The Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

an instant later both of them were racing for home.
    But I still had a queer feeling that Sarah must be there. I went back to the house, to find the dogs scratching at the front door, and when I had roused Joseph I took him back with me to search the lot. He with his revolver and I with my searchlight must have been a queer clandestine sort of picture; two middle-aged folk, Joseph half clad, wandering about in the night. And so the roundsman on the beat must have believed, for when he came across to us his voice was suspicious.
    “Lost anything?”
    “A middle-aged woman, rather heavy set,” I said half hysterically.
    “Well, she oughtn’t to be hard to find,” he observed. “Now if it was a ring, with all this brush and stuff—”
    But he was rather impressed when I told my story.
    “Tied to a tree, eh? Which tree?”
    “Over there; my butler’s examining it. The rope’s still there.”
    But a moment later Joseph almost stunned me.
    “There is no rope here, madam,” he called.
    And incredible as it may sound, the rope was not there. The policeman searched, we all searched. There was no rope and no Sarah. The policeman was not so much suspicious as slightly amused.
    “Better go back and get a good night’s sleep, ma’am,” he said soothingly. “You can come around in the morning and look all you want.”
    “But there was a rope, I could hardly untie it.”
    “Sure,” he said indulgently. “Probably the lady you’re looking for tied them up herself. She had business somewhere else and they’d be in the way. See?”
    Well, it was possible, of course. I did not believe it, knowing Sarah; but then, did I know Sarah? The surface of Sarah I knew, the unruffled, rather phlegmatic faithful Sarah; but what did I really know about her? It came to me like a blow that I did not even know if she had any family, that there was no one I could notify.
    “You go home now,” he said, as coaxingly as he would speak to a child, “and in the morning you’ll find she’s back. If she isn’t you can let me know.”
    And he said this too with an air, a certain paternalism, as though he had said: “Just leave this to me. I am the law. I’ll fix it. And now just run along. I’ve my job to attend to.”
    The next morning was rainy and gray. I had slept very little, and I rang for my breakfast tray at eight o’clock. Any hope that Sarah had slipped in early in the morning was dashed by Joseph’s sober face. I drank a little coffee, and at eight-thirty Judy came in yawning, in a luxurious negligee over very gaudy pajamas.
    “Well, what explanation does she give?” she said. “May I have my tray here? I hate eating alone.”
    “Did who give?”
    “Sarah.”
    “She hasn’t come back, Judy.”
    “What? I heard her. From two until three she walked about over my head until I was almost crazy.”
    Sarah’s room was over Judy’s. I sat up in bed and stared at her. Then I rang the bell again.
    “Joseph,” I said, “have you been into Sarah’s room this morning?”
    “No madam. I overslept, and I hurried right down.”
    “Then how do you know she has not come back?”
    “She hasn’t been down for her breakfast. She’s very early, always.”
    And just then we heard Mary Martin talking excitedly to Clara in the hall overhead, and then come running down the stairs. She burst into my room hysterically, to say that Sarah was not in her room and that it was all torn up. Judy was gone like a flash, and while I threw something about me I questioned Mary. She had, it seems, knocked at Sarah’s door to borrow the morning paper. The morning paper, by the way, always reached me fourth hand; Joseph took it in and looked it over, Sarah got it from him, Mary Martin borrowed it from Sarah, and when I rang for it, usually at nine o’clock, it was apt to bear certain unmistakable scars; a bit of butter, a smudge of egg, or a squirt of grapefruit juice. Anyhow, receiving no answer, Mary had opened the door, and what she saw I