“Who is it?”
“Archie Goodwin. What—”
The maid appeared in the doorway, looking flustered. “You can’t come in! Miss Nichols isn’t dressed!”
“Okay.” I halted out of delicacy. “But I heard a scream. Do you need any rescuing, Janet?”
“Oh, no!” the undressed invisible Janet called, in a voice so weak I could just hear it. “No, I’m all right!” The voice was not only weak, it was shaky.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing serious,” the maid said. “A cut on her arm. She cut herself with a piece of glass.”
“She what?” I goggled. But without waiting for an answer, I stepped across and walked through the maid into the bathroom. Janet, undressed in the fullest sense of the word and wet all over, was seated on a stool. Ignoring protests and shaking off the maid, who was as red as a beet having her modesty shocked by proxy, I got a towel from a rack and handed it to Janet.
“Here,” I said, “this will protect civilization. How the dickens did you do that?”
I lifted her left arm for a look. The cut, nearly an inch long, halfway between the wrist and the elbow, looked worse than it probably was on account of the mixture of blood and iodine. It certainly didn’t seem to be worth fainting for, but Janet’s face looked as if she might be going to faint. I took the iodine bottle out of her hand and put the cork in it.