Read Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery for Free Online Page A

Not at all. I’ll be back presently.” With that, and a slanting look at my Oxford ties, he went away.
    It left me alone again in that big gloomy bedroom with the rain whispering against the window and a sick man, a man who’d been shot, on the bed.
    I was a little shaken. Shootings, guns and bullets. Police and a doctor who wouldn’t look at me.
    To complicate it, Drue with her loveliness and her honesty linked so strongly with that dreary, secretive house and everybody in it. Especially the man who had been shot.
    The dark panels of the door reflected a dreary light from the windows opposite. My patient gave a kind of weak chuckle and said quite clearly, “Nice going.”
    It gave me rather a start. I hurried to the bed. His eyelids fluttered and opened; there was a gleam of laughter in his eyes and the corners of his mouth twitched. Otherwise he hadn’t moved. He made a great effort and said, “Nurse …”
    “Yes. You’d better not talk.”
    But there was something he had to say. I watched him struggle for the words, his bright eyes seeking into mine. “Thought—there was a girl. Here …” he said laboriously, and waited for me to reply. I hesitated. His hand still lay outside the cover and it moved a little and he said, watching me intently, “Somebody I know …”
    “There is another nurse,” I said then. “You must sleep now.”
    “Another—nurse …” he said and, as a wave of drugged sleep caught and engulfed him again, his voice drifted away. I waited. He’d gone back to sleep, I thought; but as I started to move away he spoke again. And he said quickly, in a jumbled rush of words, something that ended with the words “—yellow gloves.” That was all I could understand, for the rest was only a blurred mumble and he was overtaken by sleep like an avalanche while I stood there watching him and wondering what yellow gloves had to do with anything at all.
    Well, in the end I decided he was rambling and it meant nothing. Although his recognition of Drue had been sensible enough, unless it was merely deeply instinctive.
    That, when I thought of it, was queer—that he’d known she was there.
    As I have indicated, my encounter with the doctor and the state trooper was not exactly conducive to a quiet state of mind; there was also the matter of the missing gun, and the bullet that had been thrown out. I am a sensible woman. It is my nature, and I see no reason to hide my light under a bushel, to enjoy a certain poise. Master of my fate and captain of my destiny, under even the most untoward circumstances. But I won’t say I didn’t feel uneasy, for I did. And the story Drue had told me, naturally, added to my uneasiness.
    For when I had considered everything I had heard and observed (not much, perhaps, but enough), it all summed up to just one conclusion. I’m not sentimental or unduly sympathetic; quite the contrary. But I liked Drue Cable and even if I hadn’t it was obvious that she had no friends in that household. It was as obvious that she was determined to stay.
    And I didn’t like the look of things.
    So I had to stay with her. There simply wasn’t anything else for me to do. And if they sent her away I still had to stay. No question of that.
    While I was very reluctantly reaching that conclusion, Craig Brent continued to sleep heavily, without stirring or saying anything more. After a while, finding it difficult to sit still, I drifted to the deeply recessed bay windows and looked out through the streaming rain. That was how it happened that I saw Drue go to the garden and return.
    It was by that time fairly late in the afternoon. The room and the whole great house seemed perfectly still, except for the rain. Once somewhere away off in the distance a radio was turned on—apparently for a news bulletin. I wondered what fresh turn the war had taken, and wished, as I’d wished so many times, that they would take me. I nursed all through the other war. I am twenty years older and thirty