Nancy Clue Mysteries 3 - A Ghost in the Closet (27 page)

"Why, this is the only part of the sanitarium that looks like a real hospital," Cherry thought as she crept down the hall way, thankful that her regulation nurse's shoes had silent rubber soles on them. She would hate to make any undue noise and interrupt an examination!

"Perhaps this is where surgery is carried out," she thought as she peered through a window and saw a row of steel tables and trays of sterile surgical implements. "But why put it so far away from the other wards?" she wondered. Cherry suddenly remembered having seen a sign for the Surgical Ward on the second floor. "So what is this place?"

The sound of muffled footsteps let her know she wouldn't be alone for long. She grabbed the door knob and, relieved to find the door unlocked, raced into the room and hid behind a pile of cardboard boxes marked Fragile. The footsteps faded away.

Cherry jumped up to leave and clumsily sent the top box flying. She heard the sickening sound of glass breaking. When she opened the box, she was relieved to find only a few vials had shattered. "Maybe nobody will notice," Cherry hoped, "seeing as there are hundreds of vials in this box. I wonder what it is?" she mused, looking at the clear-colored liquid. Each vial was stamped with three letters.

"LSD," Cherry read aloud. "It must be some new medication," she reasoned. She froze when she heard the footsteps again, only this time they were much louder. "Uh-oh," she thought. "I'd better not get caught creeping around." She set the box upright and scurried out of the room. In the hallway, she glanced over her shoulder and saw the distinctive shadow of a man with a cigar clenched in his teeth. He was about to turn the corner!

"It's Dr. Fraud! If he finds me here, he might suspect something's up," Cherry thought worriedly. Another door a few feet away caught her eye. Cherry hurriedly found the skeleton key on the key ring, fit it into the lock, said a quick prayer and breathed a sigh of relief when she heard a click. She slipped through the door and quietly shut it behind her. She found herself in a dimly-lit stairwell.

"Oh, no," Cherry thought when she realized she was holding a vial of the mystery medication in her hand. "What if he notices a box has been opened?" she thought worriedly. "What if I'm found sneaking around down here while Nancy has been unmasked and is in trouble? Is there a law in Illinois against impersonating a psychiatric patient?" she wondered.

CHAPTER 43

A Sad Case

"This is no time to think, Aimless," she told herself. "You've got to get out of here-and fast!" Cherry pushed the door open a crack and looked out. The hallway was deserted. The only sound besides the loud thumping of her heart was that of Dr. Fraud's deep, booming voice.

"Nurse Cramp, we are about to embark on an experiment that will free all of mankind from the confines of the human mind," she heard him say.

Cherry listened eagerly. That was something she'd like to know about!

"Yes, Doctor," Nurse Cramp replied. "Ward C is ready. The patients are looking forward to their vitamin shots," Nurse Cramp said with just a hint of gaiety in her voice.

"Once it's been tested here, the whole of Lake Merrimen can have a taste," the doctor promised. "You see, Nurse, just a bit of this in the water supply will produce amazing results."

"Phew," Cherry thought as she slipped the vial into her uniform pocket. "And I thought it might be something dangerous!" She took a deep steadying breath and opened the door, ready to make her escape, but jumped back when she saw Nurse Cramp standing in the hallway. She hoped desperately that she hadn't been spotted.

"Even if she did see me, she'll never be able to pick me out from all the other nurses here," she told herself. "I'd better get back to the ward before I'm reported missing!"

Hoping to find her way back to Ward B, Cherry scrambled up the narrow, winding staircase. To her consternation, the stairs kept spiraling upward. "I've climbed every stair there is to climb in all of Illinois," Cherry thought breathlessly when at last she came to a door. She realized she was in one of the twin towers flanking the Gothic-style mansion turned sanitarium. She fit the skeleton key into the lock of the old wooden door and flung it open only to find a sweet-faced middle-aged Private Duty Nurse sitting in an orange Naugahyde chair reading a magazine.

"Oh, good, my replacement's here early," the nurse said in relief as she dropped the magazine onto a nearby table, slipped into her regulation nurse's sweater, walked to the modern elevator not five feet away and pressed a button. "I've never seen anyone come up the back way before. You must be quite an athletic girl," she remarked. "Well, anyway, her medication's on the tray. I've left you a stack of magazines. Help yourself to some candy. Bye."

"Wait!" Cherry cried. "I'm not here to-" But it was too late. The nurse was gone. There was no one else on the floor; indeed, there were no other rooms!

"Oh, no," Cherry thought, all in a tizzy. "Now I am trapped, for I can't possibly leave the patient on her own. But how am I going to explain what I'm doing here when the right nurse comes along?"

Cherry shook herself to her senses. First and foremost, she was a nurse. "I'll check the patient's chart, dispense her medication and hope for the best," she decided.

She opened the door to find a woman about her mother's age, clad in silk lounging pajamas and soft slippers, sitting in a chair staring out the room's lone window. The woman didn't look up when the door opened. She just sat there looking all alone in the world.

Cherry's heart went out to the sad psychiatric patient. She scanned the simply furnished room for the woman's medical records, but didn't see any. "Excuse me, could you tell me where your chart is kept?" Cherry asked. She had no idea how many of the pink pills on the hallway table to give the patient.

The woman turned her head and looked straight at her. "Where have I seen that pert little nose and determined chin before?" Cherry wondered to herself. "And she has such lovely strawberry blond hair-it's a pity no one's styled it recently."

"Are you speaking to me?" the woman asked in a soft voice. "No one ever speaks to me. It's probably because I can't remember anything. I can't remember what day it is, or what I had for luncheon, or even my name." The woman's dramatic confession was delivered in a flat emotionless monotone. Her eyes seemed glazed over, as if she couldn't quite focus.

Cherry walked over to the woman and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, but deep down she was disappointed. She would never find that chart now. It was clear, especially to a nurse of Cherry's vast experience, that she had an amnesia victim on her hands!

Cherry knew that light conversation on pleasant topics could be most helpful for amnesiacs. She searched her brain for something soothing to say. "I often can't remember the littlest things," Cherry confided. "And I'm a nurse!"

This seemed to startle the patient, so Cherry tried a different tactic. "I like your outfit," she said.

"It's very soft," the woman replied as she stroked the cream-colored fabric of her right sleeve, "but I can't remember what it's made of. Oh, I can't remember anything." Her bright blue eyes filled with tears. She turned away, clutching her hankie in her small white hands.

Cherry touched her shoulder. "It's shantung silk," she told her. "I know because a friend of mine has two sets of shantung silk lounging pajamas. They're handmade and embroidered with her initials."

"Shantung silk," the woman murmured.

"Can you remember that?" Cherry asked her.

"I'll try," the woman said. "I try to remember things, really I do, only everything sifts through my brain like sand. Oh, what's wrong with me? It's as if I'm in a fog! " She began to weep.

"I mustn't let her get too excited, especially if she's past due for her medication," Cherry told herself. "I must say something to take her mind off her troubles. But what?"

"I was in a fog once in San Francisco," she chattered brightly. "You see, I had gone there to visit my beloved Aunt Gertrude and along the way I met the nicest girls-" The patient visibly relaxed while Cherry told the story of her past adventures, taking care to omit any parts that might unduly frighten the frail-seeming woman, who fell back in her chair and closed her eyes.

For five full minutes, Cherry talked, ending with, "-and then I met Nancy and we came here to Illinois and here I am."

The patient shot straight up. "Nancy?" she cried. Then she put a finger to her lips and furrowed her pretty brow.

"That name seems to ring a bell," Cherry thought. "And it's the queerest thing. Nancy makes that very same gesture when she's thinking. It must be a Midwestern trait."

"Could your name be Nancy?" Cherry asked her.

"I don't know," the woman shook her head. "I hear that name over and over in my dreams," she remembered.

"Your name must be Nancy, then. It's the only logical explanation," Cherry cried in triumph. "We've certainly made remarkable progress in a very short time," she added happily.

The patient's face lit up when she heard that. "Do you mean to say you think there's hope for me?" she asked tentatively.

"There's no such thing as a hopeless case," Cherry scolded her. "Remember. Every cloud has a silver lining." Cherry decided then and there she would have to take this woman's case up with Dr. Fraud. Pleasant chatter and social stimuli obviously helped this patient-why, then, was she kept so far from the others? A moment later, Cherry's first opportunity to voice that question appeared when a strange nurse burst in. But before Cherry could say anything she was ordered out of the room in a most discourteous manner.

"Please don't go," the patient pulled at Cherry's arm.

"I must go," Cherry told her in a kindly manner. "I have other patients who need me. I'll come see you again," she promised.

Tears filled the woman's blue eyes. "Promise?" she asked.

"Scout's honor," Cherry said. "I will, too," she told herself, "just as soon as this case is cracked!"

Once in the hallway, Cherry received the tongue lashing of her career. "Were you authorized to have contact with that patient?" the new nurse angrily quizzed her.

Cherry shook her head. She didn't trust herself to speak. She was both scared and angry, plus she was unimaginably tardy! "I didn't think it could do any harm," she finally managed to say. "She seems so lonely shut up like that. She says nobody ever comes to visit her."

"That woman is a hopeless paramnesiac," the nurse explained curtly. "She tells terrible lies."

"What?" Cherry said in bewilderment. "She seems like an average amnesiac to me and not someone who has a memory of that which has never happened, refusing to believe her memory's anything but real and so goes on and on about a thing that has never occurred. Quite the opposite. Why, she couldn't tell me a thing about herself."

The nurse relaxed. "When she first came to this institution twentytwo years ago, she was housed with the general population," she explained, "but we had to put her here because she scared everyone so with her wild stories. She ran around the grounds wailing and moaning and telling everyone she was a ghost!"

"No!" Cherry cried. "How ghastly!"

The nurse nodded in sympathy. "She imagines she was brutally murdered by her husband. Nothing we say can convince her otherwise."

"I understand now why she's in isolation," Cherry said. "Paramnesiacs can be most upsetting to others. Still, it's so sad. How horrible to believe something as gruesome as that.

"I'm due back on Ward B," Cherry suddenly remembered. "I'm new here, and I got lost, and that's how I ended up in her room."

The nurse put Cherry in the elevator and punched a button. "When you get out, turn left, then right, then left again, and you'll be in Ward B," she directed. Cherry tried hard to memorize the path between that place and Ward B. As soon as she could, she would be back with more helpful conversation. Cherry wouldn't forget her promise to that lonely woman.

When at last Cherry arrived in Ward B, she was surprised to find Dr. Fraud and Nurse Cramp waiting for her. And they had the queerest expressions on their faces.

"I got lost!" Cherry cried. "Can they tell I'm lying?" she wondered as a deep flush crept up her neck. "Can they see the outline of the top-secret vitamin vial through the thin material of my uniform pocket?"

"We were worried about you, dear," Head Nurse Fiscus exclaimed.

"It's so easy to get turned around in this big old place," Nurse Cramp added with a knowing smile. "You should never have gone off on your own."

Cherry smiled cheerily. She hadn't been found out after all! "I got the supplies you asked for," she informed Nurse Fiscus. "Shall I begin the assignment?"

"We've got a new task for you, dear," Nurse Cramp told Cherry. "You're to go get Miss New and accompany her to Hydrotherapy."

"Think you can find your way there?" Head Nurse Fiscus teased.

"Absolutely," Cherry promised. Inwardly she breathed a sigh of relief. What luck! The Hydrotherapy Room was in the basement! "Now Nancy and I will really get a chance to investigate," she smiled to herself as she left the room. "And on the way down, I'll tell her about the top-secret vitamin potion I found, plus relay to her the tragic tale of that poor patient I stumbled onto." She realized with a start that Nurse Cramp was right behind her.