“But that can’t possibly be the case here,” I expostulated. “We know—”
“Pardonnez-moi, we know nothing; even less,” de Grandin denied. “Come, let us go.”
“Go?” I echoed. “Go where?”
“To interview Madame Betty, of course,” he returned coolly. “I may be wrong, but unless I am more mistaken than I think, we may find interesting developments at her home.”
Grumbling, but with my curiosity piqued, I rose to accompany him to the pretty little cottage where Kit Norton had taken his bride three years before.
“It is most strange,” he muttered as we passed through the quiet streets. “It seems hardly likely the poor Monsieur Christopher should have suffered the same fate. And yet—” he broke off musingly.
“What’s that?” I asked sharply, annoyed at his persistent sympathy for young Norton.
“I did but think aloud,” he returned. “The unfortunate gentleman of Lyons, of whom I spoke earlier in the evening—his aberration was an oddly tangled one. Investigations by the police showed that several days before he deserted his family and set out for Marseilles, he had an altercation with a certain fortune-telling man from the East; indeed, he had gone so far as to tweak his nose, and the Oriental had pronounced a curse of forgetfulness on him.”
AS WE PAUSED BEFORE the cottage gate a long roadster, driven as though contending for a racing-trophy, dashed past us and stopped at the curb with a screeching of sharply applied brakes. A moment later its occupant leaped out and ran at breakneck speed up the brick path leading to Norton’s front stoop. “Lesterdale!” I exclaimed in surprise.
“Eh, what do you say?” de Grandin asked.
“That’s Lesterdale, the best nerve man in the city,” I responded. “Wonder what brings him here?”
“Let us see,” the Frenchman returned matter-of-factly. “The house is open, Let us enter.”
Dr. Lesterdale had a case worthy of all his skill, we discovered almost as soon as we marched unbidden into Norton’s cottage.
Betty Norton crouched in her bed, her knees drawn up, her chin resting on them, and her arms flailing the unresisting air with the fury of the grand movement stage of hysteria. As we paused at the bedroom door we caught a glimpse of her tear-smeared face as she stared wildly about the room with wide, horror-numbed eyes. “Frank,” she shrieked, “oh, Frank my love, where are you?”
“Doctor,” she bent a terrified look on Lesterdale, “I dreamed—l thought I was Kit Norton’s wife, that I was the mother of—oh, say it isn’t true, Doctor.”
“Tiens, what is this?” de Grandin muttered. “Has she, too, emerged from a state of suspended memory?”
Lesterdale’s eyes were cool with professional unconcern. Like everyone else in the city he knew the scandal of Betty’s divorce and remarriage, and had he been there in any capacity other than that of physician, I could well imagine how his glance would have been blank with cold contempt as he looked at the pretty woman contorted on the bed. “Water!” he ordered shortly of the terrified nurse.
A moment later he dissolved a small white tablet in the half-filled tumbler she brought, plunged the nozzle of his hypodermic into the mixture and barked another order. “Alcohol—sponge—in the case yonder,” he snapped.
The nurse got the alcohol and a cotton sponge from his kit and swabbed Betty’s left arm.
The needle pierced the girl’s delicate skin and I saw a blister rise as the morphia went home before the syringe-plunger’s pressure.
“See the child has substitute feedings—dextro-maltose, milk and water, Wilson’s formula No. 2—can’t have it nurse with the mother full o’ morphine. Call me if she kicks up another row.” Lesterdale glanced appraisingly at Betty, noted the narcotic already stealing over her, and turned toward the door. “She ought to be quiet for the rest of the night,” he added over his shoulder.
“Oh, hullo, Trowbridge,” he called as he recognized me by the door. “What’s up, did they rout you out, too? Devil of a note, dragging a man from the bridge table to calm a conscience-stricken female. What?”
“But do you think it’s just an attack of conscience?” I countered. “Mightn’t it be a case of puerperal insan—”
“No,” he cut in. “Not even lactational neurosis; no symptom of it. It’s hysteria, pure and simple, or”—he smiled acidly—“more simple than pure, I’d say, considering who’s having it. Don’t see how it happened, but something’s awakened the little strumpet’s conscience, and it’s hurting her like the devil. Good-night,” he nodded shortly as he passed down the hall without a backward glance.
“Mordieu, he is hard, that one; hard like a nail,” de Grandin murmured. “A good neurologist he may be, Friend Trowbridge, but I think he is also a monumental fool. Let us interrogate the garde-malade.”
The nurse recognized me with a start of surprise as we edged into the room. “Mr. Norton called at my office, and—” I began, but she cut me short.
“Oh, he did, did he?” she returned sourly. “I should think he would, after what he’s done. He—”
“Slowly, Mademoiselle, if you please,” de Grandin urged. “‘Our perceptions are dull, and you go too fast. What, precisely, did Monsieur Norton do?”
The girl stared at him. “What?” she echoed. “Plenty. He came home from the office with a beautiful bouquet; then pretended he didn’t know his own wife and baby, and went flying out of the house like a crazy man. He drove the poor thing to this—” she glanced compassionately at Betty. “He hadn’t been gone half-an-hour when she went completely to pieces and started raving like a lunatic!”
“Ah?” de Grandin tweaked his mustache meditatively. “Now we begin to make progress. What, if you please, was the exact nature of her delusion?”
The nurse considered a moment. Years of hospital training had taught her accurate observation where symptoms were concerned, and professional habit was stronger than womanly anger. “She began crying as though her heart would break,” she replied slowly; “then, when he came back the second time and stared wildly in the room before rushing off again, she seemed to change completely. I’ve never seen anything like it. One moment she was crying and wringing her hands, begging Mr. Norton to recognize her, the next she was like a different woman. Just for a moment she stopped crying, and a sort of dazed, surprised look came into her eyes; then she looked round the room as though she’d never seen it before—like a casualty victim coming out of the ether in the emergency ward,” she finished with professional clarity.
“This dazed, bewildered condition lasted only a moment; then, like a woman recovering from a faint, she asked, ‘Where am I?’
“I soothed her as best I could; told her Mr. Norton had gone out for a moment, but would be back directly, and held the baby out to her. This seemed to excite her all the more. I had to explain where she was, who she was, and who the baby was—can you imagine? Instead of calming her, it seemed to make her worse. She stared unbelievingly at me, and when I showed her the baby again, she fell to screaming at the top of her voice and calling for somebody named Frank. Have you any idea who it could be, Dr. Trowbridge?”
“What else happened?” I returned, evading her question.
“That’s all, sir. I grew alarmed when she seemed to shrink from her own child, and called Dr. Lesterdale. He’s the best nerve man in town, don’t you think?”
“Quite,” I agreed. “If you—”
“Non, mon ami,” de Grandin interrupted. “Trouble the good mademoiselle no more. We have already heard enough—parbleu, I fear we have heard more than we can conveniently piece together. Come, let us go.
“Grand Dieu,” he murmured as we reached the street, “it is amazing, it is astonishing, it is bewildering! Has the clock of time turned back, and are we once more in the seventeenth century?”
“Eh?” I asked.
“Is witchcraft rampant in our midst?” he returned. “Barbe d’un bouc, my friend, I know not whether to say we have witnessed two most extraordinar
y cases of mental derangement or something wholly and entirely infernal.”
2
HOMER ABBOT, SON OF my old schoolmate, Judge Winslow Abbot, and one of the cleverest of the younger members of the local bar, was waiting nervously in my consulting-room next morning. “It’s about Marjorie,” he began, almost before we had exchanged greetings. “I’m dreadfully worried about her, Doctor!”
“What’s wrong?” I asked, noting the parentheses of wrinkles which worry had etched between his brows. “Do you want me to run over and look at her?”
“No, sir; I’m afraid this business is a little out of your line,” he confessed. “To tell you the truth, I’ve come to you more as a friend than as a physician.” He paused a moment, as though debating whether to continue; then: “She’s been acting queerly, recently. About a week ago she began coming down to breakfast all crocked up—circles under her eyes, no more life than a wet handkerchief, and all that sort of thing, you know. I was concerned at once, and begged her to come to you, but she just laughed at me.
“It’s gone from bad to worse, since. She’s irritable as the deuce—flies off the handle at nothing, scolds me like a shrew with or without reason; most of the time she seems actually trying to avoid me, makes every kind of excuse to keep from coming to the door with me in the morning, pleads a headache, or some other indisposition, to get away from me in the evening, even—”
“H’m,” I smiled knowingly to myself. A happy explanation of Marjorie’s sudden vagaries had occurred to me, but Homer’s next words killed it.
“Three nights ago I happened to wake up about one o’clock,” he hurried on. “You know that feeling of vague malaise we sometimes have for no reason at all? That’s what I felt when I sat up in bed and looked round. Everything was quiet—too quiet—in the room. I switched on the night light and looked across at Marjorie’s bed. It was empty.
“I waited and waited. When half an hour went by with no sign of her, I couldn’t stand it any more. I looked everywhere—went through the house from cellar to attic; she wasn’t anywhere. It wasn’t till I’d finished my search and returned almost frantic to the bedroom that I noticed her clothing was missing from the chair where she usually puts it; when I went to the closet I found her heavy sports coat gone, too.
“I sat up waiting for her till nearly five o’clock; finally, I couldn’t stick it any more, and dropped off to sleep.
“Marjorie was sleeping peacefully as a child when I woke two hours later, and when I tried to rouse her and ask where she’d been during the night, she turned from me like a fretful child, too, and mumbled something about wanting to be let alone.
“I tried my best to ask her about it that evening, but she had a couple of girl friends in to dinner and we played contract afterward, so I didn’t get a word alone with her till after eleven, when the company left. Then she fairly ran upstairs to bed, complaining of a splitting headache, and each time I tried to speak to her she begged me to let her alone to suffer in peace.
“I don’t think she went out that night, but I don’t know.”
“Eh?” I asked, impressed by the emphasis he laid on the last four words. “How d’ye mean?”
For answer he thrust his hand into his waistcoat pocket and extracted a tiny square of folded white paper. “What do you make of this?” he asked, handing me the packet.
I opened the paper, disclosing a dust of fine, white, crystalline powder, wet my forefinger, gathered a few grains of the substance on it, and touched it to my tongue. “Good heavens!” I ejaculated.
“Morphine, isn’t it?” he asked.
“No, it is codeine,” I returned. “Where—”
“On her dresser, yesterday morning,” he cut in. “And there was another like it, with a few grains of the stuff still adhering to the paper, on the pantry shelf. We had coffee with our refreshments the night before, and I thought mine tasted bitter, but the others laughed at me, so I thought maybe the trouble was with me rather than the coffee. By the way, Marjorie brought the coffee in herself that night, and it wasn’t till I found these powders that I recalled she brought mine in separately, the only cup on the tray—no chance for me to take the wrong one that way, you see.
“I slept like a log that night, and woke with a queer, dizzy feeling yesterday morning. Marjorie was still asleep when I was dressed and ready for breakfast, and it was just by chance I discovered the powder. You see, I thought perhaps her headache was still troubling her, and went to her dresser for some cologne. That’s where I found the package I just showed you. I thought I recognized it; they gave me something of the kind in the hospital at St. Nazaire during the war.”
“But see here, boy,” I expostulated, “maybe we’re making a mountain of a molehill. This stuff’s codeine, beyond doubt, and Marjorie shouldn’t be allowed to have it; but it’s possible some quack gave it her for those headaches she’s been complaining of—more than one woman’s been made a dope fiend that way. That feeling of depression you had on waking—”
“Wasn’t present this morning,” he interrupted sharply. “I don’t know how I came to reason it all out, but the moment I found that infernal stuff I knew she’d drugged my coffee the previous night. So I took the paper and went downstairs and fixed a dummy pack with table salt, and left it where I’d found the codeine on her dresser. It was while I was looking for salt to make the dummy I found the empty codeine paper in the pantry.
“Dr. Trowbridge,” he leaned forward impressively, “last night, after dinner, my coffee was salty as brine!”
Young Homer Abbot and I faced each other a moment in solemn-eyed silence. I opened my lips to utter some banality, but he hurried on:
“I pretended to become sleepy almost immediately, and went to bed—but I didn’t undress. Marjorie didn’t trouble even to come upstairs to see if I had fallen asleep; I suppose she was so sure the dope had done its work. I heard the front door close before I’d been in bed half an hour, jumped up, slipped on my shoes and jacket, and ran after her. I got down just in time to see her taxi round the corner, and though I chased it like a hound hunting a rabbit, it lost me in the fog, and I had to give up.
“Marjorie came in a few minutes after five this morning,” he concluded. Then, because he was still little more than a boy, and because his happy little world had tumbled to pieces before his eyes, Homer Abbot put his arm down on my desk, pillowed his face against it and cried like a heart-broken child.
“Poor chap,” I sympathized. “Poor boy, it’s a rotten shame, and—”
“And we had best be stirring ourselves to correct it, my friend,” Jules de Grandin supplemented as he stepped noiselessly into the room.
“I must ask forgiveness for eavesdropping,” he added as he paused beside me, “but I caught the beginning of the young monsieur’s so tragic tale, and could not forbear to linger till I heard its end.
“Do not despair, my friend,” he patted Homer’s bowed shoulder gently. “All looks hopeless, I know, but I think there is a reason behind it all, nor is it what you think.
“Trowbridge, my friend,” he added, his little eyes snapping with cold fury. “I damnation think this business of Monsieur Abbot’s and that of Monsieur Norton are bound up together somehow. Yes. Certainly there is someone, or some thing, in this city which stands in urgent need of eradication, and I shall supply that need—may Satan fry me in a pan with butter and parsnips if I do not so!”
Again he turned to Homer. “Think, Monsieur,” he urged, “what happened before your so charming wife began to show this remarkable change? Consider carefully the smallest happening, the seemingly least important thing may guide us to a solution of the case. What, by example, did you do for several days before she manifested the first symptom—even the very night before her indisposition became patent?”
Young Abbot took his chin in his hand as he bent his thoughts backward. “I can’t recall anything, especially, that happened about that time,” he answered slowly. “Let’s see, four of us went to the thea
ter that Thursday night, and stopped at a night club afterward. U’m, yes; something rather queer did happen there. We had a little spat, but—?”
“Excellent!” de Grandin interjected. “This petite querelle, it was about what, if you please?”
“Nothing of importance,” the other replied. “There was a queer, bilious-looking fellow sitting alone at a table across from us, and he kept looking at Marjorie. I didn’t notice him at first, but at last he got on my nerves, and I rose to speak to him. Marjorie begged me not to make a scene, and the fellow left a few minutes afterward—damn him, I’d have wrung his neck, if I’d caught him!” he ended savagely.
“Indeed, and for why?” de Grandin asked softly.
“Just before he left the room he turned and held up a little mirror, or some small, round, bright object, and flashed a ray from it directly into Marjorie’s eyes. I made a dash for him, but he’d gone before I could reach the door.”
“U’m,” de Grandin murmured to himself. “That is of importance, also.” He nodded once or twice thoughtfully; then: “And Madame, your wife, she said what?” he asked.
“She fussed at me!” Homer returned in an injured voice. “Declared I’d made a disgraceful scene and humiliated her, and all that kind of thing. Next morning she slept late, and was as exhausted as though she’d just risen from a sickbed when she finally got up.”
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