Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  The next second I was alone on the porch, and soon after that the officer returned.

  Chapter IX

  I WAS IN A poor state of nerves when I was finally shown into the library. Only Mr. Lancaster was still there, and he looked as though he had not moved since the afternoon. He was lying back in the same chair, with his delicate immaculately kept hands on the arms, and his face a waxy yellow. He did not rise as usual on my entrance. At first he seemed not to know that I was there; then he opened his eyes and looked at me, a strange and unfriendly look.

  “What brings you here?” he asked, still without moving.

  “I want to talk to the Inspector.”

  “About what?” He still lay back, but I got an impression of sudden tension.

  I took my courage in my hands.

  “About the money, Mr. Lancaster,” I said. “I may be wrong, but I have thought of a way by which it could have been taken out of the house.”

  “Taken out of the house! How do you know it has been taken out of the house?”

  Luckily for me Inspector Briggs came in just then, looking rather annoyed, and took me to the morning room behind the parlor. He put me into a chair, and then drawing one close in front of me, sat down himself. At that moment I thanked heaven for long skirts. Whatever it was Margaret had given me, it felt bulky and uncomfortable in my stocking.

  “Now, Miss Hall,” he said, “let’s have it. I presume it’s about this murder.”

  “The murder and the gold,” I told him.

  “Gold? What do you know about any gold?”

  That was the first time I realized that the family had not told the police about it, and I was pretty well confused. But I managed to say that there was a story that Mrs. Lancaster had been hoarding it and that, trying to think how it could be taken away—if it was—I had thought of the street-cleaner.

  “After all,” I said, “somebody did this killing, Inspector. And it wasn’t Jim Wellington, no matter what you think.”

  He smiled rather grimly.

  “Somebody did it, that’s sure,” he agreed. “Well, we’ll look up your friend with the cart; but I wouldn’t be too hopeful. You live next door, eh? Then I suppose you know this family fairly well.”

  “I’ve lived next door to them all my life. But as to knowing them well, if you knew the Crescent you wouldn’t say that.”

  “Why?” He eyed me, absently pinching his upper lip; a habit I was to learn well as time went on.

  “I don’t know. We are rather a repressed lot, I imagine. We see a good bit of each other, but no one is particularly intimate with anyone else. We still leave cards when we call after four o’clock,” I added; and he seemed to find that amusing, for he smiled.

  “But you have certain powers of observation,” he pointed out. “Take this family here, in this house. Did they get along together? Just shut your eyes and tell me what you can think, or remember, about them; their relationships, their prejudices, their differences if they had any.” And seeing me hesitate, he added: “Nobody is under suspicion, of course. As a matter of fact, it is practically impossible for any of them to have done it; for reasons I won’t go into now. This is routine, but it has to be done.”

  “I don’t really know much,” I told him. “They seemed to get along very well. The two girls were devoted to Mrs. Lancaster, although she was a fretful invalid. In a way Miss Emily bore most of that burden; but Emily was her favorite.”

  “And Mr. Lancaster? Was he fond of his wife?”

  “He was most loyal and careful of her. But she was not easy to get along with. You see,” I explained, “our servants talk back and forth, and so we learn things we wouldn’t otherwise.”

  “And—since you seem to know about this money—how did Mr. Lancaster regard the hoarding?”

  “He disliked it. All of them did.”

  He leaned back and pinched his lip again. “Now that’s interesting,” he commented. “Very interesting. It doesn’t look—well, let’s get on. What about Miss Margaret? Rather more worldly, isn’t she? Doesn’t like being a spinster and doesn’t like getting old. Isn’t that it?”

  I colored uncomfortably.

  “No woman likes either, Inspector.”

  But he grinned at me cheerfully.

  “Tut, tut!” he said. “You’re still a young woman, and a good-looking one at that. Well, what about her?”

  “I don’t know very much. She’s a good housekeeper, and she helps with her mother. She goes out more than Miss Emily, almost every other afternoon; and she dresses more carefully. That is, Miss Emily is frightfully neat, of course, but Miss Margaret is more—well, I dare say more fashionable.”

  “Hasn’t give up hope yet, in other words!” he said, and laughed a little. “All right, that will do for the family. Now tell me about this afternoon. Close your eyes again. But first; have you any idea just how this gold was put into the chest? The old lady was helpless, wasn’t she? Then who did it, or was there when it was done?”

  “I haven’t any idea. I never heard of it until tonight.”

  “And then Wellington told you?”

  “I heard before that. All the Crescent seems to have known about it, except myself.”

  He pinched his lips again, thoughtfully.

  “They did, eh? Just how did they know? I gather the family here hasn’t been very communicative about it.”

  “I really don’t know. George Talbot is in a bank, and I suppose even bankers have their human moments—in clubs or wherever bankers go when they are not banking.”

  “The Talbots knew then, I take it?”

  “They must have. Mrs. Talbot says she remonstrated with Mrs. Lancaster only this afternoon about having it there. And Mrs. Lancaster was peevish, and said Margaret had been scolding her too.”

  “Humph!” he said. “Quite a lot of interest in that money all at once, wasn’t there? Well, let’s get back to you, and what you saw before Emily Lancaster came out of her faint, and found young Wellington with you.”

  I had begun to have a queer unwilling sort of confidence in the man, but I hesitated then.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “It takes a lot of trouble to send an innocent man to the chair these days, and somethings as much to send a guilty one!”

  So I told him all I knew, which was not a great deal. I began at three-thirty that afternoon, and ended when I left the house perhaps an hour and a half later. He listened with his eyes closed, and still pinching that upper lip of his, until I had finished. Then he thanked me and got up.

  “It’s the sort of case that sets a police department by the ears,” he said. “A crime probably by a non-habitual criminal, and so ordinary methods are no use in it. Well, we’ll have to hope for some luck. Maybe it’s in the chest! Certainly from the weight of it the gold still is!”

  And I imagine that it was after that talk with me that Mr. Sullivan went down for the ice pick and met Mr. Lancaster in the hall, only to be forbidden to open the chest at all.

  My friend of the pavement was waiting for me when I left the house. It was after midnight by that time, and raining hard, and I still remember the street lamp shining on his glistening rubber coat, and his injunction to me that I “had better make a run for it.”

  It was not until I had got back to my own room that I missed Margaret’s parcel! My heart almost stopped beating, for whatever it was I knew that it probably lay, white and gleaming, somewhere on the pavement between the two houses.

  I turned out my light and surveyed what little of the street I could see from my window. My friend of the rubber coat was not in sight, but toward the rear and No Man’s Land men seemed to be still moving. Their flashlights at that distance looked like fireflies moving close to the earth. I did not know just what they were searching for, unless it was footprints. But they gave me what the Inspector had not, a terror of the relentless process of the law that turned me cold.

  For I knew I would have to go out again, retrace my steps and find that envelope
which was to save someone who was innocent. And who could that be but Jim?

  The rubber coat was not in sight when I reached the pavement again, and I found my parcel easily enough. No sooner had I picked it up, however, than the now familiar voice spoke close behind me.

  “I thought I’d put you safely to bed!”

  “I lost my handkerchief while I was running,” I said, and dropped the wet object down the neck of my frock.

  He saw the gesture and seemed undecided. After all, he could hardly have up-ended me there on the street and shaken it out of me. But he did not believe the handkerchief story, and he lost some of his amiability.

  “I’d like to see what you picked up just now, miss.”

  “My handkerchief. I’ve told you. If you don’t believe me take me over to Inspector Briggs and watch him laugh at you!”

  “And you won’t show it?”

  “Why should I? Unless I’m under arrest?”

  That decided him, for with a sharp warning to go back home and stay there he let me go. When I reached our porch, he was still standing there in the pouring rain, looking uneasily after me. And so frightened was I was that I was locked in my room with the shades drawn before I so much as looked at what Margaret had given me.

  Then I examined it. It was a fair-sized white envelope on which the rain had already done its work, for as I examined it it fairly went to pieces in my hands.

  There was no concealing its contents. What it contained was a man’s glove, a glove belonging to a large man, and of heavy leather. Nor was there any concealing the fact that the glove was stained with blood. It was wet and faded on the back, but the palm and fingers were stiff with it.

  I stood there, literally frozen with horror. It was a glove that would have fitted Jim Wellington, but could on no account belong to Mr. Lancaster, with his small delicate hands. Like a woman’s, his hands. And instantly I was seeing Margaret running down the stairs after poor Emily, and coming across that glove, maybe in the lower hall. Finding it and hiding it. She liked Jim. She had said: “All I’m trying to do is to save somebody who is innocent.”

  But how, if that glove was Jim’s could she believe him innocent?

  I took it to the light and examined it carefully. It was an old right-hand glove. The marks on the inside showed that it had made several trips to the cleaner’s, and ignorant as I was of such matters I knew that the police could easily identify it from those marks. Also it bore, in addition to the stains, some curious black streaks that looked as though it might have been used while the owner worked about the engine of a car, but which had a pungent odor, familiar but hard to identify, except that it was apparently not engine grease. Still, it might have been.

  I sat back and thought. Beginning at the house nearest the gate, Jim Wellington and Helen had a car, but it was kept at a garage on Liberty Avenue, not far away. The Daltons had a car, and Joseph drove it on state occasions. Mr. Dalton often worked over it in the garage. Holmes I eliminated; he had true mechanic’s hands; usually dirty, to Mother’s disgust. The Lancasters had no car at all, using a hired one when necessary, and George Talbot had an ancient Ford, notorious in the Crescent for its noise and for George’s boast that he had never looked under the hood since he bought it.

  Also, I was more and more certain that the black smears were not engine grease; that they were something else which I should be able to identify, but could not; and which was pungent enough to rise above the odor of wet leather and the dreadful flat smell of dried blood.

  One thing I did know. That glove held the key to the crime next door. It had been worn by the killer, and now I was to hide it where even the police could not find it. For I knew well enough that the man in the rubber coat had not believed me.

  I could not even burn it. Not at once, anyhow. It was wet, and besides, Margaret had told me to hide it. I might get her permission later to destroy it, but for that night at least I had to secret it. But where? And as though to add to my troubles that night, Mother had to choose that moment to waken and to come through the connecting bath into my room. I had only time to slip the dreadful thing under a chair cushion before she entered.

  There was nothing to do but to face it out, so I stood there while she gazed in amazement at my sopping head and dress.

  “Louisa! Where in the world have you been?”

  “I couldn’t sleep, mother. I walked to the corner, and the storm caught me.”

  “You went out? Like that?”

  “No, I came back like this, mother.”

  But she refused to smile. I can still see her, as I see so many things belonging to that dreadful time; her hair in its usual kid rollers, her dead black dressing gown about her, and her face grave and somber.

  “Louisa,” she said, “if I ask you to stay in the house especially at night, until this crime is solved, will you believe me when I tell you that there is a real reason for it?”

  “I should think you would have to tell me more than that, mother.”

  She shook her head.

  “It is not my secret. And it is particularly necessary that the police should not know.”

  “But if it has any bearing on this terrible thing they ought to know.”

  “The thing is done. Nobody can bring her back.”

  “It all sounds stupid and silly to me,” I broke out. “And if the rest of us are in danger it’s criminally wrong. That’s all.”

  But Mother’s face took on the obstinate look I know so well.

  “I am sure all possible steps will be taken,” she said. “The only reason I have told you is that you will realize that you must not leave the house at night. Or even in the daytime, alone.”

  “So, to avoid publicity, we are all to be prisoners! Mother, if you don’t tell the police I shall.”

  I was frightened after I had said it, for I do not remember ever before coming into open conflict with her. I had the little girl feeling that probably the lightning outside would strike me dead the next minute, but Mother took it better than I expected.

  “If you do,” she said, coldly but without indignation, “I can only tell you that you will spoil two lives, and may completely destroy one of them.”

  With that she went out, leaving me to make of it what I could.

  Chapter X

  I REMEMBER THAT I spent the time until Mother slept again in undressing and in trying to think of a safe spot in which to hide that sickening glove.

  Perhaps that seems a simple matter in a house as large as ours, but it does not take into account the Crescent type of housekeeping. For thirty-odd years, in four of our five houses, the week has been divided into certain household “days.” Thus, although we have imported certain labor-saving devices, we still wash on Monday and iron on Tuesday. We bake—we still bake our own bread—on Wednesday and Saturday, we clean our silver on Thursday, we do our marketing three times a week and do it ourselves, and on Friday we have a general cleaning, upstairs and down. Saturday is a sort of preparation day, being devoted to the preparing of elaborate food for Sunday, and to the changing of beds, the listing of Monday’s wash and a complete tidying up of house, porches and grounds.

  Nothing is sacred from this system, and I myself have rather less privacy than the elephant in our city zoo. It is nothing unusual for me to find Mother seated before my bureau and putting into order the contents of its drawers, and it was in the course of such an investigation that she once found hidden there a letter from Jim Wellington, and thus ended my first and only romance.

  So it was that, there waiting for Mother to go to sleep, I was wildly canvassing the house for some safe hiding place for the glove. I considered the library and dropping it behind the books there; but although we use the room the books are my father’s and so are held virtually sacred. No hand but Mother’s ever dusts them, and only that week I had heard her say that she meant to get at them again. On the third floor the storeroom was always locked, and Mother carried the key. And it was now Friday by the clock, a day which
meant the lifting of all liftables and the moving of all movables in the entire house.

  Never before had I realized what must be the mental condition of a criminal faced with the problem of hiding the clue to his guilt; and never before had I considered that it might be practically impossible in a house of eighteen rooms, baths, pantries and innumerable closets, to conceal an object as small as a glove. Certainly I did not believe that, having at last found a spot which seemingly answered all requirements, it would be discovered in less than twenty-four hours by anything so ironic as a mere turn in the weather!

  But that is precisely what happened, for the place I finally located was over the radiator at the end of the guest wing hall.

  Some years ago the Crescent had decided that our hot-water heat was hard on its furniture, and almost all of us had installed new patented radiator covers in our upper and lower halls. These covers were of metal and resembled all other covers of the sort, with one exception. The top of each one was hinged, and underneath lay a flat zinc water pan. One might examine them for days, and unless one knew the secret he would not discover that shallow pan, which was filled only when cold weather stared our furnaces.

  In our house there were two in the upper hall, one underneath the front window and outside of Mother’s door; the other near the end of the guest wing, where a window faced the Daltons’. It was this one I decided to use, and it was there, at something after one o’clock in the morning, that I placed the glove.

  My spirits rose at once, I remember. The storm had passed, and a cooler air was coming through the open window near at hand. To add to my relief I heard a car drive in at the gate, stop at the Wellington house and men go round the Crescent and out the gate again. That could only mean that they had brought Jim back, and I drew my first full breath of the evening when far away I heard his front door slam.

  It was then that I went to the window, to discover that the Dalton house, like the Lancasters’, was lighted from top floor to basement.