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

to that moment I think he had been inclined to lay Judy’s condition to accident, the more so as she refused to explain why she had been in the garage.
    “Come now, Miss Judy. You had a reason, hadn’t you?”
    “I’ve told you. I wanted to get the foot rule.”
    “Did you tell Joseph you wanted to see the ladder?”
    “I may have,” she said airily. “Just to make conversation.”
    “This ladder,” he persisted. “It is the one Walter Somers used in the lavatory?”
    Judy yawned.
    “Sorry,” she said. “I lost some sleep last night. Is it the same ladder, Elizabeth Jane? You tell him.”
    “It is,” I said flatly, “and you know it perfectly well, Judy. You’re being silly.”
    But she had no more to say, and the Inspector stamped down the stairs in no pleasant mood and inclined to discredit her whole story. For which I did not blame him.
    He did however believe Norah. She was looking pale and demoralized, and she said something about witch lights and then crossed herself. The result was that he at once commenced an investigation of the shrubbery, and that his men almost immediately discovered footprints in the soft ground to the right of the path and where Norah had seen the light.
    There were four, two rights and two lefts, and when I went out to look at them the Inspector was standing near them, surveying them with his head on one side.
    “Very neat,” he said. “Very pretty. See anything queer about them, Simmons?”
    “They’re kind of small, if that’s it.”
    “What about the heels?”
    “Very good, sir. Clear as a bell.”
    The Inspector drew a long breath.
    “And that’s all you see, is it?” he demanded violently. “What the hell’s the use of my trying to teach you fellows anything? Look at those heels! A kangaroo couldn’t have left those prints. They’ve been planted.”
    He left the discomfited Simmons to mount guard over the prints and to keep the dogs away from them, and not unlike a terrier himself, set to work to examine the nearby ground and bushes.
    “The fellow, whoever he was, stepped off the path there when Miss Judy came along. But he left footprints, and later on he remembered them. He came back, smoothed them over and planted false ones. If he’s overlooked one now—”
    He was carefully turning over dead leaves with a stick he carried, and now he stooped suddenly and picked up something.
    “Look at this!” he said. “The key to the tool room, isn’t it? I thought so. Threw it here as he ran.”
    He was examining the key, which is the flat key of the usual Yale lock, and now he gave an exclamation of disgust.
    “Clean as a whistle,” he said. “Pretty cagey, this chap. Must have been in a devil of a hurry, but he wiped it first; or he wore gloves.”
    He stood there for some time, staring at the key.
    “Well,” he said finally, “we have just two guesses, Miss Bell. Either he wanted to do away with Miss Judy, which is unlikely; or he did not like her going into that tool room.”
    “But he let her go in, and he locked her there.”
    “Not in shape to do much looking about, however,” he said grimly. “Now which was it?”
    He glared at me as though he expected an answer.
    “I’m sure I don’t know,” I said meekly.
    Later on I stood by while his men measured the distance between the footprints and made molds of them. They sprayed the marks with something first, and then poured in plaster of Paris which the Inspector reinforced with the inevitable toothpicks. The result was a pair of rather ghastly white shoes, which he surveyed with satisfaction.
    “How do I know they were planted?” he said. “Well, the stride was too long for the foot, for one thing. Here’s a small foot and a long stride. Then the ground’s soft; they weren’t deep enough. And there’s another point. When a man walks there’s a back thrust to his foot, and the weight’s likely to be more on the outside and back of the heel. Look at me; I walk in this earth. What