“Came to Boston. Got job. Chauffeur for Malcolm Dayton, banker. Eloped with his daughter. We were married by a justice of the peace but Edyth suspected I mightn’t feel really married unless a priest blessed us. She looked up the priest of our parish and I went to him. No, hadn’t gone to the Funeral Mass for the kid even, and never to confession since the smash. The priest made me ashamed but agreed to get the dispensations. He talked to Edyth and assured himself she was old enough to know her own mind and really wanted to be my wife. She is ten years older than me. So I confessed and was taken back and received communion, and we were married again in the rectory before the housekeeper and janitor. Edyth was to take instruction. I could have lived alone outside the Church all right, but couldn’t have rested easy with my wife outside it. So I was glad Edyth insisted, I guess. Remembered my mother too well! Couldn’t imagine the mother of my children not a Catholic!
“Dayton went crazy when we told him. He wrote that he would buy a divorce for Edyth any time she asked him to, but until then to keep away from him. We had a baby the first year. A boy. I got a job selling the new Ajax cars. I thought we were pretty well off, but Edyth didn’t. We had a nice apartment and a maid. My mother never had a maid. Edyth’s friends stuck to her. They were fine. Some of them I liked a lot. But she was never really mine. Somehow she was her father’s girl. The baby was born at the Lying-In. The day they were coming home, I had to give a driving lesson in Arlington, but a girl friend of Edyth’s was bringing them and would help the nurse and the maid fix them up comfortably. But I came home and found nobody but the nurse. Called the hospital and they told me that Dayton had come for his daughter and grandson. Called the house. Got Dayton himself. Sorry—can’t remember a word he said. But I knew that Edyth and the baby were with him and weren’t coming home. And the next day he sent a lawyer around who told me that the old man had had me watched and that they had a clear case for a divorce. They had one framed, all right—but no use going into that. I had not been unfaithful. No, I told you, I can’t remember a single word he said on the ’phone.
“No—I didn’t say a word to the nurse who had stood staring at me while I ’phoned. Found I couldn’t. But I thought it was because I was crying. The baby and his mother not coming home, you know. Thought it was tears in my throat. I thought so then, I mean. I walked out of the apartment, got into the car, drove all night. At dawn I was back in Boston. I don’t remember where I drove or anything about it.
“Yes, I stopped for gasoline once or twice during the night. I held up my fingers to show how many gallons and didn’t say a word. But I didn’t realize it was because I couldn’t speak until I got back to the apartment in the morning. The nurse had slept there and was waiting for her money. Yes, my throat closes up whenever I try to speak. It’s like tears—or a sob. Don’t like to try any more. No, haven’t been to Mass since the Sunday before Edyth and the boy were coming home from the hospital. No—don’t want to see a priest. I’ve lost my faith, I think. No, my family know nothing about me. They won’t, either.
“The Ajax people kept me on as a mechanic. It’s charity, really. They’re as hard hit as all the rest by the depression. They really can’t afford a mechanic who can’t talk to the people who drive in. The boss sent me to you. I make thirty a week. Can pay you ten. Ten a week goes to the smashed plane debt. If you don’t cure me quickly, I’ll disappear. The boss is risking his own job, keeping me on. Yes, the boy is fine. When I saw him at the hospital he looked like my kid brother. The kid would have been his uncle.”
There the history proper ended and Janet’s typing began. It was a report of the physical condition of the patient. Doctor Pryne had, apparently, passed McCloud on to various specialists. Petra skipped all this. It was technical and dull but as much as she took in appeared to rate McCloud’s physical condition as excellent. All the remaining cards in the pile, a dozen or more, written on both sides, in Doctor Pryne’s illegible hand, might as well have been inscribed in Chinese for all Petra could read of them. They appeared to record the experiments in treatment Doctor Pryne had tried on the case, and would have been fascinating, Petra thought, if only she could have read three consecutive words.
But one sentence was clear,—and underlined: “Must find out what Malcolm Dayton said to him on the telephone.”
As she read this, Petra heard some one breathe.... She had not noticed the step in the reception office nor in this room, but she heard the breath, soft as it was. She looked up from the card she was studying and saw Janet. It was the secretary’s sharply indrawn breath that had so startled Petra. But when she woke to the expression on her new friend’s face, her very blood ran cold. This was not Janet, the intelligent, the kind, the clever Janet. What had happened to her? What was the matter?
“Petra Farwell! What are you doing with those files?”
“Reading about McCloud. I wanted to learn....” But her explanation died stillborn. Suddenly, like a thunderclap, Petra knew what a fool she had been, what a terrible thing she had done. She knew now why Janet looked as if she had come upon a murderer, his hands dripping blood. Petra put her hand up to her mouth. It was dry and her tongue was dry.