Alex.”
“That’s right, the rooms aren’t numbered as such, but if you look up, right in the middle of the top beam of the door, just below the transom, you’ll see a colored piece of tape, for this room green. You can see it right there. Now, each key has a corresponding color tag attached to its handle. Here’s the green one.”
I put the key in the keyhole to open the door, but it wouldn’t work. I thought that some of the tags had got crossed so I tried all the keys. None of them worked. I immediately dashed back to the nurse’s station and asked Nurse Jenkins about the locked room. She said the room was open this morning because she saw the housekeeper in there dusting. It is her weekly duty to dust and change the bed sheets in vacant rooms and today was that day.
“When was the last time you used the key to the room with the green tag?” I asked Nurse Jenkins,
“Let’s see, it must have been when Mister Lunsford was here. He gave me back his key when he left three months ago. I tested it as I always do to make sure it was the right key, and it worked…I know, I remember,” she said.
“Well, none of these keys work. And where’s the duplicate ring? I tried all of these. Did you give the key on this ring to any other staff member after you tested the green-tagged one for this room?”
“No, I did not,” she answered vehemently. Then she went to a desk where a duplicate set of keys were kept. The whole set was missing. “I can’t understand it. They should be here. There’re always here…in this drawer. I saw them this morning. I…”
“Never mind, Miss Jenkins, I’ll sort it out later,” I said.
Then I returned to the door of the locked room where I’d left Doctor Lederer.
“Now we have another mystery on our hands. Not only do we have an unknown patient here, but it seems like both keys to this door are missing. In fact a whole set of duplicate keys are missing. I don’t even know what this key with the green tag goes to. We have duplicate keys, Doctor Lederer. We give one to the patient occupying the room, as it gives him or her, a feeling of privacy, and one is kept at the nurses’ post.”
“I think a third mystery has manifested, Alex. Just now, while you were gone, I thought―no, I know I heard a curious noise behind the door of this room.”
I could hardly believe what Doctor Lederer had said to me. After a short reflection, I asked him, “What kind of noise?”
“It was like heavy thumping. I could actually feel the vibration. The sound seemed to be moving around the room and, oh yes…also, the thumping was immediately followed by a… how should I say…like the dragging of…something—a foot perhaps. In other words, as if a foot were leading, thus making the thump, and the other foot was being dragged, kind of a scratchy-type sound. It was like, thump-drag, thump-drag, thump-drag. It started right after you left me and it lasted for about…oh, fifteen, twenty seconds, no more than twenty seconds, I’m sure. I didn’t even have to put my head up against the door; it was audible enough for me to hear it three feet away...as well as feeling the vibration, as I said before. Then it stopped and you came back about a minute later.”
“We have to get to the bottom of this,” I said. So I knocked on the door again, only this time with more force. There was no response. Then I yelled, “Is there anybody in there?” Again, there was no response. Then I tried to peek through the keyhole. It was too dark to see anything. I was really getting agitated now and was about to go to the supply room and get a stepladder, in order to climb up to the transom and look in the room.
Then Doctor Lederer reminded me there wasn’t much time left and we still had to see the other two patients on the second floor, then be back to meet Doctor Calloway in his office at eleven. It was already a quarter to eleven. We had fifteen minutes so I gave up on getting into the green room and
David Levithan, Rachel Cohn