The Opening Door

by Helen Reilly

  He dropped the moss-covered bullet into the empty cartridge shell. He added more moss and stuffed it tightly and held the treated cartridge shell out to Eve on the palm of his hand.

  “A shell like this, loaded with the bullet from Bruce Cunningham’s rifle was placed in the breech of the walking-stick shotgun that was in the umbrella stand in the hall of the house on Henderson Square. It was now ready for murder when the opportunity should present itself. Meanwhile Lieutenant Cunningham’s rifle had been returned to the Eldon Place apartment. On the night Charlotte Foy was killed, her appointment with the Lieutenant on the telephone was overheard. She went to keep the appointment and was shot from outside the railings with Bruce Cunningham’s doctored bullet, propelled, not from the rifle, which was safely in the Eldon Place apartment, but from the firing mechanism of the walking-stick shotgun. When the moss-protected bullet struck Charlotte it still bore the six lands of the Lieutenant’s .351, although the gun was never anywhere near the scene. That was why you were given the morphine here in the shop. That rifle had to be found by the police.”

  Eve didn’t say anything.

  Outside snow fell and the fire whispered busily. “An extremely clever piece of work, McKee,” Fernandez said, and looked at the girl’s lovely still face with a troubled glance. There was something frightening in her composure.

  It affected McKee, too. He got up and began to walk to and fro. Eve hadn’t been present at that final scene up there in the house on Red Fox Road. When Pierson and Todhunter jumped down into the tank she was mercifully unconscious. McKee shared Fernandez’s opinion that they had to break through the wall of ice Eve had built around herself. Sorrow, revolt, tears—anything was better than this white immobility. The sooner she hit bottom the sooner she would come up. He began to talk again, giving her the background for murder, succinctly.

  “In the spring of 1921, your father, Charlotte Foy, Gerald, you and little Natalie were living in the house in Eastport. Virginia Flavell, your father’s second wife, had been dead some six weeks. Immediately following Virginia’s death, Charlotte had returned to take care of you all. The Corey fortune, left in trust for Virginia’s infant daughter Natalie, had put the household on a new footing and there was no longer any lack of money. There was plenty for everything.”

  McKee put an elbow on the mantel and looked down into the glowing coals. “In the cottage at the foot of the lawn at that time, Susan De Sange lived alone with her baby, visited at rare intervals by her husband, Lucien De Sange. Susan had been a close friend of Virginia’s and of Mr. Flavell’s. When Charlotte took over, she and Susan hit it off equally well and the situation remained the same. That spring there was an epidemic of whooping cough.”

  He lit a fresh cigarette and tossed the match into the flames. “The Flavell children caught it first, you and Gerald and the six-weeks-old Natalie. But no particular anxiety was aroused. The attack was light and you all had the best of medical care. Then Susan De Sange came down with it and Charlotte had her hands full. She nursed not only you three children, but also Susan, devotedly. The only one who escaped the infection was Mrs. De Sange’s baby, largely due to Charlotte’s care.

  “That was the situation up until the night of June 4, 1921. On that night, after she had returned from the cottage where she had made Susan comfortable, and had attended to Susan’s baby, Lucy, Charlotte went up the hill and into the big house. You and Gerald were in bed. Hugh was in the library working on his books and Jim Holland, a guest in the house, was studying in his bedroom for his entrance exams to Yale. It was the nurse’s night off. Charlotte went into the nursery for a final look at the six-weeks-old Natalie.

  McKee paused and turned toward Eve. “That was when it happened. The little Natalie Flavell, in a paroxysm of coughing, had rolled over on her face and when Charlotte snatched up the child, her worst fears were realized. Natalie Flavell was dead”

  The words “Natalie Flavell was dead” crashed in a deafening cadence against the barrier of Eve’s numb withdrawal. She raised her head and looked at the Scotsman. He nodded.

  “Standing there beside the crib in the big luxurious nursery that had been especially built for the dead child she held in her arms, Charlotte was appalled. She thought sickeningly of what the death of the little Natalie would mean, of penury instead of opulence, of your father’s return to financial worry, of Gerald of whom she was very fond and who needed an expensive operation, because the money, settled on Virginia’s baby, would return to the Coreys and vanish forever from the Flavell orbit. Virginia’s fortune had been settled on her infant daughter and her daughter was dead.

  “It was then that the idea occurred to Charlotte,” McKee said. “Keep in mind,” he continued musingly, “that she had had a terrible shock, that she was wrapped up in Gerald and in her brother-in-law Hugh, and that the inhibitions that ordinarily governed her were in abeyance. She wasn’t an imaginative woman, but she had a clear logical mind. Holding the dead baby in her arms, she thought of the live one in the cottage at the foot of the hill, thought of it first with anger and revolt and then with a question. The children were both girls and they were both of approximately the same age. She and the nurse were the only ones who handled the infant Natalie. Charlotte also took care of Susan De Sange’s child. Susan hadn’t seen her baby in almost a month for fear of giving it her whooping cough. If she put one child in place of the other, and got rid of the nurse, no one would ever know. The more she considered the idea, the more feasible it sounded. She put it into action.

  “There were no particular difficulties. Mrs. De Sange was ill in a bedroom on the far side of the cottage. Charlotte went down there with the dead Natalie. The actual transfer was simple. The only thing that differentiated the two children were the pink bead bracelets around their wrists, bracelets that had been put on in the Norwalk hospital where they were both born. One bracelet spelled Natalie, the other Lucy. But in taking Lucy’s bracelet off to make the change, the elastic broke and one of the beads dropped to the floor and in her haste and confusion Charlotte was unable to find it.”

  McKee took out the pink bead that Susan De Sange had dug from between the floor boards in the cottage on that night more than a month ago. Light shone on what Pierson had called a design in back. It was the letter U.

  He looked beyond Fernandez and Eve at the storm sweeping past the windows and thought of Alicia’s furious revolt in the house on Red Fox Road when she saw the Corey money going over the hill, of her charge that the whole story was false and that Charlotte was dead and he had no witnesses.

  He had produced his witness. It was Natalie herself. After they removed her from the little control closet in the tank room where they found her unconscious, crushed down into a corner, her eyes closed, the marks of bruises on her throat, and as soon as she recovered she told him everything. She had said, “The money isn’t mine. I’ve got to tell the truth in spite of what it will mean to—to Papa, and to—Bruce. The money will have to go back to the Coreys, in Boston.”

  He went on clarifying aloud, for Eve. “Charlotte sent for Natalie in Vermont in the middle of October. When Natalie stopped to see your aunt on her way down from Montreal, Charlotte revealed the entire story. She said that if the original fortune hadn’t increased so enormously, if Natalie had been going to marry one of the Coreys instead of Bruce Cunningham, it might have been different. Things hadn’t arranged themselves that way and her mind was made up. She was going to get in touch with Spencer Gorham and right the wrong she had done twenty-one years earlier.”

  Eve said in a low voice, a hand shading her eyes, “Natalie wasn’t the only one who knew...?”

  “No,” McKee agreed. “Susan De Sange knew when she returned to New York last spring and first saw Natalie and, in her, the image of Lucien De Sange as he had been as a young man. Bently knew or suspected through Susan. Mrs. De Sange confronted Charlotte with the portrait of Lucien that day in the house on Henderson Square. Charlotte tore the photograph from her. She said, �
�You found it up there in the cottage,’ referring to the pink bead. She was wrong. Mrs. De Sange didn’t find it until later.”

  He rolled the bead in a cupped palm and went back in memory to that December night and to the stricken group of people in the living room of the house on Red Fox Road, with Eve unconscious on the floor above. He looked at one person who was the nucleus, the center of a sudden disturbance, at the quick surge of a strong young body, the uplifting of a fair head...

  Natalie Flavell had stood like that for a long moment, her hands plunged into the pockets of her dark-blue housecoat, her narrow white face twisted out of shape, the violence and rage and hatred she had held in check cunningly for so long blazing in the wide staring brown eyes that gazed through the dark windows at the prospect of escape in vain...

  It was over, done with. He gave himself a shake and returned to the present. Eve’s head was bent, her shoulders huddled. She had to have it, he decided, had to have all of it in one clean blow, so that the healing process might begin.

  He went on inexorably. “When she couldn’t dissuade your aunt, Natalie killed her. She gave you the morphine, discarding it later at the Cedars. She knew how you and Bruce Cunningham felt. She wanted to destroy you both. She attacked Bently at the footbridge up in Eastport, because she was afraid he might have been outside the Henderson Square house when she followed Charlotte and because he was in the Cedars when she got rid of the morphine.

  “I had Anthony Burchall telephone to her that final night. When she was told, on my instructions, that Lieutenant Cunningham was going to be cleared, she determined to get rid of you, at least.

  “She was feigning unconsciousness when we found her on the floor of that little closet in the tank room. She put the marks of those bruises on her own throat, just as she took the digitalis earlier in an attempt to gain time and keep Charlotte from going to Gorham. Fortunately for us Pierson saw her enter the tank and wait for you to follow the clever trail of her dropped mules...”

  Eve buried her face in her hands. Outside it was growing dark and the snow was coming down harder.

  Fernandez cleared his throat and began to talk, quickly, to McKee. “I still don’t see, Chris, how you were able to say a couple of days before the wind-up that you knew who it was.”

  The Scotsman shrugged. “It was the little wooden chest that told me. The tiny yellow woolen shirt and the bracelet of pink beads in it that had been the real Natalie’s meant nothing except to Charlotte. But they would have inspired curiosity and questions that might have aroused suspicions if they were found. Whoever killed Charlotte removed them. Hugh Flavell entered her room after she was dead to investigate the chest’s contents. His were the only prints on it. Obviously he hadn’t polished the box in order to give us his prints as a gift. Charlotte handled the box before she went out that night. The polishing of it, therefore, took place after she left the house and before Hugh Flavell entered the bedroom. The person who had done the polishing was the perpetrator. And the only one who could have done it was Natalie.”

  Eve’s face was still hidden. Give her time, Fernandez thought. “While we’re on the subject, McKee, why pull that quick-change act in the corridor in the Norwalk Hospital? Why did you stand there gaping at those nurses, and at the orderly coming out of Bently’s room?”

  “I wasn’t seeing either of them,” McKee said, watching Eve, “or, rather, I did see the nurses with the babies. It was the old association of ideas. I had just been told about the pink bead. Looking at the nurses with their bundles my mind registered the word ‘baby’. The feeding cup the orderly was carrying jingled at the same moment. The jingle reminded me of Bruce Cunningham’s identification tag. You see? Baby, identification bracelet, bead. I guessed then what Charlotte had done...”

  Eve sat up. She took a wisp of linen from her sweater pocket and wiped wetness from her lashes. Her face was in shadow. “For me,” she said in a blurred voice, “the worst is that I’m responsible for everything that happened. Natalie was driven to what she did because...of myself and Bruce.”

  It was what McKee had been waiting for. “Not at all, Miss Flavell.” He drove at her brusquely. “You’re wrong, completely and absolutely wrong. If Lieutenant Cunningham had never existed Charlotte Foy would have been killed just the same. From the moment Charlotte told Natalie the truth she was doomed. Natalie has boasted that she would have killed Charlotte then and there, in Vermont, only that she was afraid of discovery.”

  “Boasted...” Eve cried with sick horror.

  Fernandez intervened then. He said quietly, “In my opinion, your sister—the girl you thought was your sister—will never be given the extreme penalty, Miss Flavell. She isn’t insane but she’s definitely a border-line case. I gather that she was always volatile and none too stable. Charlotte’s revelation sent her over the edge and off the normal beam. She couldn’t bend, so she broke....”

  Eve stared at him. Light flickered in her gray eyes. She opened them wider. “Not the extreme penalty...” Life was beginning to come back to her, death to go away. Doctor Fernandez was right, she thought, recalling Natalie’s sudden sharp outbursts of temper as a child, outbursts that seldom came to the surface in later years, because she wasn’t thwarted or checked. Yes, given that temperament and the blow Charlotte’s revelation had dealt her, it was all logical enough, logical and terrible. But as she forced herself to look at it, directly and without flinching, for the first time, her own sense of personal responsibility grew less heavy, and she could breathe again, and feel.

  She sat up with a little sigh. “Does Bruce know it all?” Her voice was low but steady.

  McKee was getting to his feet. Eve was seeing straight now; their work here was over. “Yes,” he said, “the Lieutenant knows,” and didn’t say anything more. He shook hands with Eve, so did Fernandez, and then the two men were gone and she was alone.

  She got up stiffly and went to the hearth and stood there looking down into the fire. Bruce knew she was not to blame. The pain in her accelerated. Bruce knew—and he had never come near her. Jim had been kinder, Jim whom she had wronged and who had said goodbye to her without a word of condemnation or reproach. A cold wind struck between her shoulders. She half turned, and remained motionless.

  Bruce was coming into the shop. He was coming toward her, snow on his cap, on the wide shoulders of his heavy coat with the silver insignia on it.

  She watched him come, in silence, her heart pounding. His face was dark and still and intent and his eyes were fastened steadily on hers.

  “Eve,” he said, and was beside her, with her two cold hands in his. “I came as soon as I could,” he said. “I’ve been to Washington ever since I was released—a special job...I couldn’t get here sooner or send you word—I wasn’t supposed to communicate with anyone.”

  Eve held herself very straight. She was still numb, but the pain was going. She could bear it now—she could bear anything. “Bruce,” she said in a small whisper. “Bruce...

  He gathered her hands closer. He said huskily, “Jump in a cab and ride with me over to Mitchel Field. I’m flying west at five-fifteen. I may be away a long while—but when I come back...”

  He didn’t kiss her. Yet standing there, their hands linked and with that imminent parting looming between them, a parting that might endure for months, for years, even forever, a curious sense of peace took possession of Eve and of the tall man in uniform looking down at her. Without words they both knew that if they lived, when the personal horror they had gone through had been dulled by time, and the greater horror of the war had finally passed, they would be together again for good.

  “Wait until I get my coat,” Eve said, with a lilt to her smile. She snatched it from a hanger and Bruce put her into it and they moved to the door and out into the storm side by side.

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