“If she took that piece of rope, it was not to tie the dogs up; I can assure you of that. She had not expected to take them. I don’t think she wanted to take them. And as for this man on the stairs,” I went on, rather tartly, “you tell me that that was Sarah Gittings, who had left the house only a half hour before, and who could get in at any time! I am to believe that Sarah went to that empty lot, tied up the dogs, put on a pair of dark trousers, broke her way in through the drawing room door, and deliberately let me see her on the staircase! Remember, she knew about that mirror.”
“But that’s where the man in the case comes in,” said Judy, maliciously. “Sarah’s lover. He met her at the lot and found she’d forgotten her toothbrush. Naturally, he refused to elope with her without her toothbrush. It’s all perfectly simple.”
Mr. Harrison smiled. “Still,” he said, rising, “she did take the rope. And now we’ll look at that broken door.”
But with the peculiar irony of events which was to handicap all of us through the entire series of crimes, all traces of footprints in the ground near the steps—there is no walk there—had already been obliterated. The rain was over, and Abner Jones had commenced his spring cleaning up of the lawns and had carefully raked away any possible signs.
Nevertheless, Judy maintained that Mr. Harrison had found something on the steps.
“When he stooped over to tie his shoe,” she said, “he stooped and picked up something very small and shiny. It looked like the point of a knife.”
By noon there was still no news of Sarah. All reports had been negative, and I believe that the Inspector found no further clues. Judy reported once that he and the officer in uniform were going through the trash barrel in the service yard and taking out the glass from the broken window. But the rain must have washed it fairly clean. Clara had been told to put Sarah’s room in order again, but when that had been done Inspector Harrison advised me to lock it and keep the key.
He left us at noon. It was raining hard, but some time later I saw him, in a dripping mackintosh, moving slowly around in the Larimer property. When I looked out again, an hour later, he was still there, but he seemed to have exchanged his soft hat for a cap.
It was not until the figure had disappeared over the hillside that I decided that it was not the Inspector, but some one else.
Chapter Five
THE VAST MAJORITY OF crimes, I believe, are never solved by any single method or any single individual. Complex crimes, I mean, without distinct clues and obvious motives.
Certainly in the case of Sarah Gittings, and in those which followed it, the final solution was a combination of luck and—curiously enough—the temporary physical disability of one individual.
And I am filled with shuddering horror when I think where we all might be but for this last.
That day, Tuesday, dragged on interminably. I could do no work on the biography, and Mary Martin was shut up in her room with a novel. The servants were uneasy and even the dogs seemed dejected; Joseph puttered about, looking aged and careworn, and the maids seemed to drink endless tea in the kitchen and to be reluctant to go upstairs.
At three o’clock, Jim not having arrived and Judy being out with the dogs, I decided to call Katherine once more. It seemed to me that she might have a clue of some sort. She knew Sarah better than any of us, and I felt that at least she should be told.
But all I obtained from her was a thorough scolding for harboring Judy.
“Well!” she said when she heard my voice. “It’s about time! You tell Judy to come right home. It’s outrageous, Elizabeth.”
“What is outrageous?” I asked.
“Her chasing that idiotic youth. Now listen, Elizabeth; I want you to keep him out of the house. It’s the very least you can do, if she won’t come home.”
“I haven’t seen any youth yet,” I explained mildly. “And I’m not worrying about Judy. I have something else to worry about.”
Her voice was shrill when I told her.
“Missing?” she said. “Sarah missing! Haven’t you any idea where she is?”
“None, except that I’m afraid it’s serious. The police are working on it.”
“Maybe I’d better come down.”
I checked that at once. Katherine is an intense, repressed woman, who can be exceedingly charming, but who can also be exceedingly stubborn at times. As that stubbornness of hers was to work for us later on I must not decry it, but I did not want her then.
“You can’t do anything,” I said. “And Howard probably needs you. Judy says he’s not so well.”
“No,” she said slowly. “No. He’s not as well as he ought to be.”
She said nothing more about coming down, but insisted that I see Jim at once.
“He was fond of Sarah,” she said, “and he really has such a good mind. I know he will help you.”
She had no other suggestions to make, however. Sarah had no family, she was certain of that. Her great fear seemed to be that she had been struck by an automobile, and as that was mild compared with what I was beginning to think I allowed it to rest at that.
I had made no promise as to Judy, which was as well, for when she came back she was accompanied by a cheerful looking blond youth who was evidently the one in question, and who was presented to me only as Dick.
“This is Dick,” was what Judy said. “And he is a nice person, of poor but honest parents.”
Dick merely grinned at that; he seemed to know Judy, and almost before I knew it he and I were standing in the lower hall, and Judy was dropping lead pencils down the airshaft.
“Does that sound like it, Elizabeth Jane?” she would call to me at the top of her voice. “Or this?”
To save my life I could not tell. They seemed to be less sharp, less distinct, but I was not certain. Indeed, when Mr. Carter, for that turned out to be the youth’s family name, tapped with his penknife on the marble mantel in the drawing room, the effect seemed rather more like what I had heard.
“That for Wallie!” said Judy, coming down. “That pencil’s probably been there for ages. I’d like to see his face when he finds six more there! And now let’s have tea.”
I liked the boy. Indeed, I wondered what Katherine could have against him. Poverty, perhaps; but then Judy would have enough and to spare when Howard died. And Howard had already had one attack of angina pectoris that I knew of, and others possibly which he had concealed.
Judy was clearly very much in love. Indeed, I felt that she could hardly keep her hands off the boy; that she wanted to touch his sleeve or rumple his hair; and that he, more shyly, less sure of himself, was quite desperately in love with her.
But he was business-like enough about the case. He wanted the story, or such part of it as he might have.
“It will leak out somehow,” he said. “Probably Harrison will give it out himself; they’ll give out something, anyhow. Somebody may have seen her, you know. A lot of missing people are turned up that way.”
We were still arguing the matter, Judy taking Dick’s side of it, of course, when Jim Blake came in.
I can recall that scene now; the tap-tap of the glazier’s hammer as he repaired the broken pane in the drawing room, the lowered voices of Judy and Dick from the music room, whither they had retired with alacrity after Judy had dutifully kissed her uncle, and Jim Blake himself, sitting neatly in his chair, pale gray spats, gray tie, gray bordered silk handkerchief, and hair brushed neatly over his bald spot, explaining that he had felt ill that morning or he would have come earlier.
“Just the old trouble,” he said, and I noticed that he mopped his forehead. “This wet weather—”
Some years ago he had been thrown from a borrowed hunter and had sprained his back. Judy had always maintained that his frequent retirements to his bed as a result were what she called “too much food and drink.” But that day he looked really ill.
“Tell me about Sarah,” he said, and lighted a cigar with hands that I thought were none too steady. He did no
t interrupt me until I had finished.
“You’ve had the police, you say?”
“I have indeed. What else could I do?”
“Katherine doesn’t want it to get into the newspapers.”
“Why not? There’s no family disgrace in it, is there? That’s idiotic.”
He took out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead again.
“It’s queer, any way you take it. You say Wallie was here last night? What does he think?”
“He seems to think it’s mighty important to find her. As of course it is.”
“And she’d tied the dogs to a tree? That’s curious. Just where did you say they were?”
He sat silent for some time after that. Judy was banging the piano in the next room, and the noise seemed to bother him.
“Infernal din!” he said querulously. And after a pause: “How is Howard? What does Judy think about him?”
“I don’t believe she knows very much. He’s a secretive person; Katherine is worried, I know that.”
He seemed to ponder that, turning his cigar in his long, well-kept fingers.
“This girl who telephoned, this Florence, she hasn’t been identified yet? They haven’t traced the call?”
“Not so far as I know.”
Asked later on to recall Jim Blake’s attitude that day, if it was that of an uneasy man, I was obliged to say that it was. Yet at the time it did not occur to me. He was an orderly soul, his life tidily and comfortably arranged, and what I felt then was that this thing with its potentialities of evil had disturbed him, his small plans, possibly for that very afternoon, the cheerful routine of his days.
“I suppose they’ve searched the lot next door, and the park?”
“Inspector Harrison has been over it.”
He sat for some time after that, apparently thoughtful. I realize now that he was carefully framing his next question.
“Elizabeth,” he said, “when was Howard here last? Has he been here recently?”
“Howard? Not for months.”
“You’re sure of that, I suppose?”
“He hasn’t been able to get about, Jim. You know that.”
He looked at me with eyes that even then seemed sunken, and drew a long breath.
“I suppose that’s so,” he said, and lapsed into silence.
There was, at the time, only one result to that visit of Jim Blake’s. I called Dick in and told him and Judy Katherine’s desire for secrecy.
“Trust mother!” said Judy. “Keep in the society columns and out of the news!”
But the story was suppressed. Not until Sarah’s body was found, four days later, was there any publicity.
The discovery of the body was one of those sheer chances to which I have referred. Without any possible motive for her killing, the police still believed it possible that she had deliberately disappeared. But, as Judy pointed out, there was as little known reason for such a disappearance as for her murder.
And then on the Saturday of that week she was found, poor soul.
I have no distinct memories of those four days of nightmare, save of the increasing certainty of disaster, of Katherine’s and Laura’s frenzied suggestions by telephone and wire, of Judy’s forced cheerfulness, and a queer sort of desperation in Wallie which I could not understand.
He had joined the police in the search, visited the Morgue, gone through her effects to find a photograph to be sent to other cities. During those days he seemed neither to eat nor sleep, and he grew perceptibly thinner. All his old nonchalance had left him, and at least once in that four-day interval he came in somewhat the worse for liquor.
It was that night—I do not remember which one—that he told me he had written me a letter and put it in his box at the bank.
“So you’ll understand,” he said, his tongue slightly thick. “So if anything happens to me you’ll understand.”
Judy looked up at him.
“You’re lit,” she stated coldly. “Lit and mawkish. What’s going to happen to you?”
“You’ll see,” he said somberly. “Plenty may happen to me. If you don’t believe it, look at me!”
“You’re not much to look at just now,” she told him. “You’d better order him some black coffee, Elizabeth Jane.”
She told me later that she did not believe he had written me any letter. But he had indeed. Months later we found it where he said it would be, in his box at the bank. But by that time we needed no explanation.
The finding of Sarah’s body was as extraordinary as was everything else in this strange case.
Judy had taken the dogs for their usual walk in the park, and somewhere there she met Dick, certainly not by chance. It appears that for purposes of their own they had left the main park and walked through that narrow ravine which is behind my own property, and through which a bridle path follows the wanderings of a small stream. As this ravine lies close to the lot where the dogs had been found, there had been a search of sorts. The two young people, then, were not searching. They were walking along, intent on their own affairs. In front of them a man on a gray horse was ambling quietly along.
Suddenly and without warning the horse shied violently, and the rider went off. He was not hurt, and Dick caught the horse and led it back to him.
“Not hurt, are you?” Judy asked.
“Only surprised,” he told her. “Surprised and irritated! That’s the second time this beast has shied at that sewer, or whatever it is. Twice this week. Yet he’s seen it a hundred times.”
Well, he got on again, having led the animal past the obstacle, and Judy and Dick looked at it. At some time it had evidently been intended to raise the road level there, and what they saw was a brick sewer entrance, circular, and standing about seven feet above the ground.
“Funny,” said Judy. “What’s happened to that thing this week?”
Dick laughed at her. Neither of them, I am sure, was thinking of poor Sarah. It was a bright cool spring day, made for lovers, and he teased her. It was a part of the game.
“I suppose that horse can see things we can’t see!” he said.
“Why not? Dogs can.”
And at that moment Jock, beside the base of the structure, suddenly raised his head and let out a long wail.
They were rather incoherent about what happened after that. It was Dick who finally got to the top and looked down. At first he could see nothing. Then he made out what looked like a bundle of clothing below, and Judy knew by his face.
Even then of course they were not certain it was Sarah. They did not come home; they got the park police at once, and Dick did not let Judy wait after that. He brought her back, whimpering, and I put her to bed and waited.
It was Sarah.
They never let me see her, and I was glad of that.
She had been murdered. There were indications of a heavy blow on the back of the head, not necessarily fatal; but the actual cause of death, poor creature, was two stab wounds in the chest. One had penetrated to the right ventricle of the heart, and she had died very quickly.
Only later on was I to have the full picture of that tragic discovery; the evidence that the body had been dragged along beside the bridle path for almost a quarter of a mile, a herculean task; the inexplicable fact that the shoes had been removed and thrown in after the body; the difficulty of explaining how that inert figure had been lifted seven feet in the air to the top of the sewer to be dropped as it was found, head down, into that pipe-like orifice; and strangest and most dreadful of all to me, that the very rope with which the dogs had been tied when I found them, had been fastened under her arms and used to drag the body.
The homicide squad, I believe, was early on the scene, a cordon of police thrown out, and the path closed from the Larimer lot to a point beyond the sewer. But the heavy rain and the fact that the path had been used had obliterated all traces save those broken branches down the hillside which apparently proved that Sarah had been killed on or near the Larimer property.
&n
bsp; The body had been found at three o’clock, and the medical examination took place as soon as it could be removed. The crime detection unit, a group of specialists, had been notified before that removal, but of the seven only one found anything to do there, and that was the photographer. And a gruesome enough exhibit those pictures made; the waiting ambulance, the mounted men holding back the curious who attempted to break the line, and close-up photographs of that poor body in its incredible resting place.
Inspector Harrison, sitting gravely in my library that night, was puzzled and restless.
“It’s a curious case,” he said. “Apparently motiveless. She was not robbed; the purse was found with the body, although—you say she carried a key to this house?”
“Yes. Inspector, I have been wondering if she did leave her bedroom door unlocked that night when she went out. If that man on the stairs hadn’t already killed her and taken both keys.”
“I think not. And I’ll tell you why. Now the time when you saw that figure on the stairs was at seven-thirty-five, approximately. You’d finished a seven o’clock dinner and had got to your coffee. That’s near enough, anyhow. But Sarah Gittings did not die until around ten o’clock.”
“I don’t understand. How do you know that?”
“By the food in the stomach. It had been in the stomach for approximately four hours before she died. The autopsy showed us that. But it does not show us where Sarah Gittings was between seven o’clock and ten. Three hours between the time she left this house and the time of her death. Where was she? What was she doing during that three hours? Once we learn that, and the identity of this Florence, we will have somewhere to go.”
“I have wondered if a maniac, a homicidal maniac—”
“On account of the shoes? No, I think not, although there may have been an endeavor to make us think that. No. Why did Sarah Gittings take a chair from the laundry and place it in the wood-cellar? Why did she agree to take the dogs, and at the same time take a rope with which to tie them? What was in her room that would justify breaking into this house to secure it? Those are the questions we have to ask ourselves, Miss Bell.
The Door Page 4
