A Child Lost

by Michelle Cox

  The sun was just setting, so the room was dark except for the rosy glow that shone through the one window. Henrietta looked past the twin bed piled with guests’ coats to the extra mattress on the floor and guessed it must be the room where Rose and Billy were staying. Ida soundlessly closed the door.

  “What’s all this about?” Ida asked quietly, taking a sip of her drink.

  “We were looking for a woman, the friend of my sister’s friend,” Henrietta explained quickly, sensing she did not have much time. “A woman named Liesel. We found out that she had been taken to Dunning, which we believed was somehow a mistake in the first place. She suffered from fits, epilepsy, we think. But when we finally traced her to Dunning and went to get her out, we were shocked to find she was dead! We asked for a report, a cause of death, and all they would tell us, reluctantly at that, was that she had a bad reaction to the electric shock treatment they tried on her and that she died. They were very quick to dismiss us.”

  Ida nodded as if this made sense. “Which ward?”

  “Ward 3C,” Henrietta answered and watched as Ida took another drink.

  “Go on,” she said quietly.

  “So I found myself there again, recently, this time to retrieve this woman’s child, if you can believe it, who had also been sent there, again, we believe wrongly. When the nurse wasn’t looking, I . . . I snuck a look at the log and saw that the woman, Liesel, had no less than eight treatments in the short time she was there and, what’s more, that she hadn’t died for nearly a week after the last one . . .” Henrietta’s voice trailed off, waiting for Ida to say something, but she just continued to stare at Henrietta.

  “So don’t you think that’s odd?” Henrietta urged. “If it was really a result of the electric shock treatments, wouldn’t she have died immediately? Or very soon after? Not six days!”

  Again, Ida’s face remained a blank.

  “So when Mrs. Hennessey mentioned that you saw something there, too . . . I just wondered if perhaps you could shed any light on it. I just get this funny feeling that maybe they’re hiding something?” Henrietta’s voice trailed off.

  “Like what?” Ida asked.

  “Like maybe something else happened to Liesel? Something not quite accidental? But I can’t understand why. Why would someone want to kill a poor immigrant woman?” Henrietta sighed, repeating Clive’s words. “I guess I was hoping you might be able to add something to this. Can you?” she looked at her pleadingly.

  “Why should I?” Ida asked bitterly. “Why should I risk my neck? Already did once, and look where it got me.”

  Henrietta considered this. She didn’t really have a good answer. “Because of the child?” she finally said. “So that someone else doesn’t lose their mother?”

  Ida sighed deeply and took several moments to answer. “Yes, I . . . I do think something odd is going on there,” she said hesitantly. “I don’t have any proof exactly, but I’m . . . I’m almost sure of it.” She looked up at Henrietta nervously.

  “Yes?” Henrietta asked, trying to hide her excitement.

  “I was assigned to Ward 3C for a while,” she said in a very low voice, so low that Henrietta had to strain to hear her. “I usually worked the day shift, but I would sometimes fill in on nights, too. A lot of times, we worked double shifts. I was always asked to stay because I don’t have a husband or a family. It was harder for some of the other nurses. So, one night, one of my patients had somehow untied herself from the bed—”

  “Untied herself?” Henrietta interrupted, shocked.

  “Yes, the patients are often tied into bed at night to keep them from wandering—”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “I know it sounds bad, but it’s sometimes necessary for their own safety. Or the safety of the other residents,” she said grimly. “There are a lot of terrible things that go on in that place.”

  At those words, an image of the man with the sores on his face looking lecherously at Anna suddenly came into Henrietta’s mind, and she had to actually shake her head to dispel it.

  “I’m sure you’re right. I’m sorry. Please, go on.”

  “As I was saying, one of my patients had gotten out of bed and smeared feces all over the wall.”

  Henrietta swallowed hard, trying to block out the repulsive image that came to mind.

  “It took some time to restrain her,” Ida went on. “I called for help, but no one came, so I finally managed to do it myself. After I got her back in bed, I hurried to the stock room to get something to clean up the mess with. As I grabbed some towels, I noticed a brown bottle sitting there on the counter. It struck me as odd at the time because it was brown, and most of our bottles are clear. Or sometimes green. And it didn’t have a label. Curious, I decided to open it and smell it, wondering if it was alcohol—hootch, you know—of some kind. Either one of the nurse’s or maybe something they had confiscated from a patient. But it wasn’t alcohol,” Ida said, pausing to take a long drink herself. “It had a smell of almonds to it . . .”

  Here Ida looked at Henrietta as if that detail should mean something to her, but when Henrietta did not react, she went on. “It wasn’t until the end of my shift that I remembered it and went back to the stock room to investigate further, but the bottle was gone. I couldn’t find it anywhere. It’s as if it disappeared into thin air. Not long after that, Nurse Collins arrived to relieve me, and I left.”

  “Did you mention it to Nurse Collins?”

  “No,” Ida said, shifting uncomfortably. “It didn’t seem like something important enough to mention, and, anyway, I was in a hurry to get home. My mother was quite ill at the time, and I needed to care for her. All thoughts of work went out of my head.”

  Henrietta took a drink of her cherry cordial and felt sorry for this poor woman who had to work all night as a nurse and then again at home. Before she could ask anything more, however, Ida hurried on, apparently eager to finish the story.

  “Imagine my surprise the next day when I went in only to discover there had been a death in the night! It took a little while, but it finally occurred to me that the stuff in the bottle . . . it must have been cyanide!”

  “Cyanide!” Henrietta exclaimed. “You mean poison?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “But . . . but how do you know?” Henrietta asked, thinking that this was sounding a little farfetched despite her eagerness for proof of some sort of wrongdoing.

  “Don’t you see? Cyanide gives off a smell of almonds,” Ida said anxiously. “It must have been it.”

  Henrietta felt a thrill run down her spine. This is just the sort of thing she had been hoping for! But as excited as she was, she made herself play devil’s advocate, Clive’s voice in her mind, telling her to be cautious. “But . . . couldn’t the death have just been a coincidence?” she asked hesitantly.

  “It could have been,” Ida said with an annoyed shrug. “But no one was even close to death. We sort of know when it’s going to happen. The other patients do, too, somehow. They start shunning that person. Call it a sixth sense, if you will. But I hadn’t felt anything like that. None of us had. It was an older woman, Mrs. Leary, I think it was. A sudden heart attack, they said. The morning nurses had already taken her body down to the morgue, stripped her bed, and given it to a new patient by the time I got in. Of course, it’s not unusual for someone to die, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that something was odd about the whole thing. That’s when I remembered seeing the funny bottle, but I could hardly believe what my mind was suggesting. The first chance I got, I went to the stock room to look more closely for it, but there was no trace of it. I looked everywhere, but I didn’t see any brown bottle. I wondered, then, if in my exhausted state I had possibly imagined it.”

  “Who was on duty with you that night? That seems like the obvious person to question.”

  “No one.”

  “No one? What do you mean?”

  “It was a floater. If we were ever short, Harding would ass
ign someone to float between wards and help as needed,” Ida said, taking a drink.

  “So Nurse Harding was there that night?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Who was the floater?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t remember,” Ida said with a sigh. “I’ve tried and tried to recall, but I don’t think I ever saw her. That’s why when I called out for help with my patient, no one responded.”

  “Hmmm. I see,” Henrietta mused. “Then what happened?”

  “I guess I forgot about it for a while,” Ida said with a shrug. “But then I started noticing over the next few months that there were more sudden deaths which no one, it seemed, was paying attention to or cared about really. That may seem unusual or harsh, but every death at Dunning is the end of suffering for someone and at the same time, one less person to clothe and feed, and an open bed for someone assigned to a mattress on the floor. But I was trying to pay attention, trying to make some sort of connection. I’m not sure why, really, just that it felt odd. The only thing I was able to discover was that the sudden deaths always occurred on either Ward 3B or 3C. I kept looking for a brown bottle but could never find one. I even checked the stock rooms on both wards, but I found nothing there, either. But the deaths kept happening. Not all at once or with any pattern, so that I eventually began to question my own sanity. Working in a place like that does something to you.”

  “I can only imagine,” Henrietta agreed with a shudder. “Were you ever able to make any connections?” Henrietta asked. “Something that linked them?”

  “Not really. Just that they oddly never occurred while I was on duty. Only on days or nights when I was off.”

  “Men? Women?”

  “Both.”

  “Old?”

  “Didn’t matter.”

  “Any connection in their diagnosis?”

  Ida thought about that question. “I’m not sure,” she said, thinking. “Not that I can remember.”

  “Didn’t any of their families ever question their loved one’s death?” Henrietta probed.

  Ida again paused to think. “Well, there’s something,” she said slowly. “None of them seemed to have any family, come to think of it. No one ever came to collect their remains or their possessions. We keep their things for sixty days and then give them out to other patients if no one comes forward to claim them.”

  “Sixty days? That’s not long.”

  Ida shrugged. “Like I said, none of them had any family. No one missed them.”

  “So, none of them had a family,” Henrietta mused, thinking it wasn’t much of a connection. “So then what?”

  Ida took another drink. “I . . . I started losing sleep over these deaths. Wondering if I was seeing too much into them. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I worked up my courage and confronted Nurse Harding with it. I told her about the brown bottle I had seen on the night Mrs. Leary died.”

  “You did?” Henrietta whispered excitedly. “What did she say?”

  “You can imagine,” Ida said bitterly. “She didn’t believe me, of course. Said I was imagining things. I admit that what I was proposing—that someone there was . . . well, was poisoning patients—was ludicrous. I had told myself this countless times, but it was the only thing that seemed to explain what was happening. The only thing that this all added up to. I asked Nurse Harding who the floater was the night Mrs. Leary died—the night I saw the bottle—but she said she couldn’t remember and to mind my own business. Said I should keep my mouth shut and get on with my work.”

  “And then you got fired.”

  “Yes,” she said looking up at Henrietta in surprise. “How did you—?

  “I asked Nurse Harding if she knew you. She said you had been dismissed for drinking,” Henrietta said, observing her closely. “A fondness for gin, I think is what she said.” Henrietta could not help her eyes from glancing at Ida’s current glass, which was nearly empty at this point.

  “Yes, I was fired not long after I confronted Nurse Harding. That’s peculiar, isn’t it? Especially as they’re so short-staffed. There’s not much you can get fired from Dunning for. Drinking is one of them, for some reason, as if there aren’t worse things that happen there,” she said with a little shudder. “But I’m no drunk.” Then she knocked back the last of her drink, which took some courage, Henrietta conceded, given the current conversation.

  Ida let out a deep sigh. “As much as I was tempted to beg for my job, I was afraid as well, and given what I suspected of happening, I just wanted to get out of there. And since I had clearly made an enemy of Nurse Harding, I knew my life would have been hell there anyway after that.”

  “Did she at least give you a reason? Did she mention drinking?”

  “No, she didn’t,” Ida said wryly. “Just said my services were no longer needed. As I was packing up my things, she found me and reminded me that confidentiality and trust were two of the hallmarks of the nursing profession and that a nurse with a loose tongue quickly lost her professional reputation. I’ll admit—it scared me. I needed a reference, and I knew what she was implying. That I needed to keep my mouth shut if I ever hoped to find another place.”

  “She said that?” Henrietta asked, surprised that Nurse Harding was capable of such eloquence.

  “Not in those exact words,” Ida said, comprehending Henrietta’s meaning, “but I understood her message, which was to keep my mouth shut if I ever hoped to get another nursing job. Like I said, I was desperate to care for my mother. I needed a job. Thankfully I was able to get a place at Jefferson Park and all seemed fine; I tried to forget about my suspicions and put it behind me. Imagine my surprise, then, when I heard through a colleague the rumor going around that I was dismissed for drinking! The evil witch made sure to cover her tracks. First get rid of me, threaten and scare me into silence, and then put it about that I was let go for drinking, thereby discounting my suspicions should I ever decide to voice them,” she said bitterly. “Oh, she was clever, all right.”

  Henrietta was stunned by this information. How could someone be that calculating? That evil? She shuddered and a brief image of Neptune came to mind. She pushed it away as another thought occurred to her. “But . . . but what about Nurse Collins—” Henrietta began to ask, suddenly wondering what her role in all of this was. Had she, too, noticed something out of the ordinary? Surely, she would have been sympathetic if Ida had thought to confide in her instead of Nurse Harding. But before Henrietta could finish asking about her, there was a brisk knock at the bedroom door, and Clive poked in his head. He seemed surprised to see the two of them standing there in the dark.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said hurriedly. Though his face was partially in shadow, Henrietta could see his concern. “I just wondered where you were. Forgive me,” he said with a bow.

  Before he could retreat, however, Ida said, “I have to go. I’ve told you everything I know. Now, please let me be,” she begged, pushing past Clive, stumbling a bit as she did. Clive reached out and steadied her, but she did not look at him and merely mumbled a thank you.

  Henrietta tried to perceive if her speech was slurred, but she could not tell.

  “Everything all right, darling?” Clive pulled his gaze back to Henrietta.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, coming up and linking her arm through his. “Let’s go home.”

  Chapter 20

  Henrietta remained seated in the back of the Daimler for several moments, even after it had rolled to a stop a block away from the main gates of Dunning. She checked her wristwatch and confirmed there was still at least an hour left of visiting hours. She took a deep breath, steeling herself against the prospect of going in. She had hoped after the last time that she would never return to this awful place, but she felt she had no choice now and prayed it would be quick.

  She had related to Clive all that Ida Lynde told her at the Hennessey’s party, but he seemed unconvinced, saying that it was farfetched and that, according to Mr. Hennessey, anyway, she w
as a boozer. Her story had the typical flavor of alcohol-induced paranoia to it, he said, which he had witnessed too many times to count. And even if they did take seriously for one moment the suspicion that several deaths at Dunning were not the result of natural causes, Liesel Klinkhammer’s in particular, what would the motive be? The theory fell apart there, Clive reasoned. Add to that Ida Lynde’s reputed alcoholism, and it was pretty much a hill of beans.

  Henrietta argued that she didn’t believe Ida to be an alcoholic; she had seen plenty of those in her lifetime. Irritatingly, Clive then pointed out how Ida had stumbled from the bedroom at the Hennessey’s.

  “Honestly, Clive, anyone can stumble!” Henrietta admonished, but they had dropped the conversation when Antonia happened to enter the room where they were sitting.

  But Henrietta could not stop thinking about it. She had come up with several more questions she wished she could ask Ida, but she had no idea where she lived or how to contact her. She supposed she could ask Mrs. Hennessey about how to reach her, but she was hesitant to involve the older woman in this, given Mrs. Hennessey’s fondness for gossip—especially if it turned out to be nothing. And anyway, even if she could talk with Ida again somehow, she wasn’t sure how much more she could share. She seemed to have already told her all she knew. Except, Henrietta had wanted to ask her more about Nurse Collins; she had been about to before Clive walked in on them. Surely Nurse Collins, working in such close quarters with Ida, had noticed something, too? Had Ida ever whispered her suspicions to her colleague? Henrietta wondered, or was she fired before she could do so?

  It occurred to Henrietta, then, that perhaps she should return to Dunning herself and attempt to find a record of exactly who was working the night Mrs. Leary died, and to possibly question Nurse Collins if she could find her. Perhaps she knew who the mysterious floater was that night, or saw something after Ida had gone home? Perhaps she shared Ida’s wild theories of a murderer, more than likely a murderess, on the loose. Or, on the other hand, maybe Nurse Collins could corroborate that Ida was indeed a paranoid alcoholic. Yes, Henrietta reasoned more and more as each day passed: speaking directly to Nurse Collins seemed to be the thing to do . . . if she could work up the courage, that is, to return to Dunning and interview her.