by Helen Wells
“Would you like a cool drink, Bob? Chewing gum?” Dr. Hope offered them.
“No, thank you. I’m not thirsty. I just had a cool—” His voice trailed off.
“Just relax, Bob.” Dr. Hope nodded and leaned back in his chair. He was unhurried. “You must have had a hard time. Can you tell Miss Cherry and me where you were just a few days ago?”
“I guess it was around here.”
“Mmmm. What did the place look like?”
“Trees. Streets. People. No one I knew.” Bob broke into a sweat. “Can you tell me what town this is? Hilton, I think you said, but what state?”
“Illinois.” Dr. Hope answered as if Bob’s question were a perfectly natural one. “Have you ever been in Illinois before?”
“Not that I know of.”
“When I say home to you, what do you think of? Close your eyes and think. Take your time.”
Bob made an effort. “A large white frame house,” he said vaguely.
“I suppose that’s where your family lives.”
“I have no family!”
Dr. Hope nudged Cherry. She said pleasantly, hoping it was the right cue:
“Everyone has a family.”
“Well, I haven’t. I—I’m the sole survivor.”
Cherry was inclined to believe him, but she saw a tiny frown between Dr. Hope’s eyes. He said:
“Haven’t you anyone at all? Who were your family members?”
“No one—no one—”
“Your father,” Dr. Hope prompted. No answer. “And your mother. Where is your mother?”
Bob grew so distressed that Dr. Hope said:
“Never mind. Let it go for now. Unless you want to tell us why you believe you’re the sole survivor?”
“I—My father is dead.”
“Yes. How long ago?”
“While I was still in school. In college.”
“I see. By the way, which college did you attend?”
Bob turned his face away. A minute went by. “I can’t remember,” he said painfully.
Dr. Hope said that was all right, he would remember everything in good time.
“And your mother?”
“She’s dead, I tell you! How many times must I say so—I beg your pardon. Very rude of me.”
Bob’s excitement about his mother—he had replied calmly about his father—was not lost on either Dr. Hope or Cherry. Cherry smoothed over the bad moment by offering Bob a drink of water. He was glad of the lull. Dr. Hope resumed:
“Well, let’s see now, Bob Smith. That isn’t really your name, is it?”
“No, I made it up when I was in a town—around here, I think—and I was applying for an odd job in a—possibly a restaurant? The man in charge asked my name and—”
Dr. Hope nodded. “What is your name?”
Bob forced a grin. “I’d like to know that myself.” For that much humor and courage, Cherry patted his hand.
“Miss Cherry?” said Dr. Hope. “You have a brother, I hear,” and gave her the lead.
“Yes, a twin brother, in fact.” She tried to think what events in her brother Charlie’s life might be paralleled in any young man’s life. “He’s seen service in the Air Force. Have you been in the armed forces, Bob?”
“No, I haven’t.” He seemed entirely calm and certain about this.
“But you’re the right age for it,” Cherry said.
“Yes, but I haven’t. I know when I was in my teens I went to a boys’ summer camp and they taught us how to handle rifles—marksmanship—we had a shooting range—and I know that I attended college, because I remember the long quiet hours of study. But I haven’t been in any of the armed services,” he said very definitely.
This seemed unlikely to Cherry. She glanced at Dr. Hope for his reaction, but his expression was noncommittal, friendly.
“You’re about twenty-five, I’d say, aren’t you, Bob?”
“Twenty-six, I think, sir, if I’ve got the present year right.”
Cherry told him the year, matter-of-factly, as if she were telling him the hour. Poor Bob was lost in time.
“Thank you,” he said. “I wish I knew what date it was when I left home.”
Cherry remembered the calendar she had found in his pocket, with the paper torn off at last April. She had better not mention it unless Dr. Hope did so. He chose instead to pick up another thread of Bob’s remark.
“When you left home, you say. That was the large white house. Picture the house in your mind’s eye, Bob, and tell me what feelings it stirs up in you.”
Bob threw his arm across his eyes, and thought. When he took his arm away, he looked bewildered.
“I know there is something I should be worried about, but I can’t remember what it is.”
“You know? How do you know?”
“I just do. I’m sure of it. It troubles me.”
“It?”
Bob said sadly, “I only know that I do—or rather, I ought to feel terribly worried and responsible.”
“Some trouble about your family,” Cherry murmured. “With the large white house.”
“No.”
“With what place, then?” Dr. Hope asked.
Bob sank back, tired. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t come clear to me. I almost see some place to tell you about, and then it’s as if a wall of mist rises up.”
“All right, you’ve done fine.” The doctor signaled to Cherry that the drug was wearing off. “A good start. See if you can’t take a nap now, Bob.”
He was already dozing off.
Cherry tiptoed out after Dr. Hope. They held a brief conference in the hall. Dr. Hope held up one hand and counted off on his fingers what this first interview had yielded.
“First, Bob denies he has a family, but he recalls a white house and grows upset at mention of his mother. Very cloudy there. Second, he says he’s been to college. I’m inclined to believe that; he talks like an educated man. Maybe he’ll remember or describe what college, and we can trace his identity through college records. Third, he’s sure he never had military service, but can’t explain why not. Yet he’s the right age and physically fit. He probably was balanced enough until some unbearable stress caused this breakdown—”
Dr. Hope was inclined to believe Bob had had some military service but was actively forgetting it. Cherry reminded him that the detective, who had fingerprinted Bob, would check on that.
“Good. What else? Bob said he knew that he ought to feel concerned and responsible about something. And that ‘something’ is the crux of his present difficulty.”
“Present difficulty—an injury rooted probably in his childhood?” Cherry asked, “Did I notice correctly that Bob remembered only the recent past in this interview? Didn’t remember his far past at all?”
“Right! Bob remembered that he’d had odd jobs around here. As we’d expect. Now, if we or that detective fellow could locate his employers—”
Cherry made a suggestion, and Dr. Hope approved it. Their uncharted search was under way.
In case you missed Cherry Ames, Island Nurse …
CHAPTER II
The Three from the Plane
WITHIN A VERY SHORT TIME, CHERRY HAD THE BEDROOM of the suite ready for the patient and everything prepared according to Dr. Joe’s instructions. But just to be sure, she stood for a moment in the middle of the room to check again.
Near the head of the bed were the two intravenous stands—“IV” stands the nurses called them—which a hospital attendant had brought from the supply room where such equipment was kept for use as required. From one stand hung the pint container of normal saline, a lifesaving salt solution that would likely be infused into a patient’s vein. The other stand would hold a pint of blood for transfusion after the patient’s blood had been typed for compatibility.
“The man had a sudden hemorrhage and lost a lot of blood,” Dr. Fortune had told Cherry over the phone. “He’ll need a transfusion.”
She also had ready an oxygen tan
k and mask, thermometer, cotton swabs, adhesive tape, bottles of antiseptic and anesthetic, sterile gauze pads, needles and tubing used in giving intravenous treatment, hypodermic needles, and other medical supplies.
Everything had been done that could be done beforehand. The bedroom had become a little hospital within a hospital. Cherry gave a nod of satisfaction and looked at her watch. The ambulance should be back from the airfield at any minute.
She had already alerted the laboratory to have someone ready to test the patient’s blood. Now, she heard a knock at the door and a voice call “Miss Ames,” and Millie Reynolds, one of the laboratory technicians, came bustling in.
“They have all arrived. I saw them bring in the patient, so I didn’t have to wait for your call,” she announced. Millie was a blond, blue-eyed girl who looked as if she could not possibly have a brain in her head, but she was one of the best laboratory technicians at Hilton.
Cherry had noticed the accent on “all” and she smiled. “How many exactly, Millie, are there with the patient?” she asked. “You make it sound as if he were royalty accompanied by his entourage.”
“Well, it’s practically that,” Millie said. “I heard this big, handsome hunk of man say something about his uncle, Sir Something-or-other, that’s the patient. … Imagine a patient with a title! Isn’t it exciting?”
Millie did not have time to tell about “the others” with the sick man, for there were sounds of movement in the hall and a hospital attendant rolled in a still form. He was followed by Dr. Fortune and two young men, one of them in pilot’s uniform, his visored hat in his hand.
Dr. Joe gave Cherry one of his warm smiles, then glanced at Millie.
“Doctor, Miss Reynolds is ready to check the blood at once,” Cherry explained.
“Very good.” Turning to the two young men, Dr. Joe told them, “You may wait here in the sitting room.”
The patient was taken into the bedroom and the door closed. Things must be done quickly. There was no time to waste; a man’s life was threatened. In the next instant, the three of them—Dr. Joe, Millie, and Cherry—became an efficient team.
The man was unconscious. His flesh was gray and clammy from loss of blood and shock. His pulse was rapid.
The mask was placed over his face and the flow of oxygen regulated.
The rubber bands and tubing for the IV administration were adjusted. Cherry wiped a spot over the veins of one arm with a swab of cotton soaked in antiseptic. The doctor injected a small amount of a local anesthetic to numb the arm slightly, then deftly pushed the hollow needle into a vein in the bend of the patient’s elbow, and the slow drip of liquid into the vein began.
Meanwhile, Millie had quickly pricked a finger and drawn a little of the man’s blood into a tiny vial. Off she went with it to the laboratory, where she would test it immediately for blood type. The transfusion could not be given until this was known.
Aided by Cherry, Dr. Joe proceeded with the examination of his patient.
At the airfield and during the ride in the ambulance, the nephew and the pilot had told the doctor what had happened. And between listening through his stethoscope, checking of pulse and breathing, gently feeling the patient’s stomach and abdomen, Dr. Joe gave Cherry bits and pieces of information.
“Fellow collapsed in a plane not far from here. … Name’s Barclay—Sir Ian Barclay. … Haven’t seen him in ten years. … Owns iron mines up in Canada. … Peptic-ulcer case. … Nephew said doctor up there had been treating him for some time. … Lloyd Barclay, that’s the nephew’s name, said his uncle was getting along pretty well … then this sudden hemorrhage. … Uncle went to make telephone call to check on how things were going in his mines. … Found there was trouble. … Sudden anxiety probably set off this attack.”
The door opened. Dr. Joe’s and Cherry’s heads turned as one to Millie, with a bottle from the hospital’s blood bank in her hands.
“Group O, Rhesus positive,” she told them, “and the patient’s is the same—perfect match.” She walked briskly over with it, then as briskly out again.
Group O was a common blood type and could be safely given to anyone belonging to the other main groups—A, B, or Ab—just as long as the Rhesus—or RH—factor was the same. That Sir Ian Barclay’s belonged to this common type was certainly a bit of good luck right at the start, Cherry thought, as she swabbed his arm with a bit of antiseptic-soaked cotton in preparation for the transfusion.
Cherry and Dr. Joe could only wait now while the science of medicine, which had taken man many centuries to develop, took over. Sir Ian’s body must be supplied with oxygen, so he breathed it into his lungs through the snoutlike device invented for the purpose. The salt and liquid his body had lost were being replaced by the saline. And lifegiving blood flowed into his veins from the bottle hanging from the stand.
Sir Ian Barclay was breathing easily now. Some of the grayness had given way to the faint violet of returning blood. His flesh was warmer and drier.
Familiar as she was with the care and healing of the sick, Cherry never ceased to wonder at the miracle of medicine. And one was taking place before her eyes right now.
It was true that there were failures, and there was so very much yet unknown about health and sickness—yet what science and good care could do was no less a miracle. Perhaps that was why it was the most important thing in the world to her to be a nurse, Cherry thought. She was a part of the wonder of healing.
That was the way Dr. Joe had always felt too. He had given his whole life to medicine. A small, friendly man who spoke slowly and haltingly—who would think of him as a hero? He was a modern-day hero, nevertheless.
She saw Dr. Joe put his hand on Sir Ian’s forehead. Then he listened again to the patient’s heartbeat.
“Looks as if we’ll bring him through,” Dr. Joe said, straightening up.
He pulled up a chair beside the bed and nodded to one near Cherry. “Might as well sit as stand at this point,” he said.
They sat in silence. Cherry knew that Dr. Joe would add nothing to what he had told her before. That much information he had given her because she needed to be oriented to the case. Sir Ian Barclay at the moment was not a personality to the doctor, but a sick human being who must be made well again.
As Cherry sat beside Sir Ian, the lean, powerful figure, with its strong, bony face and gray-streaked black hair, began to pique her curiosity. “Here is a man,” she thought, “who looks as if he had great strength of character. He is a wealthy mine owner. A Canadian with a title. He is on a tour of mines in the United States. He calls home, hears bad news, collapses shortly afterward.”
“Sudden hemorrhage of a peptic ulcer,” Dr. Joe had said. People with ulcers had sudden flare-ups—that Cherry knew. Bad news could cause an attack. What had been the nature of the bad news that had caused this wealthy man, with the sturdy look of an eagle, to collapse, she wondered.
A mumbling came suddenly from the bed.
Both Cherry and Dr. Joe jumped.
Sir Ian Barclay had opened his gray eyes and was staring at them.
CHERRY AMES, SKI NURSE MYSTERY
TITLES BY HELEN WELLS
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse
Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse
Cherry Ames, Army Nurse
Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse
Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse
Cherry Ames, Veterans’ Nurse
Cherry Ames, Private Duty Nurse
Cherry Ames, Visiting Nurse
Cherry Ames, Cruise Nurse
Cherry Ames, Boarding School Nurse
Cherry Ames, Department Store Nurse
Cherry Ames, Camp Nurse
Cherry Ames at Hilton Hospital
Cherry Ames, Island Nurse
Cherry Ames, Rural Nurse
Cherry Ames, Staff Nurse
Cherry Ames, Companion Nurse
Cherry Ames, Jungle Nurse
Cherry Ames, The Mystery in the Doctor’s Office
Cherry Ames, Sk
i Nurse Mystery
CHERRY AMES NURSE STORIES
CHERRY AMES SKI NURSE MYSTERY
By
HELEN WELLS
Copyright © 1968 by Grosset & Dunlap, Inc.
Copyright © renewed 2008 by Harriet Schulman Forman
Springer Publishing Company, LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Springer Publishing Company, LLC.
Springer Publishing Company, LLC
11 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036-8002
www.springerpub.com
Acquisitions Editor: Sally J. Barhydt
Series Editor: Harriet S. Forman
Production Editor: Carol Cain
Cover design: Mimi Flow
Composition: Apex Publishing, LLC
08 09 10 11/ 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wells, Helen, 1910–
[Ski nurse mystery]
Cherry Ames, ski nurse mystery / by Helen Wells.
p. cm.
Originally published in 1968 under the title Ski nurse mystery as #27 in the Cherry Ames nurse story series.
Summary: Cherry takes a position as a nurse with an orthopedic doctor in a Swiss ski resort, and becomes involved in a mystery including a hostile patient with a gun whom the doctor treats on Cherry’s first day at work.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8261-0437-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8261-0437-1 (alk. paper)
[1. Nurses—Fiction. 2. Medical care—Fiction. 3. Ski resorts—Fiction. 4. Smuggling—Fiction. 5. Switzerland—History—20th century. 6. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.W4644Sk 2007
[Fic]—dc22
2007035813
Printed in the United States of America by Bang Printing