Hilda’s cheerfulness suffered a setback. She picked up what she had laid out, tucked under her arm the five-pound Practice of Nursing—a book which on night duty induced a gentle somnolence which was not sleep—and went back to Janice’s door.
The girl also was standing by her window, staring out. So absorbed was she that she did not hear Hilda. She rapped twice on the doorframe before she heard and turned, looking startled.
“Oh!” she said, flushing. “I’m sorry. Are you ready?”
Hilda surveyed the room. Janice had evidently made an attempt to make it cheerful. The old mahogany bed had a bright patchwork quilt on it, there were yellow curtains at the window, and a low chair by the fireplace looked as if she had upholstered it herself in a blue-and-gray chintz. But there was little sign of Janice’s personal life, no photographs, no letters or invitations. The small desk was bare, except for a few books and a package of cigarettes.
“All ready,” Hilda said composedly. “Did the doctor leave any orders?”
For some reason Janice flushed.
“No. She’s not really sick. Just a sedative if she can’t sleep. Her heart’s weak, of course. That’s why it all seems—so fiendish.”
She did not explain. She led the way forward, and Hilda took her bearings carefully, as she always did in a strange house. The layout, so far as she could see, was simple. The narrow hall into which her room and Jan’s opened had two rooms also on the other side. But in the front of the house the hall widened, at the top of the stairs, into a large square landing, lighted in daytime by a window over the staircase, and furnished as an informal sitting-room. Two bedrooms occupied the front corners of the house, with what had once been a third smaller room between them now apparently converted into bathrooms.
Janice explained as they went forward.
“My uncle, Carlton Fairbanks, and his wife have these rooms across from yours and mine,” she said. “They’re out of town just now. And Mother has the other corner in front, over the library.”
Unexpectedly she yawned. Then she smiled. The smile changed her completely. She looked younger, as if she had recaptured her youth.
“You go straight to bed,” Hilda said sternly.
“You’ll call me if anything goes wrong?”
“Nothing will go wrong.”
She watched the girl as she went back along the hall. In her short skirt and green pullover sweater she looked like a child. Hilda grunted with disapproval, put down her impedimenta—including Practice of Nursing—on a marble topped table, looked around for a comfortable chair in which to spend the night and saw none, and then finally rapped at her patient’s door.
Chapter 3
Her first real view was not prepossessing. Mrs. Fairbanks was dressed in an ancient quilted dressing-gown, and she looked less like an alert but uneasy terrier, and more like a frightened and rather dowdy old woman. Nor was her manner reassuring.
“Come in,” she said shortly, “and lock the door. I have something to show you. And don’t tell me it came down the chimney or through a window. The windows are barred and screened and the chimney flue is closed. Not only that. There is a wad of newspaper above the flue. I put it there myself.”
Hilda stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The room was large and square. It had two windows facing the front of the house and two at the side. A large four-poster bed with a tester top occupied the wall opposite the side windows, with a door to a bathroom beside it. The other wall contained a fireplace flanked, as she discovered later, by two closets.
Save for a radio by the bed the room was probably as it had been since the old lady had come there as a bride. The heavy walnut bureau, the cane-seated rocking chair by the empty fireplace, even the faded photograph of Henry Fairbanks on the mantel, a Henry wearing a high choker collar and a heavy mustache, dated from before the turn of the century.
Mrs. Fairbanks saw her glance at it.
“I keep that there to remind myself of an early mistake,” she said dryly. “And I don’t want my back rubbed, young woman. What I want to know is how this got into my room.”
She led the way to the bed, which had been neatly turned down for the night. On the blanket cover lay a bath towel with something undeniably alive in it. Hilda reached over and touched it.
“What is it?” she asked.
Mrs. Fairbanks jerked her hand away.
“Don’t touch it,” she said irritably. “I had a hard enough time catching it. What do you think it is?”
“Perhaps you’d better tell me.”
“It’s a bat,” said the old lady. “They think I’m crazy. My own daughter thinks I’m crazy. I keep on telling them that things get into my room, but nobody believes me. Yes, Miss Adams, it’s a bat.”
There was hard triumph in her voice.
“Three bats, two sparrows, and a rat,” she went on. “All in the last month or two. A rat!” she said scornfully. “I’ve lived in this house fifty years, and there has never been a rat in it.”
Hilda felt uncomfortable. She did not like rats. She resisted an impulse to look at the floor.
“How do they get in?” she inquired. “After all, there must be some way.”
“That’s why you’re here. You find that out and I’ll pay you an extra week’s salary. And I want that bat kept. When I saw that police officer today he said to keep anything I found, if I could get it.”
“I don’t take extra pay,” said Hilda mildly. “What am I to do with the thing?”
“Take it back to the storeroom. The last door on the right. There’s a shoe box there. Put it inside and tie it up. And don’t let it get away, young woman. I want it.”
Hilda picked up the towel gingerly. Under her hands something small and warm squirmed. She felt a horrible distaste for the whole business. But Mrs. Fairbanks’s eyes were on her, intellectual and wary and somehow pathetic. She started on her errand, to hear the key turn behind her, and all at once she had the feeling of something sinister about the whole business—the gloomy house, the old woman locked in her room, the wretched little creature in her hands. The inspector had been right when he said it all looked damned queer to him.
The storeroom was, as Mrs. Fairbanks had said, at the back of the hall. She held her towel carefully in one hand and opened the door with the other. She had stepped inside and was feeling for the light switch when there was a sudden noise overhead. The next moment something soft and furry had landed on her shoulder and dropped with a plop to the floor.
“Oh, my God!” she said feebly.
But the rat—she was sure it was a rat—had disappeared when at last she found the light switch and turned it on. She was still shaken, however. Her hands trembled when she found the shoe box and dumped the bat into it. It lay there, stunned and helpless, and before she carried it back to the old lady she stopped at the table and cut a small air hole with her surgical scissors. But she was irritable when, after the usual unlocking, she was again admitted to the room.
“How am I to look after you,” she inquired, “if you keep me locked out all the time?”
“I haven’t asked you to look after me.”
“But surely—”
“Listen, young woman. I want you to examine this room. Maybe you can find out how these creatures get in. If you can’t, then I’ll know that somebody in this house is trying to scare me to death.”
“That’s dreadful, Mrs. Fairbanks. You can’t believe it.”
“Of course it’s dreadful. But not so dreadful as poison.”
“Poison!”
“Poison,” repeated Mrs. Fairbanks. “Ask the doctor, if you don’t believe me. It was in the sugar on my tray. Arsenic.”
She sat in the rocking chair by the fireplace, looking wizened but complacent. As though, having set out to startle the nurse, she had happily succeeded. She had indeed. Hilda was thoroughly startled. She stood looking down, her face set and unsmiling. Quite definitely she did not like this case. But equally definitely the old woman b
elieved what she was saying.
“When was all this?” she asked.
“Three months ago. It was in the sugar on my breakfast tray.”
“You are sure you didn’t imagine it?”
“I didn’t imagine that bat, did I?”
She went on. She had strawberries the morning it happened. She always had her breakfast in her room. The arsenic was in the powdered sugar, and she had almost died.
“But I didn’t,” she said. “I fooled them all. And I didn’t imagine it. The doctor took samples of everything. It was in the sugar. That’s the advantage of having a young man,” she said. “This boy is smart. He knows all the new things. If I’d had old Smythe I’d have died. Jan got young Brooke. She’d met him somewhere. And he was close. He lives across from the stable on Huston Street. It was arsenic, all right.”
Hilda looked—and felt—horrified.
“What about the servants?” she said sharply.
“Had them for years. Trust them more than I trust my family.”
“Who brought up the tray?”
“Janice.”
“But you can’t suspect her, Mrs. Fairbanks.”
“I suspect everybody,” said Mrs. Fairbanks grimly.
Hilda sat down. All at once the whole situation seemed incredible—the deadly quiet of the house, the barred and screened windows, the thick atmosphere of an unaired room, this talk of attempted murder, and the old woman in the rocking chair, telling calmly of an attempt to murder her.
“Of course you notified the police,” she said.
“Of course I did nothing of the kind.”
“But the doctor—”
Mrs. Fairbanks smiled, showing a pair of excellent dentures.
“I told him I took it myself by mistake,” she said. “He didn’t believe me, but what could he do? For a good many years I have kept this family out of the newspapers. We have had our troubles, like other people. My daughter’s divorce, for one thing.” Her face hardened. “A most tragic and unnecessary thing. It lost me Frank Garrison, the one person I trusted. And my son Carlton’s unhappy marriage to a girl far beneath him. Could I tell the police that a member of my family was trying to kill me?”
“But you don’t know that it is a member of your family, Mrs. Fairbanks.”
“Who else? I have had my servants for years. They get a little by my will, but they don’t know it. Not enough anyhow to justify their trying to kill me. Amos, my old coachman, drives my car when I go out, and I usually take Janice with me. He may not be fond of me. I don’t suppose he is, but he won’t let anything happen to Jan. He used to drive her around in her pony cart.”
Hilda was puzzled. Mrs. Fairbank’s own attitude was bewildering. It was as though she were playing a game with death, and so far had been victorious.
“Have there been any attempts since?” she asked.
“I’ve seen to that. When I eat downstairs I see that everybody eats what I do, and before I do. And I get my breakfasts up here. I squeeze my own orange juice, and I make my coffee in a percolator in the bathroom. And I don’t take sugar in it! Now you’d better look around. I’ve told you what you’re here for.”
Hilda got up, her uniform rustling starchily. She was convinced now that something was wrong, unless Mrs. Fairbanks was not rational, and that she did not believe. There was the hard ring of truth in her voice. Of course she could check the poison story with Dr. Brooke. And there was the bat. Even supposing that the old lady was playing a game of some sort for her own purposes, how, living the life she did, could she have obtained a bat? Hilda had no idea how anyone got possession of such a creature. Now and then one saw them at night in the country. Once in her child hood one had got into the house, and they had all covered their heads for fear it would get in their hair. But here, in the city—
“Was your door open tonight?” she said.
“My door is never open.”
That seemed to be that. Hilda began to search the room; without result, however. The windows, including the bathroom, were as Mrs. Fairbanks had said both barred and screened, and the screens were screwed into place. The closets which flanked the fireplace revealed themselves as unbroken stretches of painted plaster, and gave forth the musty odor of old garments long used. Only in one was a break. In the closet nearest the door was a small safe, built in at one side, and looking modern and substantial.
As she backed out she found Mrs. Fairbanks watching her.
“What about the safe?” she asked. “Could anything be put in it, so that when you open it it could get out?”
“Nobody can open it but myself. And I don’t. There is nothing in it.”
But once more the crafty look was on her face, and Hilda did not believe her. When, after crawling under the bed, examining the chimney in a rain of soot and replacing the paper which closed it, and peering behind the old-fashioned bathtub, she agreed that the room was as tight as a drum, the old woman gave her a sardonic grin.
“I told that policeman that,” she said. “But he as much as said I was a liar.”
It was after eleven at night when at last she agreed to go to bed. She refused the sleeping tablet the doctor had left, and she did not let Hilda undress her. She sent her away rather promptly, with orders to sit outside the door and not to shut her eyes for a minute. And Hilda went, to hear the door being locked behind her, and to find that a metamorphosis had taken place in the hall outside. A large comfortable chair had been brought and placed by the table near the old lady’s door. There was a reading lamp beside it, and the table itself was piled high with books and magazines. In addition there was a screen to cut off drafts, and as she looked Janice came up the front stairs carrying a heavy tray.
She was slightly breathless.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “There’s coffee in a Thermos. I had Maggie make it when I knew you were coming. Maggie’s the cook. You see, Grandmother doesn’t want to be left. If you went downstairs for supper—”
Hilda took the tray from her.
“I ought to scold you,” she said severely. “I thought I sent you to bed.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m going now.” She looked at Hilda shyly. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “Now nothing can happen, can it?”
Days later Hilda was to remember the girl’s face, too thin but now confident and relieved, the sounds of Mrs. Fairbanks moving about in her locked room, the shoe box with the captive bat on the table, and her own confident voice.
“Of course nothing can happen. Go to bed and forget all about it.”
Janice did not go at once, however. She picked up Hilda’s textbook and opened it at random.
“I suppose it’s pretty hard, studying to be a nurse.”
“It’s a good bit more than study.”
“I would like to go into a hospital. But, of course, the way things are—It must be wonderful to—well, to know what a doctor means when he says things. I feel so ignorant.”
Hilda looked at her. Was it a desire to escape from this house? Or was she perhaps interested in young Brooke? She thought back over the long line of interns she had known. She did not like interns. They were too cocky. They grinned at the young nurses and ignored the older ones. Once one of them had grabbed her as she came around a corner, and his face had been funny when he saw who it was. But Brooke must have interned long after she left Mount Hope Hospital.
She changed the subject.
“Tell me a little about the household,” she suggested. “Your mother, your uncle and aunt live here. What about the servants?”
Jan sat down and lit a cigarette.
“There are only three in the house now,” she said, “and Amos outside. There used to be more, but lately Granny—well, you know how it is. I think Granny is scared. She’s cut down on them. We even save on light. Maybe you’ve noticed!”
She smiled and curled up in the chair, looking relaxed and comfortable.
“How long have they been here, Miss Janice?”
<
br /> “Oh, please call me Jan. Everybody does. Well, William’s been here thirty years. Maggie, the cook, has been here for twenty. Ida”—Jan smiled—“Ida’s a newcomer. Only ten. And, of course, Amos. He lives over the stable. The others live upstairs, at the rear.”
“I suppose you trust them all?”
“Absolutely.”
“Any others? Any regular visitors?”
Janice looked slightly defiant.
“Only my father. Granny doesn’t like callers, and Mother—well, she sees her friends outside. At the country club or at restaurants. Since the—since the trouble Granny hasn’t liked her to have them here.”
She put out her cigarette and got up. The box containing the bat was on the table. She looked at it.
“I suppose you’ll show that to the police?” she asked.
“That seems to be your grandmother’s idea.”
Janice drew a long breath.
“I had to do it,” she said. “I was afraid they would say she was crazy. Have her committed. I had to, Miss Adams.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
But Janice had already gone. She was walking down the hall toward her bedroom, and she was fumbling in her sleeve for her handkerchief.
Hilda was thoughtful after the girl had gone. She got out her knitting, but after a few minutes she put it down and opened her textbook. What she found was far from satisfactory. Arsenic was disposed of in a brief paragraph:
Many drugs, such as dilute acids, iron, arsenic, and so on, are irritating to mucous lining of the stomach and may cause pain, nausea, and vomiting. And death, she thought. Death to an old woman who, whatever her peculiarities, was helpless and pathetic.
She put the book away and picking up the chart wrote on it in her neat hand: 11:30 P.M. Patient excitable. Pulse small and rapid. Refuses to take sedative.
She was still writing when the radio was turned on in Mrs. Fairbanks’s room. It made her jump. It was loud, and it blatted on her eardrums like a thousand shrieking devils. She stood it for ten minutes. Then she banged on the door.
Miss Pinkerton Page 22