The House without the Door by Elizabeth Daly Page B

was a long pause. Then she said, again looking beyond him: "I always believed that it was suicide."
    "Well, I grant you that motive for suicide is often obscure, too obscure to be understood in a court of justice. Motives shade off into one another until they're hardly what the average person recognizes as a motive at all."
    "Yes, and men disappear and nobody ever knows why they ran away."
    "They do indeed. Now Mr. Locke favours the accident theory."
    "Accident?" Miss Warren looked as if she would have liked to develop the theory herself, if she had ever considered it.
    "You must get him to tell you about it; it sounds quite plausible, as plausible as suicide."
    She gazed at him in silence.
    "What I must do first," said Gamadge, looking about him, and then disposing of his cigarette end in a black glass ashtray, "is to get this business last August as straight as I can. It's not easy to get things straight after three months, but I must do my best. You went up there on a train that arrives at Burford at seven twenty-two?"
    Miss Warren seemed to seek information from the gold walls. She said at last: "Oh, yes. I remember that I couldn't take a train before six. Mrs. Smiles had come in from a trip to the country, just for overnight. She was going to Long Island. I had to see her off before I went up to Burford."
    "When did she go?"
    "About half-past three, I think."
    "Noody saw you off?"
    "No."
    "The servants here knew when you left the apartment?"
    "There were no servants here; it was closed for the summer. I got Mrs. Smiles' room ready for her the night before, and we went out to dinner at a restaurant. I got her breakfast for her in the morning."
    "Did you come back here after you had put Mrs. Smiles on her train?"
    "She never takes trains. I put her into her car, and saw that she had her luggage. Then I took my own bag down to the station."
    "Nearly three hours to kill on an August afternoon in New York. How did you manage the process, Miss Warren?"
    "I don't remember."
    "Surely you must. Did you shop, or call up a friend?"
    "I think I called a friend up, but he was out of town."
    "Mr. Belden, perhaps?"
    She looked at him, coldly. "Yes."
    "Really, I should think you would have gone up to the country on an earlier train."
    "You're trying to—" there was sudden horror in her glance. "You think I went up there earlier, and put that stuff on the step."
    "Say that I'm trying to help you prove you didn't. Why didn't you take an earlier train? I'm only asking."
    "I had errands. I remember now."
    "Mr. Belden: was he away on holiday, or only for that afternoon?"
    "Just for the day. His work takes him out of town a great deal."
    "Did they tell you where he had gone?"
    Miss Warren said with dry composure: "There was nobody in the office but the girl at the telephone, and she didn't know. It was a Friday."
    "I thought that Mr. Belden might have gone off for the weekend."
    "Perhaps he had. I don't really remember. I thought it was only for the afternoon, but 1 may have forgotten."
    "He didn't tell you at some later time where he had been?"
    "I never asked him. I am up at Mrs. Smiles' place in the Adirondacks most of the summer, myself."
    "When you reach Burford, Miss Warren, and get out at the station, are the cabs in full view?"
    "Nothing's in full view from that side; nothing but trees. The ticket office is across the track, and the cabs park behind it."
    "You climb stairs to cross?"
    "Yes." Miss Warren's mouth curved down at the corners in an expression of contempt. "And I don't think the conductor is acquainted with me; I don't go up there often. Nobody knows what train I went up on."
    "You don't get up there often, nor does Mr. Locke. He says that he goes because Mrs. Gregson has remembered him in her will."
    "I hope you won't tell Cousin Vina that."
    "I may not need to tell her that. On Saturday morning, when Mrs. Gregson was made so ill by eating mackerel, you were all 'in and out of the kitchen' before she came down; so Locke