The utter and terrible stillness of Cub Sterling was more frightful than any words would have been.
“Go on!” Matthew Higgins was relentless and Sally continued.
“It took three years to earn enough money to come to America and then it took years of blind wandering to reach this hospital and....
“When she reached it, her great love had grown, through endless pain and privation, to a great bitterness. She determined to reveal the Great Dr. Sterling and ruin him, and by mistake when she asked to see him, she was taken, instead, to his father-in-law, Dr. Jemison, and it was through the door of Dr. Jemison’s office that she saw Ethridge Sterling standing with his arm around Dr. Jemison’s daughter.
“She had a heart attack. Dr. Jemison pronounced her dead, and she was carted back through the dispensary door and handed over to a German Society for burial. The president of the society was Otto Weber. He burned her papers and I, then nine, was put into an orphan asylum.
“My father was already famous. He was Otto’s best customer. But what we learn in the first eight years of our lives ... if it is bitter ... we never forget....
“At the asylum we had candy at Christmas and mush for breakfast, and the Elijah Wilson operated upon us, free, when necessary. I remember quite vividly when I was operated upon. Double hernia, and endless pain, and a dispensary consultation. Dr. Sterling was designated to do the operation.
“Upon the day slated, his son was born and my case was turned over to an assistant resident. A man killed in the War....”
“Fegus,” Cub’s voice was low.
“The doctor had never done the operation before. I was his first ... the incisions were too deep.
“I lost my mother before I really knew her and my manhood before it began....
“I lost both of them because my father was Dr. Ethridge Sterling, of the famous hands.
“At sixteen, when the boys in the orphanage discovered my inabilities, I determined to ruin my father ... and began studying pharmacy with an idea of becoming connected, eventually, with his hospital.
“The orphanage farmed me out to a pharmacist. Otto Weber had become a political influence. I went to him and worked upon his sentiment. It was he, and the excellency of my work ... and why not? I am the son of Dr. Sterling ... that persuaded the Attorney-General to recommend me to Dr. Barton and Dr. MacArthur as assistant pharmacist.
“I passed my state boards brilliantly. I entered the pharmacy of the Elijah Wilson, the same year that Cub Sterling entered medical school.
“He spent ten years studying the science of medicine. I spent those ten years perfecting myself in the science of murder. At first I intended murdering the patients of my father, slowly, occasionally, over a period of years. Then I perceived if I waited until Wilkins died, became promoted as Chief Pharmacist and murdered my brother’s patients, I would doubly ruin my father....
“Then the gods smiled...! Through the losing of my top hair, I, unconsciously, grew a nickname. For five years now, I have catered to that nickname. I shaved my center part to accentuate my bald spot. I pomaded my long front hair, which naturally is curly as my brother’s, to slick behind my ears ... to change my forehead line.
“There is not a famous doctor around this hospital who would not testify as to my baldness....
“Around a hospital where so many people are constantly passing at stated intervals to stated places, the eyes of even a good observer become dulled into ‘seeing,’ when a person resembling a familiar doctor passes at an unexpected time, that doctor!
“It is upon that knowledge, a sudden assumption of my brother’s queer angularity, and the combing of my recently washed hair to cover my bald spot, that I have built my resemblance ... not upon the features....
“Some day I shall be caught. When I am caught my father will be caught also.”
“Is that all?” Higgins was still relentless....
Cub Sterling’s head jerked up from his folded arms and he said:
“God! It’s enough!”
Sally Ferguson’s voice out into him:
“There is a diary of the murders, too.”
Both men rose and came to her side. Their movement disturbed the fly and he began circling around the dead man’s head.
Sally’s voice drowned out his buzzing.