“I think he’s had a rotten deal,” she said. “From all of us. A bit of allowance from father, and now I’m not to see him!”
“But you are going to see him,” I told her. “You’re going to see him tonight. He wants to look over an old ormolu cabinet Laura has sent me.”
She forgot her irritation in her delight.
“Lovely! Has it got any secret drawers? I adore looking for secret drawers,” she said, and went on eating a substantial meal. These young things, with their slender waists and healthy appetites!
She had already rushed up to the third floor to greet Sarah, and while we were eating I heard Sarah on the way down. This was nothing unusual. She would go out sometimes at night, either to the movies or to take Jock and Isabel for a walk, and I could sit at my place at the table and watch her coming down the stairs. The fireplace in the music room is set at an angle, and in the mirror over it I would see Sarah; first her soft-soled low-heeled shoes, then the bottom of her white skirt, and then her gray coat, until finally all of Sarah emerged into view.
This evening however I saw that she had taken off her uniform, and I called to her.
“Going to the movies, Sarah?”
“No.” She had no small amenities of speech.
“Don’t you want the dogs? They haven’t been out today.”
She seemed to hesitate. I could see her in the mirror, and I surprised an odd expression on her face. Then the dogs themselves discovered her and began to leap about her.
“Do take them, Sarah,” Judy called.
“I suppose I can,” she agreed rather grudgingly. “What time is it?”
Judy looked at her wrist watch and told her.
“And do behave yourself, Sarah!” she called.
But Sarah did not answer. She snapped the leashes on the dogs and went out. That was at five minutes after seven. She went out and never came back.
Judy and I loitered over the meal, or rather I loitered; Judy ate and answered the telephone. One call was from a youth named Dick, and there was a subtle change in Judy’s voice which made me suspicious. Another, however, she answered coldly.
“I don’t see why,” she said. “She knew quite well where I was going … Well, I’m all right. If I want to go wrong I don’t need to come here to do it … No, she’s gone out.”
I have recorded this conversation because it became highly important later on. To the best of my knowledge it came soon after Sarah left; at seven-fifteen or thereabouts.
Judy came back to the table with her head in the air.
“Uncle Jim,” she said. “Wouldn’t you know mother would sic him on me? The old goose!”
By which she referred not to Katherine, but to Katherine’s brother, Jim Blake. Judy had chosen to affect a dislike for him, not because of any inherent qualities in Jim himself, but because Katherine was apt to make him her agent when Judy visited me.
Personally I was fond of Jim, perhaps because he paid me the small attentions a woman of my age finds gratifying, and certainly Katherine adored him.
“He asked for Sarah, but I told him she had gone out. What in the world does he want with Sarah?”
“He may have had some message from your mother for her.”
“Probably to keep an eye on me,” said Judy, drily.
I think all this is accurate. So many things happened that evening that I find it difficult to go back to that quiet meal. Quiet, that is, up to the time when Joseph brought in our coffee.
I know we discussed Jim, Judy and I, and Judy with the contempt of her youth for the man in his late forties who takes no active part in the world. Yet Jim had organized his life as best he could. He was a bachelor, who went everywhere for a reason which I surmised but Judy could not understand; the fear of the lonely of being alone.
“Uncle Jim and his parties!” said Judy. “How in the world does he pay for them?”
“He has a little from his mother.”
“And more probably from my mother!”
Well, that might have been, so I said nothing, and as money meant nothing in Judy’s lavish young life she was immediately cheerful again.
It is hard to remember Jim as he was in those days; as he must have been when he left his house that night. A tall man, still very erect, and with graying hair carefully brushed to hide its thinness, he was always urbane and well dressed. He was popular too. He had never let business, which in his case was a dilettante interest in real estate, interfere with a golf game or bridge, and by way of keeping up his social end he gave innumerable little tea parties and dinners. He had a colored servant named Amos who was a quick change artist, and so people dined with Jim on food cooked by Amos, to be served by Amos in a dinner jacket, and then went outside to find Amos in a uniform and puttees, standing by the car with the rug neatly folded over his arm.
There are some people to whom all colored men look alike, and to these no doubt Jim Blake appeared to be served by a retinue of servants.
“The Deb’s delight!” was Judy’s closing and scathing comment, and then Joseph brought in the coffee.
That was, according to Joseph’s statement to the police and later before the Grand Jury, at seven-thirty or seven-thirty-five.
Judy had lighted a cigarette. I remember thinking how pretty she looked in the candle light, and how the house brightened when she was there. Joseph was moving about the pantry, and in the silence I could hear distant voices from the servants’ hall beyond the kitchen.
Judy had lapsed into silence. The initial excitement of her arrival was over, and I thought now that she looked dispirited and rather tired. Then I happened to raise my eyes, and they fell on the mirror.
There was a man on the staircase.
Chapter Three
HE SEEMED TO BE crouching there. I could see only his legs, in darkish trousers, and he had no idea that I could see him at all. He was apparently listening, listening and calculating. Should he make a dash to get out, or retreat? The door from the dining room to the hall was wide open. I would surely see him; was it worth the trying?
Evidently he decided that it was not, for without turning he backed soundlessly up the stairs.
“Judy,” I said quietly. “Don’t move or raise your voice. There’s a burglar upstairs. I’ve just seen him.”
“What shall I do? I can close the library door and call the police.”
“Do that, then, and I’ll tell Joseph. He can’t get out by the back stairs without going through the kitchen, and the servants would see him.”
I rang for Joseph, feeling calm and rather pleased at my calmness. Such few jewels as I keep out of the bank were on me, and if he wanted my gold toilet set he was welcome. It was insured. But while I waited for Joseph I took off my rings and dropped them into the flower vase on the table.
Joseph took the news quietly. He said that Robert was still in the garage, and that he would station him at the foot of the back stairs, but that to wait for the police was nonsense.
“He’d jump out a window, madam. But if I go up, as though I didn’t know he was about, I might surprise him.”
“You’re not armed.”
“I have a revolver in the pantry, madam.”
That did not surprise me. There had been some burglaries in the neighborhood recently—I believe the bootlegger had had the tables turned on him, a matter which I considered a sort of poetic justice—and I stood in the doorway watching the stairs until Joseph reappeared.
“If he gets past me,” he said, “stand out of his way, madam. These cat burglars are dangerous.”
He went up the front staircase, leaving me in the lower hall. I could hear Judy at the telephone, patiently explaining in a low voice, and I could hear Joseph overhead, moving about systematically: the second floor, the third, opening room doors and closet doors, moving with his dignified unhurried tread, but doing the thing thoroughly.
He was still moving majestically along the third floor hall when I heard a slight noise near at hand. I could neither de
scribe it nor locate it. Something fairly near me had made a sound, a small sharp report. It appeared to have come from the back hallway, where there is a small lavatory. When Judy emerged I told her, and against my protests she marched back and threw open the door.
It was quite empty and soon after Joseph came down to say that he had found nobody, but that some one might be hiding on the roof, and as by that time a policeman had arrived on a motorcycle, I sent him out to look.
The officer inside and Joseph out, it seemed scarcely credible that we found nobody. But our burglar had gone; without booty too, as it turned out, for my toilet things were undisturbed.
I think the officer was rather amused than otherwise. Judy saw him out.
“If you’re ever in trouble again, Miss, just send for me,” he said gallantly.
“I’m always in trouble,” said Judy.
“Now is that so? What sort of trouble?”
“Policemen,” said Judy pleasantly, and closed the door on him.
Looking back, it seems strange how light-hearted we were that night. That loneliness which is my usual lot had gone with Judy’s arrival, and when Wallie arrived at eight-thirty he found Judy insisting on my smoking a cigarette.
“You’re shaken, Elizabeth Jane,” she was saying. “You know darn well you’re shaken.”
“Shaken? About what?” said Wallie from the hall.
“She’s had a burglar, poor dear,” Judy explained. “A burglar in dark trousers, crouched on the staircase.”
“On the stairs? Do you mean you saw him?”
“She saw his legs.”
“And that’s all?”
“That’s enough, isn’t it? The rest of him was sure to be around somewhere. The said legs then ceased crouching and went upstairs. After that they vanished.”
He said nothing more, but walked back into the dining room and surveyed the mirror.
“That’s a tricky arrangement you have there, Elizabeth Jane,” he called. He had adopted Judy’s habit. “Go up the stairs, Judy, and let me see your legs.”
“Don’t be shameless!” she said. “How’s this?”
“All right. Yes, I see them, and very nice ones they are at that.”
When he came forward again Judy insisted on examining the stair rail for fingerprints, although Wallie said that it was nonsense; that all criminals wore gloves nowadays, and that with the increasing crime wave the glove factories were running night shifts. But she departed for a candle nevertheless, and Wallie glanced up the staircase.
“Rather a blow for the divine Sarah, eh what?” he said.
“Sarah is out, fortunately. She took the dogs.”
It struck me, as he stood there in the full light over his head, that he was looking even thinner then usual, and very worn. He had much of his mother’s beauty, if one dare speak of beauty in a man, but he had also inherited her high-strung nervous temperament. The war must have been hell for him, for he never spoke of it. I have noticed that the men who really fought and really suffered have very little to say about it; whether because they cannot bear to recall it or because most of them are inarticulate I do not know.
While we stood there I told him about the sound I had heard, and he went back to the lavatory and looked up.
This lavatory is merely a small washroom opening from the rear portion of the hall, and lighted by an opaque glass ceiling, in the center of which a glass transom opens by a cord for ventilation. The shaft above is rather like an elevator well, and light enters through a skylight in the roof.
Onto this well there is only one opening and this the window to the housemaid’s closet on the third floor. As during the tornado of 1893 the entire skylight frame and all had been lifted and dropped end-on into the shaft, crashing through the glass roof below, my father had had placed across it some iron bars. These, four in number, were firmly embedded in the walls about six feet below the window sill.
“I suppose nobody has examined the shaft?”
“I really don’t know. Probably not.”
He continued to gaze upward.
“He might have swung into the shaft, and stood on the bars.”
“Provided he knew there were bars there,” I said drily.
Suddenly he turned and shot up the stairs, and a moment later he was calling from the third floor.
“Get a ladder, somebody. There’s something on top of that skylight down there.”
“You mean—the man himself?”
He laughed at that.
“He’d have gone through the glass like a load of coal! No. Something small. I can see it against the light beneath.”
He ran down, rushed into the library for matches, and when Robert had brought a ladder from the garage and placed it in the lavatory, he was on it and halfway through the transom in an instant.
We stood huddled in the door, Judy still holding the candle, and I—for some unknown reason—with a lighted cigarette in my hand which some one had thrust on me, and Robert and Joseph behind.
I don’t know what I had expected, but I know that I felt a shock of disappointment when Wallie said:
“Hello! Here it is. A pencil!”
He found nothing else, and came down in a moment looking dirty and rather the worse for wear, but extremely pleased with himself.
“A pencil!” he said exultantly. “Now how about it? Will Scotland Yard send for me or will it not? That’s what you heard, you see.”
But Judy only took one glance at it.
“Possibly,” she said. “Still, as it’s the sort Elizabeth Jane uses herself, with the point looking as though she’d sharpened it with her teeth, I see nothing to write home about.”
That annoyed him.
“All right,” he told her. “We’ll see. It may have fingerprints.”
“I thought you’d decided he wore gloves! Why don’t you try to find how he got in? That’s more to the point. And also how he got out?”
It seems strange to be writing all this; the amiable bickering between Wallie and Judy; the light-hearted experiment to find if a pencil dropped from the third floor made the sound I had heard, and my own feeling that it did not; and the final discovery of the shattered pane in the rear French door of the drawing room, and our failure to see, lying on the step outside, that broken point of a penknife which Inspector Harrison was to find the next morning.
Strange, almost frivolous.
It was Judy who found the broken pane, hidden as it was behind the casement curtains on the door, and who pointed out the ease with which our intruder had reached in and turned the key. There is another door at the back of the drawing room, a sort of service entrance which opens into the rear hall beside the servants’ staircase, and it was evident that he had used this to gain access to the upper floors.
“Easy enough,” said Judy. “But he couldn’t get out that way. Clara was coming down to her dinner, so he hid on the front stairs.”
“And I suppose he was not in the light shaft at all?” Wallie demanded.
“I don’t say he wasn’t,” said my surprising Judy. “I only say that the pencil is not proved. I think it very likely he did hide in the shaft. He’d retreated before Joseph as far as he could go.”
“But what did he want?” I demanded. “I don’t suppose he broke in here to drop a pencil. If he was coming down when I saw him—”
“Well, he might have been going up,” said Judy practically. “A good burglar might start at the top and work down. Like housecleaning.”
Wallie had sealed the pencil in an envelope for the police, and I daresay all of this had not taken much more than half an hour. It must have been at nine o’clock or thereabouts, then, that I sent the maids to their beds and watched them as they made a nervous half-hysterical start, and nine-thirty before Joseph and Wallie had placed a padlock on the broken door in the drawing room. Then I ordered Joseph to bed, but he objected.
“Miss Sarah has not come in.”
“She has a key, Joseph.”
But
I was uneasy. In the excitement I had forgotten Sarah.
Wallie looked up sharply from the door.
“Sarah!” he said. “Is she still out?”
“Yes. And she has the dogs. Where could she stay until this hour with two dogs? She has no friends.”
I left Wallie and Judy in the drawing room, and wandered out and down the steps. It was a cold night, without a moon but with plenty of starlight, and I walked down the drive. I remembered that as I walked I whistled for the dogs. Sometimes she loosened them and they preceded her home.
It seemed to me that I heard a dog barking far off somewhere, but that was all.
I was vaguely inclined to walk in that direction. The dog seemed to be at the far end of the Larimer lot or beyond it, in the park. But at the gate I met Mary Martin, hurrying home. She had been out somewhere for dinner, and she was slightly sulky; it was a continued grievance with her that Sarah had a key to the house and she had none, but I have an old-fashioned sense of responsibility to the people in my employ, and Mary was a still young and very pretty girl.
On the way to the house I told her about our burglar, and she relaxed somewhat.
“I don’t think you should be out here alone,” she said. “He may still be about.”
“I was looking for Sarah,” I explained. “She’s out with the dogs, and it’s getting late.”
To my intense surprise she stopped perfectly still.
“When did she go out?” she said sharply.
“At seven. That’s almost three hours.”
She moved on again, but in silence. The front door was open, and in the light from it I thought she looked rather pale. At that moment however Wallie appeared in the doorway, and suddenly she brightened.
“I wouldn’t worry, Miss Bell. She can take care of herself. And she has a key!”
She glanced at me rather pertly, favored Wallie with a smile as she went in, greeting Judy with considerable manner—she seemed always to be afraid that Judy might patronize her—and teetered up the stairs on the high heels she affected.
Wallie gazed after her as she went up. At the turn she paused. I saw her looking down at us intently, at Judy, at myself, at Wallie. Mostly at Wallie.
The Door Page 2
