EPISODE III
THE GIRL ON THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR
When Teano first spoke to me of his sister, nothing was further from my thoughts than a meeting with the telephone girl at the Priscilla Alden, a hotel sacred to ladies. But unexpected things happen in the best regulated lives, especially in New York, as anyone may learn by the Sunday papers. Not many days after the gate of the Sisterhood House shut for the second time between Maida and me, I changed my residence from New York to a hotel about five miles from Pine Cliff. Roger Odell and Roger's bride had gone to South America on one of those business trips which financiers seem to take as nonchalantly as we cross a street. His last words to me were: "You know, I rely on you to look after Maida, as well as she can be looked after, under that brute of a woman's thumb."
I did the best I could; but whether my wounds or my love sickness were to blame, the fact was that something had made me a bundle of raw nerves.
I slept badly, and my dreams were of some hideous thing happening to Maida; or else of the mummy-case being stolen. In my waking hours I chased back and forth between town and country, trying to find in New York the "Egyptian-looking man" who had disturbed Maida's peace of mind, and who had reasons for wishing me to forget the number of his automobile: trying to make sure on Long Island if a connection existed between this man and the head of the Sisterhood.
At last I realised that I was in no fit state of nerves for a guardian. The hotel people recommended me to a celebrated doctor practising on Long Island; and one morning, ashamed of myself as a "molly-coddle," I went to keep an appointment with him. Thorne was his name and he lived in a grey-shingled house set back from the road behind a small lawn. The place was outside the village; but since abandoning my crutch, I had begun to take as much exercise as possible. I walked, therefore, to the doctor's, rather than use the car presented to me by Roger. This seems a small detail to note, but deductions following certain events proved it to have been important.
I was received by the keen-eyed Thorne, in his private office, and during the catechism to which he subjected me, I thought nothing of what went on in the outer room through which I had passed. I should ill have earned Roger Odell's nickname ("the gilded amateur detective"), however, if I hadn't ferreted it out afterwards and "put two and two together."
It was an ordinary room, with a desk at which sat a young woman who answered the door and kept the doctor's appointments classified. I was vaguely aware that I had interrupted her business of stamping letters, which a boy would post. She had not finished when a few minutes later the next patient arrived. This person gave his name as Mr. Genardius, and confessed that he had no appointment; but his face—covered with bandages—presented such a pitiful appearance that the girl agreed to let him wait. "When the gentleman who's in the office now goes away," she explained, "the doctor's hour for receiving is over. But he may give you a few minutes."
"Isn't the gentleman an English officer, Lord John Hasle?" inquired the would-be patient, whose face as seen under a wide-brimmed, old-fashioned felt hat, and between linen wrappings, consisted of deep-set black eyes, wide nostrils, and a long-lipped mouth.
"Why, yes, he is," admitted the young woman, to whom I had given my name. "Do you know him?"