The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry

The AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY

By MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

Author of WHEN A MAN MARRIES THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE THE MAN IN LOWER TEN THE WINDOW AT THE WHITE CAT, ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY

INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT 1911 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY

Part One✦

CHAPTER I✦

WHAT HAPPENED TO JOHNSON

Strictly speaking, this is Tish’s story, but Tish is unable to write it, being laid up, as you probably know from the newspapers. But we all three felt that a record of the affair ought to be kept while it was fresh in our minds, although goodness knows we’re not likely to forget any of it. A good many people wondered, when the story came out, how Tish had come to be mixed up with it at all, but as Tish herself says, it was very simple. The people at the hospital had become demoralized, and some firm hand had to take hold. Besides, Tish was a member of the Ladies’ Committee, and felt responsible.

Tish says the first thing she knew about it was a piercing scream, just outside her room. This was followed by a number of short, sharp cries, feminine, and steps running past her bedroom door. Now, as Tish also remarks with truth, one hears a variety of strange sounds in a hospital at night, and at first she thought it was the woman across the hall, who had had her appendix removed that afternoon, and who had been very unpleasant as a neighbor all evening. But when the noise kept up, and only died away to be followed by somebody crying hysterically down the hall, Tish was roused. She sat up in bed and threw her small traveling clock at Miss Lewis.

(Miss Lewis was Tish’s nurse, a splendid woman, but a heavy sleeper. She slept on a cot in the room, and until Tish learned that it did not hurt the clock to throw it, she had been obliged to ring for one of the night nurses to come in and waken her. So now she threw the clock.)

Miss Lewis picked the clock from off her chest and sat up, yawning, to look at it.

“Twenty minutes after one, Miss Carberry,” she said. “Would you like some buttermilk?”

Now Tish was not really ill. She was taking a rest cure last autumn while her apartment was being painted and papered, and while she recovered from a twisted knee. She’d bought a second-hand automobile some months before, and learned to run it herself, and the knee was the result of her being thrown out over the steering wheel and ten feet beyond the potato wagon she had collided with. Although, as Tish says, it is a strange thing that her knee was twisted, when she brought up standing on her head in three inches of muddy water and a family of tadpoles.

Both Aggie and I went to see her daily, the three of us being old friends, although not related, and she was always glad to see us, although she grew sarcastic when Aggie casually remarked that except for the meeting of the anti-vivisection society, we might also have been flung over the potato wagon. Well--

“Would you like some buttermilk?” asked Miss Lewis again, beginning to draw on her kimono. Tish says that provoked her and she reached for the clock again, but of course Miss Lewis had it in her hand.

“No,” she snapped. “Go out in the hall and see what has happened.”

Miss Lewis yawned again and groped around in the half light for her slippers. It was more than Tish could stand. She hopped out of bed in her bare feet and limped to the door.

The hall was almost dark and across it the woman with the appendix--or with_out_--was groaning. But half way along, where the night nurse has her desk and keeps her papers and where the annunciator for the patients’ bells is fastened to the wall, Tish saw a group of five or six nurses, gathered about somebody in a chair. One of them came running past with a glass of something, and the crowd opened to admit the girl and the glass and closed again. Miss Lewis came and looked over Tish’s shoulder.

“Gee!” she said, and ran down the hall with her slippers flapping and her braid switching from side to side. Just then the woman across gave another groan, and it being dark and the scream still echoing in her ears, Tish reached inside the door for her cane and hobbled out in her nightgown.

The girl in the chair, she said, was as white as milk, and her lips were blue. She was half-lying, with her head against the back of the chair, and a violent shudder now and then was the only sign of life about her. One of the other nurses was stroking her hands and talking to her in a soothing tone.

“Now listen, Miss Blake,” she said. “It couldn’t be. We all have these queer feelings here. It’s the nervous strain and loss of sleep. I’ll never forget the first time I had to do it.”

“Nor I,” said another girl, “I went with you. Do you remember? It was that dwarf that died in J. We’d forgotten something, and you had to go and leave me alone.”

“Hush!” another nurse broke in, and Miss Blake began to shudder again. “If we had some hot coffee for her--will you drink some coffee if we make it, Miss Blake?”

The girl in the chair shook her head and Miss Lewis dragged one of the nurses from the group and whispered to her. Tish heard part of the answer.

“Went up with Linda Smith and as usual Linda forgot something--she’s been over-working; went to raise the window for fresh air--she says she heard a sound, but didn’t notice it--when she turned around”--then more whispering that Tish couldn’t catch.

“No!” Miss Lewis said, and looked queer herself. “Then, if it’s true, it is still--?”

“Yes.”

Miss Blake sat up just then and tried to wipe her blue lips with her handkerchief, but her hands shook so that one of the nurses did it for her. She mopped the girl’s pallid forehead, too, and put her arm over her shoulders protectingly.

“You’re going off duty, girl,” she said. “About all the hard work in the place has been falling to you lately, and if we don’t take care we will be minus the class flower.”

Tish says the girl tried to smile at that and was very pretty. I can answer for her looks myself, having seen her often enough later. She had soft, wavy, black hair and Irish-blue eyes, and she was rather small. Partly for that and partly because she was so young, we fell into the way of calling her the Little Nurse. But to go back to Tish’s story.

“You’re sure you didn’t doze off?” one of the girls asked, pressing forward. But the Little Nurse shook her head.

“Asleep! There?” she said, in a low voice. “Could you?”

“What enrages me,” Miss Lewis burst out, glaring at the group through her glasses, “is why Linda Smith left her there alone.”

“She forgot something,” said Miss Blake.

“She usually forgets something!” Miss Lewis began. “When she dies, Linda’ll forget--”

“Hush!” somebody whispered. “Here she is.”

Miss Smith came quickly along the hall, her arms full of bundles. She stopped when she saw the group and ran her eye over it.

“Well!” she said, “what is it? Fudge?”

One of the girls detached herself from the group and started for her. Miss Smith was a tall, raw-boned woman, with short, curly hair and a rugged but good-natured face, and Tish says she stood smiling at them.

“I suppose you know,” she said. “The spiritualist from K has ‘passed over.’ Didn’t want to go, poor old man. Said he had three wives waiting in the spirit world.”

The other girl came up to her then and caught her by the elbow and whispered to her. Tish was standing in the shadow, leaning on her cane, and she didn’t know from Adam what was the matter, but she was covered with goose flesh.

“Nonsense!” said Miss Linda Smith suddenly. “She’s been dozing.”

Miss Blake got up and steadied herself by the back of the chair, looking across at the other woman.

“I’m afraid not, Miss Smith,” she said. “You--remember when--when the orderlies carried up poor old--Johnson. They--laid him on the table in the mortuary, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” said Miss Smith, half smiling. “They usually do. They don’t generally throw ’em out the window.”

Miss Blake clutched the chair tighter, Tish says, and her lips trembled.

“I want you to come with me and see,” she said. “We--covered the body with a sheet, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” Miss Smith stopped smiling.

“And then you left, and I was alone. I--I tried not to mind. I haven’t been here very long. But I was afraid, after a minute or two, that I was--getting faint. I--seemed to feel eyes on me.”

Some of the girls nodded as if they understood.

“So I went to the window and threw it up to get air. Then I thought I heard something moving behind me. I--I felt it, like the eyes, rather than heard it. And--I didn’t look around at once; I couldn’t. It was so far from the rest of the house, and--I was alone with it. And when I turned--” She stopped and moistened her lips with her tongue, and her face was ghastly--“it was gone, Miss Smith. Gone!”

Now Tish isn’t easy to frighten, but at that moment the appendix woman gave a deep groan and she says her heart jumped once or twice and turned over in her chest. The nurses were all standing huddled together in a little group, and one of them kept looking over her shoulder.