The Door

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Joseph, it seems, was downstairs. The door at the top of the back stairs is a swinging one, as otherwise the maids forget to close it, and it swings noiselessly. She pushed it open, and there was Mary Martin, down the hall and just coming out of Joseph’s room. She stepped back when she saw Norah, and then reconsidered and came out again.

  “I was looking for some matches,” she said.

  According to Norah she had no matches in her hands, however, and she looked so pale that Norah was curious. When Mary had shut herself in her room Norah glanced inside Joseph’s door. There were no matches on his bureau, and his revolver lay on top of the bed.

  But with Mary gone, and the house quiet again and with no “snooping,” as Judy called it, I went into the library that night to find Dick grinning and Judy with her mouth set hard.

  “Well, tell her, if you think it’s so funny.”

  “Tell her yourself, lady of my heart. Do your own dirty work.”

  “Don’t be such an ass. It’s a perfectly simple thing I want, Elizabeth Jane. I want to get into Florence Gunther’s room.”

  “The answer is just as simple, Judy,” I said shortly. “You’ll do nothing of the sort.”

  But she was argumentative and a trifle sulky.

  “Oh well, if you must have it. I want to look for something. That’s all.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. But now listen to this; I don’t know why poor Sarah was killed, or Florence either. But I do know why their shoes were taken off. One or the other of them had something; I don’t know what, but she had. It might have been a paper—”

  “Give me the papers and take the child!” said Dick.

  She ignored that.

  “Now Dick has struck up an acquaintance with a blonde out there at the house on Halkett Street. She’s named Lily, and he’s quite fond of her; he’s even had her out to lunch.”

  Dick groaned, and she grinned maliciously.

  “Her name is Sanderson, Lily Sanderson, and she’s rather a mess. But she likes to talk, and she’s got something she hasn’t told the police. She won’t even tell him, but she might tell us.”

  “Who are ‘us’?”

  “You and I, Elizabeth Jane; you to give staidness and respectability to the excursion, I to use my little wiles to wheedle her if necessary. Dick says she’s afraid of the police, but once she sets eyes on you she’ll open up like a flower.”

  I declined at once, but she has her own methods, has Judy, and so in the end I reluctantly consented to go.

  The appointment was made for the next night, Friday. Evidently Miss Sanderson was uneasy, for she made it Friday because the colored woman would be off for her afternoon out. And it was she herself who admitted us when, having left the car at the corner, Judy and I presented ourselves on the following evening.

  She opened the door with her finger to her lips.

  “Now how nice!” she said, in a loud clear tone. “Here I was, afraid I was to have an evening alone, and this happens!”

  All the time she was urging us in with little gestures, and Judy’s face was a study. Miss Sanderson was a large blonde woman with a slight limp, and she was evidently prepared for company. She was slightly overdressed, and her room when she took us up to it was very tidy. Suspiciously tidy, Judy said later, as if she had just finished with it.

  When she had closed the door she lowered her voice.

  “You never know who’s around in a place like this. It’s all ears. And since poor Miss Gunther’s awful end—” She looked at me with her pale blue eyes, and they were childish and filled with terror. “I haven’t slept much since. If there is a homicidal maniac loose, nobody can tell who’ll be next.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” said Judy. “There’s no maniac loose. Whoever killed her knew what he was doing.”

  That seemed to relieve her. She was, for all her clothes, a singularly simple woman, and I am glad here to pay my bit of tribute to Lily Sanderson. She had her own small part in the solving of the mystery, and of the four major crimes which it involved.

  She liked Judy at once, I think. There is something direct about Judy, for all her talk about using her wiles; and Judy, I think, felt the compassion of youth for her, for the narrow life that one room typified, for the loneliness of soul which was feeding on this one great excitement. I saw her looking about at the dreadful reach at beauty which the room revealed, the tea table at which nobody obviously ever had tea, at the silk shawl draped over the bed, at the imitation shell toilet set, the gaudily painted scrap basket, and at the screen which concealed the washstand in its corner, and behind which, I had no doubt, Miss Sanderson had dumped a clutter of odds and ends.

  “You are very comfortable here, aren’t you? It’s quite homelike.”

  Miss Sanderson smiled her childlike smile.

  “It’s all the home I have,” she said. “And Mrs. Bassett likes everything to be nice. She’s very clean, really.”

  Before she settled to her story she opened her door, looked out, closed it again.

  “I’m only talking because you were friends of poor Florence,” she said. “And I don’t know if what I have to tell you is important, or not. I won’t have to go to the police, will I?”

  “Certainly not,” said Judy sturdily.

  “You know I told them that I’d heard her moving things about, that night? Well, I did. I didn’t like to say what I really thought.” She lowered her voice. “I thought she had a man up there. That’s what I went up in the morning to speak to her about.”

  “A man?” I asked. “Could you hear him?”

  “A man and a woman,” she said. “I could hear them both.”

  Her story amounted to this:

  She was a light sleeper, and she was wakened some time after midnight by movements in the room above. As Florence never stirred about in the night, this puzzled her. Especially as the movements continued.

  “Somebody seemed to be moving the furniture,” she said. “Very carefully, but you can’t move a bureau in a house built like this without it making some noise. Even then I might have gone to sleep again, but there were two people. One walked heavier than the other.”

  She was curious, rather than alarmed. She got up and opened her door, and at last she crept up the stairs and—she seemed to apologize for this—put her ear to the door. There was a man talking in a low tone in the room.

  That scandalized her. She went downstairs “with her head whirling,” and stood there, uncertain what to do. She seems to have been in a state of shock and indignation, imagining all sorts of things. And the sounds went on, only now she could hear a woman crying. She was outraged. She thought Florence Gunther had a man in her room and that they were quarreling.

  Finally she took her haircurler and rapped vigorously on the chandelier. The noises ceased at once, but although she set her door open and waited inside in the dark, nobody came down. Whoever they were, they must have escaped down the rear staircase.

  But she could not sleep. A sort of virtuous fury possessed her, and half an hour later she threw something on and went up valiantly to Florence’s room.

  “I was going to give her a good talking to,” she said. “It makes me sick now to think of it, but this is a respectable house, and—well, you know what I mean. If she was carrying on with anybody—”

  The door was closed but not locked, and she spoke to Florence and got no answer. She turned on the switch inside the door, and there was the room; in chaos. She seemed unable to describe it. She made a gesture.

  “Even her shoes,” she said. “Her poor shoes were on the floor. But she hadn’t been robbed. Her dime bank was still on her dresser, and she had an old-fashioned watch for a clock, beside the daybed on a table. It was still there.”

  She shot downstairs after that, trembling, and got into bed. Even then she was not certain that Florence was not concerned in it somehow. She knew that one of the two in that room had been a woman. Then too she “didn’t want to be mixed up in any
trouble.” She might lose her position, and in addition she had a childish fear of the police.

  “If they knew I’d been up there—”

  She went to sleep finally, but at seven she went up the stairs again and opened the door. The room had been straightened. It looked better.

  “Not just right, you know. But things were put away. The way the police found it.”

  “And what do you think now?” Judy inquired. She had lighted a cigarette and was offering one to “Lily.”

  “Oh, may I? I’d love to. We aren’t supposed to smoke here, but every now and then I open a window and—It rests one, I think.”

  “Yes, it does rest one,” said Judy politely. “And now what were those people after? Have you any idea?”

  “Not really. But she was in a lawyer’s office, and they get some queer things sometimes. Letters, you know, and so on. If she had something like that it might explain a lot. It had to be something small, or they’d have found it. But I’m sure I don’t know where it is, if it’s there.”

  “Oh, you’ve looked?” said Judy.

  “Yes. The room’s kept locked, but my key fits it. I suppose it’s hardly the correct thing, but she was a friend of mine—”

  Her eyes filled with tears, and Judy patted her heavy shoulder.

  “Of course it was the correct thing. Perfectly correct. As a matter of fact I’d like to go up myself and look around. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Miss Sanderson not only did not mind, but looked rather gratified.

  “I’ll wait down here with the curler,” she said with a conspiratorial air, “and if I hear anything I’ll rap on the chandelier.”

  I was all for waiting below, but Judy took me with her, maintaining that the very sight of me would remove her from the sneak thief class if we were discovered, and at last I consented. Nevertheless, I was frankly trembling when we started up the stairs. Miss Sanderson had preceded us, creeping up with a stealth which gave the entire procedure a clandestine appearance which was disquieting, to say the least. After unlocking the door, however, she left us as noiselessly as we had come, and Judy moved the key from the outside to the inside of the door.

  As we stood there in the darkness I think even Judy was uneasy, and I know that I felt like a criminal. The house was exceedingly quiet. Mrs. Bassett, Miss Sanderson had said, slept at the rear of the floor, but she was ill, had been for some time. And whatever was the mysterious life of the women behind the closed doors around us, it was conducted in silence.

  Judy drew the shades before she turned on the light, and then the two of us gazed at this strange room, from which Florence Gunther had started out in a checked frock and a blue coat and with a blue bag on her arm, to a sudden and unaccountable death.

  It was neat now, very orderly, the daybed covered with the imitation Indian rug, her clothing still in its closet, her shoes in a row underneath. Practical shoes, flat heeled, without coquetry, each with its wooden tree. Judy looked depressed and angry.

  “She had so little,” she said. “Why not have let her alone?”

  But she was businesslike, too.

  “No use looking in the obvious places,” she announced. “They’ll have seen to that. Something small. I suppose the police took it for granted that they got it, whatever it was. But if Lily is right—! If I wanted to hide a paper here, where would I put it? I hid a love letter once from mother, in my can of tooth powder.”

  Poor Florence’s tooth powder was on her washstand, but although with much difficulty and a pair of scissors Judy finally worked the top off, she found nothing there. Then she examined the bottles on the dresser; one dark blue one interested her, but it contained an eye lotion and nothing else. The wall paper—“she might have loosened the paper and then glued it back again”—showed no signs of being tampered with, and the baseboard was close to the wall.

  She reached the clothes closet, then, by elimination, and with small hope.

  “They’ll have done that first,” she said.

  Apparently she was right. No pocket, no lining, no hem of any garment revealed so much as a hint. Save one thing, which at first looked as though our search was useless. There was an old pocketbook in the closet, and she brought it out and examined it.

  “Look here!” she said. “She’s carried something in this pocketbook, hidden. See where she’s cut the lining and sewed it up again?”

  “It’s not sewed now.”

  “No,” she said slowly. “Of course, if she transferred it to the blue bag—!”

  But time was passing, and I was growing impatient. The whole excursion seemed to me to be an impertinent meddling, and so I was about to say to Judy, when there came a sharp rap from the chandelier beneath our feet.

  Neither one of us moved, and I know I hardly breathed. Some one was coming up the stairs, moving very quietly. The steps halted just outside the door, and I motioned wildly to Judy to turn out the light. But in a moment they moved on again, toward the rear of the house, and I breathed again.

  After that we locked the door, and Judy matter-of-factly went on with her search. She was on the floor now, carefully inspecting Florence’s shoes.

  “I used to hide my cigarettes in my slippers,” she stated. “Mother raised hell about my smoking. I’ll just look these over and then we’ll go.”

  “And the sooner the better,” I retorted testily. “If you think I’m enjoying this, I’m not. I’ve never spent a night I enjoyed less.”

  But she was paying no attention. She had found, in a pair of flat black shoes, leather insoles designed to support the arches. Glanced at casually each was a part of the shoe, but Judy’s sensitive well-manicured fingers were digging at one of them diligently.

  “Flat feet, poor dear,” she said, and jerked out the insole.

  It was, I believe a quite common affair of its sort, although I had never seen one before. In the forward portion was a pocket, into which fitted a small pad of wood, designed to raise the forward arch.

  Behind this Judy dug but a small scrap of paper, neatly folded.

  I think we were both trembling when she drew it out and held it up. But without opening it she dropped it inside the neck of her frock and finding a pin, fastened it there. She wears so little underneath that this precaution was necessary.

  “No time now to be curious, Elizabeth Jane,” she said. “We have to get out of here, and to stall off Lily.”

  Everything was still quiet as we relocked the door and went down. Miss Sanderson was peering out of her door and beckoned us in, but Judy shook her head.

  “They made a pretty clean sweep,” she said, “but thank you anyhow. You’ve been very sweet to us.”

  “He didn’t try to get in, did he?”

  “Somebody stopped outside the door and then went on. Who was it?”

  “I couldn’t see. It was a man though. It might have been the doctor,” she added doubtfully. “I just thought I’d better warn you. Won’t you come in again?”

  She was clearly disappointed when we refused. She must have had many lonely evenings, poor soul, and to entertain Judy would have been a real thrill; Judy Somers, whose pictures were often in the New York evening papers and in the smarter magazines.

  “I’ve got some sandwiches,” she said.

  “Thanks, no. I never eat at night.”

  She saw us out, rather forlornly.

  “If anything turns up, I’ll let you know.”

  “Please do. You’ve been wonderful.”

  She brightened at that, and the last we saw of her she was peering around the half-closed front door, loath to go back to her untasted sandwiches, to her loneliness and her wakeful nights.

  We found the car around the corner where we had left it, but not until we were in my bedroom with the door locked did Judy produce that scrap of paper. And then it turned out to be completely unintelligible. Neatly typed, on thin copy paper was this: “Clock dial. Five o’clock right. Seven o’clock left. Press on six.”

  “Clock di
al!” said Judy. “What clock? There’s something in a clock somewhere, but that’s as far as I go. It wasn’t her clock. She didn’t have one. As far as I can make out, we’re exactly where we started!”

  Which turned out to be very nearly a precise statement of the situation.

  Chapter Twelve

  JUST WHEN AMOS DISCOVERED that his carpet was missing from the car I do not know. With Jim in bed the car was not in use, and it may have been a couple of days before he missed it, or even more. I hardly think he suspected me, although he may have.

  But some time before Sunday he saw Wallie and told him. Just why he should have told him I do not know. Certainly he believed Jim Blake to be the guiltiest wretch unhung, but we also know that he had a queer affection for him. Maybe Wallie questioned him; Wallie had his own problem to solve, and he may have gone to Amos.

  The result, however, was an extremely unpleasant interview between Wallie and myself a day or two after Judy had found the paper. I know now that he was frightened, terrified beyond any power of mine to imagine, and with Wallie as with other nervous persons anxiety took the form of anger.

  He stalked into the house then late on Sunday afternoon, looking so strange that at first I thought he had been drinking again.

  “Do you mind if I close the door?” he demanded. “I’ve got some things to say that you may not want overheard.”

  “Then I’d better leave it open. I don’t care for any more secrets, or any scenes.”

  “Very well,” he said savagely. “It’s you I’m trying to protect.”

  But he slammed the door shut, nevertheless, and then confronted me.

  “I’ve got to know something. Of all the damnable, outrageous messes—! Did you or did you not take the rug out of Jim Blake’s car the other night?”

  “Why? Is it missing?”

  “You know damned well it’s missing.”

  “I don’t like your tone, Wallie.”

  He pulled himself together then, and took another turn about the room.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I get excited. God, who wouldn’t be excited? I’ll ask you in a different way. Was the carpet in the car the other night when Amos drove you back here?”