The Door (7 page)

“You had no reason to believe she had any personal enemies? Anybody who could gain by doing away with her?”

“None whatever,” I said promptly, and told him of her relations to the family. “I would have said,” I finished, “that she had no outside life whatever.”

“She had never married?”

“Never.”

“I suppose she was in possession of a good many family facts? I’ll not say secrets, but facts; relationships, differences, that sort of thing?”

“Such as they are, yes. But it is a singularly united family.”

“Save, I suppose, for Mr. Somers’ son by his first marriage. I understand that he is not particularly
persona grata.
”

“Who told you that?”

He smiled.

“He told me himself, as a matter of fact. He seems very anxious to have the mystery solved, as of course we all are. I suppose he was fond of her?”

“I never thought so. No.”

He coughed.

“In this—er—family difference, I gather that your sympathies have lain with this Walter. Is that so?”

“Yes and no,” I said slowly. “Walter has never amounted to much since the war, and his father has never understood him. They are opposed temperaments. Walter is sensitive and high-strung. Mr. Somers is a silent man very successful in business—he’s in Wall Street—and they haven’t hit it off. Mr. Somers has financed Walter in several businesses, but he has always failed. I believe he has said that he is through, except for a trust fund in his will, a small one. But if you have any idea that Walter is concerned in Sarah’s death—”

“I have no such idea. We have checked his movements that night. As a matter of fact, when he left your house he went directly to his club. He left at eleven-fifteen. He recalls your asking the time, and that your own watch was a minute or two slow. At eleven-thirty he was at his club, and joined a bridge game. That time is fixed. The man whose place he took had agreed to be at home by midnight.”

He turned over the papers on his desk, and finally picked up one of them.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “your own statement that Sarah Gittings had no life outside your family necessarily brings the family into this affair. Your cousin, now, Mr. Blake. How well did she know him?”

“She saw him once in a while. I don’t suppose she had ever said much more than good-morning to him.”

“Then you know of no reason why she should write to him?”

“None whatever.”

“Yet she did write to him, Miss Bell. She wrote to him on the day before her death, and I believe that he received that letter.”

He sat back in his chair and surveyed me.

“He got that letter,” he repeated.

“But why would he deny it?”

“That’s what I intend to find out. Actually, it appears that Sarah Gittings knew Mr. Blake much better than you believe. On at least one evening during the week before her death she went to his house. He was dining out, however, and did not see her. On Saturday night she telephoned to him, but not from your house. We have gone over your calls. Clearly this was some private matter between them. Amos, Mr. Blake’s servant, says he recognized her voice; of course that’s dubious, but again Mr. Blake was out. Then on Sunday she wrote, and I have every reason to believe that he got the letter on Monday.”

“Why?”

“Because he went out that night to meet her.”

I think, recalling that interview, that he was deliberately telling me these things in order to get my reaction to them, to watch for those reactions. Later on I believe he attempted to convey something of this system of his to the Grand Jury; that he said, in effect:

“You are to remember that guilt or innocence is not always solved or otherwise by the sworn statements of witnesses. People have perjured themselves before this. The reaction to a question is an important one; there is a subtle difference between the honest man and the most subtle liar.”

So now he watched me.

“Did you know, when she left your house that night, that she was going out to meet Mr. Blake?”

“No. And I don’t believe it now.”

“You saw the writing on her cuff. Was that hers?”

“It looked like it. I daresay it was.”

“Yet no such envelope was found in her room the next day, when the police searched it. Nor among the trash which Inspector Harrison examined. She wrote and sent that letter, Miss Bell, and he received it. Unless some one in your house found it and deliberately destroyed it.”

“If you think I did that, I did not.”

“No,” he said. “I am sure you did not. That is why I know he got it. But why should he deny it? Remember, I am bringing no accusation against Mr. Blake, but I want him to come clean on this story. He knows something. You might suggest to him that it would be better for him to tell what he knows than to have us find it out for ourselves.”

I was slightly dazed as I left, and sitting back in the car I was puzzled. How little, after all, we know of people! Sarah, moving quietly about my house, massaging me each morning with quiet efficiency; her life an open book, not too interesting. And yet Sarah had had a secret, a secret which she had withheld from me and had given or tried to give to Jim Blake.

I decided to see Jim at once and give him the District Attorney’s message. But Jim had had a return of his old trouble and was in bed. And as it happened, something occurred that night which took my mind away from Jim for the time, and from everything else except Judy.

She had been in a fever of anger and resentment ever since Sarah’s death. After all, Sarah had helped to bring her into the world, and she was outraged. I daresay under other conditions I might have found her determination to solve a crime amusing rather than otherwise, but there was a set to her small jaw, a feverish look in her eyes, that commanded my respect. And in the end, like Katherine, she did make her small contribution.

To Dick of course she was wonderful, no matter what she did.

So she and Dick were working on the case; she in a fury of indignation, Dick largely because of her. I know that they had gone over every inch of the lot where the dogs had been tied, but that they had found nothing. I think, however, that they were afraid I could not give their efforts sympathetic attention, for except for their lack of success they did not confide in me.

On that night, Wednesday, they had been making a sketch of the lot and the park, but Judy looked very tired, and at ten o’clock I sent Dick away. Judy started up for bed, but in the hall she must have thought of something and changed her mind. She went back through the pantry, where Joseph was reading the evening paper, and asked if he had a flashlight. Joseph had none there, and she went into the kitchen, got some matches and the garage key from its nail and proceeded to the garage.

Shortly after she came back to the kitchen door and called in to him:

“Where’s the ladder, Joseph? The ladder Mr. Walter used in the lavatory that night?”

“It’s in the tool room, Miss Judy. Shall I bring it in?”

“Never mind,” she said, and went out again.

At half past ten I heard him making his round of the windows and doors, before going to bed. At the front door he stopped, and then came to me in the library.

“I suppose Miss Judy came in by the front door, madam?”

“Miss Judy! Has she been out?”

“She went out through the kitchen, a little after ten. She said she wanted the ladder; she didn’t say why.”

I was uneasy rather than alarmed, until I saw that the garage was dark.

“She’s not there, Joseph!”

“Maybe she took the car and went out, madam.”

“She’d have told me, I’m sure.”

I was starting out at once, but he held me back.

“I’d better get my revolver,” he said. “If there’s anything wrong—”

That sent a shiver of fear down my spine.

“Judy!” I called. “Judy!”

There was no answer, and together Joseph and I started out, he slightly in the lead and his revolver in his hand. It was a black night and starless; just such a night as when poor Sarah met her death, and the very silence was terrifying. Halfway along the path Joseph wheeled suddenly.

“Who’s there?” he said sharply.

“What did you hear, Joseph?”

“I thought somebody moved in the bushes.”

We listened, but everything was quiet, and we went on.

In the garage itself, when we switched on the lights, everything was in order, and the key Judy had used was still in the small door which gave entrance from the side. This door was closed but not locked. The first ominous thing was when we discovered that the door into the tool room was locked and that the key was missing from its nail. I rattled the knob and called Judy, but received no reply, and Joseph in the meantime was searching for the key.

“She’s in here, Joseph.”

“Not necessarily, madam. Robert hides the key sometimes. He says that Abner takes his tools.”

But Judy was in there. Not until Joseph had broken a window and crawled in did we find her, poor child, senseless and bleeding from a cut on the head.

Joseph carried her into the house, and into the library. She was already stirring when he placed her on the couch there, and she was quite conscious, although dizzy and nauseated, in a short time. Enough indeed to protest against my calling a doctor.

“We don’t want any more fuss,” she said, and tried to smile. “Remember mother, Elizabeth Jane! Always in the society columns but never in the news.”

But as she was violently nauseated almost immediately I got Joseph to telephone to Doctor Simonds, and he came very soon afterwards.

She had, he said, been struck on the head, and Joseph suggested that the ladder itself had fallen on her. As a matter of fact, later investigation showed the ladder lying on the floor, and as Judy said it was against the wall when she saw it, there was a possibility of truth in this. But one thing was certain; however she was hurt, she had been definitely locked in the tool room. She had used the key and left it in the door. Some one had locked her in and taken the key. It was nowhere to be found.

We got her up to bed, and the diagnosis was a mild concussion and a lucky escape. The doctor was inclined to be humorous about it.

“You have a hard head, Judy. A hard head but a soft heart, eh?”

Well, he ordered ice to what she called her bump and heat to her feet, and while Joseph was cracking the ice below she told her story. But although Joseph maintained that she had asked him about the ladder, she gave an entirely different reason herself.

“Abner has a foot rule in the tool room,” was her story to me. “I wanted to measure the cabinet. Sometimes you find a secret drawer that way. So I got the key to the garage and went out. I thought I heard something in the shrubbery behind me once, but it might have been a rabbit, I don’t know.

“The tool room light had burned out, so I lighted a match when I went in. The door was not locked, but the key was in it. There was nobody in the tool room, unless they were behind the door when I opened it. I lighted a fresh match, and just then the door slammed behind me and blew out the match. I said ‘damn,’ and—that’s all I remember.”

To add to our bewilderment and my own secret anxiety, Joseph brought forth something when he carried up the ice; something which was odd, to say the least. This was that just before ten o’clock, when he let the dogs out the back door, he heard them barking in the shrubbery. This barking, however, ceased abruptly.

“As though they’d recognized the party,” said Joseph, who now and then lapsed into colloquial English. “Jock now, he’d never let up if it was a stranger.”

But there was something horrible in that thought; that any one who knew us would attack Judy, and the situation was not improved by Norah’s declaration the next day that, at two o’clock in the morning, four hours after the attack on Judy, she had seen some one with a flashlight in the shrubbery near the garage. The night had been cool and she had got out of bed to close her window. Then she saw the light, and because it was rather ghostly and the
morale
of the household none too good, she had simply got back into bed and drawn the covers over her head.

Inspector Harrison had come early at my request, and Norah repeated the story to him.

The flashlight, she said, was close to the ground, and almost as soon as she saw it, it went out.

Up to that moment I think he had been inclined to lay Judy’s condition to accident, the more so as she refused to explain why she had been in the garage.

“Come now, Miss Judy. You had a reason, hadn’t you?”

“I’ve told you. I wanted to get the foot rule.”

“Did you tell Joseph you wanted to see the ladder?”

“I may have,” she said airily. “Just to make conversation.”

“This ladder,” he persisted. “It is the one Walter Somers used in the lavatory?”

Judy yawned.

“Sorry,” she said. “I lost some sleep last night. Is it the same ladder, Elizabeth Jane? You tell him.”

“It is,” I said flatly, “and you know it perfectly well, Judy. You’re being silly.”

But she had no more to say, and the Inspector stamped down the stairs in no pleasant mood and inclined to discredit her whole story. For which I did not blame him.

He did however believe Norah. She was looking pale and demoralized, and she said something about witch lights and then crossed herself. The result was that he at once commenced an investigation of the shrubbery, and that his men almost immediately discovered footprints in the soft ground to the right of the path and where Norah had seen the light.

There were four, two rights and two lefts, and when I went out to look at them the Inspector was standing near them, surveying them with his head on one side.

“Very neat,” he said. “Very pretty. See anything queer about them, Simmons?”

“They’re kind of small, if that’s it.”

“What about the heels?”

“Very good, sir. Clear as a bell.”

The Inspector drew a long breath.

“And that’s all you see, is it?” he demanded violently. “What the hell’s the use of my trying to teach you fellows anything? Look at those heels! A kangaroo couldn’t have left those prints. They’ve been planted.”