by Helen Wells
That, she reflected, smiling inwardly, was putting it mildly, but she didn’t want to arouse the purser’s suspicions.
Ziggy shook his head grimly. “If she wants to know, she’ll have to ask the ship’s surgeon. I’m just the pharmacist’s mate when it comes to dying passengers.” He got up and left the room.
Cherry decided that Ziggy was right. Jan herself would have to question Dr. Monroe. Even though it was now “Kirk” and “Cherry,” he would never violate professional ethics and repeat what his patient had said.
After she had finished her inventory, Cherry went to the dispensary to check the supplies and the sterilization equipment. Then it was noon and time for her visit to Timmy.
Mrs. Crane looked exhausted by her four-hour stretch of duty. But she didn’t utter a complaint. With Cherry looking on, she went through the routine of Timmy’s care without mishap. Cherry complimented her enthusiastically.
“You’re as good as any nurse’s aide now. In another day or so I’ll be pinning a handkerchief on your hair to show you’ve won your cap.”
Mrs. Crane flushed with pleasure. “The doctor said Timmy couldn’t go out on deck today because of the rise in his temperature last night. But he did say if it was normal all day Timmy could go up to the library and see the Christmas tree when it’s lighted up this evening. That nice Mr. Landgraf offered to carry Timmy. That was really awfully sweet of him, don’t you think?”
“Oh, did Timmy have a visitor this morning?” Cherry asked quickly.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Landgraf and Jan Paulding and her mother. He and Jan both offered to read to Timmy while I took a dip in the pool, but I refused. I was afraid Miss Cherry Ames would scold me if I left the room for even one minute.”
Cherry laughed. “Well, you’ve earned a rest. I’ll ask the steward to bring my lunch on the same tray with Timmy’s. So you run along and have your swim. Unless I’m called elsewhere I’ll be glad to stay with Timmy for a couple of hours.”
Mrs. Crane thanked Cherry gratefully. “Then I’ll just stay right on until two and have my lunch at the pool. You’re a lamb, Cherry.”
Timmy was so full of Christmas Eve excitement he could hardly eat. When Cherry told him it was her birthday too, he promptly offered to give her the entire contents of his toy box.
And then Cherry suddenly remembered the cable she had tucked into her uniform pocket hours ago. It was from her mother:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARLING. HAVE LOTS OF FUN.
A wave of homesickness swept over Cherry. If she were home now she and Charlie would be trimming the tree. There would be all sorts of mysterious whisperings as gifts were wrapped in the presence of everyone except the one who would open them on Christmas Day. Lost in thought she didn’t hear what Timmy was saying until he repeated:
“I’ve got a piece of yellow paper too, Cherry. Listen to me! I’ve got a ’portant piece of yellow paper too.”
“Have you?” Cherry smiled. “That’s nice. Did somebody send you a cable wishing you a merry Christmas?”
Timmy shook his head. “No, it b’longs to Henry. He was reading it in that chair just like you’re reading yours. Then Jan came in and he stuffed it in his pocket. But when he wasn’t looking I took it out and hid it under my pillow.”
“Timmy Crane,” Cherry scolded. “You’re a naughty boy. Give me that paper right away. I’ll have Waidy return it to Henry when he comes for our trays.”
“Okey-dokey,” Timmy said cheerfully. “I just borrowed it cause it looked so nice and ’portant. But you’ve got to read it to me first. I could only read some of the words, like milk.”
Cherry laughed. “I don’t think you read that one right. I can’t imagine anyone used the word milk in a cable to Henry.”
“Did so read it right,” Tim shouted. “M-I-L-K spells milk!” He reached under his pillow and produced a crumpled piece of yellow paper.
It was not, Cherry saw at once, a cablegram. Then she almost shouted herself, when Timmy triumphantly pointed to four capital letters in the middle of the sheet. They did, indeed, spell milk, and the crumpled piece of yellow paper was the carbon copy of a letter signed:
“R. D. Ziegler, Ship’s Purser.”
CHAPTER XV
Milk of Magnesia
CHERRY’S EYES ALMOST POPPED OUT OF HER HEAD. THIS, then, must be the missing letter.
“Read it,” Tim yelled. “Read to me.”
Cherry hesitated. Should she return the letter to the purser without finding out what it said? If she did, she might be letting a valuable clue slip through her fingers. She glanced swiftly at the name and address above the salutation. There could be no harm in reading that much of it.
One glance was enough for Cherry. The letter was addressed to:
MR. JUAN CAMELOT, Attorney-at-Law
Willemstad
Curaçao
Jan’s Uncle Benedict’s lawyer!
“Read it,” Timmy yelled for the third time. And Cherry did, swiftly, so that the words were jumbled together and made no sense at all to the little boy.
“What’s so ’portant ’bout that?” he demanded in disgust. He returned to the more exciting topic of what Santa Claus was going to bring him.
As he rambled on with the long list of what he expected to find in his stocking the next morning, Cherry read the letter more carefully.
Dear Sir:
Due to an oversight on the part of a steward, certain items in the late Mr. Benedict Paulding’s medicine cabinet were not included in the effects sent ashore at the time of his disembarkation on Tuesday, December 12th. These items are enclosed herewith. They are:
1 Gold-plated Safety Razor
1 Used Razor Blade
1 New “ “
1 Toothbrush
1 Can Tooth Powder
1 Bottle Milk of Magnesia (16 ounces)
1 Comb (2 Teeth Missing)
1 Pair Military Hairbrushes
I myself am guilty of neglecting to turn these items into the Home Office at the Port of New York. I am therefore sending them to you by messenger when we next dock in Willemstad, Tuesday, December 26th. I trust this is satisfactory.
Cherry stared at the fifth item: 1 Can Tooth Powder. Perhaps it contained the missing ambergris! If so, it was perfectly safe in the purser’s locked desk where he kept all trivia connected with the passengers. She had caught a glimpse of that drawer earlier when he put away a handkerchief and compact a waitress had discovered left behind on one of the dining-room tables. The deep drawer was filled with large and small sealed, brown-paper packages, all carefully labeled and dated.
In one of them was Jan’s ambergris! So the mystery was over. All Jan had to do was request the purser to hand over her uncle’s toilet articles to her, his heir.
But would it be as simple as that? Ziggy might refuse, even when confronted with the carbon copy of the letter to Mr. Camelot. And rightly so. There was some legal technicality that prevented heirs from inheriting anything until after the will had been probated. Jan had said that her uncle’s will would not be probated until her arrival in Willemstad.
So what was their next step? Whoever had twice broken into the purser’s office would surely make another search. This time, he might be successful.
If that mysterious person was, as Cherry was beginning to suspect, Mr. Henry Landgraf, he now knew what she knew: that some of old Mr. Paulding’s possessions were still aboard ship. Like Cherry, he would immediately think of the tooth-powder can … a perfect, innocent-looking container for priceless ambergris.
Cherry could hardly wait to consult with Jan. At last it was two o’clock and Mrs. Crane came back right on the hour, excited and flushed.
“Run along, Cherry,” she said. “And don’t come back at four. I’m going to be really brave and try to cope all by myself.” She giggled. “I’m glad you can’t get too far away from me, though.”
Cherry decided that she had better obtain the ship’s surgeon’s approval before turning complete care of Timmy over t
o his pretty young mother.
She found Kirk in his office two doors beyond.
“Hello,” he greeted her. “Where have you been keeping yourself? If I hadn’t seen your entries in the sick-bay log I wouldn’t have known there was a nurse aboard.”
Cherry pretended to sulk. “After all, Dr. Monroe, it is Sunday. And, I might add, the day before Christmas. Not to mention the fact—or also, as Timmy would say, my birthday!”
“Cherry!” He pumped her hand up and down. “And the gift shop would be closed until this evening, so I can’t buy you a present!”
“I don’t want a present.” Cherry smiled. “What I want you to do is let me turn Timmy over to his mother from now on. It’s not that I want to get out of a task, it’s just that it’s good for her—for both of them.” Then she explained about Timmy’s grandmother and Nanny.
Kirk nodded approvingly. “You’re a good little psychologist, Cherry. And there’s no reason why his mother shouldn’t assume full responsibility now. Even a teenager like Jan could nurse him without too much risk. If his temperature doesn’t go up tonight, we’ll take him off sulfa as a Christmas present. And let him go on deck. It’s a shame he’s missing all this lovely tropical weather. As a matter of fact, let’s prescribe a sun bath for him this afternoon. It can’t possibly do him any harm and I think probably will do him a lot of good.”
“That’s what I think,” Cherry said. “He’s hardly coughing at all now and he’s not nearly so hoarse.”
Kirk Monroe chuckled. “If he didn’t insist upon talking so much he would probably have gotten over his laryngitis much sooner. He’s a regular magpie, that one!”
He’s like a magpie in more ways than one, Cherry thought, remembering the letter Tim had filched from Henry Landgraf’s pocket. She flushed guiltily. That letter was still in her own pocket. Ethically speaking, she should return it to the purser at once. But she didn’t like to do that until she had shown it to Jan.
Suddenly it struck Cherry that the letter shouldn’t be given to either Ziggy or Jan. She should take it straight to the captain herself. For it was irrevocable proof that Mr. Henry Landgraf had taken it from the purser’s office the night before.
But there was good old Rule 6:
“The ship’s nurse must always be diplomatic, cooperative and courteous in her relationship with a passenger, an officer, or a member of the crew.”
And, the next one: “When an equivocal question arises, the nurse must not assume any responsibility whatsoever. She must immediately refer the passenger, the officer, or the member of the crew to the ship’s surgeon.”
Before she knew it Cherry had handed over Ziggy’s letter and was blurting out the whole story.
“Ambergris!” Kirk interrupted once.
“Yes, ambergris,” Cherry said. “Fantastic, but true.”
“It’s a fantastic substance all right,” Kirk agreed. “Especially the much-sought-after fossil ambergris. They say that effete Oriental potentates value highly the flavor of a drop of the tincture in their hot coffee. And there’s a legend in the Indies and Moslem countries that it has the same life-giving qualities that Ponce de Leon’s Florida Water was supposed to have. In olden times the maharajahs treasured it in sealed caskets as they did their gold and precious stones. Their descendants can now sell this form of superrefined ambergris for fabulous sums.”
“Then Jan’s ambre blanc,” Cherry put in, “may be very valuable?”
“I imagine so,” Kirk agreed. “You see a little of the pulverized stuff goes a long way. When I was a kid a chemist friend of mine let me watch him prepare the tincture. First he crushed a small stone of it with mortar and pestle. Pretty much the way you prepare Tim’s sulfa.” He smiled. “Then he added alcohol at 96° in a proportion of 8 liters to 1,000 grams of powdered ambergris. The mixture was allowed to stand, with occasional stirring, in an open container for eight days. Then the alcohol was poured off and another 8 ounces poured over the residue. After eight washings, my chemist friend had 40 liters of the tincture which he filtered into another container and left to age in a warm place for about six months. Then he started all over again with the settling.”
“You mean what was left of the original 1,000 grams?” Cherry demanded incredulously.
“That’s right,” Kirk grinned. “It goes on almost endlessly like the story of the ants who kept going into the granary and bringing out another grain of wheat. After the chemists exhaust the settling—and I do mean exhaust—it is dried and ground and then used in sachet powders. They literally don’t waste a grain of it.”
Cherry sighed. “Well, I’m glad you know all about it. I couldn’t quite believe it was as valuable as Jan claims it is. What does it smell like, Kirk?”
“That depends on the quality,” he told her. “A highly refined lot of ambre blanc would be faintly reminiscent of incense in a church, plus the seaweedy mustiness of the tide on the high seas. That’s a much more exotic odor than the tide on a beach, you know. There’s a muskiness through it all and sometimes a trace of an aroma that makes you think of expensively blended tobacco.”
Cherry went on with her story then. Kirk listened soberly and when she had finished he said, “There’s nothing we can do, Cherry, except advise Jan to cable the lawyer at once to come aboard in person and get that sealed envelope. A messenger might be intercepted.”
“But,” Cherry protested, “why can’t we lay the matter before the captain? Make him put the package in his own safe? Surely, he would when we tell him it contains priceless ambergris!”
Kirk threw back his head, roaring with laughter. “You are a landlubber, Cherry Ames! In the first place, the Old Man would have apoplexy if he heard you were probing into the passengers’ personal affairs. In the second, leaving you out of it, he would immediately ask for my resignation. Shipboard protocol forbids my activity in any department except the medical department. Reporting our suspicions to him would be like telling him how to avoid a collision at sea. We leave radar to him, and he leaves sick bay to us. We’re subjects of a little autocracy, if you like, but that’s the way it is.”
Cherry sighed. “I’m so afraid Mr. Henry Landgraf will steal that ambergris before we dock on Tuesday. If he does, Jan will have to give up her hopes of becoming an artist.”
Kirk grinned. “You don’t know that Mr. Landgraf is the villain in the case. Someone else might have crumpled up that letter and thrown it away, thinking there was no clue in it as to the whereabouts of the ambergris. Mr. Landgraf might have picked it up and read it out of idle curiosity. Seems like a nice enough fellow to me. Spends a lot of time amusing Tim—even offered to carry him up to see the tree this evening.”
“But don’t you see?” Cherry wailed. “He’s just using Timmy so he can have opportunities to search that cabin.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Kirk Monroe said mildly. “Tim has impressed everyone who entered his presence into service. He even got me playing ‘hot and cold’ in the search for his Fuzzy-Wuzzy. And to think it was at the bottom of the pool all along.”
Cherry sucked in her breath. How much did Dr. Monroe know about that?
But the surgeon went on easily, “I gather his mother finally retrieved the panda last night. Can’t imagine why one of the pool attendants didn’t discover it before.”
“It was lying on the bottom in the shadow of the diving board,” Cherry blurted. Too late, she could have bitten off her tongue.
Fortunately the young doctor did not notice her blunder. “So that was the answer,” he said incuriously, adding, “I imagine you want to go along now and have a chat with Jan Paulding about that cable. Unofficially, in an advisory capacity only, I’ll help every way I can.” He stared thoughtfully down at his hands. “I rather hope, Cherry, that Mr. Camelot won’t find any ambergris in that sealed package. If he does, he will almost certainly report both Ziggy’s and Waidler’s negligence to the captain.”
He shook his head. “They both have excellent records as
loyal and conscientious employees of long standing. It would be a shame if their careers had to end in disgrace due to such minor infractions of duty.” He pointed to the itemized list in the letter. “Less honest persons would have dumped that stuff overboard without a qualm.”
Cherry hadn’t thought about that angle of Jan’s problem. Now she saw all too clearly that this bit of scuttlebutt must never reach the captain’s ears. She took the bull by the horns:
“Kirk,” she said hesitantly, “you can be a big help right now by answering one simple question. If you don’t want to answer me, I’ll get Jan to ask you the same question. Did her uncle say anything before he lost consciousness? Anything at all significant?”
Kirk Monroe ran his long, surgeon’s fingers along the edge of his glass-topped desk. “Now that you remind me, he did say something which may or may not be significant. At the time I thought his mind was wandering, because shortly after that he lapsed into a coma. At first he merely complained of a pain in his chest, then when his breathing became more labored, he beckoned to me with one hand and pointed to the bathroom with the other. I could hardly make out what he was saying, but it sounded like:
“ ‘Milk of magnesia. Please, Doc, give me milk of magnesia.’ ”
“I remember,” Kirk went on, “Ziggy grunted and tapped his forehead. I felt the same way about the request. What good would milk of magnesia do to a man dying with a blood clot in his lung?”
“Not much,” Cherry admitted. “Is that all he said?”
“That’s all he had time for,” Kirk told her. “It all happened very quickly, I had hardly time to send for the nurse and Ziggy. Then his lawyer came aboard and took him ashore. I signed the necessary papers, and that was that.”
Cherry suddenly jumped up. “Oh, Kirk,” she cried. “Don’t you see? Milk of magnesia bottles are generally made of cloudy, blue glass. You couldn’t tell, unless you examined them carefully, whether they contained a powder or a liquid. The magnesia itself often forms a white powdery crust around the neck of the bottle. What a perfect hiding place for a pint of priceless ambergris!”
