The Red Door

And then he was driving through the last of the darkness toward Witch Hazel Farm, chased the last five miles by a shower. As he came down the wet drive and his headlamps swept the front of the house, splintering into fragments of light against the mullioned windows, he had a premonition that all was not well.

He couldn’t have said why, except that Hamish, in the back of his mind, was as moody as the weather, his voice as depressing as the rain.

As he stepped out of the car, he realized that the rain had brought a chill with it. He splashed to the door as the shower grew heavier.

He lifted the knocker and let it fall. Even though it had been draped in black crepe to mark a house of mourning, its sound echoed through the silence, startling birds taking shelter in the greenery below the windows.

No one came.

And then the door was flung open and a frantic Walter Teller cried, “Come quickly, for God’s sake—”

He broke off, staring at Rutledge in bewilderment. “How did you get here so soon? The doctor isn’t even here.” Then looking over Rutledge’s shoulder, he exclaimed, “Here he is now. Let him in, will you? I must go—” And he ran back into the house, leaving the door standing wide.

The doctor’s motorcar was barreling down the drive, pulling up smartly behind Rutledge’s.

“This way,” Rutledge said, and Fielding nodded, preceding Rutledge into the house and taking the stairs two at a time.

Rutledge followed. On the first floor, the passage ran to the right and to the left. The doctor turned right, entered a room two doors down, and disappeared from view. Rutledge could hear someone crying.

He reached the doorway, and the first thing to meet his eyes was the great four-poster bed from another era, its bedclothes scattered and some falling onto the polished floorboards in a wild tangle.

Jenny Teller lay on the bed in her nightdress, her fair hair tumbled and uncombed, her feet bare.

Walter Teller was stepping aside to let the doctor work with her.

Fielding bent over the bed, his hands quick and sure. But after only a matter of minutes, he straightened and said, “There’s nothing I can do. She’s gone. I’m so sorry, Walter.”

“But she was alive when you got here!” he exclaimed. “I could tell.”

“I don’t think she was. And if she had been, it was too late, far too late. The laudanum had done its work. She must have been dying when you found her.”

“She can’t have been. I won’t believe it.” He leaned over his wife, touching her face, calling her name, begging her to wake up. The doctor watched him for a time, then caught his shoulder and pulled him away. “There’s nothing more you can do, man. Let me make her decent. She shouldn’t be left like this.”

It took some time to convince Teller to go out of the room. He reached the doorway, his face wet with tears, his mouth open in a silent cry of grief, then stumbled into the passage, going as far as the stairs, where he sat down on the top step, his head in his hands.

Shutting the door, Rutledge began searching the room from where he stood, his eyes roving from the armoire to the tall dresser, to the smaller chest of drawers on the far side of the bed, a desk by the windows, and a long mirror.

“There was a glass verra’ like that one in Lancashire,” Hamish said.

And so there was. Very like it. Even to the carved roses at the top of the oval frame. It must have come from the same manufacturer to be so alike.

Odd that both women owned the same mirror. He wouldn’t have accused either of them of vanity.

He brought himself up sharply and continued to search for anything out of the ordinary.

Finishing his inspection of the room, he waited without speaking.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” the doctor demanded as he turned to see Rutledge still by the door.

“I got here not five minutes before you. I was called away before I could finish that business of Captain Teller’s fall.”

Fielding nodded. “I thought he might have called you. Walter, I mean.” He gestured to the woman on the bed. “Well, since you’re here, help me lay her out. The bed’s in a state. Where’s Mollie?”

“The maid? I don’t think Teller summoned her.” He crossed the room and helped the doctor with his work, smoothing out the bed-clothes, laying the dead woman back into the center of the bed, and pulling a sheet up to her chin. He worked impersonally, and when the body had been made presentable, he could say with certainty that there was nothing unusual here, no signs of violence.

He said, when their work was done, “What happened?”

“An accidental overdose of laudanum at a guess. I prescribed it some time ago. I can’t tell you why she was taking it now. Worry over that business with her husband? Or the boy going away to school? I know she took it very hard when Captain Teller fell here. She said something to me Sunday evening about not knowing how she was to sleep. She kept seeing him lying there at the bottom of the stairs.”

“And you prescribed nothing then?”