Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne

by Hoch Edward D.

  Most of them left quietly, anxious to be free, though the short blond one demanded a suitcase he’d had when he was arrested. Sheriff Lens found it in the property room and sent him on his way. “It seems there should be something for them with all the public-works projects around,” I said.

  “They don’t want to work. They just want to bum around lookin’ for handouts. That big fella looks like he’s got the strength of three people but you don’t see him using it.” He went back to his desk. “At least I emptied out the cells for the next batch. Now what can I do for you, Doc?”

  “I was out to the Foster place a few days ago. On the way back I noticed a couple of junked automobiles in a field at the old Bailey farm. Know anything about it?”

  Sheriff Lens pounded the desk with his fist. “Aren’t they outa there yet? Rex Stapleton leased that field from the estate a few months back. Maybe they thought he was takin’ up farming, but all he wanted was space to store some old wrecks from his garage. He says he might need them for parts, but I told him they’re an eyesore and to get them outa there fast. I guess the next thing to do is to give him a summons.”

  “I just wanted to let you know about it.”

  “I appreciate that, Doc. How’s the new nurse workin’ out?”

  “May’s fine. It’s a funny thing, she’ll never replace April, but in some ways I feel closer to her. She’s a bit more friendly than April, even if she’s not as good a nurse.”

  “When’s April’s wedding?”

  “Three weeks from Saturday. I’ll be going up to Maine for it.”

  “Give her my best, Doc. I always liked that gal.”

  I returned to my office and found that the usual rash of early-spring illnesses were upon us. May had calls from two people with the flu and one woman whose child had broken out in spots. It was probably chicken pox since he’d already had measles, but I promised to take a run out there.

  “Someday doctors will stay in their offices and everyone will come to them,” May remarked as I prepared to leave.

  “That would be a sad day for the medical profession,” I said. “Some of these people can’t even afford cars. How would they get here?”

  The thunderstorm came on Thursday of that week, as surprising as the one a month earlier. It was my first opportunity to see the effect it had on May Russo. She’d been unusually edgy all week long, almost as if she somehow sensed the oncoming storm. With the first clap of thunder, she buried her head in her hands. We were alone in the office.

  “Come on, May,” I said to her. “I’m here with you. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  There was a flash of lightning and then another crash, closer this time. “You don’t know,” she moaned.

  “Don’t know what?”

  But she didn’t answer me. It was almost as if she’d gone into a trance. “Go in here and lie down,” I suggested, helping her to her feet and guiding her to the examining table in my inner office. She stretched out there and I left her alone for a while.

  By three o’clock, some fifteen minutes later, the storm had passed. What thunder there was could be heard far in the distance, moving away. I found May sitting on the edge of the table. “I’m sorry, Dr. Sam. I always think I’m getting better, but then the thunder comes and it’s like a fog settling over my brain.”

  “Did you go to sleep?”

  “I think I did, for a few minutes. I had a dream. It was a terrible thing—about a hammer and people being killed.”

  “You’re all right now,” I assured her.

  “I hope so.” She slid off the table and returned to the outer office. In that moment she seemed more like a frightened child than a confident young woman who drove an expensive yellow Duesenberg.

  “Have you ever considered seeing a specialist?” I suggested. “I’m not a believer in Freudian psychology myself, but some doctors can do wonders these days.”

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked quietly, wanting to know.

  “Of course not. Whatever your trouble is, we’ll get to the bottom of it,” I told her.

  My three o’clock patient arrived then, a few minutes late because of the storm. I asked May if she wanted to take the rest of the afternoon off, but she insisted on staying at her desk.

  It was more than an hour later when Sheriff Lens arrived at the office. His face was dead serious and I knew something was wrong. May must have seen it, too. “There’s been a killing, Doc,” he said without preliminaries.

  “What? Who?”

  “Hank Foster. It happened out at his house about an hour ago. An intruder came in during the thunderstorm and killed him with a hammer.”

  “My God!” I looked at May, remembering her dream. “What about Bruna? Is she all right?”

  “She was hit on the shoulder. Nothing more than a bad bruise. Doc Quinn is with her.”

  “Doc Quinn? Bruna’s my patient.”

  “Under the circumstances, Doc, I thought it was better to call in someone else.”

  “What circumstances are those?”

  Painfully, he glanced from my face to May’s. “Bruna swears that the person who entered their house and murdered her husband was May here.”

  Oddly, my first reaction was one of relief. It was so impossible, so easy to disprove, that I felt no apprehension for May at all. “That’s quite fantastic,” I assured him. “May was here in the office with me during the entire storm.”

  “Bruna says she’s sure, Doc. She was only inches away from Hank when he was killed.”

  May’s face had gone white, drained of blood. “Where did it happen?” she managed to ask. “In the thunder room?”

  “That’s right.” Sheriff Lens eyed her carefully. “Do you remember what happened now?”

  “No, of course not. I wasn’t there. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Then how’d you know it happened in the thunder room?”

  “You said it was during the storm, and I saw the room when I was there. I supposed they’d have been in it to keep away from the thunder and lightning.”

  “May is very frightened of thunderstorms,” I explained. I told the sheriff everything that had happened during the storm, pointing out that it would have been impossible for May to have left the office long enough to have committed the crime.

  “But she was outa your sight for fifteen minutes, Doc. You just told me so yourself.”

  “Fifteen minutes at most, just before three o’clock. What time did the killing take place?”

  “Just then, at the height of the storm.”

  “All right. May was resting in the examining room for fifteen minutes or less. Are you trying to say that in such a short period she could have climbed out the window, driven her car out to the Foster house, killed Hank Foster, driven back, and climbed back in the window? In that storm it would have taken her at least fifteen minutes to drive just one way. And what about her clothing? You can see it’s perfectly dry.”

  “Could she have been there for maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes, Doc?”

  “Not a chance! We had a three o’clock patient who arrived just a few minutes later. May was back at her desk by that time.”

  Sheriff Lens fidgeted. “Well, I never really believed Bruna Foster, but you know I have to check these things out.”

  “I’d like to speak with her if I could. I’m just as anxious as you to get to the bottom of this.”

  “She’s pretty much in shock right now. Doc Quinn thought—”

  “I’m her doctor, Sheriff.”

  I could see him torn between duty and friendship, perhaps regretting now that he hadn’t called me at once. “All right, come along,” he said.

  As I was leaving, I turned to May. “Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “No one thinks you were involved.”

  “Thank you, Doctor Sam.”

  It developed that Doc Quinn had brought Bruna into Pilgrim Memorial to have her shoulder X-rayed. We found her in the treatment room not a hundred yards from my office. She was hu
ddled in a blanket while Quinn examined the X-ray. “Hello, Sam,” he said. “I didn’t mean to intrude on your patient like this, but the sheriff phoned me and said—”

  “It’s all right, I understand.” I turned to Bruna. “I’m terribly sorry about Hank.”

  “It was her—your nurse, May Russo! She killed Hank!”

  “Try to calm down.” I glanced over Quinn’s shoulder at the X-ray. “Anything broken?”

  “No. As I suspected, it’s just a bad bruise. She tried to protect her husband and got hit with the hammer.”

  “May was trying to kill me, too,” the woman insisted.

  I sat down next to her. “Tell me everything that happened, Bruna.”

  Her face hardened at the memory of it. “The storm started around twenty minutes to three. What time is it now?”

  “Nearly five.”

  “Only two hours! It seems like a day.”

  When she didn’t continue, I prompted, “The storm—”

  “Yes. It came up bad, out of the west. Hank and I weren’t really afraid, but we went to the thunder room as we often do during storms. There are no windows and with the door closed we can barely hear the thunder. After a few minutes, there was a noise downstairs—Hank said it sounded like the front door slamming.”

  “Was it locked?”

  “Heavens, no! Who locks their doors around here in the daytime?”

  “Go on.”

  “After a minute or two there was a terrible crash of thunder. We could hear it right through the door. Hank thought lightning might have hit the barn and he opened the door to go look. And May Russo was standing just outside the door with a hammer in her hand and a wild look in her eyes! Her hair was straight and wet from the rain and her clothes were drenched. She never said a word.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “A green dress with a black belt. She had a black jacket over it, but it didn’t protect her from the rain.”

  I turned to Sheriff Lens. “Satisfied, Sheriff? May’s wearing a blue sweater and black skirt today. I’ve never seen her in a green dress. And you saw—her clothes were perfectly dry.”

  “It was her!” Bruna Foster insisted. “She hit Hank twice on the head with that hammer. When I tried to grab it from her, she hit me. I ducked and she caught my shoulder. It was her!”

  “Could it have been someone disguised as May, wearing a wig?”

  She thought about it and then shook her head. “As she hit me, I yanked at her hair. It was no wig.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I fell to the floor and I thought she was going to swing at me again—kill me as she had Hank. But the storm was letting up by then and she seemed to just change her mind. She ran out of the room and down the stairs. I heard the front door slam and then I dragged myself to the phone and called the sheriff.”

  “Did you hear a car?”

  “No.”

  While Doc Quinn continued his examination, I took Sheriff Lens aside. “What do you think?” he asked. “She certainly sounds like she’s telling the truth.”

  “But she can’t be, Sheriff! Either she’s mistaken or she’s deliberately lying. There’s no third possibility.”

  “How do we find out?”

  I considered that for a moment. “We need a sort of lineup, like the city police use. Bruna only met May that one time at her house. She might have her mixed up with someone else. I’ll find a couple of blonde nurses and put May in a white coat so they look pretty much alike. Then I’ll walk them past this door and see if she recognizes May.”

  “Sounds okay to me,” Sheriff Lens agreed.

  I was certain it would put a quick end to the entire business. The nurses were eager to cooperate and donned identical lab coats over the uniforms. Then I got May and told her about it. I walked the nurses past first, one at a time, while Bruna Foster watched. Then I walked May by the door.

  “That’s her!” Bruna gasped, pointing a shaky finger. “She’s the one who killed my Hank!”

  That evening, I followed May in my car to the apartment she’d rented over Main Drugs and went up to chat with her for a while. “The woman’s lying,” I said. “It’s as simple as that.”

  “It’s not as simple as that! Why would she invent such a story in the first place? If she killed her husband, she could have said the intruder was some unknown prowler. Why say it was me?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “I really black out for a few minutes when I get these spells, Dr. Sam. Maybe I did go there and kill that poor man without knowing it.”

  “You think you changed your clothes twice, drove both ways, and even dried your hair in those fifteen minutes?”

  “I don’t know, maybe I flew over there! —I told you about my dream of the hammer.”

  “Yes.” I’d been trying to put that out of my mind. I didn’t believe in the supernatural, and I didn’t believe in people flying through space without an airplane.

  “If she’s telling the truth, what other explanation is there?”

  “I don’t know. Do you have a twin sister?”

  “No.” She gave a faint smile. “I can’t imagine two of us, can you?”

  She urged me to stay for dinner and I did. She was a good cook, fixing pork chops to simmer while we both relaxed with cocktails. It wasn’t the sort of treatment I’d come to expect in Northmont.

  We’d just finished dinner when Sheriff Lens arrived. He seemed distressed to find me there. “Gosh, Doc, I’m real sorry.”

  I saw the frightened look on May’s face.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “I’m goin’ to have to arrest you, May. We’ve got a confirming witness.”

  “What?”

  “Rex Stapleton was out in that field near the Foster place moving those junked cars when the storm hit. He says he saw you come runnin’ out of the Foster house just before three o’clock, as the storm was lettin’ up. He says you were carryin’ a hammer, May.”

  Her face contorted and she turned her back to us, bracing herself on a table. “It’s not true,” she said. “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” I told her. “Sheriff—”

  “I’m sorry, Doc. You give her a strong alibi, but I’ve got two other people who swear she was out there. I’ll have to hold her, at least overnight.”

  “I’m going to see Stapleton,” I decided.

  I found him at the garage, working late. He glanced up from the motor of a late-model Oldsmobile and said, “How are you, Doc? Be with you in a minute.”

  “Rex, why did you lie about seeing May Russo out at the Foster place today?”

  “Huh? It wasn’t a lie. She was there.” He straightened. “I’m damn sorry about it, Doc, but as soon as I heard what happened I went right to the sheriff.”

  “She was with me at the time of the killing, she couldn’t have been out there. Nobody can be in two places at once.”

  “I don’t know about that, Doc. All I know is what I saw. I heard the door slam and I looked over toward the house and seen her come running off the porch. She had something in her hand. I could see it was a hammer.”

  “Which way did she go?”

  “Back across the field toward the creek. She disappeared into the trees. I thought it was pretty strange at the time, but I didn’t hear about the killing till I got back to town.”

  “You couldn’t have been mistaken?”

  “Hell, it was her, Doc . . .”

  I slept restlessly that night, confronted by the impossibility of it. Every possible theory ran through my mind. Toward morning I’d even conjured up a love affair between Rex Stapleton and Bruna, in which he killed her husband and they’d both lied about it. But if that was the case I was faced with the same dilemma—why were they trying to pin the crime on May, a most unlikely killer?

  I arrived at the office early and puttered around until nine o’clock. I found myself waiting for May’s arrival, then remembered she was
in jail.

  What if Bruna and Rex weren’t lying?

  What if May hadn’t told me everything?

  I put in a call to the registrar’s office at Radcliffe College up in Cambridge. When I had the woman on the phone I told her who I was and asked about May Russo. “She would have graduated in 1930,” I said.

  “Yes, Doctor, I remember May. A charming young woman.”

  “Did she have a twin sister?”

  “No, I’m quite sure she didn’t. But she was the only member of her family to attend Radcliffe. Her grades were outstanding.”

  “Do you have a home address where I might reach her parents? It’s very important.”

  “Her parents? Didn’t you know? Her parents were both murdered while she was a senior here.”

  “What?” I caught the edge of the desk, trying to keep the room from spinning. “What did you say?”

  “Her parents were murdered. Someone got into their house and killed them with a hammer. They never found out who did it.”

  I took a deep breath and asked, “Was there any suspicion of May?”

  “Oh, no. She was here in her dorm when it happened.”

  I thanked the woman for the information and hung up. The next thing was to have Sheriff Lens check on the previous crime and learn the exact circumstances. I didn’t really need that, though. I was sure he’d find that May’s mother and father had been killed in the thunder room at their house, during a storm.

  How could such a thing happen twice in one life? Did May possess some sort of split personality that enabled her to be in two places at once? Whatever the answer, I knew I had to see her. I’d confront her with this new information and force the truth from her.

  I drove to the jail and hurried into the sheriff’s office. “I have to see May,” I told him.

  “You’re too late, Doc. A lawyer showed up from somewhere first thing this morning and got her released. I had no choice. She’s free till the case goes before a county grand jury.”

  “A lawyer? Where did she go?”

  “Back to her apartment, I suppose. Didn’t she call you?”