Cherry Ames Boxed Set 13-16

by Helen Wells

  “Pell also admitted that his debts heavily outweigh his assets. The Securities Division expects that a government audit of Pell’s records will take some time to complete. His records are careless, and his bookkeeping system had collapsed. Mr. Atwood said they will seek court orders for Pell’s banks to stop payment on his ‘dividend’ checks. Those clients who received ‘profits’ from Pell may be required, when the court appoints receivers, to turn the ‘profits’ into a general fund in which all Pell’s creditors will share for a pro-rata cash distribution. The Pell case may be a difficult one to investigate and settle because of many victims’ reluctance to make complaints and admit publicly they have been fleeced. They may face arrest if they fail to aid in the prosecution of Pell and his agents. A state-wide and nation-wide police alarm has gone out to apprehend the agents still at large.

  “Acting on the recommendation of the Securities Division, and on the complaint of a Peoria resident, John Ogden, the state’s attorney in that county will institute criminal action against Pell and his eight agents. The state attorney general will conduct an investigation, under powers given by the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act. The Securities Division, acting through the state attorney general, will enjoin Pell and his agents from conducting any further business, with a recommendation to the court to make the injunction permanent. Pell and his crew are liable to fines and jail sentences of up to seven to nine years for larceny.

  “Pell is also subject to criminal prosecution by the local U.S. Post Office inspectors and the local federal district attorney for using the U. S. mails to defraud.

  “Pell, usually dapper and confident, looked like a defeated man last evening. Bail was set at a high figure, and he could not find a bondsman. Pell remains in jail.

  “Pell’s brother-in-law, Edgar Farrow of Chicago, who acted as one of Pell’s salesmen, and his wife, were picked up at New York International Airport as they were about to board an overseas plane. Farrow was carrying thousands of dollars in a suitcase.

  “James Foye, another salesman, arrested earlier …”

  Cherry put the newspaper down, feeling sober. She only hoped Peggy Wilmot would get some, if not all, of her money back. Cherry gave the newspaper to her father, who was patiently waiting for it, kissed her parents, and went on to the hospital.

  Cherry’s ward was interested in her trip. “Did you have a nice time?” several patients asked.

  “Well, I had an interesting time,” Cherry replied, and Peggy Wilmot smiled sadly. The rest of the patients had not been told about the distressing affair.

  Cherry whispered to Peggy the main happenings of her weekend, while the ward was busy having breakfast. Cherry stressed the constructive, hopeful aspects of the situation.

  “I’m so grateful to you,” Peggy murmured over and over. “How could I ever have believed in Pell’s wild promises? I’m no longer so naive. Well, but I’ve been thinking all weekend—” Peggy sat up straighter in the bed and faced Cherry. “You know, this experience has opened my eyes. It’s showed me how immature I’ve been. It—it helped me to grow up.”

  Cherry gave a silent cheer. She said comfortingly that many other persons, too, had been deceived by Pell and Foye.

  Peggy shook her head. “That doesn’t excuse me. From now on I’ll be more responsible.” About her financial loss, whatever it might be, she was resigned and calm. “Oh, I don’t even want to talk about this swindle! Leave it to the law. I’m much more interested in starting to walk again,” Peggy said with spirit.

  “Good for you!” Cherry said. “I want to see you in the walker.”

  During the morning Cherry brought in the walker and a small pair of crutches, since Peggy was small. Peggy got out of bed with some difficulty; Cherry helped her. Cherry, acting as physical therapist, taught her how to walk with crutches. The walker was used as a precaution. Its frame supported Peggy as she stood up, weak after three weeks in bed, and took her first few hesitant steps on crutches. Dr. Dan Blake came in to watch.

  “That’s fine, just fine,” Dr. Dan said. “You won’t need the walker after today, I can see that.”

  “Tomorrow,” Cherry said, “she’ll walk with the crutches alone. Won’t she, Dr. Blake? Miss Greer?”

  The head nurse who was watching, too, smiled and nodded.

  “After four or five days,” Dr. Dan promised Peggy, “you should be strong enough to walk with the help of a cane. Then you’ll discard that, too. Good luck,” and he went to see Mrs. Henry, the surgery patient.

  Peggy Wilmot flushed at the encouragement. She would walk, and walk without pain.

  Cherry remembered something Dr. Dan had said to her the other day: “Someday all the research that’s being done on arthritis will give us new knowledge and better techniques. Someday a cure will be found. Then our patients won’t suffer so much and won’t be crippled.” He himself was doing research in the hospital laboratory in his off hours.

  Cherry helped Peggy Wilmot into a wheelchair of the correct height, seating her at an erect angle. After a rest, Peggy would be taken to the hospital gym to exercise, and then to the hospital swimming pool. This afternoon, on Dr. Watson’s orders, she was to practice sewing and typing, starting with fifteen minutes of each.

  At noon Liz, their discharged teenage patient, practically pranced into the ward, her cast notwithstanding, to show what a fine recovery she was making. She kept up her hospital contact through occasional visits to the Out-Patient Department, as Peggy Wilmot would.

  “The doctors say I’ll be riding again by September,” Liz announced proudly.

  The entire ward, Peggy especially, were heartened by seeing Liz. Cherry said to Peggy Wilmot, “Next week you’ll be discharged and go home, too.”

  Peggy had made a wonderful recovery. The inflammation was all but gone, and Peggy had no deformity—thanks, Cherry knew, to good medical and nursing care.

  “Want to know something?” Peggy Wilmot said shyly to Cherry. “My old boss called me up Saturday, while you were in Chicago. He’d heard about me from my neighbors who do business with him. And—well, he offered me my secretarial job back. Beginning in September.”

  “Wonderful! That will give you a month to rest.”

  “I’ll be glad to keep busy at work,” Peggy said. “And it will be satisfying to earn something.” She did not mention the Pell misadventure again.

  Cherry’s job with this patient was nearly finished when Miss Vesey called on her to do a different sort of job—to help with preparations for the junior volunteers’ Awards party. All the juniors had by now served fifty hours—and Miss Vesey said it was time for their well-earned awards. Not that any of them would stop serving the hospital until school reopened in September, and if possible, not even then.

  “They’ve done a magnificent job,” Ann Vesey said to Cherry. “I suppose you know that at school, at an assembly, each junior will receive a certificate of accomplishment signed by the Commissioner of Hospitals. We’ll report the Jayvees’ service hours to their schools, along with the evaluations we’ll write on their individual performances.”

  Cherry grinned. “The Jayvees ought to write reports on us.”

  The young Director of Volunteers grinned back. “They do, indirectly. They’re invited to fill out questionnaires about what they like and don’t like about their jobs—and the kids don’t have to sign their names, either.”

  “Ouch,” said Cherry. “What’s about the party?”

  The junior volunteers and their parents were to be invited to a reception Friday evening, where each junior would receive his or her recognition pin. Those who had contributed outstanding service would also receive Certificates of Merit—including Midge, Bud Johnson, Claire Alison, Myron Stern, Dave McNeil, and several others whom Cherry knew.

  “Those youngsters are going to be pleasantly surprised,” Miss Vesey said. “I think everyone will have reason to feel proud. We’re inviting many teachers and people in the community. There’ll be a speech by the Medical Director of our h
ospital, then the awards, and then refreshments and dancing. It’ll be a formal, dressy occasion.”

  “Sounds delightful,” Cherry said. “Our Jayvees certainly deserve to be honored.”

  All that week the Jayvees’ Hospitality Lounge buzzed with talk of the coming party. No one neglected his or her job, but the juniors couldn’t help being excited. Dodo Ware declared she would put her award pin into her memory book. A great deal of planning went on about who would call for whom on the great evening. The boys wanted to wear their hospital uniforms to the party. Mrs. Jenkins sniffed at that. The girls voted, “Dress up.” Dr. Dan Blake asked Cherry if he could escort her to the Awards party, and she accepted with pleasure.

  He was a little late in coming for her on Friday evening, phoning Cherry at home that he was still working with an emergency patient. Cherry waited on her porch in the warm, quiet evening, breathing in the nighttime fragrance of her mother’s flower garden, thinking of the party and the awards.

  What good citizens her town’s Jayvees were—what a difference between that selfish, cheating Pell and Foye, and the loving, giving young volunteers. Cherry thought the Jayvees were not only infinitely better persons, but infinitely richer. They made everyone around them richer, too. Why, Carol Nichols and Midge had already gotten hospital permission and a promise of help from their high school art teacher to have their art class, next fall, paint Mother Goose murals on the walls of the Children’s Pavilion and in the playroom.

  A car pulled up in front of the Ames’s house. Dr. Dan got out and came up the walk toward Cherry. They were very glad to see each other again.

  “Good evening,” he called out. “Turn on the porch light and let’s see how lovely you look.”

  Cherry turned on the light and pirouetted for him in her pretty dress. “Have I your approval, sir?”

  “Lovely,” he said. “Incidentally, you deserve some sort of award yourself.” Cherry smiled, switched off the light and called good night to her family. Dr. Dan helped her into the car, and Smiling broadly at each other, they started out to the very special party.

  In case you missed Cherry Ames, Cruise Nurse…

  CHAPTER I

  Waiting for a Letter

  CHERRY OPENED ONE DARK-BROWN EYE AND CLOSED IT again quickly. Shivering, she pulled the covers up until her black curls were hidden beneath the thick, crazy quilt comforter.

  Cherry had been dreaming. It was such a very pleasant dream she didn’t want to stop. She was dreaming that she was back in her own room in Hilton, Illinois. She had cautiously opened one eye to make sure everything was exactly the same in the dream as it was in real life:

  Her dressing table with its dotted-swiss skirts and brisk red bows; the crisp, ruffled white curtains tied back with bright-red ribbon; a stream of cold December sunlight pouring through the open window to bring out the varied colors in the hooked rug her grandmother had made.

  Cherry sighed. If only the dream could come true. But, of course, she wasn’t home. She was with the rest of the Spencer Club in Greenwich Village, New York City.

  For one year and three months now Cherry had been a visiting nurse, sharing No. 9, the Greenwich Village apartment, with Josie, Gwen, Bertha, Vivian, and Mai Lee. They were all visiting nurses too. Thinking about the Spencer Club made Cherry realize more than ever that she must be dreaming. If she were awake she would hear them chattering as they dressed and breakfasted.

  No one could sleep through the chatter and the clatter and confusion of an early working-day morning in No. 9. You couldn’t even dream through it, Cherry decided, and boldly opened both eyes. She sniffed tentatively.

  The crisp, cold air was laden with the delicious blend of freshly perked coffee and thick slabs of bacon frying on the stove in her mother’s kitchen. Cherry pinched one red cheek and then the other. She was awake. She wasn’t dreaming! She was home!

  And then it all came back to her. She remembered that two weeks ago the dizziness had suddenly gotten worse; so much worse that everything went black for a minute. The dizzy spells, she had known for a long time, were due to fatigue.

  Cherry had been making a report about a contagious disease that had suddenly broken out in her district: Mumps—nothing very serious, but should they try the new inoculation?

  “The Lerner children are all down with it,” Cherry was stuttering. Her tongue felt thick and dry in her mouth. Her head ached. Her back ached. Her legs ached from knee to toe. Her feet were weighted down with the iron clamps of complete exhaustion.

  She stared across the desk, trying to focus her eyes on Miss Dorothy Davis, her supervisor. And then all of a sudden Miss Davis’s face began to dance and whirl. Nausea flooded over Cherry. She gripped the edge of the desk with sweating fingers. She wasn’t going to faint. Nurses don’t go around fainting. Nurses can’t even spare the time to be sick. Not when they know that in one year in New York City alone the Visiting Nurse Service gave nursing care to almost five million people!

  But Cherry did faint. Everything went black for a minute. When she came to, Miss Davis had pushed Cherry’s head down between her knees. Now she handed Cherry a glass of water into which she had stirred a teaspoon of aromatic spirits of ammonia.

  “Drink up,” Miss Davis said briskly. “You’re going to be all right, Ames. You’re overtired. Need a vacation. Take your work too seriously.”

  Cherry drank up and felt better. The dizziness ebbed away, but the ache had spread to every bone and joint in her body. She struggled to her feet. Miss Davis tucked Cherry’s hand in the crook of her arm.

  “I’m sending you home in a cab,” she said. “A relief nurse will cover your district while you’re gone. And you’re going to be gone for one whole month.”

  “Oh, no, please,” Cherry had protested weakly. “Mr. Morvell … Mrs. di Pattio … the Lerner children—”

  The supervisor snapped her fingers, her brown eyes flashing. But her smile was warm. “Listen to me, Cherry Ames. You’re not the only visiting nurse in the world. Run-down and exhausted as you are, you’re not really much good to us. You’re a liability right now.” She grinned to take the edge off her words. “A month’s leave of absence and you’re an asset again. We need assets. Your boss’s orders. See?”

  Cherry had managed a sickly laugh. “Yes, ma’am, but—”

  And then Mrs. Berkey, the assistant supervisor, appeared on the scene. She was tall and capable looking, and her gray eyes were grim. “I’m taking you home, Ames,” she said. “Now. Have an errand downtown anyway. Cab’s waiting. Hustle into your coat and rubbers. I’m a busy woman.”

  Cherry meekly obeyed. Orders were orders. She was too weary to argue further anyway.

  Outside in the street, Mrs. Berkey, holding Cherry firmly by the arm as they walked toward a waiting cab, said, “Miss Davis and I have had our eyes on you for the past month. You need a good long rest. And a change.”

  During the ride downtown Mrs. Berkey had said something else which even now Cherry couldn’t quite believe. She’d said that what Cherry needed was a Caribbean cruise. Miss Davis was going to try to arrange it. Her brother, Dr. Fowler Davis, was in the medical department of one of the big steamship lines.

  There was, however, a long waiting list. Cruise jobs were prized by nurses, exhausted by long hours and understaffed hospitals. But Cherry, Mrs. Berkey said, should spend a couple of weeks at home before taking on any new duties anyway. And then it would be the holiday season. A great many nurses on the list might withdraw their names, preferring to spend Christmas at home …

  Cherry sat up in bed and tugged the comforter around her shoulders. It was too good to come true. A Caribbean cruise! The round trip would take twelve days. Almost two weeks of warm weather and sea air. A stopover at the exciting-sounding island of Curaçao in the Netherlands West Indies; then on to Venezuela and Colombia in South America.

  But there was a long waiting list. That, Cherry decided, was the catch. There must be hundreds of other overtired young nurses ahead of her on th
e list. They must have signed up ages ago for ship’s-nurse jobs on luxury ocean liners cruising to glamorous Caribbean ports. What chance did Ames have?

  Ames, Cherry admitted ruefully, had waited too long. She had known a month ago that she was suffering from fatigue and needed a vacation, if not a change.

  “I was silly,” Cherry scolded herself now. “As Miss Davis said, I’m not the only visiting nurse in the world.”

  Well, she had learned her lesson. She had been relaxing now for almost two weeks and felt fine. But it still seemed like a dream to be home.

  Breakfast in bed. Window-shopping with Midge, home too, for the holidays. Long, satisfying talks with Midge’s father, Dr. Joe. And best of all, wonderful, quiet evenings around the fire with her mother and father. They talked very little as they munched buttered popcorn and lazily cracked nuts, watching the smoldering logs crumple into dying embers. But the very peace and quiet of those happy evenings had gradually stopped the dull ache in her tired body. And now that Charlie was home on vacation too, life was perfect.

  “In bed from nine to noon,” Dr. Joseph Fortune had ordered, affectionately stern. He had ushered Cherry and her twin brother, Charlie, into the world. It was Dr. Joe who had inspired her to become a nurse.

  Dear Dr. Joe with his beautiful, sensitive face and luminous eyes! “He was really worried about me when I tottered off the train and practically collapsed into Dad’s arms.”

  Charlie had been worried too, Cherry knew; almost as upset as her parents had been, although she had gained back a few pounds before his arrival. But he hid his anxiety under a steady stream of teasing:

  “If you don’t get those red cheeks back soon, Nurse Ames, we’ll have to change your name to Lily.”

  Charlie was the only one to whom Cherry had confided her dream of a Caribbean cruise. Cherry felt certain that her parents and Dr. Joe would have strenuous objections if she so much as mentioned it. It would be hard to convince them that she was well and strong now; that the trip actually would be good for her.