She was not on the first floor at least. He raced up to the second and the third storey, plunging from room to room, opening even the closet doors. Then he came down to the second storey again and found Nora at the top of the stairs leaning against the balustrade with a changed face, haggard and fallen like soft dough.
“Have you thought where she could have gone?” he asked. “Can you make a single guess about her?”
“I can make a guess easy enough,” said Nora slowly, drawing her breath in between every word or so. “There’s the railroad bridge that makes a good drop. There’s the inlet that’s taken more than one unhappy soul before her.”
“She’s not done that. She’s hidden herself. Try to think if there’s a place away from the house where she might have hidden herself; some place she knew when she was a child.”
“What’s she now but a child?” demanded the panting voice of Nora. “The poor innocent—the poor sweet—ah, but you’ve been the murder and the death of her. God pity the day that she ever saw you, Mr. Doctor Stevens or whatever your lying name may be.”
“Try to make sense,” begged Kildare. “Nora, what’s in her mind that drives her frantic?”
“Would I be telling you?” demanded Nora. “God strike me before I’d whisper a word of it. May the black bog take you and keep you. May the mould crawl on the skin of your body! May the heart break and the soul die in you, for you’ve been the death of my darling!”
Kildare got past her and down the stairs. It would be easy for Nancy to thumb a ride to New York, and it was vastly important that he should get to her father’s house before she did. He shot the car down the drive and swung it at a stagger on to the road.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE Messenger butler looked at Kildare with an eye of surprise when he opened the door for him.
“Is Mr. Messenger here?” asked Kildare.
“He is, and busy,” said the butler. “But not too busy to see you, sir, I’m sure. He’s in the library.”
There were unpleasant implications in the tone of this speech. Kildare ran up the stairs and found the library door open. Inside, three men with a bulldog look about all of them sat with Paul Messenger. He was saying:
“You can start your questions. I think I’ve told the complete story. I’d like to keep it from the newspapers if possible. But if you think the publicity would give us a better chance to find her, I’ll call in the reporters.”
He saw Kildare then and, rising from his chair, he moved across the room toward him, saying in his clear calm voice to the police: “Excuse me for an instant. I must talk with the doctor who was with her when she disappeared. This is young Doctor Kildare, gentlemen, who seems to have frightened her away.”
He came out to Kildare and closed the door behind him. He was scrupulously polite. He was perfectly cold.
“I have heard from Nora,” said Messenger. “She tells me that you finally revealed yourself as a doctor and that Nancy, naturally, was frightened away.”
“It was an accident case. I couldn’t stand by and see a youngster victimised for life.”
“You found the youngster more important than Nancy?” asked Messenger.
He smiled on Kildare. He was beyond anger.
“You have the police in there, haven’t you?” asked Kildare.
“I felt that it was the thing to do. Do you object?”
Kildare said calmly: “I think that if they come near her, she’ll take her life.”
Messenger put a quick hand out and braced himself against the wall, but he rallied at once.
“There is that possibility,” agreed Messenger. “But from this point forward I prefer the regular to the irregular methods—in spite of the lucky experience of the Chanlers. The police, perhaps the newspapers, will take up where you have left off, doctor.”
“If you use the newspapers, she will know what’s coming. She’ll kill herself.”
He struck as brutally hard as Messenger and watched the father wince.
After a moment of consideration, Messenger said:
“I think there is only one thing we can reach a mutual agreement upon, and that is to have nothing to do with one another from this point forward. We come to the consideration of your fee. I have my chequebook here. Kindly name any sum you have in mind.”
“Interns,” said Kildare, “can’t take money.”
“They cannot take money? What can you take, Doctor Kildare?”
He answered: “Nothing!”
“Ah,” said Messenger, “but you hoped to find advancement in your hospital as a result of your work on this case?”
Kildare considered him through an infinite distance of thought.
“There’s no charge to you,” he said.
“You make me uncomfortable,” answered Messenger.
“That’s too bad,” said Kildare, still watching him curiously. “You can repay me in one way.”
“That interests me.”
“Will you tell me the cause of her mother’s death?”
“My dear doctor, so far as I am concerned,” said Messenger, “the case is now in the hands of the police—and perhaps of the newspapers. They may find my daughter for me—since you have lost her.”
“You’re hating me,” said Kildare, nodding.
“Not at all,” answered Messenger. “I should be punished, not you. The most important work that could be done, I entrusted to a bit of cold blood. I should have searched for a thoroughbred.”
“I understand you,” said Kildare. “Good-bye, Mr. Messenger.”
“Not yet,” insisted Messenger. “There remains the very important question of remuneration. I cannot take something—whatever it is—for nothing.”
Kildare turned on his heel and left the house.
He went back to the hospital and reported at the office of Carew.
“Messengers with bad news shouldn’t be so prompt,” said Carew with his usual hard realism. “I’ve heard from our friend Messenger. He seems to think that you’ve been a bad bargain. Young Doctor Kildare was a valuable article in the Messenger house yesterday, but today there’s a bear market on Kildares. As a matter of fact Messenger was in an expansive mood about the whole hospital because of the fine work he thought you were doing. I had him tremendously interested in an extension of our laboratories and some of the most expensive equipment in the world. But of course that’s ended now. Why did you scare the girl away, Kildare? You might have thought twice about that, mightn’t you?”
He kept tapping at his cigar, though the ashes had not had a chance to form, and looking past Kildare out the window.
When Kildare said nothing, he added: “Well, there goes a pipe dream out of the window. Millions—or nothing. That’s the way the world goes…I suppose you want to be assigned to regular intern duty now that Gillespie is out of your scheme of things?”
“May I have a day or two off still?” asked Kildare.
“For what?” asked Carew curiously.
“I want to try my luck at finding Miss Messenger.”
Carew tapped his fingers on the desk and frowned.
“That’s true,” he said. “There would be a reward for that.”
Kildare said nothing.
“Irregular,” said Carew, “but I suppose that I could sanction it. The whole thing has turned out rather badly for you. Tell me one thing, Kildare, will you?”
“If I can, sir.”
“Are you nine-tenths genius or nine-tenths damned fool?…Well, run along.”
Kildare went back to his room, dropped on his bed face down, and slept like an exhausted animal. There was still a gleam of the sunset colour in the sky when he wakened, turned, and saw Tom Collins seated on the other bed with a rattling newspaper stretched between his hands.