Free The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart Page B

to depend. Already there were a number of them: Sarah’s poor body found by the coincidence of Judy being near when a horse shied; the coolness of an April night so that Norah must go to her window to close it; Mary Martin happening to open Sarah’s door while she was writing a letter, so that Sarah had made that damning record on her white sleeve; Jim Blake’s deviation from his custom of dressing for dinner and its results; Judy’s sudden and still mysterious desire to visit the garage at night; even my own impulsive gift to Jim Blake of my grandfather’s sword-stick.
    On that Sunday afternoon, at five o’clock, Florence Gunther came to see me and was turned away. I had gone upstairs to rest, and she was turned away.
    Why had she not come sooner? She was frightened, of course. We know that now. Afraid for her very life. The nights must have been pure terror, locked away in there in the upper room of that shabby house on Halkett Street. But she knew she held the key to the mystery. One can figure her reading the papers, searching for some news, and all the time holding the key and wondering what she ought to do.
    If she had gone to the police with her story, she might have saved her life. But if all of us behaved rationally under stress there would be no mysteries, and the dread of the police and of publicity is very strong in many people. And in addition she herself had something to hide, a small matter but vital to her. How could she tell her story and not reveal that?
    She must have thought of all those things, sitting alone at night in that none too comfortable room of hers with its daybed covered with an imitation Navajo rug, its dull curtains and duller carpet, its book from the circulating library, and perhaps on the dresser when she went to bed at night, the gold bridge with its two teeth which was later to identify her.
    Yet in the end she reached a decision and came to me. And Joseph, who was to identify her as my visitor later on by a photograph, answered the bell and turned her away! I was asleep, he said, and could not be disturbed. So she went off, poor creature, walking down my path to the pavement and to her doom; a thin colorless girl in a dark blue coat and a checked dress.
    She had left no name, and Joseph did not tell me until I went down to dinner.
    Even then it meant nothing to me.
    “What was she like, Joseph? A reporter?”
    “I think not, madam. A thinnish person, very quiet.”
    Dick was having an early Sunday night supper with me, early so that the servants might go out. That, too, is a custom of my mother’s, the original purpose having been that they might go to church. Now, I believe, they go to the movies.
    But I thought no more of the matter. Mary Martin had rather upset me. She had come in from a walk to tell me that she was leaving as soon as I could spare her, and had suddenly burst into tears.
    “I just want to get away,” she said, through her handkerchief. “I’m nervous here. I’m—I guess I’m frightened.”
    “That’s silly, Mary. Where would you go?”
    “I may go to New York. Mrs. Somers has said she may find something for me.”
    Judy’s comment on that conversation, when I stopped in her room to tell her, was characteristic.
    “Mother’s idea of keeping Mary’s mouth shut,” she said. “And polite blackmail on the part of the lady!”
    So Mary had not come down to dinner, and Dick and I were alone. He talked, I remember, about crime; that Scotland Yard seized on one dominant clue and followed it through, but that the expert American detective used the Continental method and followed every possible clue. And he stated as a corollary to this that the experts connected with the homicide squad had some clues in connection with Sarah’s murder that they were not giving out.
    “They’ve got something, and I think it puzzles them.”
    “You don’t know what it is?”
    But he only shook his head, and proceeded to eat a substantial meal. I remember wondering if