Free The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck by Alexander Laing Page A

cause to, after the lathering he gave you last night. They say they found a piece of your pants over in the cemetery, where they got him at last, after an all-night hunt.”
    “Did they have to hurt him?”
    “Nah. They had the jacket on him before he came to. But he’s food for the squirrels, all right. What do you think they found he’d been doing? Digging up a grave—looking for blood, he said.”
    Jap went out. A little later, when I was getting into my clothes, an interne named Jib Tucker gave me a factual account of what had happened to Mike. The poor fellow (I was about to write “the poor devil,” and perhaps I still should) had been found at daylight, lying unconscious on a new grave. The stump of his left arm was thrust into a deep hole which he evidently had clawed with his right hand.
    As I was hearing the details, an awful, morbid notion took possession of my mind. I knew without needing to be told (and subsequent investigation substantiated the conviction) that the grave to which Mike had gone unerringly in his madness, through the dark night, was that of the boy Peter Thompkins, in whose dead body some of the blood of Mike’s own being had so recently incurred the mystery of death.
    My head was buzzing, and I felt sick and scared.
    Presently the fit of panic passed. I got a grip on myself when I remembered that Biddy would need to be consoled; but the memory of her plight only deepened the mystery. She had no been at home when I arrived, long after midnight. Where could she have been, and what had brought Dr. Alling to the bedside, while Mike was still quietly sleeping?
    Daisy Towers might have an answer, I thought. It would be out of character for her not to have one, plus a complete history of what had happened, neatly arranged in her efficient pretty head. I limped downstairs, and stopped at the reception window. She twitted me genially for having been so badly mauled by a one-armed invalid.
    “How’s Biddy taking it?”
    “Don’t know, Dave. They’ve got her upstairs pumped full of morphia. She was throwing hysterics when they brought her in.”
    I asked when that was. Daisy looked at a card, and said, “Two-twenty A.M., about fifteen minutes after you and Dr. Alling arrived, feet first.”
    “Where was she when the fight started?” I asked.
    “Out for a walk. She hadn’t been out of the house in ten days, Dr. Alling said. He was bawling you out for that, sweetheart. He told her to walk around for half an hour or so, even if it was after midnight.”
    “How did Dr. Alling himself happen to be there just then, Daisy?”
    “He attended Mike yesterday morning, as you know, so he was the logical one for her to call, wasn’t he?”
    “How did you know he was there yesterday morning?” I asked. “He wasn’t summoned by phone, that time.”
    “It’s my business to know where doctors are, my boy, no matter how they’re summoned. I phoned him at Wyck’s that a symmelus had been born, and he said he’d be right over. But when it took him twenty-five minutes to get from Wyck’s to here, with a live monster to see, I knew he’d been dragged somewhere in between.”
    “He’s right about one thing,” I confessed. “He thinks you’re a smart girl, the way you keep track of doctors.”
    “I have been till this morning. You don’t happen to know where Dr. Gideon Wyck is, do you?”
    Perhaps I only imagined that she was watching me narrowly, in spite of her casual tone. I’m afraid I hesitated before admitting, “No, I don’t. Why?”
    “His daughter’s been making very innocent-sounding calls around town to give anybody a chance to explain why her papa didn’t come home at all last night.”
    “Oh, he’s an old night-owl anyway,” I remarked quickly.
    “Yes, but it’s nearly eleven in the morning now.”
    Dr. Wyck’s words, spoken to Muriel on the bridge, flashed back into my mind: “It makes no difference, so far as I’m concerned, after tonight.” Had he felt certain