The Door Between

The Door Between Read Free

Book: The Door Between Read Free
Author: Ellery Queen
Tags: General Fiction
Ads: Link
had provided. Eva grew up in a Nantasket paradise, laved by salt winds made pleasanter by the lavish acrid smell of wild flowers. The doctor sent her to the best schools – schools he investigated suspiciously beforehand. He provided money, good times, wardrobe, the care of hand-picked women for her. He had made his motherless house a home for her; and he had inoculated her character against infection with the same sure knowledge with which he supervised the hygiene of her body.
    Yet those were formative years and Eva experienced no biting emotion. She knew she was forming – even a plant must have a vague sensibility of its growth: like all growing things she felt life tracing its course through her body, doing extraordinary things to her, shaping and building her, filling her full of meanings too green for expression and destinations too far away to be more than glimpsed. It was an interesting time, even an exciting time; and Eva went about in a glow, happy only as a plant is happy.
    But then, suddenly, something went dark about her, as if some monstrous light-organism had swallowed up the sun and bathed the world in evil, unnatural colors.
    From a gay and lovely vegetable she became overnight a creature of moods, chiefly black. Food lost its savor. Fashions, which had always been exciting, became dull – she quarreled bitterly with her dressmaker; her friends, whom she had always managed beautifully, became intolerable – she lost two of them forever by telling them some plain truths about themselves.
    It was all very mysterious. The theatre, the books she loved, the witcheries of Calloway and Toscanini, cocktail parties, the fascinating quest for bargains in the Boston and New York stores, the gossip, the dancing, the Causes she was always championing – all the interests and activities which had filled in the outline of her pleasant existence inexplicably began to fade together, as if there were a conspiracy against her. She even took it out savagely on Brownie, her favorite horse at the Central Park stables; and Brownie was so outraged that he dumped her unceremoniously into the middle of the bridle-path. It still ached where she had fallen.
    All these wonderful symptoms, coming to a head in an unusually insidious spring in New York – Dr. MacClure had long since given up the Nantasket house except for occasional weekends – really reduced themselves to a simple diagnosis, if only Dr. MacClure had been ordinarily observant. But the poor man was too obsessed with his own excursions into romance these days to see farther than the end of his nose.
    “Oh, I wish I were dead,” said Eva aloud to the little gulps in the pool; and for the moment she really did.
    The bridge creaked, and from the way it trembled underfoot Eva knew a man had come up behind her. She felt herself growing warmer than the warmness of the evening warranted. It would be too silly if he –
    “Why?” asked a young man’s voice. It was not only a man’s voice, it was a young man’s voice; and what was more embarrassing, the voice was quite hatefully amused.
    “Go away,” said Eva.
    “And have you on my conscience for the rest of my life?”
    “Don’t be unpleasant, now. Go away.”
    “See here,” said the voice, “there’s water right under you and you look pretty desperate. Were you thinking of suicide?”
    “Don’t be absurd!” flared Eva, swishing around. “The pool isn’t two feet deep.”
    He was a very large young man, almost as large as Dr. MacClure, Eva was chagrined to notice; and he was despicably good-looking. Not only that, he was dressed in dinner clothes, which somehow made matters worse. The same piercing keen-puckered eyes people remarked in Dr. MacClure beamed down at her; and altogether Eva felt like a child.
    She decided to snub him, and turned back to the rail.
    “Oh, come now,” said the large young man, “we can’t let it go at that. I have a certain social responsibility. If it wasn’t drowning, what

Similar Books

Wildalone

Krassi Zourkova

Trials (Rock Bottom)

Sarah Biermann

Joe Hill

Wallace Stegner

Balls

Julian Tepper, Julian

The Lost

Caridad Piñeiro