She nodded at me vaguely and turned to Wolfe. “Do I have to go through it again?”
“You will probably,” Wolfe advised her, “have to go through it again a dozen times. Why did you leave?”
She gulped, started to speak, found no sound was coming out, and had to start over again. “You know about the explosion and fire at the Montrose Hospital a month ago?”
“Certainly. I read newspapers.”
“You know that three hundred and two people died there that night. I was there working, in Ward G on the sixth floor. In addition to those who died, many were injured, but I went all through it and I didn’t get a scratch or any burn. My dearest friend was killed, burned to death trying to save the patients, and another dear friend is crippled for life, and a young doctor I was engaged to marry — he was killed in the explosion, and others I knew. I don’t know how I came out of it without a mark, because I’m sure I tried to help. I’m positively sure of that, but I did, and that’s one trouble, I guess, because I couldn’t be glad about it — how could I?”
She seemed to expect an answer, so Wolfe muttered, “No. Not to be expected.”
“I am not,” she said, “the kind of person who hates people.”
She stopped, so Wolfe said, “No?”
“No, I’m not. I never have been. But I began to hate the man — or if it was a woman, I don’t care which — that put the bomb there and did it. I can’t say I went out of my mind because I don’t think I did, but that’s how I felt. After two weeks I tried to go back to work at another hospital, but I couldn’t. I read all there was in the newspapers, hoping they would catch him, and I couldn’t think of anything else, and I dreamed about it every night, and I went to the police and wanted to help, but of course they had already questioned me and I had told everything I knew. The days went by, and it looked as if they never would catch him, and I wanted to do something, and I had read about that Leo Heller, and I decided to go to him and get him to do it.”
Wolfe made a noise and her head jerked up. “I said I hated him!”