It seemed a singular thing that this man Hajek was at liberty to go about the hospital, his opinions deferred to by the nurses, his duty to administer to the sick, and at the same time he was most certainly involved somehow in the ugly, sordid tragedy that had befallen us. I followed his white coat through the intervening corridors and, recalling a record I had meant to look into, also into the general office. But as I bent over the filing cabinet, though every word of his brief conversation was audible to me, I could make nothing of it. It consisted of three “Yes’s,” one “No,” and finished with “All right.” Upon which he hung up the receiver and departed briskly toward the south wing and Seventeen. Miss Jones was no wiser than I, for his eyes had been on her as he talked and she had not dared listen in.
“There’s one thing I know, Miss Keate,” she said as I was about to leave. “That voice at the other end sounded for all the world like Miss Letheny’s.”
And some twenty minutes later I was quite sure that I saw Dr. Hajek going unostentatiously out the grade door toward the garage, though when the bell rang for dinner he was sitting in the general office smoking a forbidden cigar and reading the evening papers with the utmost composure.
I spent most of the intervening time wandering about the halls; I was very restless and could not settle down to anything, and altogether the afternoon was a total loss so far as anything interesting was concerned, so I was not in the best of humours at dinner.
Once I caught a fragment of conversation from a little group of nurses down at the end of the table.
“. . . and I said, ‘What on earth is that man doing out in the elderberry bushes in all this rain?’ and she said, ‘He is watching Room 18.’ ”
“Why are they watching Room 18?” asked Miss Ferguson, wide-eyed.
“Don’t ask me!” The first girl shrugged her shoulders. “But there have been a couple of men, besides that policeman in the south wing, hanging around all day; I don’t think they are police because they don’t wear uniforms, but they didn’t have their eyes off the windows of Room 18 all day long.”
“What do you suppose is the reason?” whispered someone in a tense, shrill whisper that carried.
“I don’t know!”