Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne

by Hoch Edward D.

  “Who are you expecting to come?” Petty wanted to know.

  “I’d like to wait to see if I’m right. There’ll be plenty of time for explanations later.”

  But as the hours dragged on, I could see the sheriff’s patience wearing thin. “It’s after ten o’clock, Dr. Hawthorne. I have other duties, you know.”

  “Give me one more hour. If nothing happens by eleven, we’ll call it —”

  Below us, the cabin door started to open. I touched Petty’s arm, warning him to silence. A man I’d never seen before entered and began looking around the floor. “Who—?” Sheriff Petty started to whisper, but I squeezed his arm, tensing myself to leap out of the sleeping loft.

  I landed not six feet from the searching man, bringing him up straight with a look of surprise on his face. “Is this what you’re looking for?” I asked, holding out the pencil April and I had found the previous day.

  He looked at me oddly, then reached out his hand. “Yes, it is.”

  “Sheriff,” I called out, “you’d better join us!”

  An expression of panic crossed the man’s face and I thought he might try to flee, but he stood his ground. “What’s going on here, anyway?”

  With Petty at my side, I felt a surge of confidence. “You dropped your pen yesterday morning when you were wearing your false beard and posing as the telephone man. You had to remove the phone wires before we figured out how you got into this cabin without leaving tracks. Sheriff, I want you to arrest this man for murder. He’s the husband of Shorter’s ex-wife. His name is Glen Deveroux.”

  I had to explain it all to the sheriff before he took Deveroux away, and then later, back at the Greenbush Inn, I told April and Andre about it. Faith Deveroux, shocked by her husband’s arrest, had gone to the county jail to be with him.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” I told April at the beginning. “My mind wasn’t functioning right.”

  “We understand,” Andre said. Obviously he’d heard the details from April.

  “Glen Deveroux is a construction engineer, supposedly working for long periods on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Apparently he mistrusted his wife and would sneak back to Boston to check up on her. This time he followed her up here, wearing a beard for disguise, and found her having ­dinner with her ex-husband. Maybe they did more than have dinner. Posing as a telephone lineman, Deveroux went to Shorter’s cabin and strung a couple of thin steel cables—the sort he uses in bridge construction. From a distance they looked just like ordinary telephone or electric wires. They were so much a part of the scenery that we never noticed them as we approached the cabin, but they had to be there. The cabin had electric lights and a crank telephone. I suppose our attention was diverted by the bobcat tracks.”

  “You mean,” Andrew asked, “that this man walked across to the cabin on the telephone wire?”

  “On a steel cable,” I corrected, “with another steel cable to hang onto. Not a difficult task for a bridge builder. Once he reached the roof, he lifted the skylight and entered that way, lowering himself with another length of cable. When Shorter encountered him at work, he wasn’t alarmed because Deveroux had visited him before in his guise of a telephone lineman. Deveroux stabbed Shorter and left the way he came. Any tracks he might have left on the roof would be easily smoothed over and the wind would finish the job of obliterating them.”

  April had a question. “If Deveroux met Shorter on a previous visit to the cabin, why didn’t he simply kill the man then? Why go to all this trouble?”

  “Because Shorter wasn’t alone the first time. Gus Laxault was with him. Deveroux used this method in the hope the death would be taken for suicide. But he was so anxious to get out of there, he forgot to leave the weapon.”

  “How do you know this, Sam?” April asked. “Last night you thought Andre was guilty.”

  “I remembered the sunshine coming through the skylight when we entered the cabin to find the body. There wasn’t time for all the snow to have melted from that glass, even with the heat from the cabin. Remember it was a cold morning. There was no snow on the skylight because it slid off when the skylight was opened. It wasn’t latched like the windows. In fact, it opened quite easily. I asked myself, If the killer came through the skylight, how did he reach the roof?

  “The wires, those unseen but necessary wires, were the answer. But could telephone and electric wires support the weight of a man across that distance? Not unless they were special wires, especially anchored on either end. When the lineman was there, removing the phone not twenty-four hours after the murder, I had to suspect him.

  “Then there was the matter of the pencil. It had the initials G.D. on it, which could have stood for Glen Deveroux. It hadn’t been dropped at the time of the murder or the police would have found it. If it didn’t belong to Sheriff Petty or his people, it must have been dropped by that telephone man. If the phone man was Glen Deveroux in disguise, everything fell into place, including the motive. This morning, I took a chance he’d come back to the cabin, looking for his pencil.”

  Andre stood up when I’d finished and shook my hand. “We owe you our thanks, April and I.”

  She kissed me on the cheek. “Can you ever forgive me for the way I behaved last night?”

  “If you can forgive me.” I looked at my watch. “I think I’ll be starting back today. What are your plans?”

  “I’ll stay for the rest of the week, Sam. Then I’ll come back to help train my replacement. You deserve a month’s notice after all these years.”

  “April and Andre were married in the spring (Dr. Sam Hawthorne concluded). Of course, I hated to see April go, but they were happy together and had a fine marriage. I was the godfather for their child. Things didn’t go as smoothly with April’s replacement, though, as I’ll tell you next time.”

  THE PROBLEM OF THE THUNDER ROOM

  “Come in!” old Dr. Sam Hawthorne said, greeting the afternoon visitor with his usual warmth. “Here, you just sit down here while I pour us a small libation. What was I gonna talk about today? Oh, sure—it was when my nurse April left me to get married in the winter of ’35 . . .”

  April had been my only nurse since I came to Northmont and set up practice back in 1922. When she met this fella up in Maine and decided to marry him, it was a real blow to me. But I couldn’t stand in the way of her happiness. (Dr. Sam poured a little more brandy into his glass and continued.) That was in late January. April had agreed to work through February and help train her replacement, but finding someone qualified in a town like Northmont was easier said than done. Friday, March first, was supposed to be her last day in the office, but I prevailed on her to stay one more week.

  “Sam,” she said with a sigh, “I want to get back up to Maine and take care of our wedding plans. We’re being married right after Easter.”

  “You’ve got time, April. You’ll have the rest of your life to be Mrs. Andre Mulhone.”

  “It sounds nice, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve got to say you’ve seemed happier this past month than I’ve ever seen you. Just give me another week and I’ll try to come up with someone.”

  Perhaps it was this feeling of a deadline hanging over me that made me so receptive the following Monday morning when Sheriff Lens stopped by the office. “You’re still lookin’ for a replacement for April, Doc?”

  “I certainly am, Sheriff. Do you know of anyone?”

  “Well, a funny thing happened yesterday out on the County Line Road. One of my deputies came across a young lady in a fancy yellow Duesenberg car. It had gone off the road on a curve and she was in a ditch. Anyway, she’s stayin’ at the hotel till the car is fixed and she asked me this mornin’ if I knew of anyplace here she could get a job to pay for it.”

  “Ladies who drive Duesenbergs can usually afford the upkeep,” I remarked. “Besides, I’m looking for someone who can last thirteen years like April did. I don’t have any temporary jobs available.”

  “Said she likes North
mont and might stay if she found the right job. She worked for a dentist in Stamford. That’s pretty much like working for a doctor, isn’t it?”

  “There are similarities,” I admitted.

  “Then there’s her name. You know what comes after April. Her name is May.”

  I had to chuckle at that one. “Okay, Sheriff, I’ll talk to her,” I said.

  By noon that day Sheriff Lens hadn’t gotten back to me, and when I went out for lunch I purposely detoured past Rex’s Garage. I’ve loved fancy cars all my life, and if there was a yellow Duesenberg in town I wanted to see it.

  Rex himself was working on it when I walked in, hammering the last of the dents out of the front fenders. “Quite a car, eh, Doc?”

  “Sure is.” I walked around it, marveling at the fine workmanship.

  Just as I was lifting the hood to inspect the engine, a young woman walked in from the street. “What are you doing with my car?” she asked sharply.

  “It’s all right, Miss,” Rex Stapleton assured her, wiping the grease from his hands. “This here’s Sam Hawthorne, Northmont’s best doctor. He appreciates fine cars like yours.”

  “I’m May Russo,” she said with a ready smile, stepping forward to shake my hand. “The sheriff told me I should contact you.” She was fairly short and moved with an energy that set her blonde hair bouncing. She wore a grey sweater and a matching pleated skirt. I guessed her to be in her mid-twenties, a good decade younger than April.

  “I was admiring your car. The Duesenberg is a fine machine.”

  “Thank you. I only hope Mr. Stapleton here has it running again.”

  “Good as new,” Rex assured her, slamming one of the doors to emphasize the point. “I’ve got the bill right here. It’s not too bad.”

  I watched while she paid with a pair of new twenty-dollar bills. Then I asked, “Do you want to talk about the job?”

  “Yes—climb in and I’ll give you a ride back to your office.”

  I didn’t have to be asked twice. We rolled out of the garage and turned right on Main Street, and I felt like every eye in town was on us. “What makes you think you might want to stay in Northmont, Miss Russo?”

  “I’m escaping.”

  “Oh?”

  “From Boston and fast cars and a fast life. I thought Stamford was the answer but it’s too close to New York. I want to slow down.”

  “Did your parents give you the car?”

  She looked away and nodded. “When I started my senior year at Radcliffe. I graduated five years ago. Mr. Stapleton says you appreciate fine cars. What kind do you have?”

  “A red Mercedes 500 K.”

  “Very nice!”

  “You’ll see it at my office.”

  “Am I going the right way?”

  “Turn left at the next corner. I’m in the office wing at Pilgrim Memorial Hospital.”

  “Are you a surgeon?”

  “Nothing so glamorous. Just a lowly general practitioner.”

  She made the turn without hesitation, handling the car with skill. “Is it much farther?”

  “No. It’s less than a mile from town. The way you drive I can’t believe you could end up in a ditch.”

  “I was distracted,” she answered. “I lost some of my clothes in the accident. I have shopping to do.”

  “Sheriff Lens said you worked for a dentist.”

  “That’s right. I went to Stamford to try life on my own.”

  “What happened?”

  “The dentist had a jealous wife.” Almost as an afterthought, she asked, “Are you married?”

  I had to laugh. “No, I’m not.”

  We turned into the hospital driveway and I pointed out a parking space next to my Mercedes. “Did you walk into town from here?” she asked.

  “Of course. I walk there and back nearly every day if the weather’s good. It’s the best exercise I get.”

  She was impressed by my new Mercedes and I promised her a ride in it. Then I took her inside to meet April. “May, this is April—soon to be April Mulhone.”

  “Hello, May.” April gave her a smile and made the obvious jokes about their names. Then she settled down to describing the office procedure, hopeful that I had found her replacement. I decided to hire May Russo.

  As those first days passed, I quickly learned May’s strengths and weaknesses. A telephone call to the dentist in Stamford had brought forth a grudging recommendation and I could see at once that she was a bright, hard worker with a cheery word for all the patients. Keeping the records and accounts, scheduling the patients, even devising the best routes for my house calls all came naturally to her. She wasn’t a trained nurse as April had been, and there were times when I wished I could call on her to help with more medical procedures, but she was willing to learn and that was the important thing.

  Friday was April’s final day, and I took both of the women to lunch at a nice little restaurant across the street from Rex Stapleton’s garage. Rex ate there regularly and passed our table at one point. “How’s the Duesenberg running?” he asked May.

  “Running very well, thanks.”

  “I heard you was workin’ for the Doc here. Is he a good boss?”

  “The best.” May smiled at April and me.

  After lunch she excused herself and I had a few moments alone with April. “You know she’ll never replace you,” I said, meaning it.

  “I think she’ll work out fine if you give her a chance, Sam.”

  “Anything I should watch out for?”

  “Not with her work, certainly.” April hesitated and then added, “She’s scared of thunderstorms, but I suppose that’s not that unusual.”

  “Thunderstorms?”

  “Remember Wednesday afternoon while you were visiting your hospital patients we had that freak thunderstorm.”

  “Freak is right. In March!”

  “It lasted only a couple of minutes, but it really terrified her. She put her head down on the desk. She said they used to have a thunder room at home and she and her brother would be terribly frightened when their parents dragged them in there during a storm.”

  I’d known some old New England houses to have thunder rooms, including a few in Northmont. They were inside rooms without windows, where the family could take refuge during severe storms. It always seemed to me they tended to make people even more afraid of thunder and lightning, and May’s reaction might bear that out. “Well, we don’t have too many bad storms around here,” I said.

  April reached across the table to take my hand. “I’m going to miss you, Sam. You’ve been the best boss a woman could hope for.”

  “I hope you’ll be very happy. Have you and Andre set the date yet?”

  “I know it’ll be soon after Easter. I’m hoping for April twenty-seventh because Easter is so late this year, but we’ll let you know for sure. You will come, won’t you?”

  “Nothing could keep me away.”

  The rest of the month was generally quiet and May and I settled into a daily routine of seeing patients, making house calls, and sending out statements. Though April had rarely gone on calls with me, I tried to get May out of the office at least twice a week. For one thing, I enjoyed her company. More important, I wanted my patients to know and trust her so she’d be more than just a voice on the telephone when they called in an emergency.

  It was toward the end of March that we visited the old Foster place on Berry Road. The unseasonably warm weather that had provoked the early thunderstorm had lingered, off and on, through the month. This day was a sunny spring jewel, and some farmers could be seen already plowing their fields. Hank Foster wasn’t among them because a bad knee injury had laid him up through much of the winter.

  His wife Bruna was a tall humorless woman who’d been known to do much of the outside work around the place. She greeted me at the door, nodded briefly to May, and led us into the sitting room. “I hope you’ll have him back on his feet soon, Dr. Hawthorne. Otherwise I’ll have to ask our son to drive dow
n from Springfield to help with the planting.”

  I inspected Hank Foster’s knee, flexing it a few times. “How does that feel?”

  “Better than last time, Doc. I’ve been gettin’ around pretty good.”

  “This is a lovely old house,” May commented to Bruna Foster as I finished my examination.

  Mrs. Foster thought about that and suddenly unbent enough to ask, “Would you like to see the rest of it?”

  “I’d love to.”

  I remained downstairs with my patient while they inspected the kitchen and the second floor. I heard them moving above us and then suddenly there was a heavy thump from up there. “What was that?” Hank asked, half out of his chair.

  “I’ll go see.” At the foot of the stairs I called out, “Everything all right up there?”

  “No,” Bruna called back. “Your new nurse has fainted.”

  I found May sprawled on the floor at the doorway of a bleak, windowless room. To my relief she was already coming around. A whiff of ammonium carbonate from a bottle in my bag quickly had her sitting up.

  “What happened, May?”

  “I don’t know. I—I think it was that room.”

  “It’s a thunder room,” Bruna Foster explained. “Apparently the former owners were frightened of storms and would go there during really bad ones. Hank and I occasionally use it ourselves.”

  “It reminded me of something from my childhood,” May explained. “You’ll have to excuse me.” She got to her feet a bit unsteadily. I helped her down the stairs.

  “A great nurse I make!” she said with a self-deprecating shake of the head.

  “It could happen to anyone,” I assured her.

  The following Monday was April Fools’ Day, but it was no joke to Sheriff Lens. I stopped by the jail as he was doing his monthly cleaning-out of hobos arrested near the railway tracks. There was a burly black man, a short fellow with long blond hair and a beard—a half dozen in all.

  “This batch has been in for four weeks,” the sheriff told me. “There are no jobs here for ’em. I can’t hold them any longer, so I just shoo them out of town, let someone else worry about them. Those birds in Washington better start doin’ something about this Depression.”