“What!” I was fully awake.
“No, ma’am. They can’t find him anywhere.” Frightened though she was, she yet appeared to take a naïve relish in being the first to tell me the news. “They can’t find him at all. Miss Letheny has telephoned everywhere that he might be and the police are working on it and they have been asking us all kinds of questions.”
I reached for a fresh uniform.
“I’ll come down immediately,” I said. “About the training classes, did you speak to Dr. Balman?”
“No. Miss Dotty said to find out if you knew what was to be done.” Which was like Miss Dotty, she being amiable but not very clear-thinking.
“Dr. Balman is Dr. Letheny’s assistant. I have nothing to do with it.”
The little student nurse rustled away and ten minutes later, refreshed by a bath and a clean uniform, I followed her.
I found the main portion of the hospital fairly shuddering with excitement. To my extreme annoyance it appeared that the moronic fraction of our nursing staff was beginning to take a melancholy satisfaction in the tumult and posing freely for the reporters who, with their flashlight affairs, were swarming over the whole place. I might say here and now that I soon stopped that and did not mince matters in so doing, though I could not prevent the headlines that had already found their way into the city newspapers.
In the main office Dr. Balman and Dr. Hajek, both looking worn and haggard, were literally surrounded by our board of directors who, it seemed, had descended in a body and were determined to hold somebody responsible for the terrible thing that had occurred. I learned later that there was some trouble in convincing them that Mr. Jackson’s death was not due to a mistake on the part of the nurses. Some policemen were in the room, too, and the chief of police, himself, a burly fellow who looked habitually as if his darkest suspicions were about to be verified.
This expression intensified itself as I entered the room, which, by the way, was the first indication of a fact that later became all too painfully evident, namely that I, Sarah Keate, occupied a prominent place in the list of suspects, for had I not been in the south wing? Had I not been in a position to administer the morphine that caused the patient’s death? Had I not been the one to find him?