Black Orchids

"She what?" I goggled. But without waiting for an answer, I stepped across and walked through the maid into the bathroom. Janet, undressed in the fullest sense of the word and wet all over, was seated on a stool. Ignoring protests and shaking off the maid, who was as red as a beet having her modesty shocked by proxy, I got a towel from a rack and handed it to Janet.

"Here," I said, "this will protect civilization. How the dickens did you do that?"

I lifted her left arm for a look. The cut, nearly an inch long, halfway between the wrist and the elbow, looked worse than it probably was on account of the mixture of blood and iodine. It certainly didn't seem to be worth fainting for, but Janet's face looked as if she might be going to faint. I took the iodine bottle out of her hand and put the cork in it.

"I never scream," Janet said, holding the towel up to her chin. "Really, I never do. But it seemed so… cutting myself with glass… so soon after Miss Huddleston…" She swallowed. "I didn't scream when I cut myself; I'm not quite that silly, really I'm not. I screamed when I saw the piece of glass in the bath brush. It seemed so-"

"Here it is," the maid said.

I took it. It was a piece of jagged glass, creamy yellow, not much bigger than my thumbnail.

"It's like a piece of that bottle that was broke in Miss Huddleston's room that you was asking about," the maid said.

"I'll keep it for a souvenir," I announced, and dropped it into the pocket where I had put the iodine bottle, and picked up the bath brush from the floor. It was soaking wet. "You mean you got in the tub and got soaped, and started to use the brush and cut yourself, and looked at the brush and saw the piece of glass wedged in the bristles, and screamed. Huh?"

Janet nodded. "I know it was silly to scream-"

"I was in the room," the maid said, "and I ran in and-"

"Okay," I cut her off. "Get me some gauze and bandages."

"There in the cabinet," Janet said.

I did a neat job on her, using plenty of gauze because the cut was still trying to bleed. Where she needed the blood was in her face, which was still white and scared, though she tried to smile at me when she thanked me.

I patted her on a nice round shoulder. "Don't mention it, girlie. I'll wait downstairs until you get dressed. I like you in that towel, but I think it would be sensible to go to a doctor and get a shot of antitoxin. I’ll drive you. When you-"

"Anitoxin?" she gasped.