“You don’t know where it is?”
“No.”
He seemed to consider that too, but the next moment he startled me.
“By the way,” he said suddenly. “Did you by any chance ring up the Lancasters last night, about two hours after I left you?”
“Yes, I did. Good heavens, don’t tell me you were the man on the roof!”
He smiled and shook his head.
“No, but I was the man on the ground if you happened to see me. You scared him away, you know. That telephone bell did it. What did Margaret Lancaster say when she came down to the front porch?”
I told him; that the cedar room trap was closed and the ladder in its place, and he nodded thoughtfully.
“I see,” he said. “Of course it took some time to get there. Emily isn’t a fast mover. Well, it’s all rather curious.”
He lapsed into silence, and Jim spoke for the first time. He had remained standing since I entered, leaning against the mantelpiece with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, and I thought he looked tired and harassed.
“Thanks a lot about the glove, Lou,” he said rather awkwardly. “It’s mine, of course, or was, although I don’t know how it got into that house, or when I saw it last. I don’t wear gloves in the summer, scarcely ever carry them. I’d put the date at somewhere last spring; early in June, maybe.”
“You didn’t leave it at the Lancasters’?”
“I might at that. I simply don’t know.”
Mr. Dean looked up.
“You know this Crescent pretty well, Miss Lou. Who would you say uses boot polish around here? I suppose the butler, Joseph, at the Daltons’? And old Mr. Lancaster does his own, I imagine. Who else?”
“I don’t know. Possibly Holmes, although Mother says he hates to polish anything.”
He thought that over before he spoke again. “Well,” he said, “of course we need the other glove, but I’d say the chances are two to one against our finding it. You see, Miss Lou, a man may and usually does polish his boots with one hand; but he uses two hands on an axe. He’s got to. And that’s why we want the second glove.”
It was after that that he asked me about the Crescent itself.
“Funny place, this Crescent,” he said. “What about the Talbot woman, for instance? And why does she lock herself away? What was Mrs. Dalton hunting for, the night of the murder? And why does he look like a whipped dog? Then whose prints are those on the chest? I’ve got an idea I know, but it’s probably too late to prove it. Certainly they don’t check with those of the Lancaster family or the servants.
“Then again, does anyone in the Crescent suspect anyone else? You might know that. They’re a secretive lot, but they know each other well and some of them are interrelated. Take Jim here, and I believe the Talbots are connected, aren’t they?”
“Mrs. Lancaster’s first husband was a brother of Miss Lydia’s, and of Mrs. Talbot’s husband. I think—” I added hesitantly—“I think Miss Lydia suspects that either Miss Emily or Miss Margaret did it.”
“Did she say so?”
“Not exactly. She said she supposed they’d stood it as long as they could.”
“Now that’s interesting! Stood what? The old lady was hard to get along with, I gather.”
“Probably, but I don’t think Lydia meant it really. She was dreadfully upset.”
“Well, nerves with women are often like wine with men; they bring out indiscreet facts. However—! I suppose there’s a Mr. Talbot?”
And Jim gave me a real surprise when he said that there was.
“Although he may be dead now. He ran off when George was a baby, and has never been heard from since. It was pretty well hushed up at the time, and of course I don’t remember it; but there was a miserable story connected with it. That was years ago.”
It was so utterly incredible to me that I laughed. To learn all at once that that crayon portrait had had more than a head and shoulders; had had legs to run away with and emotions to feel and resentments to drive it off! But nobody noticed me.
“Is that why she locks up everything and everybody?”
“By George, it never occurred to me!” Jim said slowly. “It may be. Still, it’s absurd on the face of it. It must be twenty-five years ago. Maybe thirty.”
But Mr. Dean was apparently tired of ancient history. He asked me if Holmes was a hard sleeper and an early riser, to which I replied yes and no; and a little later on he explained to me, as I have said, the intensive method of search I had witnessed that afternoon.
“But they’ll not find it there,” he said. And added: “Whoever got away with that money was too intelligent for that.”
I left him standing by the fire, and Jim took me back to the kitchen door again. He was silent until we reached it, then with his hand on the doorknob he said:
“What on earth made you go to see Helen, Lou?”
“I suppose—I didn’t know about Mr. Dean, and I thought you needed looking after,” I told him.
“Well, she’s coming back. Not because it’s her duty, she says, but because she doesn’t want to miss anything!”
And with the memory of the utter bitterness of his voice in my ears I got myself home somehow and into bed. As I went back I could see that across toward Euclid Street the men were still at work with lanterns and electric lamps. They had moved considerably since the afternoon, and there was something sinister and ominous about that painstaking inch-by-inch search, and about the shadowy figures as they crept along close to the ground.
Chapter XIX
THE SECOND GLOVE TURNED up the next day, but by the time it did we were too busy wondering about Miss Emily’s adventure of the night before even to think about it.
For it was that night, a Saturday, or rather at two o’clock on Sunday morning, that Miss Emily Lancaster ran out of her home and sought sanctuary in the Talbot house. Ran just as she was, in a dressing gown over her long-sleeved nightdress and in a pair of bedroom slippers, and stood hammering on their front door until George Talbot opened it for her.
Just what had happened I do not know. Even now the Crescent can only largely surmise. I know that when I went back to our house at one o’clock I noticed that the Lancaster house, or such part of it as I could see, was still lighted; and that this surprised me. I know too that by the time I was ready for bed it was dark again. But I heard no noise, and I dare say I should never have known about that flight of Miss Emily’s at all, had not George Talbot come the next morning to tell me.
It was a Sunday morning, and breakfast is later that day. But I was down early, anxious to see if anything had happened about Holmes and his book. Nothing had apparently, for he was sitting, small and semi-grimy and entirely cheerful, over a substantial breakfast in the servants’ dining room.
He rose when I went to the door and grinned sheepishly; and I saw then that he had been reading Mother’s newspaper, which is supposed to be untouched until it is placed beside the coffee tray for her.
“Just taking a look at the inquest, miss,” he said. “Looks as though the press had it in for the police, as well as for Mr. Wellington.”
“They have to have somebody, Holmes.”
He gave me one of his furtive looks.
“Maybe. Maybe not, miss. I was wondering if I could have the afternoon off. I’d like to go out to my little place, if it’s convenient.”
“I think it will be all right. Just where is this little place of yours, Holmes?”
But he was noncommittal. “Out the North Road a ways,” he said, and thanked me.
I did not pursue the matter, a fact which I have since regretted; but just then I saw George Talbot, aimlessly knocking a golf ball about and keeping an eye on the rear of our house, and I wandered out to the back garden, where he joined me.
“I want to talk to you,” he said in a low voice. “How about the garage? Where’s Holmes?”
“Eating his breakfast.”
We sauntered as casually as possible toward the g
arage, George swishing his club about as though looking for a lost ball. Probably all this was unnecessary, for I knew the servants would have joined Holmes at the table, and except for the Daltons no one else could see us. Once inside, however, George’s manner changed.
“Listen here, Lou,” he said. “There was hell to pay last night. See what you make of this.”
Then he told me. He had been out to dinner and bridge, and got home at one. His mother had been hard to rouse, but at last his Aunt Lydia had heard him, and securing the front door key from Mrs. Talbot, had let him in. He was in a bad humor, apparently.
“It’s such senseless absurdity,” he said. “And she’s getting worse, Lou. She’s had bolts added to some of the window locks since the murder, and getting into her room is like getting into the Bastille. That with a woman who is normal in every other way! I’ve tried to get her to a good psychiatrist, but you’d think I’d suggested giving her poison.”
The story, however, had little or nothing to do with Mrs. Talbot’s aberration or whatever it was, except that Miss Emily was apparently escaping from something, and had chosen the safest place she could think of.
George had been too irritated to go at once to sleep. He had tried reading instead, and at two o’clock he heard someone ringing the bell and then pounding on the front door. He heard Lydia moving in her room, and he met her in the upper hall. She still had the front door key, and he snatched it from her and ran down the stairs.
Emily Lancaster almost fell into the hall when he opened the door. She was as white as paper and looked wild and terrified.
“Hide me, George,” she gasped. “Hide me somewhere. They’re after me.”
He fastened the door behind her, and she seemed to come to herself again, enough at least to draw her dressing gown around her. Lydia had come down by that time, and Emily had collapsed into a hall chair and was staring ahead of her with a strange look in her eyes. As George said, there was no sentiment about his Aunt Lydia, so she went to her and shook her by the shoulder.
“Don’t be an idiot, Emily,” she snapped. “You’ve had a nightmare; that’s all. Who on earth could be after you?”
George had brought her some brandy by that time, and she gulped it down. She looked better, but it had the effect of making her sorry for herself, and for the next few minutes she cried and told of her long years of service and no life of her own. But they could not get her to say what she was afraid of, or to tell who she thought was after her.
In a half hour or so she was better, however, and her story was an odd one.
Her room is on the front of the house, as I have shown, and across the hall from her mother’s. She had gone to bed early, after taking another sleeping powder. Her stepfather and Margaret were shut in the library talking, she thought, about her mother’s estate. And she went to sleep almost as soon as she went to bed. She had locked her door, of course. They all did, since what she referred to as their trouble.
She did now know how long she had been asleep when something roused her. It was a movement or a sound on the porch roof, and she sat up in bed and saw a figure outside. It was quite clear in the moonlight, but not clear enough for identification, and it seemed to be crouching and trying to raise her window screen.
She herself was too frightened even to scream. She slid out of her bed and caught up her dressing gown and slippers. Then she unlocked her door quietly and escaped into the upper hall. She tried her sister’s and father’s doors, but they were both locked; and then she thought she heard the screen being raised, and she simply ran down and out of the house; much as she had run the day of her mother’s death. Only this time she had used the kitchen door.
That was her story, and although by the time he got it more than a half hour passed, George got his automatic and went at once to the Lancaster house. He examined it carefully from the outside, finding no one, and had finally rung the doorbell. After some time Margaret admitted him, opening the door on the chain first, and only taking off the chain when she had turned on the porch light and identified him.
She had been fairly stunned by his story.
“Emily!” she said. “Do you mean she is at your house now?”
“She is. Aunt Lydia is putting her to bed.”
“But I don’t understand. Why didn’t she rouse us? Father sleeps heavily, but I am easy to waken. Of all the ridiculous things to do!” She was puzzled and indignant, but George was not interested in how she felt.
“I’d better take a look at that screen,” he said. “She may have dreamed it, but again she may not. I imagine,” he added drily, “that it would be a pretty real dream to send her out of doors in her dressing gown and slippers at this hour of the night.”
They went up the stairs quietly, so as not to arouse the household, and into Emily’s room. The coverings on the bed had been thrown back, and on a chair neatly folded were her undergarments. Everything was neat and in order; her tidy bureau was undisturbed, her bookcase, her desk.
Only the hook where her bird cage usually hung beside a window was empty, and it was at this screen that Emily had seen the figure.
From the inside the screen had apparently not been disturbed, and Margaret was willing to let it go at that. George, however, was wide awake by that time and pretty thoroughly interested. He raised the screen and got out onto the porch roof, and there lighted a match or two to examine it.
“And if someone hadn’t tried to lift it from the outside, I’ll eat it,” he said. “He’d put a chisel or something of the sort underneath to raise it; enough to get a fingerhold, I suppose. Then, he heard her either in the room or running out of the house, for he lowered it again and got away. Slid down a porch pillar and beat it. It was no dream of Miss Emily’s, Lou. Somebody was there, and that with one policeman at the gate and another patrolling the Crescent. It doesn’t make sense!”
“But why?” I asked. “Who would want to get at poor old Emily Lancaster? Who wants to wipe out the family, George? For that’s what it looks like.”
He sat on the step of the car, making idle circles with his mashie on the cement floor, and I noticed that his face had darkened.
“I had no idea once that maybe I knew,” he said, “but this kills it.”
“What sort of idea?”
“Oh, nothing much. If it had been our house I’d say that the thing one’s afraid of is the thing that happens—whatever that may be. Meaning Mother!” He spoke lightly. “But this washes that out, of course.”
He got up.
“I just thought I’d tell you. Otherwise we’re to keep quiet about it, and I’ve advised Emily to have some bars up on the windows tomorrow. Now, if we had an alibi for old Jim for last night we’d be all right. As it is—”
“George! You don’t think it was Jim?”
“No, but who cares what I think? There was somebody there, that’s sure. You can see the marks he made climbing one of the porch pillars. He broke a part of the lattice too. Well, I’ve got to go. I’ve promised Margaret to bury Emily’s bird.”
“The bird?” I said. “It’s not—dead?”
“Pretty thoroughly dead. No water. Everybody forgot it, and water evaporates pretty fast this kind of weather. Margaret asked me to take it, cage and all, for fear Emily finds it. If anyone wants it later and I’m not around, it will be behind the old barrel in the corner of our stable. No need to leave it where the poor old girl might see it and have a fit.”
He went along then cheerfully enough, but leaving me filled with dismay and remorse. Long after he had disappeared I remained in the garage, grieving over a little yellow bird which had had to die of hunger and thirst. Indeed I was still there when Holmes came out, after his breakfast.
He did not see me at first. He came into the garage whistling and moved directly to a corner, where with his foot he stirred up and scattered a small heap of fine black ashes on the cement floor. It was only when that was done that he managed a grin.
“Burned some letters last night,”
he said. “Never keep anything around that will get you into trouble. That’s my motto, miss. And your mother is down for breakfast.”
I went out, my mind confused in many ways but entirely clear on one point. Mr. Dean would never find the pages Holmes had cut out of his book.
I was depressed when I left the garage. It seemed to me that we would never solve our problem, that clues came and went and still led nowhere. And yet it was that very morning that I found the second glove; found it indeed in a spot which had been examined over and over the afternoon and evening after the crime.
This was under the dining room window at the back of the Lancaster house, and almost directly beneath Margaret Lancaster’s bedroom.
Chapter XX
OUTWARDLY THAT SUNDAY MORNING on the Crescent differed little from any of the innumerable ones which I can remember. Our servants divided as usual, one out and one in; where there were three one took the day off, one went presumably to eleven o’clock service and one remained at home to prepare the heavy midday dinner which after the week’s light luncheons sent most of us into a coma during the afternoon.
And the Crescent allows no decent interval for grief. One submits to what Mother calls the Eternal Will, puts on one’s heaviest black, and shows to the world an unbroken front of submission to God.
At a quarter to eleven then the road was lined with cars, the Daltons’ sedan, our own limousine, the Lancasters’ hired car and George Talbot’s aged roadster with Lydia in the rumble seat, where she got all the dust and wind. But Emily Lancaster did not appear. She had been brought home and put to bed, and our Mary reported that she had looked like a ghost.
I was an interested onlooker at all this, have begged off with a cold which was real enough at that. I stood on the porch and waved Mother off, and I remember watching the other cars go by, each laden with black-draped figures; and wondering if there was not someone in that funereal group who would kneel that morning under the stained glass windows of St. Mark’s and beg an unseen God for forgiveness and mercy.
It was a bright morning. The cold spell had gone, but there was a hint of autumn in the garden. Back in No Man’s Land a small child, as if aware that the overlords had departed, was trundling a red wagon, and across the intervening strip I could see that Mrs. Lancaster’s windows had been raised, as though by airing the room they could somehow remove the last trace of the little old woman who had died in it.
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