The Door (3 page)

The officer inside and Joseph out, it seemed scarcely credible that we found nobody. But our burglar had gone; without booty too, as it turned out, for my toilet things were undisturbed.

I think the officer was rather amused than otherwise. Judy saw him out.

“If you’re ever in trouble again, Miss, just send for me,” he said gallantly.

“I’m always in trouble,” said Judy.

“Now is that so? What sort of trouble?”

“Policemen,” said Judy pleasantly, and closed the door on him.

Looking back, it seems strange how light-hearted we were that night. That loneliness which is my usual lot had gone with Judy’s arrival, and when Wallie arrived at eight-thirty he found Judy insisting on my smoking a cigarette.

“You’re shaken, Elizabeth Jane,” she was saying. “You know darn well you’re shaken.”

“Shaken? About what?” said Wallie from the hall.

“She’s had a burglar, poor dear,” Judy explained. “A burglar in dark trousers, crouched on the staircase.”

“On the stairs? Do you mean you saw him?”

“She saw his legs.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s enough, isn’t it? The rest of him was sure to be around somewhere. The said legs then ceased crouching and went upstairs. After that they vanished.”

He said nothing more, but walked back into the dining room and surveyed the mirror.

“That’s a tricky arrangement you have there, Elizabeth Jane,” he called. He had adopted Judy’s habit. “Go up the stairs, Judy, and let me see your legs.”

“Don’t be shameless!” she said. “How’s this?”

“All right. Yes, I see them, and very nice ones they are at that.”

When he came forward again Judy insisted on examining the stair rail for fingerprints, although Wallie said that it was nonsense; that all criminals wore gloves nowadays, and that with the increasing crime wave the glove factories were running night shifts. But she departed for a candle nevertheless, and Wallie glanced up the staircase.

“Rather a blow for the divine Sarah, eh what?” he said.

“Sarah is out, fortunately. She took the dogs.”

It struck me, as he stood there in the full light over his head, that he was looking even thinner then usual, and very worn. He had much of his mother’s beauty, if one dare speak of beauty in a man, but he had also inherited her high-strung nervous temperament. The war must have been hell for him, for he never spoke of it. I have noticed that the men who really fought and really suffered have very little to say about it; whether because they cannot bear to recall it or because most of them are inarticulate I do not know.

While we stood there I told him about the sound I had heard, and he went back to the lavatory and looked up.

This lavatory is merely a small washroom opening from the rear portion of the hall, and lighted by an opaque glass ceiling, in the center of which a glass transom opens by a cord for ventilation. The shaft above is rather like an elevator well, and light enters through a skylight in the roof.

Onto this well there is only one opening and this the window to the housemaid’s closet on the third floor. As during the tornado of 1893 the entire skylight frame and all had been lifted and dropped end-on into the shaft, crashing through the glass roof below, my father had had placed across it some iron bars. These, four in number, were firmly embedded in the walls about six feet below the window sill.

“I suppose nobody has examined the shaft?”

“I really don’t know. Probably not.”

He continued to gaze upward.

“He might have swung into the shaft, and stood on the bars.”

“Provided he knew there were bars there,” I said drily.

Suddenly he turned and shot up the stairs, and a moment later he was calling from the third floor.

“Get a ladder, somebody. There’s something on top of that skylight down there.”

“You mean—the man himself?”

He laughed at that.

“He’d have gone through the glass like a load of coal! No. Something small. I can see it against the light beneath.”

He ran down, rushed into the library for matches, and when Robert had brought a ladder from the garage and placed it in the lavatory, he was on it and halfway through the transom in an instant.

We stood huddled in the door, Judy still holding the candle, and I—for some unknown reason—with a lighted cigarette in my hand which some one had thrust on me, and Robert and Joseph behind.

I don’t know what I had expected, but I know that I felt a shock of disappointment when Wallie said:

“Hello! Here it is. A pencil!”

He found nothing else, and came down in a moment looking dirty and rather the worse for wear, but extremely pleased with himself.

“A pencil!” he said exultantly. “Now how about it? Will Scotland Yard send for me or will it not? That’s what you heard, you see.”

But Judy only took one glance at it.

“Possibly,” she said. “Still, as it’s the sort Elizabeth Jane uses herself, with the point looking as though she’d sharpened it with her teeth, I see nothing to write home about.”

That annoyed him.

“All right,” he told her. “We’ll see. It may have fingerprints.”

“I thought you’d decided he wore gloves! Why don’t you try to find how he got in? That’s more to the point. And also how he got out?”

It seems strange to be writing all this; the amiable bickering between Wallie and Judy; the light-hearted experiment to find if a pencil dropped from the third floor made the sound I had heard, and my own feeling that it did not; and the final discovery of the shattered pane in the rear French door of the drawing room, and our failure to see, lying on the step outside, that broken point of a penknife which Inspector Harrison was to find the next morning.

Strange, almost frivolous.

It was Judy who found the broken pane, hidden as it was behind the casement curtains on the door, and who pointed out the ease with which our intruder had reached in and turned the key. There is another door at the back of the drawing room, a sort of service entrance which opens into the rear hall beside the servants’ staircase, and it was evident that he had used this to gain access to the upper floors.

“Easy enough,” said Judy. “But he couldn’t get out that way. Clara was coming down to her dinner, so he hid on the front stairs.”

“And I suppose he was not in the light shaft at all?” Wallie demanded.

“I don’t say he wasn’t,” said my surprising Judy. “I only say that the pencil is not proved. I think it very likely he did hide in the shaft. He’d retreated before Joseph as far as he could go.”

“But what did he want?” I demanded. “I don’t suppose he broke in here to drop a pencil. If he was coming down when I saw him—”

“Well, he might have been going up,” said Judy practically. “A good burglar might start at the top and work down. Like housecleaning.”

Wallie had sealed the pencil in an envelope for the police, and I daresay all of this had not taken much more than half an hour. It must have been at nine o’clock or thereabouts, then, that I sent the maids to their beds and watched them as they made a nervous half-hysterical start, and nine-thirty before Joseph and Wallie had placed a padlock on the broken door in the drawing room. Then I ordered Joseph to bed, but he objected.

“Miss Sarah has not come in.”

“She has a key, Joseph.”

But I was uneasy. In the excitement I had forgotten Sarah.

Wallie looked up sharply from the door.

“Sarah!” he said. “Is she still out?”

“Yes. And she has the dogs. Where could she stay until this hour with two dogs? She has no friends.”

I left Wallie and Judy in the drawing room, and wandered out and down the steps. It was a cold night, without a moon but with plenty of starlight, and I walked down the drive. I remembered that as I walked I whistled for the dogs. Sometimes she loosened them and they preceded her home.

It seemed to me that I heard a dog barking far off somewhere, but that was all.

I was vaguely inclined to walk in that direction. The dog seemed to be at the far end of the Larimer lot or beyond it, in the park. But at the gate I met Mary Martin, hurrying home. She had been out somewhere for dinner, and she was slightly sulky; it was a continued grievance with her that Sarah had a key to the house and she had none, but I have an old-fashioned sense of responsibility to the people in my employ, and Mary was a still young and very pretty girl.

On the way to the house I told her about our burglar, and she relaxed somewhat.

“I don’t think you should be out here alone,” she said. “He may still be about.”

“I was looking for Sarah,” I explained. “She’s out with the dogs, and it’s getting late.”

To my intense surprise she stopped perfectly still.

“When did she go out?” she said sharply.

“At seven. That’s almost three hours.”

She moved on again, but in silence. The front door was open, and in the light from it I thought she looked rather pale. At that moment however Wallie appeared in the doorway, and suddenly she brightened.

“I wouldn’t worry, Miss Bell. She can take care of herself. And she has a key!”

She glanced at me rather pertly, favored Wallie with a smile as she went in, greeting Judy with considerable manner—she seemed always to be afraid that Judy might patronize her—and teetered up the stairs on the high heels she affected.

Wallie gazed after her as she went up. At the turn she paused. I saw her looking down at us intently, at Judy, at myself, at Wallie. Mostly at Wallie.

“I wouldn’t worry about Miss Gittings,” she said. “She’s sure to be all right.”

“You might see if she’s in her room, Mary,” Judy suggested. “She may have come in while we were in the drawing room.”

We could hear her humming as she went on up the stairs, and, shortly after she called down to say that Sarah was not in her room but that it was unlocked.

“That’s queer,” said Judy. “She always locks it, doesn’t she?”

We could hear a sort of ironic amusement in Mary’s voice as she replied.

“Not so queer this evening,” she said. “She knew I was out! Her key’s in the door, on the outside, but she forgot to take it.”

I do not remember much about the hour between ten and eleven. Wallie was not willing to go until Sarah returned, and Judy and he worked over the cabinet. The house was very still. For a time, as I sat in the library, I could hear Mary moving about on the third floor, drawing a bath—she was very fastidious in everything that pertained to herself—and finally going into her room and closing the door. But by eleven Judy had given up all hope of a secret drawer in the cabinet and was yawning, and a few moments after that Wallie left and she wandered up to bed.

But I still waited in the library. I had a queer sense of apprehension, but I laid it to the events of the evening, and after a time—I am no longer young, and I tire easily—I fell into a doze.

When I roused it was one in the morning, and Sarah had not come back. She would have roused me if she had, and she would have put out the lights. Nevertheless I went upstairs and opened her door. The room was dark. I called to her, cautiously, but there was no answer, and no stertorous breathing to show that she was asleep.

For the first time I was really alarmed about her. I went downstairs again, stopping in my room for a wrap, and in the dining room for my rings, which I had almost forgotten. Then I went out on the street.

The dog, or dogs, were still barking at intervals, and at last I started toward the sound.

I
T IS ONE OF
the inevitable results of tragedy that one is always harking back to it, wondering what could have been done to avert it. I find myself going over and over the events of that night, so simple in appearance, so dreadful in result. Suppose I had turned on Sarah’s light that night? Would I have found her murderer in the room? Was the faint sound I heard the movement of her curtain in the wind, as I had thought, or something much more terrible?

Again, instead of sending Joseph upstairs to search, what if I had had the police called and the house surrounded?

Still, what could I have done for Sarah? Nothing. Nothing at all.

I was rather nervous as I walked along, going toward the Larimer lot and the park. But the occasional despairing yelps were growing more and more familiar as I advanced, and when at last I let out that feeble pipe which is my attempt at a whistle, the dogs recognized it in a sort of ecstasy of noise. I could make out Jock’s shrill bark and Isabel’s melancholy whine, but for some reason they did not come to me.

I stood on the pavement and called, loath to leave its dryness and security for the brush and trees and dampness of the Larimer property. Frightened too, I admit. Something was holding the dogs. I am quite certain now that when I started to run toward them I expected to find Sarah there, unconscious or dead. I ran in a sort of frenzy. Once indeed I fell over some old wire, and I was dizzy when I got up.

But Sarah was not there. Far back in the lot I found the dogs, and if I wondered that they had not come to me that mystery was soon solved.

They were tied. A piece of rope had been run through the loops of their leashes and then tied to a tree. So well tied that, what with their joyous rushes and the hard knotting of the rope, I could scarcely free them.

Asked later on about that knot, I had no clear memory of it whatever.

It was very dark. Far back on the street a lamp lighted that corner where the path took off, to pitch steeply down into the park. The Larimer lot is a triangle, of which the side of my property is the vertical, the street the base, and the ravine beyond the hypotenuse. Thus: