The Door Read online

  “About this rope,” he went on thoughtfully. “You left it when you untied the dogs and went back for Joseph?”

  “I left it by the tree.”

  “And when you got back it was not there?”

  “No. We searched for it as well as we could. But a rope doesn’t move itself, and it was not where I left it, or anywhere nearby.”

  He got up to go, and standing in the hallway stared back at the lavatory door.

  “This Florence,” he said, “she may try to get in touch with you. She reads the papers, and God knows they are full of it today. If she does, don’t scare her off. Find out something. Coax her here if you can, and notify me.”

  He went back into the lavatory and stood looking up at the ceiling.

  “A strong man,” he said, “or a desperate one if he got himself out of that shaft, and he may have; and it took strength to put that body where we found it.”

  As an afterthought, on his way out, he turned and said:

  “Strange thing. Both those stab wounds were exactly the same depth, four and a quarter inches.”

  Wallie and Jim had made the necessary identification, and the coroner’s jury brought in the only verdict possible. After that and pending the funeral we had a brief respite, although hardly to be called a peace. Reporters rang the bell day and night, and the press published sensational stories, including photographs of the house. Camera men even lurked in the shrubbery, trying for snapshots of any of us. One they did get, of Judy.

  They had caught her unawares with a cigarette in her hand, and to prevent the picture she had made a really shocking face at the camera. They published it, nevertheless, and Katherine was outraged.

  Katherine came down to the funeral. She was shocked and incredulous over the whole affair.

  “But why?” she repeated over and over, when we got back from the service. “She had no enemies. She really had nobody, but us.”

  “Is there anything phony about any of us?” Judy inquired. “Some family secret, or something she knew?”

  “Judy!” said Katherine indignantly.

  “But I mean it, mother. If we’re all she’s had for twenty years—”

  Fortunately for Judy, Jim Blake came in just then, and I sent upstairs for Mary Martin, who had been left to herself for several days, and ordered tea. It seemed to me that we needed it.

  We were five, then, that afternoon after Sarah’s funeral when we gathered around the tea table; Katherine in her handsome black, the large square emerald which was Howard’s latest gift to her on one white slim hand, saddened but controlled; Judy, with her boyish head and her girlish body; Mary, red-headed, pretty, not too sure of herself and resentful of it—it was clear that Katherine rather daunted her; Jim, well valeted and showing in relaxation some slight evidence of too many dinners and too many cocktails; and myself.

  Katherine inspected Jim critically as he came in.

  “You look tired, Jim.”

  “Well, it’s been an uneasy week,” he said evasively.

  But she could not let it rest at that. Everything attached to Sarah had grown enormous in her eyes; already she was exalting Sarah in her mind, her virtues, her grievances.

  “I didn’t suppose you’d bother much. You never liked her.”

  “My dear girl! I hardly knew her.”

  “You never liked her, Jim. That’s all I said. Although why you should dislike the poor dear I don’t know.”

  It seemed to me that Jim looked annoyed. More than annoyed, indeed; alarmed. Also that Mary was staring at him with a rather singular intentness, and that Judy had noticed this. There was no particular sympathy between the two girls. Judy, assured, humorous and unself-conscious, was downright and frank to the shocking point, and her small artifices were as open as herself. But there was nothing open about Mary Martin and very little that was natural, save the color of her hair.

  “Her mind’s always on herself,” Judy had complained once. “She poses her very fingers, if you know what I mean. She’s self-conscious every minute.”

  And if there is one crime in the bright lexicon of modern youth it is to be self-conscious.

  Katherine, upset and nervous, was gnawing on her grievance like a dog on a bone.

  “But you thought Howard was foolish to remember her in his will, Jim.”

  “Nonsense, Katherine. Howard’s money is his, to leave where he likes. Anyhow, let’s hope he doesn’t leave it at all for a good many years.”

  That silenced her. She sat very still, with her eyes slightly dilated, facing the issue she had herself brought up; Howard gone and herself alone. The years going on and she alone. And into that silence Mary Martin’s voice broke, quiet but very clear.

  “I have always meant to ask you, Mr. Blake. Did you receive the letter Miss Gittings wrote you on Sunday, the day before the—the thing happened?”

  “A letter?” said Jim. “She wrote me a letter?”

  But he was shocked. A child could have seen it. His teacup shook in his hand, and he was obliged to rest it on his knee. I saw Judy’s eyes narrow.

  “She did indeed. I went in while she was writing it.”

  “A letter?” Katherine asked. “Did you get it, Jim?”

  “I received no letter.” He had recovered somewhat, however, and now he turned on Mary sharply. “How did you know it was to me? Did she say so?”

  “No. She was addressing the envelope, and she put her arm over it so I could not see. That is how I know.”

  “Do speak up,” Judy said irritably. “What’s the sense in being mysterious? God knows we’ve got enough of that.”

  “Her uniform is still hanging in the closet, and Mr. Blake’s name is quite clear on the sleeve. Of course you have to take a mirror to read it.”

  I do not think any one of us doubted that she had told the truth, unless it was Katherine. And Mary sat there, pleased at being the center of attention, the picture however of demureness, her eyes on her well-manicured hands, which were as Judy had said, carelessly but beautifully posed in her lap.

  “I don’t believe it,” Katherine said suddenly. “Please bring it down, Miss Martin.”

  I saw the girl stiffen and glance at me. She was taking no orders, said her attitude, except from me.

  “Will you, Mary? Please.”

  She went out then, leaving the four of us in a rather strained silence. Jim was staring into his teacup. Judy was watching Jim, and Katherine had put her head back and closed her eyes.

  “I don’t like that girl,” she said. “She is malicious.”

  “There’s nothing malicious in her giving us a clue if she’s got one,” said Judy with determined firmness. “We don’t know that she sent the letter, but if she wrote one—”

  “Well?”

  “It looks as if she had had something to say to Uncle Jim which she didn’t care to telephone, doesn’t it?”

  Mary came back then, and I daresay all of us felt rather sick when we saw Sarah’s white uniform once more. There is something about the clothing of those who have died which is terribly pathetic; the familiarity, the small wrinkles left by a once warm body. And in Sarah’s case the uniform spelled to most of us long years of loyal service. Katherine I know was silently crying.

  Judy was the first to take the garment and examine it. I noticed that Jim did not touch it. Mary had brought a mirror, and I saw that Joseph—who was gathering the teacups—was politely dissembling an interest as keen as ours. Judy however did not help him any. She looked at the ink marks on the cuff which Mary had indicated, and then silently passed both mirror and garment to me.

  There was no question of what was there. Somewhat smeared but still readable was the word “Blake,” and while the house number was illegible, the street, Pine Street, was quite distinct.

  No one spoke until Joseph went out. Then Jim cleared his throat and said:

  “I don’t care what’s there. I never got a letter from her.”

  “She put a stamp on it,” said Mary.
/>   Judy turned on her.

  “That doesn’t prove that she mailed it.”

  But Mary shrugged her shoulders. I thought then, and I still think, that at that moment at least she was sincere enough, and also that she was enjoying the situation she had forced. For once the attention was on her and not on Katherine and Judy, with their solid place in the world, their unconscious assumption of superiority.

  “You knew her,” she said laconically. “She wouldn’t waste a two-cent stamp.”

  She was unwilling to give up the center of the stage, however. She said that the uniform might or might not have importance, but that she felt the police should see it. If looks could have killed her she would never have left that room, but she had put the issue up to us and what could we do?

  “Certainly,” said Judy shrewishly. “You might put on your things now and take it, Mary!”

  And with all eyes on her Mary merely looked at her watch and said that it was too late.

  When a half hour or so later Inspector Harrison came in he found us all sitting there, manufacturing talk to cover our discomfort, and Mary blandly smiling.

  We had to give the uniform to him. But from that time on there was not one of us who did not believe that Mary Martin was a potential enemy, and potentially dangerous; nor one of at least four of us who did not believe that Jim had actually received a letter from Sarah and was choosing to suppress the fact.

  Chapter Six

  IT IS NOT EASY to tell of this series of crimes in entire sequence. For one thing I kept no journal. For another, I must contend with that instinct of the human mind which attempts to forget what is painful to remember.

  I do know, however, that Sarah was murdered on a Monday, the eighteenth of April, and that the death of Florence Gunther did not take place until the first of May. How she had occupied herself in that interval we cannot be certain; we know that she was terrified, that at night she must have locked herself in her room and listened for stealthy footsteps on the stairs, and that in daytime her terror was of a different order, but very real.

  I can find only one bit of comfort. When death did come to her it was sudden and unexpected. She may have been smiling. She must even have been feeling a sense of relief, now that her resolution was taken. She could have had no warning, no premonition.

  Yet had she had only a little courage she might have lived.

  It is easy to say now what she should have done. She should have gone at once to the District Attorney and told her story. But perhaps she was afraid of that, of being discovered or followed. Then too Mr. Waite was away, and she may have been waiting for his return.

  We know now that she was hysterical during most of the interval, hysterical and suspicious, that she had built up the crime to fit what she knew, and that the case as she saw it was precisely the case as the police were to see it later on. But we have no details of those terrible days through which she lived from the eighteenth of April to the first of May.

  On the Tuesday following Sarah’s funeral Katherine went back to New York, and on the next day the District Attorney sent for me. He had some of the papers on the case before him, and he fingered them while he interrogated me.

  “You had no reason to believe she had any personal enemies? Anybody who could gain by doing away with her?”

  “None whatever,” I said promptly, and told him of her relations to the family. “I would have said,” I finished, “that she had no outside life whatever.”

  “She had never married?”

  “Never.”

  “I suppose she was in possession of a good many family facts? I’ll not say secrets, but facts; relationships, differences, that sort of thing?”

  “Such as they are, yes. But it is a singularly united family.”

  “Save, I suppose, for Mr. Somers’ son by his first marriage. I understand that he is not particularly persona grata.”

  “Who told you that?”

  He smiled.

  “He told me himself, as a matter of fact. He seems very anxious to have the mystery solved, as of course we all are. I suppose he was fond of her?”

  “I never thought so. No.”

  He coughed.

  “In this—er—family difference, I gather that your sympathies have lain with this Walter. Is that so?”

  “Yes and no,” I said slowly. “Walter has never amounted to much since the war, and his father has never understood him. They are opposed temperaments. Walter is sensitive and high-strung. Mr. Somers is a silent man very successful in business—he’s in Wall Street—and they haven’t hit it off. Mr. Somers has financed Walter in several businesses, but he has always failed. I believe he has said that he is through, except for a trust fund in his will, a small one. But if you have any idea that Walter is concerned in Sarah’s death—”

  “I have no such idea. We have checked his movements that night. As a matter of fact, when he left your house he went directly to his club. He left at eleven-fifteen. He recalls your asking the time, and that your own watch was a minute or two slow. At eleven-thirty he was at his club, and joined a bridge game. That time is fixed. The man whose place he took had agreed to be at home by midnight.”

  He turned over the papers on his desk, and finally picked up one of them.

  “Unfortunately,” he said, “your own statement that Sarah Gittings had no life outside your family necessarily brings the family into this affair. Your cousin, now, Mr. Blake. How well did she know him?”

  “She saw him once in a while. I don’t suppose she had ever said much more than good-morning to him.”

  “Then you know of no reason why she should write to him?”

  “None whatever.”

  “Yet she did write to him, Miss Bell. She wrote to him on the day before her death, and I believe that he received that letter.”

  He sat back in his chair and surveyed me.

  “He got that letter,” he repeated.

  “But why would he deny it?”

  “That’s what I intend to find out. Actually, it appears that Sarah Gittings knew Mr. Blake much better than you believe. On at least one evening during the week before her death she went to his house. He was dining out, however, and did not see her. On Saturday night she telephoned to him, but not from your house. We have gone over your calls. Clearly this was some private matter between them. Amos, Mr. Blake’s servant, says he recognized her voice; of course that’s dubious, but again Mr. Blake was out. Then on Sunday she wrote, and I have every reason to believe that he got the letter on Monday.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he went out that night to meet her.”

  I think, recalling that interview, that he was deliberately telling me these things in order to get my reaction to them, to watch for those reactions. Later on I believe he attempted to convey something of this system of his to the Grand Jury; that he said, in effect:

  “You are to remember that guilt or innocence is not always solved or otherwise by the sworn statements of witnesses. People have perjured themselves before this. The reaction to a question is an important one; there is a subtle difference between the honest man and the most subtle liar.”

  So now he watched me.

  “Did you know, when she left your house that night, that she was going out to meet Mr. Blake?”

  “No. And I don’t believe it now.”

  “You saw the writing on her cuff. Was that hers?”

  “It looked like it. I daresay it was.”

  “Yet no such envelope was found in her room the next day, when the police searched it. Nor among the trash which Inspector Harrison examined. She wrote and sent that letter, Miss Bell, and he received it. Unless some one in your house found it and deliberately destroyed it.”

  “If you think I did that, I did not.”

  “No,” he said. “I am sure you did not. That is why I know he got it. But why should he deny it? Remember, I am bringing no accusation against Mr. Blake, but I want him to come clean on this story. He knows somet
hing. You might suggest to him that it would be better for him to tell what he knows than to have us find it out for ourselves.”

  I was slightly dazed as I left, and sitting back in the car I was puzzled. How little, after all, we know of people! Sarah, moving quietly about my house, massaging me each morning with quiet efficiency; her life an open book, not too interesting. And yet Sarah had had a secret, a secret which she had withheld from me and had given or tried to give to Jim Blake.

  I decided to see Jim at once and give him the District Attorney’s message. But Jim had had a return of his old trouble and was in bed. And as it happened, something occurred that night which took my mind away from Jim for the time, and from everything else except Judy.

  She had been in a fever of anger and resentment ever since Sarah’s death. After all, Sarah had helped to bring her into the world, and she was outraged. I daresay under other conditions I might have found her determination to solve a crime amusing rather than otherwise, but there was a set to her small jaw, a feverish look in her eyes, that commanded my respect. And in the end, like Katherine, she did make her small contribution.

  To Dick of course she was wonderful, no matter what she did.

  So she and Dick were working on the case; she in a fury of indignation, Dick largely because of her. I know that they had gone over every inch of the lot where the dogs had been tied, but that they had found nothing. I think, however, that they were afraid I could not give their efforts sympathetic attention, for except for their lack of success they did not confide in me.

  On that night, Wednesday, they had been making a sketch of the lot and the park, but Judy looked very tired, and at ten o’clock I sent Dick away. Judy started up for bed, but in the hall she must have thought of something and changed her mind. She went back through the pantry, where Joseph was reading the evening paper, and asked if he had a flashlight. Joseph had none there, and she went into the kitchen, got some matches and the garage key from its nail and proceeded to the garage.

  Shortly after she came back to the kitchen door and called in to him:

  “Where’s the ladder, Joseph? The ladder Mr. Walter used in the lavatory that night?”