The Opening Door

by Helen Reilly

  He sprang the scrap of photographic paper on her without warning. “Will you look at this, Mrs. De Sange, please?” He held it out to her with a sudden movement and kept his eyes on her face—and knew he was right. Oh, yes, innocent or guilty, this woman had been deeply involved in some fashion or other with the late Charlotte Foy. Susan De Sange was perceptibly shaken by the little exhibit. But she was a lady of parts; she recovered herself swiftly. “You talk in parables, Inspector. I’m afraid I don’t quite...”

  McKee stopped her. He said in a tired voice, “On Wednesday morning, after Charlotte Foy’s body was discovered in Henderson Square, you went to Bruce Cunningham’s rooms to get him to do something for you. I believe you wanted him to recover this bit of paper for you from the writing room in the Flavell house. I can’t urge you too strongly to tell me the truth, for your own sake. Whose photograph was it, Mrs. De Sange? Who produced it? Why was it torn? What significance did it have?”

  She wasn’t going to tell him. Far from it. She gathered herself together and answered with well-assumed astonishment, “You’re wrong, Inspector, quite wrong. I—“ she paused, stared and frowned, “Now that you mention it I do seem to recall that Charlotte had a picture with her when she came in to me in the writing room, but I don’t know whose it was, or what she was doing with it or what, if anything, it meant.”

  McKee told himself that this was a lie out of the whole cloth. The effort she put into it and her concealed agitation—and more than agitation—were illuminating. Find the original of the photograph and they would be a good deal further along. Whatever the story back of the photograph, Susan De Sange wasn’t going to give it to him.

  He went a few minutes later but before he left he listened to a one-sided conversation over the telephone.

  Hugh Flavell called Mrs. De Sange and asked her to go up to Eastport with them for Charlotte’s funeral. She said, “I will if you want me, Hugh, dear, if you think I can be of any assistance. No, no trouble...I’ve been intending to go up to the cottage anyhow, there are some things there I want...”

  The Flavells were leaving on the twelve-fifteen from Grand Central. Late the night before, Charlotte Foy’s body had been released by the District Attorney’s office and shipped to an undertaker in the Connecticut town. Until Buchanan was found, as long as there was a possibility, however slight, that Bruce Cunningham had been framed, these people would have to be kept under observation. McKee thanked Mrs. De Sange and took his departure.

  McKee verified the fact that Edgar Bently had called on Mrs. De Sange early that morning. A man answering his description had arrived at the Trianon at nine-thirty and according to the elevator girl and the doorman he left at around ten.

  The Norwalk police corroborated Bently as a consulting architect whose cottage in Silvermine was also his office. He was a man of moderate means and kept no servants and the cottage was locked up, so no further information was forthcoming from that end. To search New York for him would be a long and possibly an abortive task and the result, if they did manage to locate him, might be disappointing. His interest in the Flavells might have had an amorous origin as Mrs. De Sange said, and he might have seen nothing whatever in the Cedars. In spite of this, and in spite of the fact that the Homicide Squad was understaffed and that McKee got not the slightest encouragement from either Dwyer or Commissioner Carey, he decided that the attempt to locate Bently had to be made.

  Accordingly, Detectives Gish and Wileski began a tour of the hotels, and McKee had a delayed conference with Spencer Gorham, the Boston lawyer who handled Natalie’s affairs. Gorham could find nothing wrong as far as the papers in Charlotte Foy’s desk went. Charlotte had never apparently thrown anything away and his task had been as lengthy as it was unproductive. Her valuables, stocks and bonds, personal belongings, etc., were in her safe-deposit box at the Grant National Bank. To complete the picture the box would have to be examined. To do this a court order would be necessary, unless the police wanted to wait until the heirs had taken out letters of administration.

  McKee didn’t want to wait. “You know what ought to be in the box?” he asked, and Gorham said “Yes,” displaying a little green memorandum book that had been in the dead woman’s desk.

  The Scotsman had done favors for the Grant National’s first vice-president. Twenty minutes later he and Gorham were examining a long drawer behind locked gates in the bank’s vault. The lawyer consulted the little green book and looked. He looked again and raised a shocked face. Nine thousand dollars in war bonds bought by Charlotte the previous June were not there.

  Inquiry revealed that Charlotte Foy had visited her safe-deposit box on Tuesday, the day before she died and that on that day she had removed the small old-fashioned wooden chest that was in her packed suitcase when McKee looked her bedroom over. It was possible the bonds had been in that. They weren’t there now. Gerald Flavell had occasionally handled an investment for his aunt, McKee reflected, and the good-looking and increasingly hag-ridden Gerald was hard up and owed bills in every direction.

  This deduction was apparently wrong. Back at the office McKee found a message from the Fingerprint Bureau waiting for him. The small wooden chest that Charlotte had been going to take to Boston with her had been tested for prints. It had taken time to get a complete set of the men’s and women’s under scrutiny. There was one set, and one set only, on the polished wood of the chest. They were Hugh Flavell’s. The stenographer, Kent, delivered the message to the Scotsman. It had caused a good deal of excitement. Kent said, “What do you think of it, Inspector?”

  McKee didn’t answer. He looked at the clock on the wall above the green filing cabinet. It was fourteen minutes after twelve and Flavell’s train left at twelve-fifteen. He could never make it. Sitting there staring across roof tops gloomy’ under a sullen sky, he told himself it didn’t matter, that the Flavells were covered, that no member of the party could hope to slip away for any length of time, that they were returning to New York in a few hours and that, besides, he had things to do here, pressing things. Wilenski had called in. Susan De Sange’s cousin by marriage had been located. Edgar Bently was staying at a small and inconspicuous hotel on the south side of Henderson Square. McKee swiveled around in his chair, pushed a weight from his shoulders and reached for the phone.

  At about the same time, in the long shed in Grand Central two miles to the north and east, Eve Flavell shared the uneasiness and the vague sense of dreary foreboding the Scotsman refused to acknowledge. The chill was bone-piercing and the lights in the car were dim. Eve didn’t want to leave the city. She didn’t want to go to Charlotte’s funeral. She had an impulse then, at the last moment, to get up and bolt to the door and run along the ramp and up through the great station into the open air and the freedom of the streets. As on that other day, the afternoon of the day on which Charlotte died, she waited too long. Out on the platform the conductor chanted faintly, “All Aboard,” the doors slammed and they were under way.

  The trip from New York to Eastport wasn’t long; it took only a little over an hour. Outside the windows of the fast New Haven train the city merged rapidly into the suburbs and the suburbs into open country studded with towns. Tawny fields and patches of woodland began to flash past. At Greenwich there was a brief glimpse of the Sound, lead-colored under the leaden sky. The Flavell party had been unable to get seats together. Jim Holland and Eve were opposite each other on the aisle, Natalie and Susan and ‘•Hugh were farther to the rear. Alicia had gone up with Gerald early that morning. Funeral services for Charlotte were to be held in the Nye Funeral Home, after which she was to be buried in the little cemetery on the edge of the village.

  In New York the murder had produced scarcely a ripple; the great wartime city had a glut of sensation and except for inquiring reporters after Bruce’s arrest, they hadn’t been bothered. Eastport was going to be different. Hugh had lived there as a young man, he returned every summer, he had been married to Eve and Gerald’s mother in the gray stone Episcopa
l Church under the elms, where the three children, Gerald and Eve and Natalie, had duly been christened. All of them dreaded the arrival in the small town, the formalities that had to be gone through and the questions, discreet or otherwise, that would be asked.

  If it hadn’t been for Natalie, Eve wouldn’t have come. She was still weak and more than a bit shaky from the beating her system had taken. But the Chief Medical Examiner, who had developed a warm interest in her, had given his consent. “It won’t do you any harm. With a thing like that you come up as fast as you go down. Only, don’t let yourself get too tired, and don’t catch cold.”

  Natalie had said forlornly the afternoon before, “I wish you could come, Eve, it would make me feel better—but not if it’s going to do you any harm.” Her eyes were enough. They were worse now. She had changed a good deal in the last twenty-four hours. Overnight she seemed to have grown five years older. She was as gentle as ever, but her color was bad and there was a new stern set to her narrow white face that made her look a little like a Joan of Arc in a severe black suit with a big-brimmed black hat covering her soft, pale hair. The effect of her wide brown gaze, no longer bright and eager but stony and withdrawn, traveling over their father’s face and Gerald’s and Alicia’s and Susan’s and Jim’s, exploringly, marked the distance along the road that had separated her from them since the previous day.

  She had broken down only once, when she was alone with Eve for a moment last night. Then she had given way to her fears like a mad creature. “They’ll convict him, Eve, for something he didn’t do. They’ll put him to death...I’ve read stories in the paper, I know. Don’t try to deceive me....I can’t stand it. Bruce—when I think of him behind bars, in a cell...” Eve had succeeded finally in quieting her, taking her in her arms and holding her tightly until she stopped shaking.

  “Nothing is sure,” she told her. “Nothing will be sure until they get the man who was in Bruce’s apartment all evening. Someone, perhaps that man was hanging around outside in the Square Wednesday night before Charlotte went out, will be proved to have gone to Bruce’s apartment and put the gun back. That’s what will happen, Natalie, I promise you.”

  Jim had backed her up later, but Natalie’s response to him had been cold. She had always been fond of Jim but she turned from him now, as she did from the others, sensing the opinion he didn’t express. Her instinct was right. To Eve Jim had said musingly, “It’s all very well to try and keep Natalie’s spirits up—but it may be a mistake. It’s damned awkward about that gun, you know.”

  The acid of pain had eaten through Eve’s armor at that and she had rounded on him furiously. Now they didn’t talk about Bruce or his chances any more. They didn’t talk about Charlotte’s murder either. In fact, Charlotte hadn’t been murdered; she had simply died. That was Hugh. He had set the tone. His late sister-in-law, companion and close friend had been taken from them by the grim reaper. Sooner or later it happened to everyone. Those near and dear passed on. Well, that was life and there was nothing you could do but submit.

  He was really amazing. For a man who could make a most ghastly fuss about a burned muffin or a hard hotel bed, he accepted major wounds with astonishing stoicism. He did it so well, perhaps because he could make himself believe practically anything he wanted to. Had he gone out for his accustomed walk in the park on the night Charlotte died? Eve wondered. Was her father the one who had left that dreadful stain at the foot of the stairs in the lovely old house on the Square.

  Let it not, she thought, be Hugh, or Gerald, or anyone connected with her by ties of blood. How would you ever get the poison out of your veins? It was, it had to be, the man waiting so queerly in the darkness and the fog at the foot of the steps the night Charlotte died. Why should anyone wait like that, without a purpose?

  A hand touched her arm and she stiffened. It was only Jim, leaning across the aisle. “Don’t look now, Eve,” he said with a faint grin, “but isn’t that gentleman up there near the water-cooler, the one behind the two sailors, a detective? Wasn’t he with the Inspector at the shop that first day?”

  Eve glanced at a big man in profile beyond two blue jackets at the front of the car who was gazing abstractedly at a baggage rack. It was Captain Pierson; she recognized him at once. “Yes, I think so, Jim,” she said calmly, but her heart leaped. Bruce was under arrest, but if the New York police were certain he was guilty why were they having them followed and watched? It meant, surely it must mean, that they weren’t sure about Bruce.

  When they left the train at Eastport she whispered the news to Natalie and Natalie drew the same conclusion. Her face grew bright in the shadow of her hat. Her brightness didn’t last. Hugh took her arm and detached her from Eve, as Charlotte had always tried to detach her. “Watch the step, dear.” He led her to a long black limousine with the A, B and C cards on the windshield and they all got in and drove to the big white house where Charlotte lay waiting.

  The undertaker, Mr. Cable, received them at the top of the steps. Inside an organ was playing Handel softly. The big twilit spaces were thickly carpeted and full of the heavy perfume of too many flowers. Men and women were standing in groups or sitting on little gilt chairs. Eve knew some of them. She shook hands with the Smiths and the Bensons, with Miss Judd and the Reverend Doctor Harris and with Cicely Thwaight, her blooming muted, her sixty-five-year-old skin rosy, her eyes bright with malicious curiosity under her white hair.

  There were candles at the head and foot of the casket in which Charlotte lay, dressed in familiar black, her hands folded quietly on her breast. Eve knelt on a gray velvet prie-dieu and looked down at the woman who had been her aunt and was frightened. She felt nothing, absolutely nothing. With Bruce’s arrest, with the terrible accusation against him, her capacity for feeling seemed to have stopped as though her nerve ends had been branded with a red-hot iron and permanently cauterized. She could see and hear, listen and reply, but people and things were an indeterminable distance away on the other side of a glass wall.

  Jim knelt beside her.’He was crying. Eve was childishly surprised. Then she remembered that he had been fond of Charlotte and that she had been good to him as a boy; she had sent him pocket money when he was at college and loaves of the raisin bread she used to bake. Jim took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes surreptitiously, and they both rose.

  Gerald was talking to Cicely Thwaight near a clump of palms. How he had—dwindled, Eve thought dispassionately. He had been gay and fearless and forthright as a boy but now he looked beaten. He was only twenty-nine but already there was the foreshadowing of age in his set features, in his receding hair line. Even the shape of his head appeared to have changed. It was smaller and set differently on his shoulders. How crazy Charlotte had been about him as a child and when he was growing up. But he had disappointed her by marrying, and leaving the house and making a home of his own. Poor Charlotte, all her plans had gone awry. She had been so set on a marriage between Natalie and that Boston cousin of the Coreys. Instead, Natalie had, engaged herself to Bruce.

  What a battle there had been! Strong as Charlotte’s will was, Natalie’s was stronger. Eve had sometimes thought that if Charlotte had handled the situation differently Natalie wouldn’t have persisted with the engagement. Say no to her sharply and she became determined to have her own way whether she really wanted it or not. It was a natural human instinct. It was highly developed in Natalie. Eve could remember her at seven, screaming herself black in the face because she wasn’t permitted to go to the circus with Gerald and a boy from school, and becoming ill and doctors and nurses being sent for and the house on tip-toe. She had told Eve afterwards, her eyes round in an innocent little face, “I can make myself sick. I can have a fever if I want to.” If only Charlotte had used tact and judgment, Natalie might have given Bruce up. If she had, Bruce wouldn’t...”Stop it,” she whispered to herself and forced her attention back to the dimly lit rooms.

  Alicia was wonderful, circulating about, receiving murmured condolences and askin
g and answering questions. She was at her best at funerals and weddings, Eve decided. She ought to be able to make a fortune with a little handbook on what to do when the undertaker comes. Her black dress was just right, smart without being too extreme, so was her manner. She was competent, sustained and sustaining, sad with the restraint of good taste and full of solicitude for Hugh and Natalie. She glanced at them constantly to see how they were, whether they needed anything.

  “Eve,” Jim halted beside her. “Are you all right? Wouldn’t you like to go outside and get a breath of air?”

  He looked thoroughly miserable. Poor Jim, he took things hard, she thought with a pang of mingled affection and remorse. Natalie was like him in that; they were both too easily upset. Eve glanced at her sister. She was standing stiffly between Hugh and Susan, who were talking to the Bensons. Natalie wasn’t talking. She was staring straight in front of her, tall and wide-shouldered and too thin in her black coat and hat and with no more expression on her face than if she were asleep.

  “I don’t think we ought to leave Nat,” Eve told Jim, and he said compassionately, “Poor kid—no. We’d better not,” and they went across to her. The minister appeared in his white surplice then, and everyone sat down and the buzzing voices stopped. Mercifully the service was short. Ten minutes later they were all in cars driving along Queens Highway under leafless elms and past dead gardens to the cemetery on the eastern slope of a hill that overlooked the town and the river.

  The Flavell plot, a big square enclosed in low iron railings, wasn’t far from the gate. Eve’s mother and Natalie’s were both buried there. Eve got out of the car first and started across shorn turf which was hard and dry with frost. A crowd was assembled near the grave. It was made up of old acquaintances and the town’s leading tradesmen who had supplied the Flavells with the best of everything for years, and with the usual gathering of the merely curious.