The Door Read online

  “I wouldn’t worry about Miss Gittings,” she said. “She’s sure to be all right.”

  “You might see if she’s in her room, Mary,” Judy suggested. “She may have come in while we were in the drawing room.”

  We could hear her humming as she went on up the stairs, and, shortly after she called down to say that Sarah was not in her room but that it was unlocked.

  “That’s queer,” said Judy. “She always locks it, doesn’t she?”

  We could hear a sort of ironic amusement in Mary’s voice as she replied.

  “Not so queer this evening,” she said. “She knew I was out! Her key’s in the door, on the outside, but she forgot to take it.”

  I do not remember much about the hour between ten and eleven. Wallie was not willing to go until Sarah returned, and Judy and he worked over the cabinet. The house was very still. For a time, as I sat in the library, I could hear Mary moving about on the third floor, drawing a bath—she was very fastidious in everything that pertained to herself—and finally going into her room and closing the door. But by eleven Judy had given up all hope of a secret drawer in the cabinet and was yawning, and a few moments after that Wallie left and she wandered up to bed.

  But I still waited in the library. I had a queer sense of apprehension, but I laid it to the events of the evening, and after a time—I am no longer young, and I tire easily—I fell into a doze.

  When I roused it was one in the morning, and Sarah had not come back. She would have roused me if she had, and she would have put out the lights. Nevertheless I went upstairs and opened her door. The room was dark. I called to her, cautiously, but there was no answer, and no stertorous breathing to show that she was asleep.

  For the first time I was really alarmed about her. I went downstairs again, stopping in my room for a wrap, and in the dining room for my rings, which I had almost forgotten. Then I went out on the street.

  The dog, or dogs, were still barking at intervals, and at last I started toward the sound.

  Chapter Four

  IT IS ONE OF the inevitable results of tragedy that one is always harking back to it, wondering what could have been done to avert it. I find myself going over and over the events of that night, so simple in appearance, so dreadful in result. Suppose I had turned on Sarah’s light that night? Would I have found her murderer in the room? Was the faint sound I heard the movement of her curtain in the wind, as I had thought, or something much more terrible?

  Again, instead of sending Joseph upstairs to search, what if I had had the police called and the house surrounded?

  Still, what could I have done for Sarah? Nothing. Nothing at all.

  I was rather nervous as I walked along, going toward the Larimer lot and the park. But the occasional despairing yelps were growing more and more familiar as I advanced, and when at last I let out that feeble pipe which is my attempt at a whistle, the dogs recognized it in a sort of ecstasy of noise. I could make out Jock’s shrill bark and Isabel’s melancholy whine, but for some reason they did not come to me.

  I stood on the pavement and called, loath to leave its dryness and security for the brush and trees and dampness of the Larimer property. Frightened too, I admit. Something was holding the dogs. I am quite certain now that when I started to run toward them I expected to find Sarah there, unconscious or dead. I ran in a sort of frenzy. Once indeed I fell over some old wire, and I was dizzy when I got up.

  But Sarah was not there. Far back in the lot I found the dogs, and if I wondered that they had not come to me that mystery was soon solved.

  They were tied. A piece of rope had been run through the loops of their leashes and then tied to a tree. So well tied that, what with their joyous rushes and the hard knotting of the rope, I could scarcely free them.

  Asked later on about that knot, I had no clear memory of it whatever.

  It was very dark. Far back on the street a lamp lighted that corner where the path took off, to pitch steeply down into the park. The Larimer lot is a triangle, of which the side of my property is the vertical, the street the base, and the ravine beyond the hypotenuse. Thus:

  I remember calling Sarah frantically, and then telling the terrier to find her.

  “Go find Sarah, Jock,” I said. “Find Sarah.”

  He only barked, however, and an instant later both of them were racing for home.

  But I still had a queer feeling that Sarah must be there. I went back to the house, to find the dogs scratching at the front door, and when I had roused Joseph I took him back with me to search the lot. He with his revolver and I with my searchlight must have been a queer clandestine sort of picture; two middle-aged folk, Joseph half clad, wandering about in the night. And so the roundsman on the beat must have believed, for when he came across to us his voice was suspicious.

  “Lost anything?”

  “A middle-aged woman, rather heavy set,” I said half hysterically.

  “Well, she oughtn’t to be hard to find,” he observed. “Now if it was a ring, with all this brush and stuff—”

  But he was rather impressed when I told my story.

  “Tied to a tree, eh? Which tree?”

  “Over there; my butler’s examining it. The rope’s still there.”

  But a moment later Joseph almost stunned me.

  “There is no rope here, madam,” he called.

  And incredible as it may sound, the rope was not there. The policeman searched, we all searched. There was no rope and no Sarah. The policeman was not so much suspicious as slightly amused.

  “Better go back and get a good night’s sleep, ma’am,” he said soothingly. “You can come around in the morning and look all you want.”

  “But there was a rope, I could hardly untie it.”

  “Sure,” he said indulgently. “Probably the lady you’re looking for tied them up herself. She had business somewhere else and they’d be in the way. See?”

  Well, it was possible, of course. I did not believe it, knowing Sarah; but then, did I know Sarah? The surface of Sarah I knew, the unruffled, rather phlegmatic faithful Sarah; but what did I really know about her? It came to me like a blow that I did not even know if she had any family, that there was no one I could notify.

  “You go home now,” he said, as coaxingly as he would speak to a child, “and in the morning you’ll find she’s back. If she isn’t you can let me know.”

  And he said this too with an air, a certain paternalism, as though he had said: “Just leave this to me. I am the law. I’ll fix it. And now just run along. I’ve my job to attend to.”

  The next morning was rainy and gray. I had slept very little, and I rang for my breakfast tray at eight o’clock. Any hope that Sarah had slipped in early in the morning was dashed by Joseph’s sober face. I drank a little coffee, and at eight-thirty Judy came in yawning, in a luxurious negligee over very gaudy pajamas.

  “Well, what explanation does she give?” she said. “May I have my tray here? I hate eating alone.”

  “Did who give?”

  “Sarah.”

  “She hasn’t come back, Judy.”

  “What? I heard her. From two until three she walked about over my head until I was almost crazy.”

  Sarah’s room was over Judy’s. I sat up in bed and stared at her. Then I rang the bell again.

  “Joseph,” I said, “have you been into Sarah’s room this morning?”

  “No madam. I overslept, and I hurried right down.”

  “Then how do you know she has not come back?”

  “She hasn’t been down for her breakfast. She’s very early, always.”

  And just then we heard Mary Martin talking excitedly to Clara in the hall overhead, and then come running down the stairs. She burst into my room hysterically, to say that Sarah was not in her room and that it was all torn up. Judy was gone like a flash, and while I threw something about me I questioned Mary. She had, it seems, knocked at Sarah’s door to borrow the morning paper. The morning paper, by the way, always reached
me fourth hand; Joseph took it in and looked it over, Sarah got it from him, Mary Martin borrowed it from Sarah, and when I rang for it, usually at nine o’clock, it was apt to bear certain unmistakable scars; a bit of butter, a smudge of egg, or a squirt of grapefruit juice. Anyhow, receiving no answer, Mary had opened the door, and what she saw I saw when I had hurried upstairs.

  Sarah’s room was in complete confusion. Some one had jerked aside her mattress and pillows, thrown down the clothes in her neat closet, looked at her shoes, and turned out her bureau. Even her trunk had been broken open, and its contents lay scattered about. Those records of family illnesses, which she carted about with her as a veteran might carry his medals, had been thrown out onto the bed and apparently examined.

  There was something ruthless and shameless about the room now. It had no secrets, no privacies. It was, in a way, as though some one had stripped Sarah, had bared her stout spinster body to the world.

  Judy, rather white, was in the doorway.

  “I wouldn’t go in,” she said. “Or at least I wouldn’t touch anything. Not until you get the police.”

  Clara, the housemaid, was staring in over my shoulder.

  “She’ll have a fit over this,” she said. “She’s that tidy!”

  But I had a dreadful feeling that poor Sarah would never again have a fit over anything in this world.

  It was nine-fifteen when I telephoned to headquarters, and at a quarter to ten a policeman in uniform and the Assistant Superintendent of Police, Inspector Harrison, reached the house.

  The two of them examined the room, and then leaving the uniformed man in charge of Sarah’s room, Inspector Harrison listened to my story in the library. He was a short stocky man, very bald and with the bluest eyes I have ever seen in an adult human being.

  As he talked he drew a wooden toothpick from his pocket and bit on the end of it. Later on I was to find that he had an apparently limitless supply of the things, and that they served a variety of purposes and moods. He had given up smoking, he said, and they gave him “something to think with.”

  He was disinclined to place any serious interpretation on Sarah’s absence until it was necessary, but he was interested in the housebreaking episode; especially in Wallie’s theory that the intruder on his first visit had swung himself into the light shaft, and he carefully examined it from above and below. There were, however, many scratches on the sill of Clara’s pantry and little to be learned from any of them.

  The Inspector stood for some time looking down into the shaft.

  “He could get in all right,” he decided, “but I’d hate to undertake to get myself out, once I was in. Still, it’s possible.”

  After that he wandered around the house, sometimes alone, sometimes with Joseph. Wallie had arrived, and he and Judy and I sat there waiting, Judy very quiet, Wallie clearly anxious and for the first time alarmed. He moved about the room, picking things up and putting them down until Judy turned on him angrily.

  “For heaven’s sake, Wallie! Can’t you keep still?”

  “If I annoy you, why not go somewhere else?”

  She lit a cigarette and looked at him.

  “I don’t get it,” she said slowly. “What’s Sarah to you? You never cared much for her.”

  “You’ll know some day.”

  She cocked an eye at him.

  “If eventually, why not now?”

  But he merely turned on his heel and resumed his nervous pacing of the room.

  Some time later he suggested that Sarah might have gone to New York, and that Judy telephone and find out. In the end, in order not to alarm Katherine, I called up Jim Blake and told him, and he agreed to invent a message for Katherine. Asked later about his manner over the telephone, I could remember very little. I know he seemed surprised, and that he said he was not well, but that he would dress and come around that afternoon.

  When he called back it was to say that evidently Sarah had not gone there, and that he would be around at three o’clock.

  The information had a curious effect on Wallie, however. As I watched him it seemed to me that he looked frightened; but that may be in view of what I know now. I do, however, recall that he looked as though he had slept badly, and that day for the first time since the early days after the war I saw him begin to twist his seal ring again.

  When he was not lighting a cigarette or throwing it away he was twisting his ring, turning it around and around on his finger.

  Once he left us and went upstairs to look at Sarah’s room. The policeman opened the door but would not let him enter, and I believe he spoke a few words with Mary. Indeed, I know now that he did. But he was back in the library when the Inspector finally came in and selected a fresh toothpick, this time to make points with.

  “First of all,” he said, “it is best not to jump to any conclusions. The lady may not be dead; very probably is not dead. We are, however, sending to the Morgue and the hospitals. But there are many reasons why people occasionally choose to disappear, and sometimes to make that disappearance as mysterious as possible. For example, Miss Gittings had a key to the house. It is just possible that she herself came back last night and ransacked her own room.”

  “In a pair of dark trousers?” I demanded sharply.

  He smiled at that.

  “Perhaps! Stranger things have been done. But now about this key. It was outside the door last night?”

  “My secretary said so.”

  “Well, it’s inside now.”

  “I don’t understand it, Inspector. Sarah always locked her door when she left the house. Locked the door and took the key.”

  “There isn’t a second key to her door?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then we’ll say that this key is hers. It may not be, but it looks like it and wherever it was last night it’s on the inside of the door now. Suppose for the sake of argument that she had decided to go away; to say nothing and go away. She might have forgotten something and come back for it.”

  “Very probably,” said Judy. “She might have forgotten her toothbrush.”

  He smiled at her.

  “Precisely. Or something she had hidden, and forgotten where she had hidden it.”

  “I see,” said Judy. “She forgot her toothbrush so she came back to get it, and as she didn’t want Joseph to know she’d forgotten it she hung in the light shaft and dropped a pencil. It’s perfectly clear.”

  “We have no proof yet that anybody was in the light shaft,” he told her, without resentment. “Where is that pencil, I’d like to look at it.”

  I unlocked a drawer of my desk and took out the envelope.

  “This been handled since?”

  “I picked it up by the point,” Wallie told him.

  “Sure it wasn’t there before?” to me.

  “I think it is unlikely,” I said. “The ceiling is glass and is regularly cleaned. It would have been seen.”

  He held it carefully by the eraser and examined it, whistling softly to himself. Then he dropped it back into the envelope and put it into his pocket.

  “Well, that’s that. Now, as to Miss Gittings herself. I suppose she had no lover?”

  “Lover?” I was shocked. “She is nearly fifty.”

  He seemed to be amused at that.

  “Still, stranger things—” he said. “Perhaps not a lover. Some man, probably younger, who might pretend to be interested for some ulterior purpose. Say money. There’s more of that than you might think. I suppose she had saved something?”

  “I don’t know. A little, perhaps.”

  He turned to Judy.

  “You accepted that it was Miss Gittings you heard moving in her room.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Why?”

  “It was her room. And the dogs had not barked. They would bark at a stranger.”

  “Oh!” he said, and took a fresh toothpick. “That’s interesting. So the dogs knew whoever it was! Very interesting.” He sat for a moment or two, app
arently thinking. Then:

  “I gather she had few or no outside contacts?”

  “None whatever.”

  “She never mentioned anybody named Florence?”

  “Florence? Not to me.”

  He settled down in his chair.

  “It is a curious thing,” he said. “We think we know all about certain individuals, and then something happens, the regular order is disturbed, and we find we know nothing at all. Now let me tell you certain things about Sarah Gittings.

  “She has been nervous for some time, two weeks or so. She has eaten very little and slept less. Sometimes she has walked the floor of her room at night for hours. At least twice in that time she was called up by a girl named Florence, and made an appointment to meet her. One of these was made yesterday morning at eleven o’clock. The cook was trying to call the grocer and overheard her. Unfortunately, the place of meeting had evidently been prearranged and was not mentioned.

  “At a quarter to five yesterday afternoon Sarah Gittings left this house. She was back in half an hour, according to the butler. She asked for an early dinner and left the house again at five minutes after seven.

  “But following that return of hers, Sarah Gittings did two peculiar things. She went down to the cellar, took a chair from the laundry there and carried it into the room where the firewood is stored; it is there now. And according to the laundress, she cut off from a new clothes line an undetermined amount of rope. The line had been neatly rolled and replaced, but she is a sharp woman, that laundress.”

  Wallie had been following this intently, and it seemed to me that he looked relieved. He had stopped twirling his ring.

  “I see,” he said. “She tied the dogs to the tree herself.”

  “It looks like it.”

  Judy was watching him. “Feeling better, Wallie?” she asked, looking more cheerful herself. “Weight off the old mind, and all that?”

  But he did not even hear her. He drew a long breath and lighted a cigarette.

  “I don’t mind saying,” he said to the detective, “that this thing is vitally important to me. I—you’ve relieved me more than you know.”

  But I had been thinking.