Cherry Ames Boxed Set 9-12

by Helen Wells

  She blinked back tears and, shutting the door, marched to his bedside. “Timmy Crane,” she began sternly. “You got out of bed. You broke your promise.”

  Timmy, brown eyes wide with innocence, stared at her. “I never break my promise,” he said with convincing dignity.

  Cherry confronted him with a grinning stuffed elephant. “Then how did Mr. Elephant get from your toy box to your bed. And don’t you dare tell me he walked!”

  Timmy laughed as only a mischievous small boy can laugh. “ ’Course, Elly didn’t walk,” he finally got out. “Elly can’t walk, silly. He’s too fat to walk. You’re just as silly as that girl who threw him to me when I asked her for my duck.”

  Cherry sat down hard on the foot of his bed. “What girl?” she asked weakly.

  Timmy squirmed with delight. He knew something Cherry didn’t know. “That girl,” he shouted. “The one with long yellow pigtails on top of her head.” He grinned impishly. “ ’Cept they didn’t stay on top of her head when she was trying to find my duck. They came tumbling down and she looked just like the girl in the storybook. The one who hung her pigtails out of the window so somebody could climb up.”

  Jan Paulding! Cherry’s numb mind couldn’t take in anything more.

  “She’s kind of nice, Cherry,” Timmy went on gleefully, “but awful silly. She threw me ‘most everything in those drawers ‘cept my duck. And there it was, plain as could be.” He pointed to the strewn floor around the closet. Sure enough, the fluffy little yellow duck was in plain view.

  “And she’s an awful fraidy-cat too,” Timmy told Cherry. “When she looked up and saw that man watching her, she sat right down on top of my ’lectric train and sort of breathed funny like Mummy does when she’s going to cry.”

  “A man, Timmy? What man?” Cherry asked Timmy in a faint voice.

  “The nice man, Cherry,” Timmy shouted hoarsely.

  Cherry realized then that she should not let him talk so much. His face was flushed and he punctuated his story with sharp little coughs.

  “Never mind, Timmy,” she said soothingly. “You can tell me all about it later. I’ve got some juice for you. You can drink it right out of the bottle with this long, red straw.”

  Whatever had happened in Room 141 during her absence, it had at least made Timmy thirsty. He sucked up the last drops of apple juice with loud “glurping” noises of satisfaction. Then he insisted upon continuing the conversation. Cherry offered to read instead, but he stuck his fingers in his ears. She tried to tell him what she knew about Morgan, the bloodthirsty pirate. Instead of listening he thrashed around in bed and pulled the pillow down over his face.

  Unfortunately, the ship’s surgeon, refreshed from a short nap, chose that moment to tap on the door. Dr. Monroe was in whites now and he looked very handsome, but Cherry wished with all her heart that he had slept a little longer.

  His gray eyes swept the topsy-turvy room. They took in Cherry’s rumpled, prune-stained uniform and came to rest on the red-faced boy in the topsy-turvy, toy-heaped bed.

  “What is going on here?” His voice was husky with annoyance and surprise.

  Timmy wailed at the top of his lungs: “She won’t listen to me. She wants to do all the talking. She talks and talks and talks! Make her listen to me!”

  Dr. Monroe frowned. “It seems to me, Miss Ames,” he said, “that you mentioned once you were pretty good with sick little boys. If this is an example—” He spread his hands expressively.

  Cherry’s taut nerves snapped under the sting of sarcasm in his voice. She stood in front of him, hands clinched tightly at her sides. “Your criticism, Dr. Monroe, is entirely unfair. I apologize for my impertinence; you force me to defend myself, and I shall. The patient has done far too much talking already. He has been coughing almost incessantly, is very hoarse, and extremely overstimulated. If you ask my opinion, and I know you won’t, I would tell you—”

  Afterward, Cherry realized that nervous exhaustion had goaded her into making such an unprofessional scene. But she did not regret a word she said. And surprisingly, instead of resenting her insubordination, Dr. Monroe threw back his head and roared with laughter.

  “Cherry Ames!” he exploded. “I admire your spunk. And,” he added more soberly, “I shouldn’t have listened to the patient’s complaint. You don’t talk too much. I found that out yesterday.”

  Cherry bit her lip to keep from bursting into tears. First a scolding and now a compliment! It was too much of a rightabout-face for her!

  “You run along to bed, Nur—Cherry,” he said kindly. “I’ll give the boy some Cheracol myself and get a maid to clean up this mess.”

  Cherry fled. He had called her by her first name! Had he done it simply because he felt sorry for her? Or had he called her Cherry because he thought of her as a human being, not just his nurse? It was nice to think that the latter premise was true. And thinking about it, she fell into an exhausted sleep.

  When her alarm clock jangled an hour later she sat up dazedly. At first she didn’t know where she was, had forgotten she was aboard an ocean liner. The tiny cabin, which she had hardly glimpsed since coming aboard, was coldly impersonal. The throbbing of the engines blended with the dull ache in her head.

  Then it all came flooding back—Timmy’s wild tale that she had deliberately interrupted. How much of it was fact; how much fantasy? His description of the girl with the long blond braids fitted Jan Paulding exactly. Had she been watching from her stateroom door, waiting for a moment when Timmy would be alone in his suite?

  And who was the man—the nice man?

  Someone tapped on her door. It was Brownie, the plump young stewardess. “Lunch in ten minutes,” she said. Taking in Cherry’s disheveled appearance, she added, “Oh, ’scuse it, please. I didn’t know you were sleeping.”

  Cherry scrambled to her feet. “You didn’t wake me up. I had to get up, anyway. I’ve got to check on two patients at noon.” Hurriedly she whitened her shoes, showered and changed into a fresh uniform and cap. Brownie, idly examining the snapshots Cherry had tucked around her mirror, asked:

  “Who’s the handsome lad in the pilot’s uniform? I could go for him.”

  “That’s my twin brother,” Cherry told her. “Charlie.”

  “Oh, boy,” Brownie said enthusiastically. “I hope he comes aboard sometime when I’m around. Will he meet you when we dock after the cruise?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Cherry smiled. “We live in Illinois, you see.”

  Brownie cheerfully shrugged away her disappointed hopes. “Speaking of handsome lads,” she said, as they hurried to lunch, “that boss of yours makes my heart go pitapat every time I pass him in the corridor. Of course, he doesn’t even know I exist. Awfully dignified, isn’t he?”

  Cherry didn’t know what to reply. Anything she said would come under the head of gossiping. At last she compromised with “He’s a fine surgeon.”

  “Oh, you!” Brownie squeezed Cherry’s arm impatiently. “Don’t you ever break down and stop being a stiffly starched, registered nurse?”

  Cherry, remembering all of the scrapes she had been involved in since her student days, couldn’t help laughing.

  “You don’t look stiffly starched,” Brownie went on in her friendly way. “Everybody keeps saying how pretty you are, and the girls are all jealous of your red cheeks and that naturally curly hair.”

  “Those same red cheeks,” Cherry laughed, “almost got me expelled from Nurses’ Training School. The chief surgeon kept ordering me to wipe off the rouge. And I couldn’t.”

  Brownie giggled. “I guess you’re human after all.”

  Lunch was creamed mushrooms on toast with puréed spinach and a crisp salad. “One thing I’ll say about this line,” Brownie whispered. “They feed us the same things they give the passengers.” She helped herself to two large pieces of French pastry. “I always gain about five pounds every cruise.”

  After lunch, Cherry did her routine check on Bill, interrupting the game of
checkers he was playing with one of his buddies who was off duty until four o’clock. He made faces at her all the time the thermometer was in his mouth, twitching his nose and wriggling his eyebrows.

  Cherry, her fingers on his pulse, pursed her lips with mock severity. She felt rested and strong again, and wondered how she could have delivered such a tirade of impertinence to the ship’s surgeon only two hours ago.

  After charting her bedside notes she hurried up to Timmy. Proudly he waved to an array of bottles on a table within easy reach.

  “Mine,” he announced loftily. “Every one of ’em. Kirk gave ‘em to me and this shiny new opener so I can pry off the tops myself. Soon as I have ‘nuff bottle tops he’s going to teach me how to play checkers with ’em.”

  Kirk! Timmy certainly believed in the use of first names. Kirk—what a nice name! And how it fitted this serious-minded, soft-spoken man.

  “Also,” Timmy went on while she took his temperature, “there’s something dif-frunt in every one of those bottles. Orange, lemon, lime, apple, pineapple, prune, apricot, even one named after you, Cherry.”

  Dr. Monroe, Cherry decided, had a way with little boys. He understood their desire to “do” for themselves. She took the thermometer to the French doors leading out on deck and read the verdict. Temperature unchanged. Well, you couldn’t expect a miracle right away.

  “Also,” Timmy said again, trying to regain her attention. “Also” was a new word Timmy had picked up somewhere and he intended to work it to death. “Also, Kirk said I was to tell you the story of the man and the duck. Kirk thought it was a very funny story. You’ll laugh like anything, Cherry.”

  Cherry, busy with mortar and pestle, said vaguely, “All right, tell me the story.”

  “Well,” Timmy began, enjoying the reversed role of teller of tales instead of listener, “first that girl couldn’t find my duck. Then she sat down on my train and ‘most cried when she saw that man staring at her.” Cherry pricked up her ears. “And the man was ‘most as silly as the girl, Cherry. Do you know what he asked the girl? He said, sort of smiling, ‘Looking for something?’ Wasn’t that silly? ’Course she was looking for something. She was looking for my duck! And ’stead of telling him that, she just jumped up and ran away. So then I told the man to please give me my duck. I said please ‘cause he’s so big and strong looking. He ‘minded me of the pirates in Dr. Kirk’s book. Not the bad ones. The nice ones, Cherry.”

  He rambled on between spoonfuls of the strained fruit and sulfa mixture, hardly knowing that Cherry was feeding him. Cherry listened attentively. The man with the nice pirate face, she began to suspect, was Mr. Rough Diamond. Perhaps she was on the verge of discovering why he and Jan were so interested in Stateroom 141.

  Mrs. Crane, who had been resting in the adjoining living room, called out:

  “Don’t let the child bore you to death, Miss Ames. He’s apt to let his imagination run away with him.”

  Bored! Cherry couldn’t have been more interested. She was delighted that her boss had “ordered” her to listen to Timmy’s tale.

  “So, after I said please two more times, he laughed and came inside the room, and then he began to look. But he couldn’t find the duck either. Course he looked in all the wrong places. Like where Waidy put our empty suitcases, ‘way back on top of the closet. And just everywhere ’cept the right place. While he was looking, Cherry, he told me all about the place where we’re going to stop first. So I didn’t mind so much not having my duck.”

  Timmy sat up in bed wide-eyed. “Do you know what, Cherry? We’re going to sail right down the middle of a city. Right down a canal—that’s a water street,” he explained painstakingly. “The man said we’d pass so close to people on shore I can spit on ‘em. Won’t that be fun?”

  “That will be fun,” Cherry agreed. She added shrewdly: “So he left without finding anything?”

  Timmy shook his head vigorously up and down. “But he promised to come back and tell me about the man with the wooden leg.”

  “Another pirate?” Cherry asked.

  “No, he was a Dutchman. Peter Stuy-Stuy—anyway, his first name was Peter. He got hurt fighting the Indians. So they had to chop off his leg. And it’s buried right there where we’re going to stop first. Cura-something or other.”

  “Curaçao,” Cherry finished. “And I imagine the man with the wooden leg was Peter Stuyvesant, wasn’t he?”

  Timmy stared at her incredulously. “Do you know about him, too?”

  “Not very much,” Cherry admitted with a laugh. It was obvious that Timmy preferred people who related the bloodthirsty events of history. “Do you want me to read you some of the pirate stories in the book Dr. Monroe loaned you?”

  Timmy whooped with joy. Mrs. Crane came into the bedroom. “If you’re going to read for a while, I think I’ll take a swim. Mind?”

  “No, indeed.” Cherry smiled. “I’m as interested in hearing about the pirates who roamed the Caribbean as Timmy is.”

  Timmy would listen to nothing but tales of the wicked Henry Morgan. Cherry found out that this wily pirate had succeeded in getting himself knighted and at one time was deputy governor of Jamaica.

  They were in the midst of an exciting description of Morgan’s brilliant and daring capture of Maracaibo from the Spaniards, when someone tapped on the door.

  Cherry was surprised to see that it was Jan Paulding. Cherry frowned. Had the young girl been listening outside the door again? If so, such snooping certainly deserved a scolding. Cherry made up her mind to have a talk with Jan Paulding before the day was over.

  CHAPTER IX

  Uncle Ben

  JAN PAULDING, IN TAILORED SHARKSKIN SLACKS AND a fuchsia sweater, was tautly poised. To Cherry she looked as nervous as a little girl about to give her first public recital.

  “Oh, Miss Ames,” she said, in a clear, cool voice. “I thought I would find you here. Would you mind stepping down the hall a minute to our suite? Mother has a ghastly headache.” She waved with forced airiness to Timmy. “I’ll be glad to stay with your little patient.”

  Cherry shook her head, smiling. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. It’s against the rules. I’m not allowed to give nursing care except by order of the ship’s surgeon.”

  A flash of something akin to anger flickered in Jan’s huge hazel eyes. She said coldly, “But that’s perfectly ridiculous. Dr. Monroe stopped in shortly after lunch and said he would send you immediately with aspirin and an ice bag. When you didn’t show up, I decided to come after you.” She frowned. “Mother is really ill.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t leave my patient,” Cherry repeated. “Why don’t you send for a steward and have the doctor paged on the loud-speaker? He’ll go to your suite at once, unless he’s tied up with a more serious case.”

  Jan clenched her slim fingers into tight fists. “I tell you it is serious. When Mother gets those blinding headaches she almost goes crazy. She threatens to—to—well, hurt herself if she doesn’t get prompt relief. And I did tell that crosspatch steward to get Dr. Monroe. Half an hour ago.”

  Cherry was torn now between duty to a patient and the rules and regulations. Dr. Monroe might well be tied up with a really serious case. If so, he would certainly expect her to take over the minor cases until he was free. What harm could there be in leaving Timmy with this lovely young girl while she slipped down the corridor for a minute or two?

  No harm at all, Cherry decided. She turned to the little boy. “Timmy, this is Miss Jan Paulding. She’s got a sick mother who needs me. Is it all right if I leave you with Jan for a few minutes?”

  “Hello, silly,” Timmy greeted Jan impolitely. “Catch!” With a friendly grin he tossed the soft yellow duck to Jan’s outstretched hands. “That’s what I wanted you to find this morning.”

  Cherry left them laughing together and sped down to the Paulding suite. Jan had left the bedroom door ajar. Her mother, a fat, pasty-faced woman, was clasping a wet towel to her forehead.

  “Nurse,
Nurse,” she moaned. “Do something.”

  Cherry said quietly, “Haven’t you a prescription from your own physician that relieves these headaches?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Paulding groaned. “A sedative and painkiller in a liquid form. But I dropped the bottle on the bathroom floor last night during the storm.” She writhed under the sheet. “Codein and aspirin, please. I can’t stand the pain another minute.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cherry said, with genuine sympathy. “I’m not allowed to give any medication without an order from Dr. Monroe. He’ll be along any minute, I’m sure. Let me fix you an ice bag in the meantime.”

  Without waiting for a reply she raced up to the purser’s office for ice cubes, then back down to the dispensary for an ice bag. Then down the corridor to Suite 125-127. Both times, as she passed Timmy’s door, she noticed that it was closed, although she had left it open.

  Dr. Monroe was sitting beside Mrs. Paulding’s bed when Cherry hurried into the room. He glanced briefly at Cherry and took the ice bag from her. “That will be all, Nurse. I’m going to give Mrs. Paulding a sixth of morphine.”

  She was glad to leave it at that. Mrs. Paulding would soon be free from pain and certainly Cherry had done nothing wrong.

  She had to knock twice on Timmy’s door before Jan opened it. Cherry took one look and froze in her tracks. Everywhere were signs that the room had been searched again. The furniture had been moved slightly from against the walls. A chair stood beside the open closet. The rug had been rolled away and hastily but not smoothly rolled back.

  Timmy said happily, “She’s looking for Fuzzy-Wuzzy now. But she’ll never find him. Not in here!”

  Cherry took two swift strides across the room and grabbed Jan’s wrist. “Jan Paulding,” she said sternly, “I’m ashamed of you. Using your mother’s illness as an excuse to illegally search another passenger’s room.”

  Jan burst into tears and crumpled down on the empty twin bed. “I wouldn’t take anything that didn’t belong to me,” she wailed. “I only want what’s mine. My very own.”