The Door Between by Ellery Queen Read Free Book Online Page A

she sat up very quickly a moment later. There must be something wrong! Kinumé had said Karen was ‘liting’ – but what was she writing? Kinumé had brought her stationery and envelope! Then she wasn’t working on her new novel at all she was writing a letter. But if she was writing a letter, why didn’t she answer her telephone?
    The telephone rang for the last time, gave up.
    Eva scrambled off the couch, skirt flying, and ran across the sitting-room to the bedroom door. Something had happened to Karen. She was ill – Kinumé had said so – she had looked poorly the last time Eva saw her – perhaps Karen had fainted or had an attack of something. That was it!
    She burst into Karen’s bedroom so precipitately that the door banged against the wall and swung back, bumping into her. And Eva stared, her heart hammering, hardly knowing what to expect.
    At first she thought the room was empty. There was no one in the low funny little Japanese bed and the writing-desk in front of the oriel windows was untenanted. In fact, the chair behind the desk, facing her, was pushed neatly into the knee-hole on the farther side, for Karen’s desk and chair were so placed as to catch the light from the triple window over her shoulder when she worked.
    Eva crossed to the far side of the room, looking around, puzzled. Everything was in place – the beautiful Japanese screen beyond the bed against the wall; the water-colors; the large empty bird-cage hanging beside the bed; the Kakémono by the great Japanese painter Oguri So¯tan, which Karen prized so dearly; the delicate bric-à-brac – everything was in place except Karen herself. Where was she? She had certainly been in the bedroom a half-hour before; Eva had heard her voice. Unless she was upstairs in the attic no one had ever seen …
    Then Eva spied two tiny Japanese shoes, toes down, hanging over the steps of the little dais behind the desk, where the floor of the oriel was raised above the level of the bedroom. And Karen’s feet were in the shoes, clad in white Japanese stockings, and there was a scrap of kimono visible …
    Eva felt her heart contract. Poor Karen! She had merely fainted after all. Eva ran around the desk. There was Karen lying face down on the dais, stretched along the step of the dais, her kimono almost fastidiously draped about her little form … Eva opened her mouth to call Kinumé.
    But her mouth closed again. She blinked and blinked and blinked, in a futile, dazed way, everything in her paralysed but her eyes.
    There was blood on the dais.
    There was blood on the dais. Eva kept blinking, so stunned her brain could think nothing but that. Blood!
    Karen’s face was twisted sideways to Eva, resting on the polished dais, and the blood was staining the floor near her white throat. There was so much of it, as if it had gushed out of that hideous slit, that red-lipped wound in the soft front of Karen’s throat … Eva covered her eyes with a little animal whimper.
    When she put her hands down one part of her numbed brain was already functioning weakly. Karen was so still, her exhausted cheeks were so white, so bluish-white, her lids so marbly and veined – Karen was dead, Karen was dead of a stab-wound in her neck. Karen was … was murdered .
    The thought repeated itself, ringing in her head like the telephone bell that had rung and rung. Only the telephone bell had stopped, and the thought would not. Eva’s hand groped for the desk; she felt she must hold on to something.
    Her hand touched something cold, and instinctively she jerked away and looked. It was a piece of metal, a long piece of metal tapering to a point and with a bow on the other end. Scarcely conscious of what she was doing, Eva picked the thing up. It was – that was queer! she thought dully – half a pair of scissors. She could even see the little hole at the base of the blade, between the table and the finger bow, where the screw which held the two halves together had once dropped