The House without the Door (5 page)

"I'll come here and wait for you. And now I want the addresses of those young people, and I want to know how to get to Pine Lots."

"It's the second road to the left beyond Burford. I'll give you the number of Benny's rooming-house, and the telephone. Celia lives with a Mrs. Smiles." She went over to the desk in the corner, and sat down at it. While she wrote Gamadge and Colby stood waiting with their overcoats on and their hats in their hands. She turned, with a slip of paper in her fingers; Gamadge went over to her. Looking down into her eyes, he felt as if he were looking at the windows of a deserted house.

"Mrs. Gregson," he said, "I know why you never ran away from all this."

"Do you?"

"Yes." He took the paper and folded it. "I know why you have brought yourself to tell me this story; I know why you're willing to pursue this investigation, although it may mean raking up the past; may even mean publicity for you, and the end of your privacy."

"I wondered if you would guess."

"I have guessed. You think that Gregson's murderer is at work again."

Colby exclaimed. Mrs. Gregson kept her eyes on Gamadge's. He went on: "You hope I'll find evidence that his murderer, having failed to get you killed by due process of law, has been using methods more direct. Your husband's money is the motive now, as it was then."

Colby advanced. He said fiercely: "I never saw it. You'll get proof of this, Gamadge." And as Gamadge doubtfully shook his head, exclaimed: "You're not giving up before you begin?"

"I must warn Mrs. Gregson not to bank on my finding proof of it. I know that the hope means more to her than life itself, and I implore her not to risk her all on it. For a man or woman who sacrifices everything to a fixed idea is risking too much. What shall you do if I fail you?"

"I must face that." She sat rigid.

"You've brooded on it too long. Take your money, leave this place and the house at Burford, cut loose from Mrs. Stoner and from the others, give up the quest. Make yourself a life; stay in cheerful hotels, meet people, teach yourself not to care whether they recognize you or not. Get away from your dependents, and there will be no more letters, and no more stories of attempts against you. Believe me, it will be worth it!"

She had listened to his urgent voice attentively. But she in turn shook her head. "You can't conceive what it means to me. I must go on with it."

"Then I'm off." Gamadge suddenly regained his natural ease of manner. "See you in the morning, and be sure to bundle Mrs. Stoner out of town before we start for Cold Brook. She's not to know where you're going; nobody's to know."

She stood up, grasping the back of her chair with a firm hand. "I won't tell. Thank you both. Thank you, Mr. Colby, for bringing him—I know he'll find out something."

"He'll do the trick. Look at him—the man's on the hunt already!" For Gamadge was half-way to the door. Colby followed him.

As they reached the stairs they met Mrs. Stoner, slowly climbing. She wore the crushed grey hat that she had carried under her arm at their first meeting, and the long grey coat. Her fur neckpiece had seen many winters. There was a little veil tied about her hat-brim which partly obscured the upper part of her face. Her eyes were wide behind it as she looked up at the two men; but they shifted like a nervous animal's.

"Good night," said Gamadge cheerfully.

"Good night."

Colby did not greet her at all. He said, as they went downstairs, "I hate leaving those two together."

"They won't be together long."

"Thank goodness you persuaded Mrs. Gregson to go up to that place; but I wish you hadn't sounded so doubtful of the outcome."

"Do you really think I shall find out who put grease on those cellar stairs, or poison in that mackerel? Or solve the problem of the gas oven and the fruit cake?" He glared malevolently at Colby.

"You ought to be able to dig up something." Colby, following him out of the house and along the alley, looked unhappy. "You're in the deuce of a hurry, anyhow. Have you an idea?"

"I'm in the deuce of a hurry to get home and get to a fire." Gamadge strode out from under the archway, and looked up and down the street for a cab. "You coming? Clara'll be glad to see you."

"I must get to Bellfield. I'll just make my train."

"Good luck to the huntin' and fishin', not to mention the ridin'. Pretty soon you'll be makin' a snow man."

Colby refused to respond to this childishness. He hurried off to get a cab on Third Avenue; Gamadge, after a long look after him, turned and walked towards Lexington.

G
AMADGE ENTERED THE LIBRARY
of his old house in the Sixties, and found himself walking on a sea of papers. Furniture stood up from among them like reefs at low tide, and an island in front of the fire contained a tea table and Gamadge's old coloured servant Theodore. He was clearing the tea tray.

"I'd like some of that before it goes, if you don't mind." The master of the house lifted his right foot from a pile of autograph letters signed.

"Right away, Mist' Gamadge, sir; get you some fresh." Theodore hurried out, ignoring the activities on the other side of the large room, where Mrs. Gamadge sat cross-legged on the floor, her hands full of manuscript, and Harold Bantz, Gamadge's young assistant, prowled on all fours among documents. Martin the cat, devoted to paper in any form, lay at full length on a bed of parchment, occasionally putting out a paw to make it rustle; when it did so he rolled over and slapped at the noise with an air of reproof. Sun, the chow, sat near his mistress and seemed to supervise her labours. He paid no attention to Martin; he had learned to forget him.

Mrs. Gamadge raised her ingenuous face to her husband. "Isn't this nice?" she inquired. "I thought it would be so cosy to do the Bendow correspondence up here."

"Well: the trestle tables in the laboratory are practically ideal for sorting papers," said Gamadge mildly. "That's why I bought them."

Harold, a youth of short stature and morose countenance, stolidly and silently continued to crawl among documents. Clara's face fell. "Oh, dear," she said, "I know you hate a mess. I made Harold do it. I thought it would be fun to work up here; where there's a fire."

"Bless you, darling; it was a very sweet idea. You shouldn't be working at all…oh, God!"

He sprang forward. Martin, tantalized beyond endurance by the crackling of a stiff glazed bit of notepaper, was chewing a corner of it and fighting the rest of the sheet with his hind legs. Gamadge fell upon him, pried open his jaws, and saved all but the fragment which Martin, with closed eyes and much jerking of the head, was hastily swallowing.

"This is too bad!" Gamadge inspected damp remains. "The Honourable Mrs. Norton's shopping-list.
One red velvet smoking-cap, 30 shillings
. That was Lord Melbourne's Christmas present, I know it was, and I was going to write an article proving something or other. Damn it all."

Clara got to her feet. "Oh, I'm so sorry."

Harold was scrabbling papers together and stuffing them into files. He said: "That ain't Mrs. Norton's list."

"How do you know?" Gamadge studied it irritably. "There are letters of hers here, and one of them's to Melbourne, I bet anything it is."

"This list ain't in the Honourable Norton's writing."

"You decided that after viewing it with the naked eye?"

"No; you viewed it with the naked eye and decided that it was."

During this colloquy Clara stood dejected. Gamadge skated to her across reaches of slippery correspondence, and clasped her in his arms. "It was sweet of you, my darling. You ought not to have bothered with the things at all. You ought to have been out having some fun."

"I like it at home." Clara had been a principal in a murder case, not long before, and was still shy of society.

"I ought to take you out more myself. We could have gone south and played some golf, but Colby's tied me up to a brute of a case. You and Harold have to help me solve it."

They sat down on the chesterfield sofa. Theodore, coming in with hot water, remarked: "Mis' Gamadge and Harold, they're young; can't expect 'em always to think old."

Harold's rage was very great. He said: "You keep your condescension to yourself. I know what I'm doing."

Gamadge winked at him behind his wife's shoulder. Harold had strict orders to allow her to assist in the laboratory and, if necessary, to wreck it; but she had not wrecked it, and really did assist.

"What's this case Mr. Colby is making you work on?"

"Before I tell you what it is I want you both to listen to a strange story. I have a lot of notes Colby prepared for me, and some newspaper clippings. But first I want my tea."

He disposed of it in large swallows, punctuating them with bites of muffin. Harold went downstairs and returned with two notebooks; one, his own, considerably battered; the other new.

"Mrs. Gamadge can practise her shorthand," he said.

"I can try to." She accepted the notebook and a pencil. "Thank you, Harold, but I'll never learn how."

"Yes, you will."

He sat down facing them. "All set?" inquired Gamadge, through muffin. He swallowed, put down his cup, wiped his fingers on a doily, and got a sheaf of typed pages and a bunch of newspaper clippings out of his pocket. "Ever hear of the Gregson Case?"

There was a pause. Harold said: "You mean the Gregson murder case? Certainly I have."

"I have too," said Clara. "Everybody heard of it. It was only a couple of years ago."

"Two years last June. You're right," agreed Gamadge, "everybody heard of it. Our friend Colby lives in Bellfield, you know, and he knew Gregson slightly, and he met Mrs. Gregson once before the trial. Now he's taken her under his wing."

Harold stared. "I thought nobody knew where she was, nobody at all."

"Colby does, I do, and soon you and Clara will. Colby, I must explain, although he lives in Bellfield, isn't a native; he bought a place on the outskirts, and he's a country gentleman— when he isn't dealing in real estate. He commutes."

"I like him ever so much," said Clara.

"He attended the Gregson trial through some pull or other, and decided that it was a complete miscarriage of justice; not her being acquitted, you know; her having been brought to trial at all. Many people thought the acquittal was the miscarriage of justice; and, the fact is that she got off by the skin of her teeth. I verily believe that in Scotland the verdict would have been 'not proven,' and that in England the judge would have looked very pinched under his wig. But the jury had gazed long upon Mrs. Gregson, and heard her speak; and it took them forty-five minutes to come back and say 'not guilty.'

"As a matter of fact, it's a case that has kept the experts guessing ever since; and I'm supposed to solve it: alone, unaided (unless you and Harold aid me), and with no material to work on but Colby's notes."

"Who wants you to solve it?" asked Clara. "Mr. Colby?"

"Mrs. Gregson. I met her this afternoon."

"You did?" Harold was impressed. "What's she like?"

"She's like a woman who had a shock from which she's never recovered."

"I don't wonder," murmured Clara.

"But she's not the woman whose picture you can see among those clippings; she's not the Mrs. Gregson the jury saw. She has adopted a new physical personality, but in spite of it I could tell why she was acquitted against the evidence and the summing up. I'd better give you an outline of the case.

"Curtis Gregson's family settled in Bellfield a long time ago, but they didn't preserve their presumably nice old colonial house; they tore it down during the 1870's, and built a new one which they improved into a fine old Victorian monstrosity with gables, bay windows, a cupola, and stained glass over the windows and around the front door. Here's a picture of it. Admire the pin-cushion flower-beds on the lawn, and the gabled carriage house turned into a garage. The house is painted a mustard yellow, so I'm informed, with a chocolate trim.

"The Curtis Gregsons were quiet, stay-at-home people. Gregson played golf, and he went to all the town meetings, but he and his wife didn't patronize the club dances. He was a lawyer, in the reputable firm of Banks & Styles, and commuted to New York. Played a poorish game of bridge on the train, didn't care for poker. Colourless man, physically and otherwise—sandy-haired, clean-shaven, just under medium height, eyes light grey. Not much of a mixer, but not disliked. At the time of his death he was forty-three.

"Mrs. Gregson was forty. She was an outlander—from a little up-state town near Utica. You won't believe me, but the name of that town is Omega."

"Why shouldn't we believe you?" asked Clara.

"Because it's such an extraordinary mixture of the classical and the early American. It sounds as if somebody must have misunderstood the Indians. However: the ladies of Bellfield are said to be very much of a clan, proud of their town and jealous of their privileges therein. Mrs. Gregson did her share of sitting on charity committees, and hauling flowers and eatables to the bridge drives and bazaars, but she was not
haute
Bellfield, and never in all the twenty years of her married life did she make intimate friends there. She seemed not to require them. The fact that she had no children may have helped to keep her out of the main current.

"But when her catastrophe arrived, no man or woman in the place had a word to say against her, or would listen to the theory that she had poisoned her husband. They won't listen to it now.

"Colby met her just once, about two years before the tragedy, and he won't listen to it. He met her in her own house. It was Gregson's turn to preside at some kind of golf meeting, and those meetings were always held at the club, but the club happened to be undergoing repairs. So he had the meeting at his residence, and Mrs. Gregson was on hand to greet the committee. Colby says he barely noticed her at the time, but that afterwards he remembered what she was like perfectly well. A slightly dowdy, rather nice-looking woman, with lots of wispy brown hair and red cheeks. Nothing to take the eye of Colby, a very worldly man. She had a pleasant way of talking, but nothing to say. Colby describes her as 'countrified'; he probably means provincial, but would consider the word an affectation.