Don't Open the Door

by Ursula Curtis

  There seemed to be no passage of time involved in this voiceless discussion, only Eve’s dangerously heavy heartbeats before she recognized a new sound, this one brisk, open, announcing itself clearly as someone approaching her door and knocking. “Miss Quinn? It’s me—Ned Saxon.”

  Eve drew in her breath with a tremble of relief, took two steps toward the door, checked herself. Ned Saxon—or someone imitating his voice, someone who knew she would trust him? Jennifer Morley had opened her door without fear, and never reentered it again. She stood paralyzed, still gripping her book as though it represented safety, aware that to be known to be at bay was perhaps the most perilous thing of all.

  The knock was repeated. The familiar voice said with sharpness, “Miss Quinn? Everything all right in there?”

  It was unmistakably Iris’s husband—no tongue, however malevolent, could be that clever—and Eve called, “Yes, I’m coming,” while she slid back the bolt and twisted the lock and switched on the outside light. Even then she felt a last-minute twinge of fear (this is what idiots do) but when she had the door open it really was Ned Saxon, the radiance showering down on his creamy-orange head.

  20

  HE was holding out her driving gloves, smiling apologetically but at the same time glancing curiously into the room behind her as if he wondered why, fully dressed as she was, she had been so long in answering his knock. He said, “Sorry to bother you, but Iris got these mixed up with hers by mistake and thought you’d be wanting them tomorrow.”

  “Oh, thanks very much. You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble, but I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” said Eve in a tumble, taking the gloves without a glance. “I heard the funniest sound outside, and I suppose I was nervous after Iris telephoned, and I was imagining all kinds of things.”

  Ned Saxon swung sharply away from her and started out into the dark. Even his back looked furiously alert. Eve went on, voluble in her own release from tension, “It’s nice to know you met two police cars in this area, but it would be even nicer to know they weren’t needed.”

  The blue gaze returned to her face, looking blind—but that was reaction to the light. Then, “Yes,” said Ned with sudden briskness . . . “If you have a flashlight I’ll just take a look around for you while I’m here.”

  His very bulk was reassuring, Eve thought, watching him move away behind the carving gold. She was already beginning to feel a little embarrassed at her own extreme reaction to what had been in all probability a stone sailed idly over the wall; there were people to whom walls presented an automatic challenge. Still, it was pleasant to know that Ned Saxon was out there, even—on the still air she heard the click of the padlock—checking the tool shed.

  It seemed thankless to close the door entirely in spite of the penetrating cold. Eve left it a few inches open and was in her bedroom collecting a sweater when Ned Saxon’s call reached her: “Miss Quinn? Better come out and see what they’ve done to your car.”

  What they’ve done—it sounded far more frightening than any amount of mere mechanical damage. Eve snatched up her coat instead, ran out into the guiding path of the flashlight slanting through the open gate. This was no casual malice; someone had meant to immobilize her tonight, and it was only the merest chance, through the accident of a pair of gloves, that there was another car here, to take her and Ambrose—

  But there wasn’t another car. Eve’s stood alone in the driveway. Then how had Ned Saxon . . . ?

  Her feet were still carrying her mechanically around the hood of the car, apparently undamaged on the near side; her brain, because of her bewilderment, made much slower progress. It informed her only now that, straining as she had been for any sound after that earthy thud, she had heard nothing until, a few seconds later, Ned’s brisk approach by foot. How odd that he hadn’t heard the sound too, in the total stillness of the night.

  How much odder that Iris, saying with such intensity, “Don’t open the door to anyone,” should not have added, “except Ned, he’s on his way with your gloves.”

  Which Eve could have sworn she had left on the front seat of her car.

  Late, too late, she glanced incredulously up from her right front tire at the face lit from below, and saw what Molly Pulliam and Jennifer Morley had seen in the last seconds before they died.

  She thought at first that the blinding light was an explosion of pain inside her head from the glancing blow he had struck her with some heavy metal object—glancing because she had had that infinitesimal warning. But the light was accompanied by an enormous heavy roar that drowned out the voice full of loathing and unimaginable invective, threaded through with, “All the same, every one of you, all the same,” while her face ground with bleeding impact into dirt and stones.

  In absolute terror, mindlessly abject with pain, she had a brief delirious dream of Henry Conlon’s shoes, and a strange dream about her cousin Celia’s husband, whose name escaped her. “Take care of her,” a voice said—well, someone should. She turned her head querulously on the dirt and stones, and gazed at the dizzying perforations of a soundproofed hospital ceiling.

  In the day and a half lost forever out of her life, Eve said tremblingly at some point, “I can’t— I don’t . . and there was a soothing professional voice there at once. “Yes, you can, Miss Quinn. Now give me your right hand . . . now your left. There, you see?”

  They had no notion of what she meant, and with severe concussion and seventeen stitches taken in the right side of her head Eve could not explain the special horror of such hatred and purpose in another human face. Was it possible ever again to trust a casual connection to whom she had been unaware of doing harm? How, in the future, survive in any kind of personal world?

  Nina Earl sent flowers, and Cox-Ivanhoe came up handsomely with dark red roses. Henry Conlon, who had flickered unevenly in and out of Eve’s consciousness, brought Scotch, and said, “Don’t worry, I asked your doctor and he said it was perfectly all right. I’m not likely to want to do away with you at this stage.”

  This stage? Eve turned her head dizzily, caught a tag end of memory, said, “If you came to tell me . . . I don’t have to know, really. I’d rather not.”

  “That was the mistake Jennifer made,” said Henry with force, and told her.

  It was all so simple—but so was a grain of sand that occasionally ended up in an astonishing growth, or a harmless snowball which, unimpeded, could grow to crushing proportions. It had its beginnings in a practical joke played by the then Molly Vane, aged seventeen, on a vindictive and neurotic housemother at the Lockwood. School.

  He gathered, said Henry, that Mrs. Marguerite Sellers ought never to have held that position at a girls’ school; she was, to put it at its simplest, jealous of her pretty and carefree charges. She had been especially harsh with Molly, who had retaliated with the inventive but innocent cruelty of her age by arranging to have an older friend, handsome in his Air Force uniform, take Mrs. Sellers to an inn on the pretext of wishing to enroll his younger sister in the school, ply her with flattery and stunning amounts of sherry, and return her to the dormitory thoroughly, maudlinly drunk.

  It was Easter vacation and the school was almost empty, but Mrs. Sellers’ imagination must have peopled it with laughing, ridiculing faces. At any rate, three days later she had done what had in all probability been at the back of her mind for some time—and she had written a note blaming Molly Vane.

  Jennifer, who was working in the office to help with Molly’s fees, was horrified when she found out, belatedly, what her sister had done. She had gone to apologize, and found the dead woman and the indictment of Molly. Instinctively, because it seemed monstrous that the death of an emotionally unstable person should be placed at the door of a young girl who had intended only mischief, she destroyed the note. Then, frantic with worry about the possible consequences of her own action, she told Henry Conlon, whom she had known all her life, and no one else.

  Mrs. Sellers’ only relative, a much younger and dis
tant cousin named Richard Morley, turned up to make the funeral arrangements. By the time when the attraction between him and Jennifer Vane was absolute, it was much too late to say, “Oh, by the way, your cousin blamed my sister for her suicide, but I tore up the note . . It grew more impossible with every passing year; Richard Morley, tense, possessive, would argue to himself, not illogically, “If she could have kept this from me, what else has she concealed?”

  It was the newspaper coverage of Molly’s murder which brought the typed and anonymous note that had sent Jennifer into a panic. It said, “Maybe someone else knew the truth about Marguerite Sellers.”

  “The door of the woman’s room was unlocked,” said Henry, getting up to peer out at the hospital’s deserted sun deck, “and Jennifer always knew it was a possibility that another person had read the note before she did and kept quiet about it simply in order not to get involved. Well, somebody obviously had, and for the whole business to come out now—Molly’s trick in the first place, Jennifer’s destroying the evidence, Jennifer married to the cousin . . .” He gave Eve a straight clear glance. “She’d gone to such pains about keeping it quiet that it was like an orphan child handed on. I felt—responsible.”

  “So you were off finding out who— ”

  “Yes, and it wasn’t hard at all except that Jennifer could hardly have undertaken it. After we eliminated you,” said Henry, smiling wryly down at Eve, “Jennifer remembered a girl in Molly’s dormitory who just might have had a younger sister visiting—that was allowed over vacation. And she did, and I found her, and she hadn’t meant the note as a threat at all but as a possible help. She didn’t sign her name because her husband is an extremely important figure in Albuquerque and she’s currently a voluntary patient at a very nice plush place for alcoholics. They have children. I couldn’t see,” said Henry, “that bringing all this to light would do anybody any good. But I had to make sure there was no connection . . .”

  A nurse came in with a pill for Eve, smiled at Henry, and left. Better get it over with, thought Eve, drowsy even before the medication. She still couldn’t move her head with any suddenness, but she glanced obliquely at the morning newspaper; the evening paper had not yet come. “Is Ned Saxon—?”

  She knew most of it by now: that Clara Ivanhoe, problematical as never before, had had to be escorted away from the awards dinner very early by Henry; that Henry’s headlights had come wheeling onto the scene of Eve’s apparently dead face being slammed into the ground by Ned Saxon; that Saxon had fled to what turned out to be a car from a used-car lot and driven it with tremendous force, and certain intent, into a huge cottonwood at what was known appropriately as Dead Man’s Corner. Somehow, until this morning, he had survived a depressed fracture of the skull and other injuries.

  “He died this afternoon,” said Henry, voice quiet and face hard. “His wife won’t admit that she suspected him, but I think she must have, and for heaven’s sake don’t worry about her, something can be done. . .

  How many enemies were there, really; how many private executioners of people who did not even know that they had transgressed? On the other hand, how many people like Henry, as safe as a vault, as thoughtful of the reputation of a woman seeking help? There was probably a balance on the right side, there must be . . .

  “You’re asleep,” said Henry’s voice from a great distance.

  “No, I’m not. I was just thinking—don’t go away yet, because I was just . . .” mumbled Eve, and was kissed, very gently, and slept.

  THE END