The Door Read Online Free PDF

saw when I had hurried upstairs.
    Sarah’s room was in complete confusion. Some one had jerked aside her mattress and pillows, thrown down the clothes in her neat closet, looked at her shoes, and turned out her bureau. Even her trunk had been broken open, and its contents lay scattered about. Those records of family illnesses, which she carted about with her as a veteran might carry his medals, had been thrown out onto the bed and apparently examined.
    There was something ruthless and shameless about the room now. It had no secrets, no privacies. It was, in a way, as though some one had stripped Sarah, had bared her stout spinster body to the world.
    Judy, rather white, was in the doorway.
    “I wouldn’t go in,” she said. “Or at least I wouldn’t touch anything. Not until you get the police.”
    Clara, the housemaid, was staring in over my shoulder.
    “She’ll have a fit over this,” she said. “She’s that tidy!”
    But I had a dreadful feeling that poor Sarah would never again have a fit over anything in this world.
    It was nine-fifteen when I telephoned to headquarters, and at a quarter to ten a policeman in uniform and the Assistant Superintendent of Police, Inspector Harrison, reached the house.
    The two of them examined the room, and then leaving the uniformed man in charge of Sarah’s room, Inspector Harrison listened to my story in the library. He was a short stocky man, very bald and with the bluest eyes I have ever seen in an adult human being.
    As he talked he drew a wooden toothpick from his pocket and bit on the end of it. Later on I was to find that he had an apparently limitless supply of the things, and that they served a variety of purposes and moods. He had given up smoking, he said, and they gave him “something to think with.”
    He was disinclined to place any serious interpretation on Sarah’s absence until it was necessary, but he was interested in the housebreaking episode; especially in Wallie’s theory that the intruder on his first visit had swung himself into the light shaft, and he carefully examined it from above and below. There were, however, many scratches on the sill of Clara’s pantry and little to be learned from any of them.
    The Inspector stood for some time looking down into the shaft.
    “He could get in all right,” he decided, “but I’d hate to undertake to get myself out, once I was in. Still, it’s possible.”
    After that he wandered around the house, sometimes alone, sometimes with Joseph. Wallie had arrived, and he and Judy and I sat there waiting, Judy very quiet, Wallie clearly anxious and for the first time alarmed. He moved about the room, picking things up and putting them down until Judy turned on him angrily.
    “For heaven’s sake, Wallie! Can’t you keep still?”
    “If I annoy you, why not go somewhere else?”
    She lit a cigarette and looked at him.
    “I don’t get it,” she said slowly. “What’s Sarah to you? You never cared much for her.”
    “You’ll know some day.”
    She cocked an eye at him.
    “If eventually, why not now?”
    But he merely turned on his heel and resumed his nervous pacing of the room.
    Some time later he suggested that Sarah might have gone to New York, and that Judy telephone and find out. In the end, in order not to alarm Katherine, I called up Jim Blake and told him, and he agreed to invent a message for Katherine. Asked later about his manner over the telephone, I could remember very little. I know he seemed surprised, and that he said he was not well, but that he would dress and come around that afternoon.
    When he called back it was to say that evidently Sarah had not gone there, and that he would be around at three o’clock.
    The information had a curious effect on Wallie, however. As I watched him it seemed to me that he looked frightened; but that may be in view of what I know now. I do, however, recall that he looked as though he had slept badly, and that day for the first time since the early days