief’s motive. Why would anyone want to steal that stuff anyway? Amino acid medicines are still so new that very few people, even doctors, know exactly or fully how to use them. No doctor or nurse or scientist in his right mind—”
“Or with any sense of ethics,” Cherry quickly interrupted. “He’d lose his standing. And no nonmedical person would have any use for it. Would he? Unless someone stole it to sell it for money. He could, couldn’t he?”
Sal thought a moment, then shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t figure it out.”
“Well, find the thief’s motive and you’ve solved half the mystery,” Cherry said as she rose to go to her ward.
“Smart girl, Cherry! Are you going to solve the mystery?” Sal inquired dryly.
“I?” Cherry laughed. “Oh, certainly. In five minutes.”
The problem tantalized her, as she hurried along the covered walk to Orthopedic Building. It was a sunny cheerful morning, with the trees and lawns all bright green, and the squirrels and birds chattering at each other. Streams of uniformed medical people in the wooden walk briskly went to morning duties. Cherry caught snatches of their conversation. They were talking about the theft.
“Must have been an inside job—must have!”
“Were any of the keys missing?”
“Anyone in our main office ought to be able to guess its value and where it’s kept—”
“No doctor would dare do such a thing!”
At the open door of Orthopedic Ward, Cherry prompted herself. “Now forget about the mystery,” and she put it away in another compartment of her mind. “For the time being,” she qualified, and went in.
The patients were having breakfast, corpsmen were cleaning and straightening the ward. Cherry flew about making herself useful at small tasks. There was a newcomer helping on the ward this morning—a nurse in the first white starched uniform Cherry had seen here.
The nurse in white kept very much to herself. Cherry tried to be friendly and started to talk with her, over a stack of bandages. Since the mystery, at the moment, was the general topic of conversation, it was only natural that Cherry should comment on it.
To her surprise, the nurse snapped crossly:
“I’m doing my work and minding my own business. Why don’t you do the same? There’s plenty to be done right here, without all you people trying to play detective.”
Cherry recoiled from the vehemence in the woman’s words and tone. “Well—” Cherry started to answer.
“Lieutenant Ames,” the young chief nurse cut in crisply from her desk, “it’s time to get your patients ready for the Reconditioning Officer.”
Cherry was grateful to the chief nurse for this reminder. She was only too happy for the opportunity to move away from this very unpleasant woman—in fact, the quicker the better!
She went quickly from bed to bed, getting the patients ready for the Reconditioning Officer and their exercises. It was heartening to see how many of them now could get out of bed and stand to exercise. Even redheaded Matty was in a sitting-up cast now, and Jim was in such good spirits he looked like a different fellow.
As Cherry worked, she was bothered by the feeling that the nurse’s violent reaction to the robbery was very strange. Why? Cherry wondered. Curious to find out more about the woman, she stole a moment in the laboratory to ask Edith Randall about the nurse in the white uniform.
“She’s a civilian nurse,” the pretty Edith explained. “Name’s Miss Lacey. She was rejected by the Army Nurse Corps and that’s why she’s not in khaki or seersucker uniform. She works here at Graham on a fairly permanent basis. And I think she lives in the village.”
“Oh, these civilian nurses can’t live in Army Nurses’ Quarters?” Cherry asked.
“She could live in Nurses’ Quarters if she wished to. Evidently she prefers to live in the village. Maybe her family’s there.” Edith giggled. “Or maybe she’s in love with a local yokel.”
Cherry was thoughtful as she went back to her duties. Nothing that Edith had told her explained why Miss Lacey had been so violent on the subject of the mystery. A sudden thought struck Cherry. “Guilty people often gave themselves away when someone innocently touched on the subject of their crime.” Could it be possible that Miss Lacey knew something about the theft?
Cherry’s vivid imagination immediately saw her armed to the teeth with picklocks and stolen keys.
This mental picture of the plump, grouchy Miss Lacey pulled Cherry up short. “Good heavens! You can’t go around pinning crimes on people who are short-tempered,” she argued with herself. “Her explosiveness is probably not the result of crimes in the night—more likely her feet hurt her.”
And with that conclusion, Cherry dismissed the nurse in white from her mind.
The morning streaked along. Before Cherry realized it, numbers of men were deserting the ward for the crafts shops. Jim, too, was going to Occupational Therapy room for the first time this morning. Cherry was to take him over there, and to deliver the doctor’s therapy prescription, for the right work to improve Jim’s particular physical condition. The ward was almost empty as they left. The hospital’s census was low, no new wounded had arrived recently. Those who did remain in bed were studying courses from their own high schools and colleges, aiming for graduation. Out in the corridor, a patient with burned hands was playing the piano.
“He plays a little more each day,” Jim told her. “Things like that make you feel good inside.”
“Don’t they, though,” said Cherry, and wondered who could be mean enough
to steal medicine from soldiers as brave as these.
Cherry was interested in going to the Occupational Therapy room. She had seen this room before, but briefly. This morning, while the O.T. officer got Jim settled, she lingered.
Occupational Therapy was in two big sunny halls. It was quiet in here, neither melancholy nor cheerful. Men worked at scattered tables, not talking, and trained Red Cross Gray Ladies kept calm watch. Cherry saw a patient she knew from Orthopedic: with his stiff, too pale fingers, he tried over and over, painfully, patiently, trembling a little, to tighten a screw in a chair leg. The men’s faces with the lowered eyes were a little tense too. Their smiles at Cherry were polite, remote. Some of them, Cherry guessed, were calming down here after shattering emotional experiences. One man with a foreign face and a thoroughly American grin was weaving at a loom. When Cherry admired his blue-and-white rug, he said:
“Yes, thank you, it’s coming out nicely. Do you think I should fringe the edges or leave them plain?” Abruptly his face tightened, his voice changed. “This is just a hobby with me. I’m not living. I’m just marking time.”
None of the men wanted to talk. Cherry knew their unwritten law: they would not talk about the horrible things seen in combat. Stubbornly, silently, they worked at the leather, woolens, wood—working their way back to health.
Jim was ready now. The O.T. instructor had stood him before a press, pumping a knee-height treadle, to regain lost circulation in his stump. The press punched holes in belts.
“Well,” said Jim philosophically to Cherry, “if I have to do this to get well, I have to do it. Maybe I can work that machine over there next.” He nodded toward a machine which heaped curly wood shavings on the floor. The wood smelled fresh and good.
“I’ll ask the O.T. officer for you,” Cherry promised him. She questioned him whether the treadle was reasonably comfortable for his leg, then spoke with the O.T. officer. Before leaving, Cherry arranged with Jim for him to go on next to the Physical Therapy rooms, where water, air, radio, electricity, massage, would stimulate his deadened leg back to life. Then, later, an artificial leg could be worked by those live muscles. “Keep a stiff upper lip and you’ll soon be walking,” she encouraged him.
“You bet,” Jim said and calmly set to pumping his press.
Cherry left O.T. and headed for the Receiving-and-Evacuation Building on the open paths. In this building soldiers arrived for admission to Graham, and departed on transfer or discharge. More important, this was the building where soldiers came for passes. A short cut of bare earth was worn across the grass, making it clear these men loved—and sought—liberty.
In the barnlike building, Cherry hunted up the brisk young lieutenant in charge. He supplied the information she needed about a patient. Cherry noticed that he looked very amused and asked why. He broke into a chuckle.
“We’re disciplining Peters again,” he said. “What! You haven’t heard about Peters? Why, he’s our prize problem boy.”
First the lieutenant explained that upon admission the men’s clothes were taken away from them and locked in the basement and were released to them only on occasions when they received passes. However, despite this precaution, some of the patients would climb out of bed, manage to get some clothes, and calmly go AWOL. Peters, minus his clothes, had managed to go AWOL eight times.
“No, no!” the young man said hastily, as Cherry’s face changed. “Peters did wear something. We never did find out exactly how he got the clothes. Well—”
When Peters had a two-day pass, he stayed five days. The last time he was gone, minus pass or permission, minus cash and clothes, for two weeks. Reducing his rank and pay from sergeant’s to private’s did not faze him. The lieutenant did not know how he got along outside for so long without money, but he did. Peters had again been currently wandering.
“Where’s your problem child now?” Cherry asked laughingly.
“Down in the basement doing his discipline routine,” the lieutenant grinned.
“What makes you so sure about that?” Cherry teased.
The young lieutenant’s face straightened: “Oh, gosh!” he exclaimed. “I guess I’d better check again. That guy is a whiz at picking locks.”
It was Cherry’s turn to sober, for suddenly Sal’s words echoed in her ears:
“That lock was picked.”
Cherry’s thoughts started racing. Who was this Peters who was so adept at picking locks? And why was he so eager to get away from the hospital? She recalled her remark to Sal: “Find the thief’s motive and you’ve solved half the mystery.” Could Peters, whom everyone regarded as a comic, have stolen and sold the amino medicine? Was this why he went AWOL—and how he sustained himself for days, seemingly without funds?
Curious to see the fellow, Cherry asked the lieutenant if she could accompany him while he checked on Peters. The lieutenant agreed, and Cherry followed him downstairs into a spacious basement. He unlocked a door into a sort of cell. There on the cot snored a tousled young man of about eighteen, happy-go-lucky even in sleep. He was clothed in a blanket and tucked in his GI shoes on the floor were some timetables.
“This is Peters,” said the young officer softly and shut the door again.
“If Peters is a criminal,” Cherry muttered to herself—“then I am Minnie Mouse!” she exclaimed aloud.
The young officer looked puzzled for a moment and then grinned at her. “Huh! Good-looking mice we have nowadays!”
It was a subdued Cherry who went back to Nurses’ Quarters. After stopping in the mail room, it was a very bright-eyed and delighted Cherry. For here was a letter from Captain Wade Cooper, AAF pilot, who had flown Cherry’s ambulance plane when she was a flight nurse. Why, she had thought Wade was still in England! Cherry grinned as she remembered the good times she and Wade had shared together. She tore open his letter eagerly.
“Dear darling Lieutenant,” he had scrawled,
“I am coming home and the first bit of U.S.A. I want to see is you. I’ll go home first to Tucson to see parents and suchlike. Then you are to invite me to Hilton for a week end. I hereby accept. It’ll be very soon, so dust off your dancing shoes. I won’t write any more than this—I’ll tell you everything in person. And I mean everything. Don’t marry anyone till I get there.
“Love, love, love—Wade.”
Whee! That was wonderful news! Cherry felt so happy about the prospect of seeing Wade again that she voted herself the evening off at the movies. She would not even ask anyone to go with her this evening. She wanted to gloat in private about a bronzed young flier named Wade Cooper.
It was a fine movie, full of blood-and-thunder mystery, and people so clever that they could have solved the hospital robbery, Cherry thought, while brushing their teeth. If she could just get that suave detective to step off the screen and into the medical storeroom—
Then, to Cherry’s amazement, when the newsreel came on, she was looking full into the gigantic screen faces of Ann, Gwen, Bertha, Josie, and Mai Lee! Yes, there were all of her old schoolmates—in Army nurse uniform—in England, helping send the wounded soldiers home. Gwen’s red hair did not show up as red, but Gwen was laughing puckishly as usual, and every freckle showed! When Ann’s serene gaze met Cherry’s gaze, and Ann spoke, Cherry almost talked back to her. It was all she could do not to bounce out of her seat and go running up to them. There came Josie, scared of the camera, and skirting it with a rabbity, sidelong glance. And there stood the little Chinese-American girl Mai Lee—she looked so tired that Cherry’s heart went out to her. And Bertha, plump as ever—and didn’t that fair hair in the background belong to Marie Swift? Suddenly the newsreel switched and Cherry lost their familiar faces, found herself confronted instead with a homely man making a speech. She got up in a dazed, happy way, and went to the box office.
“When will that newsreel of nurses be shown again?”
“Sorry, that was the last showing tonight. And the program changes tomorrow.”
Oh, well. She had had
a good, satisfying look at them, anyway. Almost a visit! It left her aglow. Only Vivian Warren was not in the picture, though Cherry knew Vivian was with them in England. The girls and Cherry had been corresponding regularly. But newsreel pictures brought them so very near!
Cherry ambled down the village street to the hospital bus, lost in reverie. Seeing Ann and Gwen and Mai Lee had brought all sorts of memories flooding back: the merry, foolish times when they were student nurses together—the still unbelievable hardships and dangers of their Pacific island field hospital—how lovely Ann had looked that winter’s day in England when she married Jack, her beautiful bridal gown fashioned from a bed sheet!
The bus driver had to tell Cherry twice that they were at the hospital gate.
She strolled off down the dusky hospital paths, still daydreaming. If it thrilled her so to see the girls on a movie screen, imagine how she would feel when Wade showed up in person! She wished he would hurry up and get to Hilton. On these thrilling spring evenings, she could do with a spot of romance.
Distant music gradually penetrated her consciousness. It came from the Officers’ Club, and it reminded her that that was a fine, cheerful place to go on a spring night. She had managed all too few visits there. Cherry brightened and trotted off at a livelier pace.
Glowing windows and the strains of a trio playing dance music welcomed her. Officer patients and nurses, some together, some alone, were pouring into the handsome little brick loggia. Cherry knew only very few of them. She entered and stood for a moment enjoying the loveliness and gaiety of this room.
It was a big, long, low room, like a lounge. Decorative Chinese murals were painted on the pale-blue brick walls. In one corner, up on a dais, was a huge gray stone fireplace, with banquettes built all around it. Out in the glass-enclosed veranda were little tables and chairs, café fashion. Another small room held a radio and television machine and couches, and there was a brightly painted cardroom. The place was crowded with men and young women in khaki, dancing, chatting, wandering around. Hot jazz poured out of the grand piano.