The Door Read online

  “Yes, sir.”

  I had a flash then of the strange relationship between the two of them, shut in there together; of suspicion and anger on Jim’s part, and on the negro’s of fear and something else. Not hostility. Uneasiness, perhaps.

  “Can I shake up your pillows, sir?”

  “No. Don’t bother.”

  I felt baffled as I went down the stairs.

  I daresay it is always difficult to face civilized human beings and to try to realize that they have joined the lost brotherhood of those who have willfully taken human lives. There appears to be no gulf; they breathe, eat, talk, even on occasion laugh. There is no mark on their foreheads. But the gulf is there, never to be bridged; less broad perhaps for those who have killed in passion, but wider than eternity itself for those who have planned, plotted, schemed, that a living being shall cease to live.

  All hope that Jim Blake would clear himself, at least in my eyes, was gone. And at the foot of the stairs Amos was waiting, enigmatic, the perfect servant, to help me into my wrap.

  “I’ll bring the car around at once, ma’am.”

  “I’ll go back with you, Amos. It will save time.”

  “The yard’s pretty dark, Miss Bell.”

  “Haven’t you a flashlight?”

  He produced one at once from a drawer of the hall table, and I followed him, through his neat pantry and kitchen and out into the yard. Here in mild weather Jim sometimes served coffee after dinner, and he had planted it rather prettily. I remember the scent of the spring night as I followed Amos, and seeing the faint outlines of Jim’s garden furniture, a bench, a few chairs, a table.

  “I see you have your things out already, Amos.”

  “Yes’m. I painted them a few days ago. We’ll be having warm weather soon.”

  I took the light while he unlocked the small door and backed the car into the alley beyond. It occurred to me that the watcher out front would hear the noise and come to investigate, but the alley was lined with garages. One car more or less would make little difference.

  I have wondered about that surveillance since. Clearly it would always have been possible for Jim to come and go by the alley way if he so desired. Probably the intention was not that, but rather to see what visitors he received, and for all I know there may have been some arrangement with Amos, to warn the watcher if Jim left his bed and dressed for any purpose.

  However that may be, we were not molested, and I still carried the flashlight when I got into the rear of the car. I knew the car well. I had sold it to Jim a year or so ago when I had bought a new one. It was a dark blue limousine, the driving seat covered with leather, the interior upholstered in a pale gray.

  “Car doing all right, Amos?”

  “Very well, ma’am.”

  Idly I switched on the flashlight and surveyed the interior. Undoubtedly the car had begun to show wear. There were scars on the seat cushions from cigarette burns, and one or two on the carpet. I think now that these movements of mine were a sort of automatism, or perhaps the instinct of the uneasy mind to seek refuge in the trivial. The car was of no importance to me. Let them burn it, these people who shared the “usual life of a bachelor,” these men for whom Amos painted the garden furniture, these women who must be protected, not dragged in.

  And then I saw something.

  There was a ring-shaped stain on the carpet near my feet, well defined, dark. It was perhaps seven inches across, and I lowered the flashlight and inspected it. It looked like oil, and woman-fashion I ran my finger over it and then sniffed the finger. It was oil. It was kerosene oil.

  I put out the flashlight and sat back. There were a dozen possible explanations for that stain, but only one occurred to me. Sitting there in the dark, I pondered the matter of eliminating it before Amos found it. Or had he already found it? Was he sitting there beyond the glass partition, driving as perfectly as he did everything else, and all the time aware of my movements, knowing what I had found? Did the police know, too?

  Suppose I were to say to Amos:

  “Amos, this carpet is dirty. I’m taking it to have it cleaned, while Mr. Blake is not using the car.”

  Perhaps that in itself would rouse his suspicion. He might say: “Don’t bother, Miss Bell. I’ll see to it.” And then Amos and I would be bickering over the carpet: it would grow important to him, and if he conquered he would take it to the police.

  I did the best thing I could think of at the moment. I stooped down and loosened the carpet, rolled it up carefully, and then hid it as best I could underneath my long cape.

  If I looked strange to Joseph when he admitted me, he said nothing. Once Judy had said that Joseph had no capacity for astonishment, and the thought supported me that night as, certainly nervous and probably bulging, I entered my own house.

  Judy called to me from the library, but I passed the door with as much expedition as I dared. She and Dick were settled there over a card table, with a sheet of paper before them. I saw that, and that Dick was apparently making a sketch of some sort. As I went up the stairs he was saying:

  “Now get this. Here’s the daybed. The closet door is there—”

  Then I was in my room, the door bolted, and that incriminating carpet on a table under a good light. There was no question about it. A jug or can containing kerosene oil had rested on it, probably quite recently.

  Chapter Ten

  A LONE WOMAN WHO has lived in a house for many years grows to know her house. It is like a live thing to her; it has its moods, its contrary days, and it has its little eccentricities. This stair creaks, that window rattles, that door sticks.

  Especially, if she is not a good sleeper, she grows to know her house at night. All houses are strange at night. It is as though, after the darkness and silence have fallen, they stir and waken to some mysterious life of their own. In my house, some of these movements I can account for. When the windows are raised the old beams creak, as though the house is cracking its knuckles, and when we have a north wind the skylight wails and whines. A metal weatherstrip that is, vibrating like a string.

  Then, too, a breeze from the west will set the ivy outside my window to whispering, little sibilant voices which have roused me more than once, convinced that I was called; and an open window in the drawing room beside the speaking tube there will send on windy days a fine thin whistle through the house.

  But I do not like my cellar. Perhaps this is a throwback to my childhood; I do not know. The fact remains that I go into it at night under protest, and that I have had installed in the back hall a switch by which a light below is turned on before any one need descend. A bit of precaution for which I could have shrieked with rage before that night had passed.

  It was eleven o’clock when I returned, and soon afterwards I heard Dick leave the house. His paper is an afternoon one, and so he has to rise fairly early. Judy wandered in to say good-night, but I had locked the carpet in my closet, and she merely lighted a cigarette and stood inside the door.

  “When is Mary going?” she asked.

  “She hasn’t said. Why?”

  “She’s been packing tonight. Dick helped Joseph to bring her trunk down from the storeroom. She doesn’t seem too keen to go.”

  “It’s her own choice,” I said, rather acidly.

  “Well, I hope to heaven mother doesn’t wish her on us! She may. To shut her mouth about Uncle Jim.”

  But she did not go away at once. She stood there, smoking fast and apparently thinking.

  “Don’t you think Wallie’s been rather queer over all this?” she said. “‘So if anything happens to me you’ll understand,’” she mimicked him. “If he knows anything now is the time to tell it. And if he doesn’t, why don’t he keep out? Where does he come in, anyhow? What’s he worried about?”

  “I do wish you’d keep out of all this, Judy.”

  “Why? It’s the day of the young, isn’t it? Everybody says so.”

  “It’s the hour for the young to be in bed.”

&nb
sp; “All right, I’m going right now. But just to show you why I’m not going back to New York, in spite of you and Dick—Wallie didn’t find that pencil on top of the skylight. He took it up with him and put it there.”

  With which she went away, whistling softly, and left me to my thoughts, which were nothing to boast about.

  I did not go to bed. I sat shut in my bedroom, with the carpet from the car rolled in my closet, waiting for the house to quiet down for the night. My mind was a welter of confusion; Jim’s evasions and half truths, the possible significance of the oil stain, and Judy’s strange statement as to Wallie and the pencil.

  And to add to my discomfort Joseph tapped at my door after letting Dick out and locking up, and told me that the women in the house had started a tale that poor Sarah was “walking,” and were scaring themselves into a fit over it. I am not a superstitious woman, but there is something of the mystic in every Christian, and I must confess that when, at something after one, the speaking tube in my room set up a thin whistle, my hair seemed to stand on end.

  Ever since the night of Sarah’s death Joseph had been instructed to leave a light burning in the lower hall, and it was burning then. I opened my door carefully and slipping out, leaned over the banister. Save that Jock had apparently been asleep there, and had now risen and was stretching himself drowsily, there was no sign of anything unusual. If there was a window or a door open in the drawing room I felt that it could stay open for a while.

  I had other business to attend to first.

  Jock’s attitude had given me confidence, and at something after one, wearing a dressing gown and my felt-soled bedroom slippers, I took the rug and a bottle of patent cleaner and made my way gingerly to the basement laundry, stopping in the kitchen to pick up the poker from the range. I was minded to have a weapon of some sort at hand.

  I had a plan, of sorts. If the stain came out I could return the rug to Amos, and he could think what he might; lay my high-handed proceeding to the eccentricities of a middle-aged female if it pleased him. If it did not come out, I could burn the thing in the furnace.

  But I was very nervous, and the basement itself daunted me; the long vistas of blackness forward, to the furnace and the coal and wood cellars, the darkness of the laundry and the drying room. The small light at the foot of the stairs, which turned on from the back hall above, made little impression on the gloom, and as I stood there it seemed to me that something crawled over the wood in the wood cellar. A rat, possibly, but it did not help my morale.

  The laundry was dark, and to light it one must enter the room, and turn on the hanging globe in the center. I went in, shivering, and directly in the center of the room I struck violently against something. It was a chair, and it upset with a clatter that echoed and re-echoed in that cavernous place.

  What was the chair doing there? It belonged under a window, and here it was, out of place again. What was it that moved that chair? And Joseph’s somber statement came back to me, to complete my demoralization. After all, chairs did move. They moved in séances. Chairs and tables, without being touched.

  I was badly frightened, I confess. A dozen stories of phantasms, discredited at the time, rose in my mind. The place seemed peopled with moving shadows, sinister and threatening, and from somewhere I seemed to hear footsteps, spectral, felt rather than heard. And when I finally found courage to try the laundry light, it had burned out.

  Such efforts as I could make then to remove the stain were of no practical value, and I decided once and for all to burn the rug and take the consequences.

  I did one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life when I went forward to the furnace cellar, carrying the rug. Once the light there was on, however, I felt better. I built a small fire of paper and kindling, and thrust in the rug. It began to blaze, although not as rapidly as I had hoped. I stood there watching and wondering about the dampers; like most women, I know nothing about a furnace.

  I wandered about, waiting for that slow combustion to become effectual, examined the windows and the door to the area way, and was retracing my steps forward to the furnace again, when I stopped suddenly.

  Some one was moving about over my head.

  I pulled myself together. The dogs had not barked. It must be Joseph, Joseph who had heard the whining in the speaking tubes and come down to investigate. But to have Joseph discover me burning that rug would have been disastrous. I turned out the furnace light at once, and went back toward the foot of the stairs, where the small light still burned. To my horror, I saw that light go out, and heard the bolt slipped in the door above.

  “Joseph!” I called. “Joseph!”

  It was not Joseph. The footsteps had ceased, but there was no answering call. Somebody, something, was lurking there overhead, listening. The thought was horrible beyond words.

  I was crouched on the foot of the staircase, and there I remained in that haunted darkness until daylight. At dawn I crept up the stairs and half sat, half lay, on the narrow landing. Perhaps I slept, perhaps I fainted. I shall never forget Joseph’s face when, at seven o’clock, he unlocked the door and found me there.

  “Good heavens, madam!” he said.

  “Help me up, Joseph. I can’t move.”

  “You’re not hurt, are you?”

  “No. You locked me in, Joseph. I’ve had a terrible night. You—or somebody.”

  “I locked you in, madam? At what time?”

  “About two o’clock, I think.”

  “I was not downstairs after midnight,” he said, and helped me to my feet.

  He got me into the pantry and made me some coffee. Norah was not yet down; my household slept badly those days, and therefore late. He had had a shock, however. His hands shook and his face was set. I can still see him moving about, his dignity less majestic than usual, making the coffee, laying a doily on the pantry table, fetching a cup and saucer from the dining room. While he waited for the coffee to boil he made a tour of the first floor, but reported everything in order. The drawing room door and windows were locked.

  “But I would suggest, madam,” he said, “that we change the lock on the front door. Since Miss Sarah’s key is missing it is hardly safe.”

  Norah came in as I finished my coffee, and she gave me a queer look. But I did not explain. I went up and crawled into my bed, and I did not waken until Joseph came up with a tray of luncheon.

  He came in, closed the door, drew a table beside the bed, opened my napkin and gave it to me. Then he straightened and looked at me.

  “I have taken the liberty of destroying the rug, madam.”

  My heart sank, but he spoke as calmly as though he had been reporting that the butter was bad.

  “The dampers were wrong,” he said. “It’s a peculiar furnace. You have to understand it.”

  He looked at me, and I looked back at him. Our relations had subtly changed, although his manner had not. We shared a secret; in effect, Joseph and I were accomplices. Between us we had compounded a felony, destroyed evidence, and Joseph knew it. Whether he had seen the stain or not, he knew that carpet.

  “You should not have tried to do that, madam,” he said. “In the future, if you need any help, you can always call on me.”

  Then he went out; strange inscrutable Joseph, living the vicarious life of all upper class servants. Somewhere he had a wife, but he never mentioned her. His room at night, the pantry and the newspapers by day, apparently comprised his life and satisfied him.

  It was when he came to remove the tray that he told me, very quietly, that his revolver was missing.

  “I have been keeping it in my bedroom lately, under my pillow,” he said. “Now it is gone. Taken by some one who knew the habits of the house, madam.”

  Chapter Eleven

  WHATEVER WAS THE MEANING of that unpleasant episode, it was impossible to go to the police with it. I was seeing rather less of the Inspector now; he and the entire homicide squad were working on the Gunther case; the crime detection unit of photographer,
chemist, microscopist and gun expert were at work, but I believe their conclusions were unimportant. The bullet was missing. From the size of the wounds in the skull and the fact that it had passed entirely through the head, they believed that it had been a large caliber bullet fired at close range, and that the time of her death had been about eight or eight-thirty.

  The bag, then, had lain in the street for almost three hours.

  Outside of these facts the murder remained a complete and utter mystery. She appeared to have been without friends or family, one of these curious beings who from all appearances have sprung sporadically into being, without any past whatever. She had had no ability for friendship, unless that odd acquaintance of hers with Sarah could be called friendship.

  Strange that two such reserved women should have found each other, have somehow broken down their repressions, have walked, talked, maybe even laughed together. For it seems now that during the month or so before the murders, they had met a number of times. One pictures them walking together, maybe sitting together in a moving picture theater, and then one day something said; a bit of confidence, and both were doomed.

  The day passed without incident, save that Mary Martin took her departure. She even cried a little when she left, although she had shown no affection for any of us.

  Judy seemed relieved to have her gone.

  “Thank heaven,” she said. “I don’t have to whisper any more. She was always listening, Elizabeth Jane. I’ve caught her at it, leaning over the banisters. I’ll bet my hat she knows something. And I’ll bet two dollars, which is all I have in the world at the moment, that she took Joseph’s gun.”

  “Why would she take Joseph’s gun? That’s silly.”

  “Is it? Well, ask Norah. She knows.”

  And ask Norah I did, with curious results.

  It appeared that on the day before Joseph had missed his revolver, Norah had gone upstairs to her room to change her uniform before she prepared luncheon. She wears rubber-soled shoes in the kitchen, as it has a tiled floor, and so she moved quietly.