The Door (12 page)

The laundry was dark, and to light it one must enter the room, and turn on the hanging globe in the center. I went in, shivering, and directly in the center of the room I struck violently against something. It was a chair, and it upset with a clatter that echoed and re-echoed in that cavernous place.

What was the chair doing there? It belonged under a window, and here it was, out of place again. What was it that moved that chair? And Joseph’s somber statement came back to me, to complete my demoralization. After all, chairs did move. They moved in séances. Chairs and tables, without being touched.

I was badly frightened, I confess. A dozen stories of phantasms, discredited at the time, rose in my mind. The place seemed peopled with moving shadows, sinister and threatening, and from somewhere I seemed to hear footsteps, spectral, felt rather than heard. And when I finally found courage to try the laundry light, it had burned out.

Such efforts as I could make then to remove the stain were of no practical value, and I decided once and for all to burn the rug and take the consequences.

I did one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life when I went forward to the furnace cellar, carrying the rug. Once the light there was on, however, I felt better. I built a small fire of paper and kindling, and thrust in the rug. It began to blaze, although not as rapidly as I had hoped. I stood there watching and wondering about the dampers; like most women, I know nothing about a furnace.

I wandered about, waiting for that slow combustion to become effectual, examined the windows and the door to the area way, and was retracing my steps forward to the furnace again, when I stopped suddenly.

Some one was moving about over my head.

I pulled myself together. The dogs had not barked. It must be Joseph, Joseph who had heard the whining in the speaking tubes and come down to investigate. But to have Joseph discover me burning that rug would have been disastrous. I turned out the furnace light at once, and went back toward the foot of the stairs, where the small light still burned. To my horror, I saw that light go out, and heard the bolt slipped in the door above.

“Joseph!” I called.
“Joseph!”

It was not Joseph. The footsteps had ceased, but there was no answering call. Somebody, something, was lurking there overhead, listening. The thought was horrible beyond words.

I was crouched on the foot of the staircase, and there I remained in that haunted darkness until daylight. At dawn I crept up the stairs and half sat, half lay, on the narrow landing. Perhaps I slept, perhaps I fainted. I shall never forget Joseph’s face when, at seven o’clock, he unlocked the door and found me there.

“Good heavens, madam!” he said.

“Help me up, Joseph. I can’t move.”

“You’re not hurt, are you?”

“No. You locked me in, Joseph. I’ve had a terrible night. You—or somebody.”

“I locked you in, madam? At what time?”

“About two o’clock, I think.”

“I was not downstairs after midnight,” he said, and helped me to my feet.

He got me into the pantry and made me some coffee. Norah was not yet down; my household slept badly those days, and therefore late. He had had a shock, however. His hands shook and his face was set. I can still see him moving about, his dignity less majestic than usual, making the coffee, laying a doily on the pantry table, fetching a cup and saucer from the dining room. While he waited for the coffee to boil he made a tour of the first floor, but reported everything in order. The drawing room door and windows were locked.

“But I would suggest, madam,” he said, “that we change the lock on the front door. Since Miss Sarah’s key is missing it is hardly safe.”

Norah came in as I finished my coffee, and she gave me a queer look. But I did not explain. I went up and crawled into my bed, and I did not waken until Joseph came up with a tray of luncheon.

He came in, closed the door, drew a table beside the bed, opened my napkin and gave it to me. Then he straightened and looked at me.

“I have taken the liberty of destroying the rug, madam.”

My heart sank, but he spoke as calmly as though he had been reporting that the butter was bad.

“The dampers were wrong,” he said. “It’s a peculiar furnace. You have to understand it.”

He looked at me, and I looked back at him. Our relations had subtly changed, although his manner had not. We shared a secret; in effect, Joseph and I were accomplices. Between us we had compounded a felony, destroyed evidence, and Joseph knew it. Whether he had seen the stain or not, he knew that carpet.

“You should not have tried to do that, madam,” he said. “In the future, if you need any help, you can always call on me.”

Then he went out; strange inscrutable Joseph, living the vicarious life of all upper class servants. Somewhere he had a wife, but he never mentioned her. His room at night, the pantry and the newspapers by day, apparently comprised his life and satisfied him.

It was when he came to remove the tray that he told me, very quietly, that his revolver was missing.

“I have been keeping it in my bedroom lately, under my pillow,” he said. “Now it is gone. Taken by some one who knew the habits of the house, madam.”

W
HATEVER WAS THE MEANING
of that unpleasant episode, it was impossible to go to the police with it. I was seeing rather less of the Inspector now; he and the entire homicide squad were working on the Gunther case; the crime detection unit of photographer, chemist, microscopist and gun expert were at work, but I believe their conclusions were unimportant. The bullet was missing. From the size of the wounds in the skull and the fact that it had passed entirely through the head, they believed that it had been a large caliber bullet fired at close range, and that the time of her death had been about eight or eight-thirty.

The bag, then, had lain in the street for almost three hours.

Outside of these facts the murder remained a complete and utter mystery. She appeared to have been without friends or family, one of these curious beings who from all appearances have sprung sporadically into being, without any past whatever. She had had no ability for friendship, unless that odd acquaintance of hers with Sarah could be called friendship.

Strange that two such reserved women should have found each other, have somehow broken down their repressions, have walked, talked, maybe even laughed together. For it seems now that during the month or so before the murders, they had met a number of times. One pictures them walking together, maybe sitting together in a moving picture theater, and then one day something said; a bit of confidence, and both were doomed.

The day passed without incident, save that Mary Martin took her departure. She even cried a little when she left, although she had shown no affection for any of us.

Judy seemed relieved to have her gone.

“Thank heaven,” she said. “I don’t have to whisper any more. She was always listening, Elizabeth Jane. I’ve caught her at it, leaning over the banisters. I’ll bet my hat she knows something. And I’ll bet two dollars, which is all I have in the world at the moment, that she took Joseph’s gun.”

“Why would she take Joseph’s gun? That’s silly.”

“Is it? Well, ask Norah. She knows.”

And ask Norah I did, with curious results.

It appeared that on the day before Joseph had missed his revolver, Norah had gone upstairs to her room to change her uniform before she prepared luncheon. She wears rubber-soled shoes in the kitchen, as it has a tiled floor, and so she moved quietly.

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.