“I never scream,” Janet said, holding the towel up to her chin. “Really, I never do. But it seemed so... cutting myself with glass... so soon after Miss Huddleston...” She swallowed. “I didn’t scream when I cut myself; I’m not quite that silly, really I’m not. I screamed when I saw the piece of glass in the bath brush. It seemed so—”
“Here it is,” the maid said.
I took it. It was a piece of jagged glass, creamy yellow, not much bigger than my thumbnail.
“It’s like a piece of that bottle that was broke in Miss Huddleston’s room that you was asking about,” the maid said.
“I’ll keep it for a souvenir,” I announced, and dropped it into the pocket where I had put the iodine bottle, and picked up the bath brush from the floor. It was soaking wet. “You mean you got in the tub and got soaped, and started to use the brush and cut yourself, and looked at the brush and saw the piece of glass wedged in the bristles, and screamed. Huh?”
Janet nodded. “I know it was silly to scream—”
“I was in the room,” the maid said, “and I ran in and—”
“Okay,” I cut her off. “Get me some gauze and bandages.”
“There in the cabinet,” Janet said.
I did a neat job on her, using plenty of gauze because the cut was still trying to bleed. Where she needed the blood was in her face, which was still white and scared, though she tried to smile at me when she thanked me.