The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart Page B

suppose, for Mr. Somers’ son by his first marriage. I understand that he is not particularly persona grata. ”
    “Who told you that?”
    He smiled.
    “He told me himself, as a matter of fact. He seems very anxious to have the mystery solved, as of course we all are. I suppose he was fond of her?”
    “I never thought so. No.”
    He coughed.
    “In this—er—family difference, I gather that your sympathies have lain with this Walter. Is that so?”
    “Yes and no,” I said slowly. “Walter has never amounted to much since the war, and his father has never understood him. They are opposed temperaments. Walter is sensitive and high-strung. Mr. Somers is a silent man very successful in business—he’s in Wall Street—and they haven’t hit it off. Mr. Somers has financed Walter in several businesses, but he has always failed. I believe he has said that he is through, except for a trust fund in his will, a small one. But if you have any idea that Walter is concerned in Sarah’s death—”
    “I have no such idea. We have checked his movements that night. As a matter of fact, when he left your house he went directly to his club. He left at eleven-fifteen. He recalls your asking the time, and that your own watch was a minute or two slow. At eleven-thirty he was at his club, and joined a bridge game. That time is fixed. The man whose place he took had agreed to be at home by midnight.”
    He turned over the papers on his desk, and finally picked up one of them.
    “Unfortunately,” he said, “your own statement that Sarah Gittings had no life outside your family necessarily brings the family into this affair. Your cousin, now, Mr. Blake. How well did she know him?”
    “She saw him once in a while. I don’t suppose she had ever said much more than good-morning to him.”
    “Then you know of no reason why she should write to him?”
    “None whatever.”
    “Yet she did write to him, Miss Bell. She wrote to him on the day before her death, and I believe that he received that letter.”
    He sat back in his chair and surveyed me.
    “He got that letter,” he repeated.
    “But why would he deny it?”
    “That’s what I intend to find out. Actually, it appears that Sarah Gittings knew Mr. Blake much better than you believe. On at least one evening during the week before her death she went to his house. He was dining out, however, and did not see her. On Saturday night she telephoned to him, but not from your house. We have gone over your calls. Clearly this was some private matter between them. Amos, Mr. Blake’s servant, says he recognized her voice; of course that’s dubious, but again Mr. Blake was out. Then on Sunday she wrote, and I have every reason to believe that he got the letter on Monday.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he went out that night to meet her.”
    I think, recalling that interview, that he was deliberately telling me these things in order to get my reaction to them, to watch for those reactions. Later on I believe he attempted to convey something of this system of his to the Grand Jury; that he said, in effect:
    “You are to remember that guilt or innocence is not always solved or otherwise by the sworn statements of witnesses. People have perjured themselves before this. The reaction to a question is an important one; there is a subtle difference between the honest man and the most subtle liar.”
    So now he watched me.
    “Did you know, when she left your house that night, that she was going out to meet Mr. Blake?”
    “No. And I don’t believe it now.”
    “You saw the writing on her cuff. Was that hers?”
    “It looked like it. I daresay it was.”
    “Yet no such envelope was found in her room the next day, when the police searched it. Nor among the trash which Inspector Harrison examined. She wrote and sent that letter, Miss Bell, and he received it. Unless some one in your house found it and deliberately destroyed it.”
    “If you think I did that, I did not.”
    “No,” he said.