The Opening Door

by Helen Reilly

  It was very dark but Eve had a torch. She kept it on until she had traversed what would be three sides of a huge city block except that it was filled with woods and hills and hollows instead of bricks and mortar. There was a gate in the high wall that hemmed in the estate. It was an inconspicuous little gate behind a clump of birches. Eve lifted the latch and pushed the gate open.

  The hinges creaked loudly. Her heart hammered and she held her breath, but no sound broke the stillness, except the gurgle of water, louder now, just ahead. There was nothing around her but darkness and close-pressing bushes. The stream she was approaching was narrow and swift and affected by the tides. At low tide it emptied itself into the bay, at high it rose ten feet between retaining walls stained with green slime. The tide was going out. Eve came on the bridge sooner than she had expected. The entrance to it was choked with shrubbery. She shone torchlight through a gap in black alders and down on narrow gray boards nailed cross-wise to spindly uprights. Never substantial, the bridge had been torn loose in the hurricane and knocked about, but you could still use it if you were careful. One of the rails was gone, but the other was there. Eve grasped it, felt it sway in her grasp, and switched off her torch. The darkness was intense and the slightest gleam of light would be visible from the lawns and gardens on the far side, once she was out in the open. She handled the shaky rail gently and started across, glad that she didn’t have to look down on the jagged black rocks that rose in sharp pinnacles, twenty feet below, foam swirling round their bases in pools and eddies. At high tide all you could do was fall into the water but at low...She felt her way forward, testing every step, and was at last on solid ground on the other side. She came to a halt a few yards farther on.

  If Susan and the man in the polo coat were going to meet it would be in Susan’s cottage, she decided. Refusing an invitation from Hugh to stay for dinner Susan had said, “I won’t, if you don’t mind. I’ve got some letters to write and things to sort through and then I’m going to bed. It’s been rather a tiring day.”

  The big house on the hill above was hidden by trees. Presently a torch appeared near the front, a bright eye in the blackness. Someone was coming down the long slope, over the cobbles that led to the stables and the garage, under the oaks, and onto the open lawn where it flattened out.

  Eve stepped into the lee of a clump of lilacs. They passed within ten yards of her. She could hear the murmur of their voices, but not what they said. It was her father, with Susan. No fence separated Susan’s place from theirs. Flat stones led to the brick terrace at the side of the cottage fronting on the brook. Susan unlocked the door and went in. Hugh followed and lights sprang up in the windows.

  Eve looked through one of them, into the portion of the living room that was visible. Susan had taken off her coat and was pulling off her hat. She tossed it to a table and turned to Hugh. He took both her hands in his and said something. Shame and distaste flooded Eve and she removed her gaze. When she looked again Susan was pulling down the living room shades and her father’s torch was a bobbing circle of brightness receding up the hill. Eve went round the lilac bushes on careful feet. Her father vanished from sight in the darkness and she settled down to wait. The cottage wasn’t too well constructed, the rooms were all on one floor and by listening at a window she was sure that she could hear whatever was said.

  She had been prepared for a long vigil; she had had no idea of how tedious waiting could be. In the first place, she was bitterly cold. In the second, as time went on and nothing happened, doubts began to assail her. It was true that Susan had talked to the man in the polo coat in the cemetery, true that she had tried to conceal her meeting with him—but suppose it was an innocent meeting, that Susan didn’t know he was the man lingering outside the house the night Charlotte died? He might even have no connection with the various things that had happened since: the unlatched window in the shop, the morphine that had been dropped into her cocktail. She gave her head a little shake. No. Just as before the scene in the cemetery she hadn’t believed implicitly in the possible guilt of the man lingering at the foot of the steps in the Square that night, now she couldn’t bring herself to believe in his innocence.

  Silence and blackness and the growing tinkle of snowflakes on dry leaves, the purr of water. She had no watch and no really accurate notion of the passage of time.

  Over and over again she analyzed the few words she had heard. “Surprised? You must have known I’d be interested.” Interested in what? In the burial of a woman who had been murdered? “I think we’d better have a talk, my friend—”

  There had been intimacy and a sort of silky threat in his tone, as though he and Susan understood each other without the necessity for many words. It occurred to Eve suddenly how little she knew of Susan, nothing, really—except that she had lived abroad with a cousin for years and had traveled a good deal and that the outbreak of hostilities had forced her back to the United States eighteen months before. “I’ll call you,” the man in the polo coat had said. Eve hadn’t heard him call—but it was obvious that Susan had come down here to her cottage so that she could see him alone.

  Pain and disillusionment mingled with Eve’s cold reflections. She had been very fond of Susan, had liked her better than any woman she had ever known, and she had thought that Susan was her friend. Well, think again, she told herself.

  What was that? Her heart hammered and she stood erect. Surely there had been a sound somewhere close to her in the darkness, a whisper of cloth or a footstep—or perhaps a coat brushing against branches. She stared into the blackness, trying to pierce it. She might just as well have been in a thick sack with the drawstrings tied. Except for a chink of light here and there inside the cottage off to her left, the darkness was absolute. She listened, turning her head from side to side. Sleet tinkled thinly and water ran—there was nothing else. But her nerves quivered and for the first time it occurred to her to be physically afraid. She was alone out here in the darkness and no one knew where she was. She had an almost overwhelming impulse to turn and run, up the slope and into the big white house, with its lights and people. Jim would be there, and Natalie—and Gerald. “Don’t be a fool,” she told herself furiously—and stiffened.

  She was on a stretch of turf perhaps a dozen yards back from the brook and facing it. The bridge was directly below and in front of her. Someone was coming toward it from the lane she had traversed earlier. The hinges of the gate creaked and a tiny circle of light spotted the gray planking. It was a man. He was whistling softly through his teeth. It was the man in the camel’s hair coat; there was a shimmer of pale cloth behind the light. Susan’s visitor had arrived.

  His torch swept the bridge experimentally, danced back. He stepped from between the alder bushes and out onto the planking, and came to a halt. He had stopped whistling. Eve stared fascinated. A funny thing happened. The torch he was carrying stood still too. Then it flew into the air in a wide arc and went out. At the same instant or perhaps the fraction of a second before, the sound came, very distinct and clear this time. It was a dull smack—exactly like the clean hit of a mid-iron lofting the ball in a two-hundred-yard drive over the fairway. But it wasn’t that...

  Weight crushed itself in under Eve’s ribs. She tried to breathe and couldn’t. Because there were other sounds. The man in the polo coat had fallen from the bridge down onto those jagged black rocks lining the channel. She heard him land, heard a muffled groan, then nothing—and then the footsteps.

  Someone was running up the slope toward her, from the bridge, running straight at her, straight for the spot on which she stood. Horror locked Eve’s muscles, her throat. It came unlocked. She opened her mouth to scream. The scream didn’t emerge. The blow stopped it, and the night and the darkness and her terror were blanked out as she fell headlong.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Eve didn’t completely lose consciousness, but the blow and the fall had stunned her, and it was three or four minutes before she came back to full awareness, to find h
erself sprawled on her side on the ground, in blackness. It was cold. Her knees and the palms of her hands were on fire and her head was ringing and a painful weight. She found her torch by accident and staggered to her feet.

  Her recollections of what immediately followed were always blurred. Someone had struck her and run away. She had a confused impression that she ought to try and find out who it was, that this was important. And there was the man in the polo coat. He was almost certainly hurt and she would have to get help. “Susan!” she shrieked, “Susan!” and was going herself across the lawn and was out on the bridge with her torch lit. She held it, shaking, on the blackness below and sobbed futilely. The man in the polo coat was there, lying face down in water and foam. His arms were thrown out above his head. There was blood on one of them. He didn’t move...

  “What is it...Who...where?” Captain Pierson had heard Eve scream. He was beside her on the bridge after a thundering dash down the hill. He looked where she was looking. He said “God,” and gaped, and swung round in the nick of time. Eve was swaying drunkenly. Her torch joined another one in the channel below the bridge and she collapsed against him, quietly, in a dead faint.

  “I tell you we were lucky we didn’t both go over. It was nip and tuck. Yep. For a minute there I thought we were both goners.” Pierson was indignant and outraged at the ordeal he had been through. He wiped his forehead at the memory and looked at the Inspector.

  The two men were in the spacious lamp-lit hall of the Flavell house at the end of Red Fox Road. It was a little after eight o’clock. Eve was upstairs in bed in the room to which she had been carried. The local doctor was with her. The others were in the living room with the door closed. The man who had fallen into the rock-strewn channel below the bridge was Edgar Bently, Susan De Sange’s cousin by marriage. Bently wasn’t dead. But his head had been injured, and in addition to a broken leg, a smashed elbow, three cracked ribs and possible internal damage, he had concussion. The ambulance had been summoned and he had been taken to the Norwalk Hospital. The surgeon who examined him had just phoned. He wasn’t prepared to say yet how bad the concussion was or what Bently’s chances of recovery were. It would take time to find out.

  McKee had arrived in Eastport an hour earlier. He was pacing the floor prowlingly, his hands in his pockets. When he didn’t answer, Pierson continued defensively, “It wasn’t my fault. How was I to keep an eye on all these people? Why, you’d need an army for that, a regular army...

  The Scotsman nodded. “It’s all right, Captain. You’re not to blame. If any one is, it’s Dwyer. He’s going to try for an indictment of Bruce Cunningham early next week. I should have come up here as soon as I found out Bently was in the neighborhood—but no, our estimable District Attorney had to have a detailed statement from me viva voce that consumed at least three hours. Exactly what happened after Miss Flavell fainted?”

  “Well, they all came running. Mrs. De Sange was first. She ran up here to this house and pretty soon they were all over the place.”

  “Did they seem surprised to see Eve Flavell?”

  “Surprise ain’t in it. They were dumbfounded. Particularly the big fellow, Jim Holland, and Natalie Flavell. She kept saying, ‘But Eve was going back to New York,’ and wringing her hands like she was half crazy. Holland went nuts, too. You going to talk to them some more?”

  “Not now,” McKee said. “Perhaps after I’ve seen Eve Flavell.” He turned.

  Doctor Newbold was coming down the stairs. Newbold was a thin middle-aged man with glasses and a shock of untidy gray hair. He knew the Flavells, had taken care of them when they were in Eastport during the summer, as his father had done before him. He said that Eve was better. She was a bit bunged up but there was nothing the matter with her that a couple of days wouldn’t cure. What she was suffering from principally was shock. “She’s anxious to see you, Inspector. I said I’d take you up.”

  Pierson remained at the door of the living room and McKee and the doctor mounted the stairs. Eve wasn’t in bed. She was on a chaise lounge in front of the wide windows in a big shadowy room with lemon-colored walls and chinoiserie hangings. The gay French chintz curtains were drawn across the windows and the lamps were lit. Pillows banked Eve’s head and shoulders. She turned toward her visitors as they came in, and flinched a little. Doctor New-bold said, “Easy does it. Don’t move around too much, Eve,” and to the Scotsman, “Don’t tire her any more than you have to. I’ll give her a sedative later.” He went out.

  Natalie and Alicia between them had undressed Eve and put her into white silk pajamas and a white negligee. A blue satin quilt was thrown over her knees. Her bandaged hands were linked loosely in front of her and there was a scratch down one pale cheek where it had come into contact with the ground. She told him quietly, looking into the depths of a mirror at shapes that weren’t there, everything that happened from the time of their arrival in Eastport until the man in the camel’s hair coat fell from the bridge at the foot of the hill.

  McKee listened intently, a hand shading his eyes. At the end Eve said, shivering, “I’ll never forgive myself, never. I should have told someone, that detective, about him, that he was coming here to see Susan.”

  “Yes,” McKee agreed, getting up and beginning to walk around the room. “It might have been better. On the other side of the ledger, your being down at the brook probably saved Bently from dying then and there. As it is, he has a chance.”

  Eve began to feel better. She had only grieved with the top of her mind for the man who had been smashed up on those terrible rocks. The real thing, the important thing, was that the attack on him cleared Bruce. Bruce had been at the inn when Bently was attacked. He hadn’t come over to the house until afterwards. He had come in to see her for a minute with Natalie. The doctor wouldn’t let them stay, wouldn’t let her answer questions. Bruce had given her one long smoldering glance, with derision in it, and bitterness and anger and a glint of mocking humor. He had been unusually tender and loverlike with Natalie. That was the way it should be, Eve told herself and twisted away from flames and got back on safe ground and said aloud, “It means, doesn’t it, Inspector, that Bruce isn’t guilty, that he didn’t kill Charlotte?”

  The Scotsman paused and looked down at her lovely luminous face. Cunningham’s whereabouts at the time of the Bently attack was the first thing he had checked. “Unless Bently’s fall was an accident,” he answered. “No, wait a minute, I don’t think it was. I think it was meant to look that way.”

  Much of what had happened, factually, was clear to him from Eve’s story. The telephone in the cottage was disconnected. Edgar Bently had called Susan De Sange, here in this house, at around a quarter of six. He had talked to her and she had repeated the brief interchange between herself and Bently with the blank irresponsiveness of complete nervous exhaustion. “Edgar said he wanted to see me. I said all right. He said there was someone watching the main gate and I told him to come by the bridge across the brook.”

  “Why did he want to avoid being seen, Mrs. De Sange?” A shrug. “Edgar was—devious.”

  “Was a time for his visit mentioned?”

  “Yes. It was a quarter of six then. He said he’d be along in about three-quarters of an hour.”

  “Did he tell you what he wanted to see you about—or did you know in advance?”

  “I—didn’t know.”

  Bently had been punctual. Someone had been waiting for him in the shelter of the bushes that masked the entrance to the footbridge, armed with a weapon, a golf club, a length of pipe or a club of some sort. He was silhouetted against torchlight, made an excellent target. The question was not how the attack had been made, but by whom and why.

  The why was the easier. Bently had been outside the Flavell house on the night Charlotte was killed, he had been in the restaurant on 52nd Street when the box of morphine tablets was thrown to the floor under the table; he had obviously seen something that made him a danger. But there was more to his activities than that. McKee
told Eve that on Wednesday morning, the morning of the day Charlotte died, Bently had taken a room in a hotel on the south side of the Square. “He was in the park that afternoon, he was watching the house, he was also watching Mrs. De Sange....”

  Eve’s hands gripped folds of blue satin and she closed her eyes. “Then you think it was Susan who...?”

  “I don’t know, I’m sure. There’s—this.” There was a little ping as the Scotsman’s thumb nail flicked the edge of the telephone on a small table near the chaise lounge. “Mrs. De Sange took Bently’s call in the library downstairs, but there are three extensions in the house, this one here in Miss Flavell’s bedroom, one in your father’s room and one at the end of the hall. Any number of people could have listened in on Bently’s call to Mrs. De Sange.”

  The clock ticked and the fire purred. Outside snow fell. Eve lay very still. It was Bruce’s life or her father’s or Natalie’s or Gerald’s or Jim’s, she thought desperately. It mustn’t be Bruce, it mustn’t be Natalie or Gerald, or her father. It wasn’t of course. They hadn’t touched that man. But the thought of the others, of Jim or Susan or Alicia in such a connection, was equally absurd...“Can’t you find out,” she said in a low voice, “where they all were when that man was hit?”

  McKee’s smile was thin. “This is a big house. Bently was attacked at around half-past six. The people here, your father and your half-sister, your brother, his wife and Mr. Holland, were in their rooms, getting ready for dinner, which was to be at seven. Mrs. De Sange was, she says, inside her cottage at the foot of the hill.”

  Eve’s face went blank. “Did you talk to Susan, Inspector?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “What did she say? Why did she try to conceal from me that she knew Mr. Bently? Why did she pretend, like that, in the cemetery?”