Chapter 1

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_Title:_ The Door
_Date of first publication:_ 1930
_Author:_ Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958)
_Date first posted:_ Oct. 30, 2020
_Date last updated:_ Dec. 15, 2020
Faded Page eBook #20201066

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[Cover Illustration]

T H E D O O R

THE DOOR
BY
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
AUTHOR OF

THE MAN IN LOWER TEN,
CIRCULAR STAIRCASE,
“K,” Etc.

[Illustration]
G R O S S E T & D U N L A P
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

T H E D O O R

CHAPTER ONE

I have wrenched my knee, and for the past two weeks my days have
consisted of three trays, two of them here in the library, a nurse at
ten o’clock each morning with a device of infernal origin which is
supposed to bake the pain out of my leg, and my thoughts for company.

But my thinking is cloudy and chaotic. The house is too quiet. I miss
Judy, busy now with affairs of her own, and perhaps I miss the
excitement of the past few months. It is difficult to take an interest
in beef croquettes for luncheon out of last night’s roast when one’s
mind is definitely turned on crime. For that is what I am thinking
about, crime; and major crime at that.

I am thinking about murder. What is the ultimate impulse which drives
the murderer to his kill? Not the motives. One can understand motives.
It is at least conceivable that a man may kill out of violent passion,
or out of fear, or jealousy or revenge. Then too there are the murders
by abnormals, drug addicts or mental deficients; they have their motives
too, of course, although they may lie hidden in distorted minds. And as
in our case, a series of crimes where the motive was hidden but
perfectly real, and where extraordinary precautions had been taken
against discovery.

But I am thinking of something more fundamental than motivation.

What is it that lies behind the final gesture of the killer?

Until then he has been of the race of men. In an instant he will have
forfeited his brotherhood, become one of a group apart, a group of those
who have destroyed human life.

Is there a profound contempt for life itself, for its value or its
importance? Or is the instinct to kill stronger than thought, an
atavistic memory from long past ages when laws had not induced
suppressions? Is the murder impulse a natural one and are all of us
potential killers, so that to save extinction men have devised the
theory of the sanctity of human life? And at that last moment does this
hereditary buried instinct surge triumphantly to the surface, steel the
hand which holds the knife, steady the revolver, put the smile on the
face of the poisoner?

There must be a something of the sort. One thing we do know; once a man
has killed, his inhibitions are destroyed. He has joined the alien clan,
of which no member knows the other, and has set his face against the
world.

Thereafter he is alone.

But I have found no answer. In our case I have looked back, searching
for some variation from the normal, or some instinct of weakening or
remorse. But I have found none. We know now that there were moments of
terrific danger, when the whole murderous structure was about to
collapse. But if there was panic then we have no evidence of it. Each
such emergency was met With diabolical ingenuity and cunning, and that
cunning went even further. It provided in advance against every possible
contingency of discovery.

What long hours went into that planning, that covering of every possible
clue, we can only surmise; the meticulous surveying of this and that,
the searching for any looseness in the whole criminal plan, the
deliberate attempts to throw suspicion elsewhere.

There must have been a real satisfaction toward the end, however, a
false feeling of security, a rubbing of the hands and a certain
complacency.

And then suddenly the whole carefully woven fabric was destroyed.
Strange and mysterious and bitter that must have been. Everything
provided against, and then at the last to be destroyed by a door, a
thing of wood and paint with an ordinary tarnished brass knob. Months
had passed. Hundreds of hands had touched that knob in the interval; the
door itself had been painted. And yet it solved our mystery and brought
destruction to as diabolical and cunning a murderer as the records of
crime will show.

* * * * *

As I have already intimated, I live alone, in the usual sense of the
word. That is, I am more or less without family. A secretary, usually a
young woman, and the customary servants form my household. And as the
first crime occurred in this household it will be as well to outline it
at once.

Outside of my secretary, Mary Martin, a young and very pretty girl, the
establishment at the time of the disappearance of Sarah Gittings
consisted of four servants: my butler, Joseph Holmes, who had been in my
employ for many years, a respectable looking man of uncertain age, very
quiet; my chauffeur, Robert White, who was not white, but a negro; the
cook, Norah Moriarity, and Clara Jenkins, the housemaid. A laundress, a
white woman, came in by the day, and from spring until fall a gardener
named Abner Jones took care of the lawns and shrubbery.

And as my property, both houses and grounds, plays an important part in
this narrative, I would better describe them also.

The house, then, sits some hundred feet back from the street. Two stone
gate posts, from which the gates have been removed, mark the entrance,
and the drive circles around a grass oval before the front door. Heavy
old shrubbery, which I have not had the heart to thin out, shields me
from the street and is spread in clumps over the grounds.

Thus the garage at the rear is partly screened from sight, although as
was shown later, there is a clear view from it of the pantry window.