Shortly before four, feeling comforted by Margaret’s visit, she decided to go out after all. She did not know the precise time. She put on her hat and went down to the second floor, where in one of the guest rooms there was a better mirror. She fixed her hat there, and then went out into the hall. On her way to the back stairs, however, she heard someone coming up the front staircase and saw that it was Jim Wellington.
He was bareheaded, and he was coming up quietly, but without any particular stealth. Of one thing she was certain. He was empty-handed.
He did not see her, but passed the landing and went on up toward the main part of the house. Certainly his presence there did not surprise her.
“He always had the run of the house,” she said, rather naively.
She had not seen or heard him go out. She herself had gone on down the back stairs, and she was there with Ellen and Jennie when the alarm was raised. Not in a thousand years would she believe Mr. Wellington committed the crime. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, and she didn’t care what anybody thought.
“So there we are!” said the Inspector, summarizing the case later on. “Wellington had been in the house and slipped away, and old Mr. Lancaster had pulled a fake alibi on us! But if this girl was right, the old gentleman came back at twenty-five minutes to four, and at a quarter to four or about that Miss Emily finds her mother all right and goes to dress. At four she discovers what has happened, and not more than ten minutes after four Eben meets the old gentleman on his way in at the gates, immaculate and not in a hurry, apparently on his way home, and not more than five or ten minutes past his usual schedule!
“I don’t mind telling you that when I got home at three o’clock that morning I took a triple bromide.”
Chapter VIII
I SUPPOSE SOME OF the Crescent people went to bed that night. That some of the women stood before their old-fashioned bureaus, stuck their brooches into their fat pincushions, unhooked dresses and hung them up, slid off petticoats, unpinned false curls and braids and put them neatly into their boxes, unhooked their tight laced stays and unbuttoned their tight shoes; and having got so far, modestly slipped their nightgowns over their heads and then removed the remainder of their clothing.
Or that some of the men also retired, after taking a final nightcap or two, the material for which rumor reported that our chauffeur, Holmes, surreptitiously supplied at a profit.
They had had the first real thrill of many years, and now behind them, visible in the mirrors before which they brushed their hair or took off their collars, were their wide beds with their bolsters, opened and waiting for them, the starched linen pillow-shams of the day laid aside, the day spreads neatly folded and the night spreads as neatly in place. The single bed had no place on the Crescent.
Looking back, I can see them all with an understanding I lacked at the time. I can see Mrs. Talbot, attended by her faithful Lizzie, removing one of the black transformations which she wore rather as other women wear a hat, and of which she claimed to have a half dozen or so. I can see Lydia taking off her pads and hanging them up in a window to dry after the hot day. I have seen them there myself, early in the morning. I can see Emily Lancaster, filled with who knows what horrors, asleep at last after the Crescent physician, Doctor Armstrong, had given her an opiate; and Margaret walking the floor of the morning room downstairs while police overran the house, listening for any approach to the library and the old couch there, where far down under the upholstery she had hidden something which she must somehow get out of the house.
And downtown, in an office in the City Hall, I can see Jim Wellington sitting in a hard chair and being questioned, his key to the Lancaster house on the desk, the Commissioner behind the desk, and the District Attorney walking the floor and smoking one cigarette after another.
“What time was it when Miss Margaret Lancaster telephoned you?”
“Between eleven and twelve. Perhaps a little later.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said her father wanted me to go over the chest and see what was in it.”
“A chest? What chest?”
Jim was astonished.
“Then they haven’t told you? The chest under my aunt’s bed. She had developed a nervous terror of banks, and she’d been turning her fortune into gold and currency for some months. Mostly gold.”
After that he had to explain the entire procedure, and they listened spellbound. Here at last, they felt was the motive for the crime. But they were not satisfied with his explanation of why he had gone to the house that afternoon.
“You carried no money today?”
“No. None whatever.”
“Then why did they send for you?”
“I’ve told you that Mr. Lancaster wanted the chest opened and investigated. A sort of audit, I suppose.”
“Why an audit? Did Margaret Lancaster explain?”
“No, I haven’t an idea. None of them had liked the hoarding. I hoped it meant the stuff was to go back to the bank. It was a fool idea from the start.”
“This key the family was searching for, was that the key to this chest?”
“I don’t know what they were searching for,” he said rather sulkily. “My aunt wore the key to the chest on a chain around her neck.”
“You know how much gold was in this chest. Is it your idea that robbery was the motive for the crime?”
“I have no ideas about it at all. More than half the stuff was in gold, the rest in currency. I’d say nobody could carry the gold away in a hurry. It’s pretty heavy. As to the currency—” He looked at them. “Why in God’s name don’t you look and see?”
But this, as it happened, was not possible that night. On the first information from Jim that the chest had held a fortune in gold and currency Inspector Briggs had been notified and the chest examined. Not only did it show no signs of having been tampered with, but it was still so heavy that the mere act of getting it out from under the bed was a difficult one.
No key had been found, and the officers stood about the chest, eyeing it. It was almost midnight by that time, but Sullivan went downstairs and after getting an ice pick from the back porch, the only tool he could find, was on his way back when he met Mr. Lancaster in the lower hall.
“I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Lancaster,” he said. “We want to take a look into that chest under your—under the bed upstairs. I suppose you have no other key to it?”
The old man eyed him stonily.
“The chest is not to be opened,” he said.
“But if there has been a robbery—”
“There has been no robbery. The chest contains a large part of my wife’s estate, and will not be opened unless her attorney is present; perhaps not until her will has been probated. I know very little about such matters.”
Sullivan, I believe, went up the stairs, swearing softly. There was apparently nothing to be done, since the chest itself showed no signs of having been disturbed. He and the Inspector agreed to let it ride until morning, and it was only the discovery of fingerprints on it that changed their minds. These checked with none belonging to the household, all of whom had been printed that evening, and were quite distinct; that is, two hands had been laid on the lid, on either side of the lock, as if to raise it.
They made no further attempt to open the box that night, but they put a policeman in the room on guard over it; and at last after a rather acid exchange with that office in the City Hall they went home, the Inspector to take his bromide and Sullivan to ponder over those prints on the box. For they were the prints of a small hand, and Jim Wellington was built on large and fairly substantial lines.
That, as nearly as I can describe it, was the situation that night of Thursday August the eighteenth, following the murder. The police had gone over every inch of the house and were still examining the grounds outside, but what they had as a result of seven hours or more intensive labor was the body of an aged and bedridden woman, almost decapitated by the blows of an axe; the picture o
f a family, stunned but still bearing with dignity its terrible catastrophe; and for clues a blood-stained axe, two or three blades of grass, a smear outside a window screen, a locked chest with some unidentified prints on it, and the knowledge for what it was worth that both Mr. Lancaster and Jim Wellington had been in the house at or about the time the murder was committed.
I myself was faint and confused when I got back from Jim’s that night. Mother was asleep, locked in and probably with a vase set on each of her window sills so it would fall if anyone tried to enter by the porch roof. Holmes was snoring lustily in the guest room, and the night air was heavy and close, as though rain were in prospect.
I remember standing in the center of my room and looking about me. My sense of security was badly shaken that night, and suddenly I realized that I had given up everything else for it, had sacrificed to it my chance to live and even my chance to love. And for what? That my bed should be neatly turned down at night and the house run smoothly, with fresh flowers in the proper season and the table napkins ironed first on the wrong side and then polished on the right?
Perhaps I was hysterical that night, for I found myself looking at the fat pincushion on my bureau and laughing. I had done that only once before. That was when I came home from boarding school for the last time, and tried to throw it out. I had done it, too; but the next day it was firmly in its place again. I had laughed then, and then burst into a storm of tears.
After that the pincushion was always symbolic to me. It stood for everything: for no children to play with when I was small; for long hair when I had wanted to cut mine; for fried chicken and ice cream at hot Sunday midday dinners; for the loss of romance and the general emptiness of life. And that night it squatted there as if to remind me that life was short, but that it was still there; that it would always be there.
I did not undress at once. Instead I stood by a window, in the room which corresponded with Margaret Lancaster’s, and thought over all that I had learned. Out of the chaos in my mind certain things were emerging. For one thing, everyone at the house that night had, either tacitly or openly, suspected that the crime was essentially a crime of the Crescent itself. Apparently George Talbot suspected Bryan Dalton, and Mr. Dalton suspected George! Both Lydia Talbot and Mrs. Dalton, not to mention Mother, seemed convinced that the answer lay in the Lancaster house itself; and only Mrs. Talbot openly believed that it was a plain case of robbery.
But that last theory seemed to me to be absurd. Even I knew that gold was heavy. One did not pick it up and simply run away with it. Again, none of us actually knew that the gold and currency were missing. And if they were, I wondered vaguely if there had been time between Mrs. Talbot’s departure and Jim’s entrance for the old lady to be killed, the chest dragged out and opened, bags of gold or bundles of notes placed on the porch roof, and the chest replaced under the bed.
For that at least we did know that night, although I do not remember how we knew it, unless it was from Lydia Talbot, who had an uncanny way of securing information. The chest was under the bed when the police got there.
I wondered about Eben, only to dismiss him. It had been half past three when I sat down at my window, and the sound of the mower had not ceased once until that time at four o’clock when he stopped to mop his hot face, and Emily had screamed in the house across.
No, not Eben. Not even any of our servants, so far as we could tell. All of them save Peggy at the Lancasters’ had been with us for years on end. All save Helen Wellington’s, that is, and they had packed and gone long before the crime. I thought of Peggy and dismissed her; a slim soft little creature, whom I had once seen walking with Holmes on the path through No Man’s Land, but whose face showed only a sort of weak amiability.
Then who else? Not a delivery driver for one of our shops. The Crescent rigidly insists on delivery at the rear, and the Lancaster rear porch had been occupied all the afternoon. Not Holmes, more recent than most of the others, but driving Mother that afternoon until half past four; nor the Daltons’ butler, Joseph, identified in the general canvass that night by Laura Dalton as having brought her iced tea at a quarter to four.
Who else but Jim, then? I began again that sort of desperate roll call of the Crescent: Helen Wellington in town, and with no possible motive: Mrs. Dalton drinking iced tea and Bryan Dalton in a pair of dirty overalls working over his car in their garage, Mother out, Eben mowing, Lydia gone shopping at two-thirty and sitting the rest of the afternoon in an air-cooled moving picture theater, George downtown at his bank, and Mrs. Talbot carefully locked in her bedroom and taking a nap.
It was Lydia Talbot that afternoon who had come nearest to making plain statement. “I suppose they stood it as long as they could,” she had said, and then became uneasy and spoke of what devoted daughters they had always been.
One thing was clear even to me, however. That was that the secret of the Lancasters’ gold was not a secret at all. Probably from the moment Jim Wellington had brought out his first canvas sack, with its neck neatly wired and sealed with lead, our grapevine telegraph had sent the news from one end of the Crescent to the other. There would be even no secret as to where it was kept, with Peggy wiping the chest daily with an oiled cloth—as we wipe all our furniture—and brushing the floor under that tragic bed.
A dozen people knew, a hundred might have learned. And as I did not then know of those screens which would not move, it seemed to me that some one of those hundred could have scaled the porch roof, slid into the room, opened the chest with the key after his deadly work was done, and escaped with his treasure.
But how? In a car? No car had passed our house from three-thirty to four. That I knew. Then who else? The street cleaner? I had hardly ever noticed him. No one seems to notice the street cleaner, for some reason. But now I recalled him, a tall thin gangling man in dirty white clothes and helmet, who was a constant source of irritation to the Crescent, which regarded him as especially employed by the city to brush its leaves into heaps and then let the wind blow them about again.
Perhaps I was not entirely rational that night, but the picture of this individual pushing his waste can on wheels persisted in my mind. After all, if the Crescent knew of the gold and the key to the chest around the old lady’s neck, then its servants knew it. And what the servants knew he might know.
In a way, too, he had access to all our properties; for whenever his cart was filled he had a way of trundling it back to No Man’s Land and there, against a city ordinance, dumping and burning it.
He could have known not only about the gold. He could easily have known about the axe in the woodshed. Moreover, so regular are our habits, it might have been possible for him to know that Emily dressed while Mrs. Lancaster slept between three-thirty and four, that the old gentleman walked at that time, leaving the screen door open, that it was Margaret’s afternoon off, as well as Peggy’s; and he could have seen that the other two maids were in the rear of the house.
Moreover, the times coincided. While I had not noticed him that day, he generally reached us by mid-afternoon. And again, it seemed to me that his cart answered the question as to how the gold had been taken, if it had.
I have told all this circumstantially, not because it made any real contribution to the solving of our crimes, but because it explains how I myself in a small way became involved in them. For shortly before midnight, and while the Inspector and Sullivan were still gazing at that chest as it was being dragged from under the bed, I was on my way to the Lancaster house with my theory!
I got out of the front door without rousing anyone, but no sooner had I set foot on the street pavement than a shadowy figure in a rubber coat looked up and flashed a light in my face.
“Not allowed to go this way, miss,” a voice said.
“Don’t be absurd. I want to see Inspector Briggs.”
“I don’t think he’ll see you. He’s busy.”
“Nevertheless I intend to try,” I said firmly; and with that he fell back, although he
followed me all the way. At the Lancaster walk he stopped.
“I’ll be here when you come out,” he told me. “It isn’t a healthy neighborhood just now for young ladies alone.”
With which cheerful remark he lighted a cigarette and lounged away.
The Lancaster house was more fully lighted than I had realized until I stood before it. Saving of lights is one of the Crescent’s pet economies, although most of us are safely beyond want, and it is an actual fact that the house in front of me, blazing from attic to cellar, was more indicative to me of the sharp break in our lives than anything else I had so far seen.
For a time, however, it looked as though I might not be admitted.
There was an officer on the porch, and he asked me sharply what I wanted.
“To see Inspector Briggs,” I told him. “Or Mr. Sullivan. He’s a detective, I believe.”
“The Inspector’s upstairs, miss,” he said doubtfully. “But I don’t think he’ll see you.”
“Tell him I have something to say that may be important. I am Miss Hall. I live next door.”
He went in then, and I stood on the porch waiting. The expected storm was closer now, and I remember distant thunder and a thin spatter of rain on the roof overhead. Then the front door opened again, but it was not the policeman. It was Margaret Lancaster.
“Louisa?” she said, in a whisper.
“I’m here, Miss Margaret.”
“Quick, take this,” she said. “Have you a pocket? If you haven’t, slip it into your stocking. And for God’s sake don’t tell anybody I gave it to you.”
She had thrust a small package into my hand; an envelope rather. I took it, but I must have seemed uncertain, for she urged me in a desperate voice to hide it.
“He’ll be down any minute!” she implored me. “Hurry!”
I slid it into my stocking, and then slowly straightened.
“I don’t like it, Miss Margaret,” I told her. “If it has anything to do with—”
“Listen to me, Lou! All I’m trying to do is to save somebody who is innocent. I swear that, Lou.”
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