I agreed, rather sulkily, and the meal went off well enough. I was anxious enough to hurry but he ate deliberately, drank his demi-tasse, paid the waiter, and at last met my impatient eyes and smiled.
“After all,” he said, “since you are determined to go anyhow, what’s the use of reading the reports? Inside of an hour you’ll know all you need to know.” But he saw that I did not take his teasing well, and drew out his pocketbook.
They were two typewritten papers clamped together.
They are on my desk before me now. The first one is indorsed:
Statement by Laura J. Bosworth, nurse, of St. Luke’s Home for Graduate Nurses.
Miss Bosworth says:
I do not know just why I came here. But I know I’m frightened. That’s the fact. I think there is something terribly wrong in the house of Francis M. Reed, 71 Beauregard Square. I think a crime of some sort has been committed. There are four people in the family, Mr. and Mrs. Reed and two children. I was to look after the children.
I was there four days and the children were never allowed out of the room. At night we were locked in. I kept wondering what I would do if there was a fire. The telephone wires are cut so no one can call the house, and I believe the doorbell is disconnected too. But that’s fixed now. Mrs. Reed went round all the time with a face like chalk and her eyes staring. At all hours of the night she’d unlock the bedroom door and come in and look at the children.
Almost all the doors through the house were locked. If I wanted to get to the kitchen to boil eggs for the children’s breakfast—for there were no servants, and Mrs. Reed was young and didn’t know anything about cooking—Mr. Reed had to unlock about four doors for me.
If Mrs. Reed looked bad, he was dreadful—sunken eyed and white and wouldn’t eat. I think he has killed somebody and is making away with the body.
Last night I said I had to have air, and they let me go out. I called up a friend from a pay-station, another nurse. This morning she sent me a special-delivery letter that I was needed on another case, and I got away. That’s all; it sounds foolish, but try it and see if it doesn’t get on your nerves.
Mr. Patton looked up at me as he finished reading.
“Now you see what I mean,” he said. “That woman was there four days, and she is as temperamental as a cow, but in those four days her nervous system went to smash.”
“Doors locked!” I reflected. “Servants gone; state of fear—it looks like a siege!”
“But why a trained nurse? Why not a policeman, if there is danger? Why any one at all, if there is something that the police are not to know?”