“Who screamed?” I demanded.
“Down the hall,” he said without turning. “There’s nobody but Miss Nichols-”
There had been nothing ear-piercing about it, in fact I had barely heard it, and there were no encores, but a scream is a scream. I marched past Hoskins and through the door, which was standing open, to the hall, and kept going.
“Last door on the right,” Hoskins said behind me. I knew that, having been in Janet’s room before. The door was shut. I turned the knob and went in, and saw no one, but another door, standing open, revealed a corner of a bathroom. As I started for it the maid’s voice came out:
“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.
“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.
I patted her on a nice round shoulder. “Don’t mention it, girlie. I’ll wait downstairs until you get dressed. I like you in that towel, but I think it would be sensible to go to a doctor and get a shot of antitoxin. I’ll drive you. When you-”
“Anitoxin?” she gasped.
“Sure.” I patted her again. “Just a precaution. Nothing to worry about. I’ll be waiting downstairs.”
Hoskins, hovering around in the hall, was relieved when I told him there was nothing for him to do except to get me a piece of paper to wrap the bath brush in. I waited till I was alone, down in the living room, to take the iodine bottle from my pocket, uncork it, and smell it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t iodine. I put the cork back in good and tight, went to a lavatory across the hall and washed my hands, and then found a telephone and dialed Wolfe’s number.
He answered himself, from the plant rooms since it wasn’t eleven o’clock yet, and I gave it to him, all of it. When I finished he said immediately and urgently:
“Get her away from there!”
“Yes, sir, that is my intention-”
“Confound it, at once! Why phone me? If Mr. Cramer goes-”
“Please,” I said firmly. “She was naked. I have no white horse, and she hasn’t got much hair, at least not that much. As soon as she’s dressed we’re off. I was going to suggest that you phone Doc Vollmer and tell him to have a dose of antitoxin ready. We’ll be there in about half an hour. Or I can phone him from here-”
“No. I will. Leave as soon as possible.”
“Righto.”
I went upstairs to the door of Janet’s room and called to her that I’d be waiting by the side gate, and then went out and turned the car around and took it that far back down the drive. I was debating what course to follow if a police car put in an appearance, when here she came down the path, a little wobbly on her pins and far from pert but her buttons all buttoned. I helped her in and tore out of there with the gravel flying.
She didn’t seem to feel like talking. I explained to her about Doc Vollmer being an old friend of ours, with his home and office on the same block as Nero Wolfe’s house, so I was taking her there, and I tried a few leading questions, such as whether she had any idea how the piece of glass got into the bristles of her bath brush, but she didn’t seem to be having any ideas. What she needed was a strong man to hold her hand, but I was driving. She had simply had the daylights scared out of her.
I had no explaining to do at Doc Vollmer’s, since Wolfe had talked to him on the phone, and we weren’t in there more than twenty minutes altogether. He cleaned the cut thoroughly, applied some of his own iodine, gave her the antitoxin in that arm, and then took me to an inside room and asked me for the iodine bottle I had. When I gave it to him he uncorked it, smelled it, frowned, poured a little of the contents into a glass vial, corked it again even tighter than I had, and handed it back to me.
“She’ll be all right,” he said. “What a devilish trick! Tell Mr. Wolfe I’ll phone him as soon as possible.”
I escorted Janet back out to the car. It was only a couple of hundred feet from there to Wolfe’s door, and I discovered that I couldn’t drive the last thirty of them because two cars were parked in front. Janet hadn’t even asked why I was taking her to Wolfe’s house. Apparently she was leaving it up to me. I gave her a reassuring grin as I opened the door with my key and waved her in.
Not knowing who the callers might be, the owners of the cars in front, instead of taking her straight to the office I ushered her into the front room. But one of them was there, sprawled in a chair, and when Janet saw him she emitted an exclamation. It was Larry Huddleston. I greeted him, invited Janet to sit, and not wanting to use the connecting door to the office, went around by the hall. Wolfe wasn’t in the office, but two more visitors were, and they were Dr. Brady and Daniel Huddleston, evidently, judging from their attitudes, not being chummy.
Oho, I thought, we’re having a party, and went to the kitchen, and there was Wolfe.
He was standing by the long table, watching Fritz rub a spice mixture into slices of calf‘s liver, and watching with him, standing beside him, closer to him than I had ever seen any woman or girl of any age tolerated, with her hand slipped between his arm and his bulk, was Maryella.
Wolfe gave me a fleeting glance. “Back, Archie? We’re doing mock terrapin. Miss Timms had a suggestion.” He leaned over to peer at the liver, straightened, and sighed clear to the bottom. He turned to me: “And Miss Nichols?”