The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart Page A

out. Then Jim cleared his throat and said:
    “I don’t care what’s there. I never got a letter from her.”
    “She put a stamp on it,” said Mary.
    Judy turned on her.
    “That doesn’t prove that she mailed it.”
    But Mary shrugged her shoulders. I thought then, and I still think, that at that moment at least she was sincere enough, and also that she was enjoying the situation she had forced. For once the attention was on her and not on Katherine and Judy, with their solid place in the world, their unconscious assumption of superiority.
    “You knew her,” she said laconically. “She wouldn’t waste a two-cent stamp.”
    She was unwilling to give up the center of the stage, however. She said that the uniform might or might not have importance, but that she felt the police should see it. If looks could have killed her she would never have left that room, but she had put the issue up to us and what could we do?
    “Certainly,” said Judy shrewishly. “You might put on your things now and take it, Mary!”
    And with all eyes on her Mary merely looked at her watch and said that it was too late.
    When a half hour or so later Inspector Harrison came in he found us all sitting there, manufacturing talk to cover our discomfort, and Mary blandly smiling.
    We had to give the uniform to him. But from that time on there was not one of us who did not believe that Mary Martin was a potential enemy, and potentially dangerous; nor one of at least four of us who did not believe that Jim had actually received a letter from Sarah and was choosing to suppress the fact.

Chapter Six
    I T IS NOT EASY to tell of this series of crimes in entire sequence. For one thing I kept no journal. For another, I must contend with that instinct of the human mind which attempts to forget what is painful to remember.
    I do know, however, that Sarah was murdered on a Monday, the eighteenth of April, and that the death of Florence Gunther did not take place until the first of May. How she had occupied herself in that interval we cannot be certain; we know that she was terrified, that at night she must have locked herself in her room and listened for stealthy footsteps on the stairs, and that in daytime her terror was of a different order, but very real.
    I can find only one bit of comfort. When death did come to her it was sudden and unexpected. She may have been smiling. She must even have been feeling a sense of relief, now that her resolution was taken. She could have had no warning, no premonition.
    Yet had she had only a little courage she might have lived.
    It is easy to say now what she should have done. She should have gone at once to the District Attorney and told her story. But perhaps she was afraid of that, of being discovered or followed. Then too Mr. Waite was away, and she may have been waiting for his return.
    We know now that she was hysterical during most of the interval, hysterical and suspicious, that she had built up the crime to fit what she knew, and that the case as she saw it was precisely the case as the police were to see it later on. But we have no details of those terrible days through which she lived from the eighteenth of April to the first of May.
    On the Tuesday following Sarah’s funeral Katherine went back to New York, and on the next day the District Attorney sent for me. He had some of the papers on the case before him, and he fingered them while he interrogated me.
    “You had no reason to believe she had any personal enemies? Anybody who could gain by doing away with her?”
    “None whatever,” I said promptly, and told him of her relations to the family. “I would have said,” I finished, “that she had no outside life whatever.”
    “She had never married?”
    “Never.”
    “I suppose she was in possession of a good many family facts? I’ll not say secrets, but facts; relationships, differences, that sort of thing?”
    “Such as they are, yes. But it is a singularly united family.”
    “Save, I