Read Online The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart - Free Book Online Page A

gave entrance from the side. This door was closed but not locked. The first ominous thing was when we discovered that the door into the tool room was locked and that the key was missing from its nail. I rattled the knob and called Judy, but received no reply, and Joseph in the meantime was searching for the key.
    “She’s in here, Joseph.”
    “Not necessarily, madam. Robert hides the key sometimes. He says that Abner takes his tools.”
    But Judy was in there. Not until Joseph had broken a window and crawled in did we find her, poor child, senseless and bleeding from a cut on the head.
    Joseph carried her into the house, and into the library. She was already stirring when he placed her on the couch there, and she was quite conscious, although dizzy and nauseated, in a short time. Enough indeed to protest against my calling a doctor.
    “We don’t want any more fuss,” she said, and tried to smile. “Remember mother, Elizabeth Jane! Always in the society columns but never in the news.”
    But as she was violently nauseated almost immediately I got Joseph to telephone to Doctor Simonds, and he came very soon afterwards.
    She had, he said, been struck on the head, and Joseph suggested that the ladder itself had fallen on her. As a matter of fact, later investigation showed the ladder lying on the floor, and as Judy said it was against the wall when she saw it, there was a possibility of truth in this. But one thing was certain; however she was hurt, she had been definitely locked in the tool room. She had used the key and left it in the door. Some one had locked her in and taken the key. It was nowhere to be found.
    We got her up to bed, and the diagnosis was a mild concussion and a lucky escape. The doctor was inclined to be humorous about it.
    “You have a hard head, Judy. A hard head but a soft heart, eh?”
    Well, he ordered ice to what she called her bump and heat to her feet, and while Joseph was cracking the ice below she told her story. But although Joseph maintained that she had asked him about the ladder, she gave an entirely different reason herself.
    “Abner has a foot rule in the tool room,” was her story to me. “I wanted to measure the cabinet. Sometimes you find a secret drawer that way. So I got the key to the garage and went out. I thought I heard something in the shrubbery behind me once, but it might have been a rabbit, I don’t know.
    “The tool room light had burned out, so I lighted a match when I went in. The door was not locked, but the key was in it. There was nobody in the tool room, unless they were behind the door when I opened it. I lighted a fresh match, and just then the door slammed behind me and blew out the match. I said ‘damn,’ and—that’s all I remember.”
    To add to our bewilderment and my own secret anxiety, Joseph brought forth something when he carried up the ice; something which was odd, to say the least. This was that just before ten o’clock, when he let the dogs out the back door, he heard them barking in the shrubbery. This barking, however, ceased abruptly.
    “As though they’d recognized the party,” said Joseph, who now and then lapsed into colloquial English. “Jock now, he’d never let up if it was a stranger.”
    But there was something horrible in that thought; that any one who knew us would attack Judy, and the situation was not improved by Norah’s declaration the next day that, at two o’clock in the morning, four hours after the attack on Judy, she had seen some one with a flashlight in the shrubbery near the garage. The night had been cool and she had got out of bed to close her window. Then she saw the light, and because it was rather ghostly and the morale of the household none too good, she had simply got back into bed and drawn the covers over her head.
    Inspector Harrison had come early at my request, and Norah repeated the story to him.
    The flashlight, she said, was close to the ground, and almost as soon as she saw it, it went out.
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