The Opening Door

by Helen Reilly

  Bruce hadn’t told Anthony Burchall much about Inspector McKee’s visit, but Burchall thought there was something in the wind, very definitely. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful—oh, Eve, think how wonderful it would be—if, on Thursday, I wouldn’t have to go to that jail to see Bruce, but that he’d be free?”

  The thought of Bruce’s freedom was an overwhelming wave Eve had to fight. That he should be out of danger, soon, was a release from the intolerable grip of her ever-present fear. It increased and brought home to her the pain of her separation from him, a separation that, no matter what happened, nothing could bridge...

  Natalie went on talking and making plans, strewing her things around and getting into white silk pajamas that made her look like a tall child. It didn’t seem to occur to her to wonder who was going to take Bruce’s place in a cell, behind bars. Eve was glad. That would come soon enough—and she had a right to a little happiness. The Inspector had left it up to her as to whether or not she should tell Natalie of the orders he had given. She decided not to. She would be within call, with only the bathroom between them, its doors open—besides she couldn’t bring herself to destroy Natalie’s bright mood.

  Joy could be as exhausting as grief. Natalie was very tired. Eve made sure the door was locked, made her get into bed, and switched off the lights and went into her own room. Ten minutes later she was in bed herself, with the big window less than three feet away up as high as it would go. Down below it, in the rain and the darkness, there was a detective, if she should need him, and both bedroom doors were locked. Nothing, no one could get at them. The thought was reassuring. She had intended to stay awake as long as she could but the strain of the evening had exhausted her and almost immediately she fell deeply asleep.

  Two hours later she woke suddenly, completely and without apparent reason. There was a tremendous knocking in her ears and her whole body was shaking. Yet there was no one in the room and no sound except the ticking of the clock and the drip of the rain. She lay still, fighting for control and listened. Then she heard it, between one drop of water falling and the next. Somewhere near her someone was turning a door knob softly to and fro.

  Eve didn’t have to orient herself. She was out of bed in an instant, grabbing up a robe and throwing it around her and going into Natalie’s room. Her sister first and then the detective...She moved in blackness toward Natalie’s bed, her hands out, so as not to bump into anything and make a racket. Her fingers touched wood, touched the satin of the quilt. She explored its softness, her palms flat, and her heart took a sick leap and stood still. The bed was empty. Natalie wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere in the room; her door was unlocked...

  Careless now of noise Eve flew across the bathroom to the window in her own room. She put her hands on the sill and leaned out into the fog she couldn’t pierce. The rain had almost stopped. “Captain,” she called in a quick voice, “Captain Pierson.” and waited—and began to shake. There was no answer; there was nothing but darkness and fog and the slow drip of water from the eaves and farther off the whisper of the rising wind.

  At that moment the man Eve sought was in a police booth a quarter of a mile away, talking over the telephone to Inspector McKee in the Norwalk Hospital. It was twenty minutes of two.

  Pierson said, “I thought you’d like to know,” and made his report. It was brief. Susan De Sange was supposed to be sleeping in the Flavell house. At twelve-forty-five she left it and went down to the cottage. She locked the door behind her when she went in but the Captain had made use of the cellar door, whose lock had been picked in advance. Pierson said, “She went on with her search, Inspector, and she sure gave that room her husband died in a good comb over. Well, she found what she was looking for about twenty past one. About time, too—she’s been at it for three days.”

  “Did you see what it was, Captain?” McKee scarcely dared to hope for an affirmative, but astonishingly Pierson said, “Yop, I saw it, Inspector. It was a bit of luck. She walked into the living room and put something down on a table near the fireplace and went back into the bedroom to straighten up and I took a look. It was a pink bead.”

  “A pink...”

  “Yah. A small, pink bead with holes in it like for stringing and a kind of a design in black on one flattish side, a kind of a little horseshoe. It was pretty dirty, but it was pink all right.”

  So they were getting to it at last; McKee thought of the string of pink beads in the little wooden chest in Charlotte Foy’s bedroom that had vanished out of existence...No, not quite. “Where is it now, Pierson?”

  “She has it, Inspector. She finished with the bedroom and I had plenty of time to duck. I didn’t brace her; I didn’t know what you wanted me to do.”

  McKee said instantly, “Go back to the house and wait. Todhunter may need you. I’ll be along in an hour or so.” He left the telephone booth and went down the wide dim corridor to the solarium near Edgar Bently’s room, where Fernandez was dozing over a magazine. The hospital was jammed and Bently had been put, of all places, in one of the emergency rooms in the maternity section.

  Fernandez sat up with a yawn. He came sharply to attention when McKee told him what he had just heard over the phone. “By George,” he whistled softly, “you were right, after all. She must have taken the stuff out of the little chest...

  “Yes. How soon will Bently be ready for me?”

  “Maybe in another half hour.”

  It wasn’t soon enough. “All right,” Fernandez said, “we’ll try him now.”

  The two men started down the corridor. It was no longer empty. Nurses, their skirts rustling, were carrying wrapped bundles to the mothers for the two-o’clock feeding. A baby wailed thinly. One of the nurses said something to another and they both stared at the two men. McKee looked past them at the door of Bently’s room. A male attendant was coming through it with a feeding cup on a tray. He got hastily out of their way and the cup did a little dance and landed on its base jinglingly.

  McKee came to an abrupt halt. He stared at the tray without seeing it. Instead he was seeing Bruce Cunningham’s thin dark face when he heard of Alicia’s disclosure to the District Attorney, his sharp movement...and in that instant the tiny missing cog slid into place and it was all there, the whole picture of Charlotte Foy’s murder, full and clear down to the smallest detail.

  Fernandez was staring at him. He said impatiently, “Well?”

  McKee said fumblingly, “I’ve got to go...Bentley’s got to be placed under arrest...I’ve got to get back to Eastport,” and without another word or so much as a glance through the half-opened door at the stricken man in the high white bed he had waited so long to see, he turned and, conquering an impulse to run, walked rapidly toward the distant elevators.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In the bedroom on the second floor of the big dark house on Red Fox Road Eve didn’t remain long beside the open window with the fog drifting through it—and silence, and no voice, no help.

  Anger flared in her briefly, died away. She had no time for anything but Natalie. Fear was a fever all through her. She pushed it aside. How Natalie had been induced to leave her room didn’t matter; nothing mattered except to find her, as quickly as possible. Eve refused to think beyond that.

  Her own door was still locked. She opened it and ran out into the corridor. It was long and empty and dim, except for a pool of light around a shaded lamp near the head of the main staircase. Her father’s room and Gerald’s and Alicia’s were in the left wing; Susan De Sange and Jim Holland were in the wing to the right. Which way? Eve paused to listen. But there was nothing to guide her. There was no sound whatever, except the rain outside and the moan of the wind.

  Her back was to the room she had just left. She couldn’t see the closet door beyond the bed open, or the man who emerged from it, and who stood in concealing darkness, watching her.

  She was seeing something else. Her bedroom was opposite the staircase at the front of the house. The flight going down was to the righ
t, the flight going up, to the left. The only way to turn was right. She half turned, and saw it. Her heart hammered, and for the moment sight left her eyes. She brushed a hand across them and put it to her throat. A white satin mule, Natalie’s mule, was lying on the fifth step of the stairs going up in a long flight to the third floor.

  Eve didn’t waste any time. She was around the newel post in a flash and was running up the wide shallow treads. She found the switch at the top and pressed the button. It was lonely up here and cold, and the long narrow hall, like the one on the floor below, was empty. Only the emptiness here was deeper, the silence more unstirring. This was the old part of the house and it was seldom visited nowadays; the strip of carpet down the middle of the hall was faded and dusty and the plaster needed a coat of paint and the air had a queer stuffy smell. Natalie wasn’t in the huge game room that took up the whole right side of the top floor. She wasn’t in the first two half-dismantled bedrooms opposite. Eve tugged at a stiff latch of a third door and confronted a cluster of decrepit mops, and barely repressed a shriek as a mouse scuttled between her bare feet. She went on, moving farther and farther away from the head of the main staircase and deeper into the faint green gloom toward the back of the | house, in a nightmare of doors with nothing behind them but cobwebs and blankness and rolled mattresses and bedsteads in corners. Servants slept here in summer. Now there was no one.

  No one—yet Natalie had to be up here, or why was her mule lying on the stairs, empty and unbearably pathetic, a little satin trifle that had fallen or dropped from a long slim foot? The fear Eve had so far managed to keep down was rising in her like a tide. In a minute it would be panic. She didn’t like this place. She didn’t like it at all. Tears she wasn’t conscious of dribbled unheeded down her cheeks.

  She was at the last door. Beyond it there was only the dark mouth of the little narrow twisting rear staircase, corkscrewing down into the depths of the silent house. The door was high and very wide. The lower half was made of heavy planking, like the others, but the upper half was slatted, like a Venetian blind. Eve looked at it and the coldness between her shoulder blades spread all through her. Pictures were coming dimly, of Gerald being spanked by Charlotte for opening this door, of Charlotte saying to him angrily, “Do you want to be killed?”

  She knew what it was then. Behind it was all that was left of the old plumbing system that back in the seventies and eighties had provided the house with water. There was some sort of big beam and tanks. To a child it had been queerly frightening and unpleasant, like something out of Dante’s Inferno.

  She wrenched at the knob and the door came toward her smoothly and easily, almost of its own volition, as though it were inviting her in. It opened out, blocking the hall and cutting off most of the light.

  Standing on the threshold, Eve peered in, her throat stiff. The beam was there, running into darkness, with emptiness on either side of it instead of a floor. She tried to pierce the blackness where the floor should have been, but could see nothing and hear nothing except rain on the roof overhead and somewhere in front of her the faint chuckle and drip of more water. If only she had brought a torch, she thought despairingly, and put her hand in her pocket instinctively, and found a flap of paper matches. She took it out and struck one. The little flame burned up brightly. Its brief glow was banked with heavy shadows. But it was better than nothing.

  There was a drop of about five feet into what seemed a small sunken square room but what was really a tank. It was lined with lead. Natalie wasn’t anywhere in sight. Eve struck another match, and stared. Directly below where she stood there was a kitchen chair with a curved back. It hadn’t been there long. There was no dust on it. It had evidently been used as a ladder. Eve stepped down on the seat and then to the floor. Wet metal was cold and slimy under her bare feet and the shadows kept banking up so that she couldn’t get a clear view all at once.

  The water, trickles of it, was coming from the rusty mouths of intake pipes leading in from the gutters. She swung a little with a new match, and her heart took a great sickening leap.

  In one corner, the right hand corner farthest from the door, there was a rectangle cut out of the floor. It was five feet long by three wide. There had once been a cover on it. There was no cover on it now. Natalie’s other mule was lying close to the edge of the black oblong.

  Eve got down on her hands and knees at the edge of the gaping hole. She leaned far over it, a match held high. Below, far below, wet bricks went round and round and down and down, and at the bottom of what she realized was an old cistern that must have acted as a storage tank, a tiny flame shone back at her from a circle of black stagnant water a million miles away.

  Natalie wasn’t down there; she couldn’t be.

  There was a sound behind Eve. It was very slight. She swiveled and staggered to her feet and swayed dizzily. The big door above her head that she had left wide open was almost closed. But another door was beginning to open. It was a small door she hadn’t seen before, a mere slit in the leaden shell. There was someone behind it, someone who was coming out...

  Eve gasped and sobbed aloud and tried to get air into her lungs and couldn’t. A blinding burning horror that shriveled her senses wound her in a sheet of flame. “No,” she whispered stiffly, and took a step backwards and then another and another. She couldn’t take her eyes off the little moving door, and the figure she knew was there.

  It was coming out from behind the door now, was coming toward her...and she was alone up here at the top of the house...at the edge of that black pit...

  Water dripped somewhere. “No,” she screamed again, no.

  She knew who was behind the door.

  The sickness of death filled her. She stepped back. Her heel went out over emptiness. She teetered and was falling into a night that exploded into broken flashes of sight and sound.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Eve put the receiver back on the hook in the gay little room at the rear of the shop on 19th Street. It was three o’clock on the afternoon of January the 14th. Outside snow was falling. Fat white flakes churned and twisted beyond the barrier of the dotted swiss curtains at the front. The lights along the green walls were on. There were pools of shadow between them.

  Eve sat in an armchair beside the desk and looked dully at the distant door. It would open presently and the past would come in, in the shape of the head of the Manhattan Homicide Squad, the past she wanted to forget and knew | she never could. More than a month had elapsed since that last terrible scene in the house in Eastport. She knew very little of the details of what had happened, except that an indictment for first-degree murder had already been returned. Eve had come down to New York as soon as she was able to travel. She had wanted to get away from everything, in space, at least. She couldn’t get away from the horror. That would be with her always.

  Bruce had been released from the Tombs weeks before. She knew that much. There was a numb void inside of her where the thought of him had once existed.

  She was sitting there, looking at the falling snow beyond the curtains when the door opened and a great drift of flakes followed Inspector McKee into the shop. He wasn’t alone. The elegant Medical Examiner was with him. The two officials greeted Eve quietly and she forced herself into the mechanical surface response that had become second nature to her and that had no connection with reality. The tank at the top of the house on Red Fox Road and the horror that had filled her were the only real things in the world. They had killed everything else.

  McKee said he had come to check on a few final details and Eve answered him dutifully. She said “yes” and “no” and “I think that’s right.” He gave her papers to sign and she wrote her name and put down the pen and waited, but the Scotsman didn’t immediately depart.

  Instead he settled himself more comfortably in his chair and lit a cigarette. “I suppose, Miss Flavell,” he said, “that there are some things that are not quite clear to you.”

  Eve looked at the backs of the books i
n the bookcases opposite. The ones on the top shelf were a little crooked. She couldn’t speak. Her silence didn’t seem to deter the Inspector. He began to talk, half to Fernandez and half to her. He said, “Todhunter, one of my detectives, was in the closet in your bedroom on the night the arrest was made. He followed you out into the corridor and up the stairs to the third floor where he was joined by Captain Pierson. They didn’t move sooner; they waited outside that little room until the attack on you came—because we had to have proof.”

  Eve folded her hands tightly and thought of the black depths into which she had so nearly been flung, of the shadows, and the sound of water dripping...She pushed soft hair from her forehead. “There’s one thing I do want to know, Inspector.” she said slowly, “one thing that isn’t clear. How was the crime committed? How was Charlotte killed with Bruce’s gun when Bruce didn’t kill her?” McKee gave Eve, then, the explanation that with the help of Sergeant Cutts of the Ballistics Bureau, he had given earlier to the Commissioner and to the District Attorney and that, with supporting evidence, had procured Bruce Cunningham’s instant release.

  “A chapter on firearms in a volume of Gross in your father’s extensive library in the house on Henderson Square is the answer to that,” he said. “Late in October Bruce Cunningham’s rifle was removed from his rooms in the Eldon Place apartment. It was taken up to Eastport and several bullets were fired from it in the meadow across the brook. One of the bullets was recovered.”

  McKee took from his pocket the red shotgun shell with which he had come provided. He drew out an envelope. There was moss in it, some of the moss he had gathered in the Flavell grounds in the hollow beside the brook. From another pocket he took a spent rifle bullet.

  “Look,” he said, and his fingers moved, wrapping a thin covering of moss around the leaden slug. The bullet discharged from Bruce Cunningham’s rifle that later killed Charlotte Foy was treated like this. The moss served as a protective covering for the markings on it, kept intact the six lands left by the rifling of the Lieutenant’s .351 when the bullet went through the barrel for the first time up there in Eastport.”