Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Emily was still awake and still worrying about her bird, for she opened her door when she heard Margaret and asked where the cage was. Margaret told her that George Talbot had taken it to the stable, and Emily had seemed satisfied.

  That was all she knew, and examination of Emily’s room supported this part of her story. The book Emily had been reading was face down on the table beside her chair, and her bed jacket lay across the foot of the bed. What the police could not understand, nor those of us who learned it by the grapevine, was why Miss Emily should have at least partially redressed herself later; have put on her shoes and stockings and her petticoat, in order to do what she had done so many nights before; to go downstairs for something to eat.

  Miss Margaret, distracted as she was by her father’s grave illness, could give no explanation.

  “She never bothered to dress,” was what she said. “She often went in her nightdress and slippers, or sometimes in a wrapper. No, I can’t understand it. The bird cage? But why in the world would she want it? She knew the bird was dead.”

  That was the way the case stood until three o’clock that afternoon. Then the police, still searching for the empty shell, found two things which only added to our mystery.

  One of these was a garden spade, identified by Eben as belonging to the Daltons and left by him on Saturday leaning against the wall of the Dalton garage. This spade was discovered in the shrubbery near the body, but at first seemed to have no significance. It was Eben’s identification which set them to thinking.

  The other was the discovery late that afternoon of the bullet itself, deeply implanted in a small tree in No Man’s Land. There was no empty shell to be found, however, and no spot could be found where, if Miss Emily had indeed carried the spade to where it lay, she had used it for any purpose whatever.

  Inspector Briggs summed it up later.

  “Well, there we were again, with the newspapers howling like nobody’s business and the Commissioner and the District Attorney carrying on like two lunatics. What had we? She didn’t shoot herself; that’s certain. And we couldn’t get a search warrant and tear all five houses wide open to look for a gun. Not the Crescent! There would have been hell to pay.

  “All that bullet did until we’d examined it the next day was to show us approximately where she’d been shot from; the direction. That pointed to the walk itself, or to the space between those two houses. But we couldn’t find the shell to prove it.

  “What we figured was that she’d been shot from close range. It was a dark night, remember; no moon. Not exactly pointblank, but close enough. And that she was out on some business of her own, maybe the gold. She’d carried that spade. Her prints were all over it.”

  “That was another thing that threw us off, for it wasn’t far from the body that we found that key to the chest and its chain. We didn’t announce that, but it was there all right; looked as though it had been buried and the rain had uncovered it. But there it was.”

  “As for the prints of those heels, well—they looked pretty fresh, but by the time we’d got there women had been swarming all over the place. They might be important and they might not. Just one of those things!”

  For, although we didn’t know it at the time, the search had finally revealed between where the body lay and the Talbot’s old stable, two or three prints of a high French heel. Just such heels as Helen Wellington and Mrs. Dalton wore as a matter of habit, and as I myself used now and again in spite of Mother’s protests and as a small assertion of independence.

  The police made molds of them; spraying them with some sort of liquid shellac first, I believe, and then pouring in some melted paraffine. The earth was fairly firm and the molds successful, but they offered no characteristics of any sort to identify them. As the Inspector said with disgust:

  “There were at least four women along the Crescent including the housemaid Peggy, who could have made those prints. But there were about a hundred thousand in the city who could have made them too.”

  We knew nothing of this on that Monday, however. All we knew was that Emily Lancaster had been killed, and that our morale had for the second time been pretty completely shattered.

  We carried on as best we could. Monday is the Crescent’s wash day, and murder or no murder, at or before nine o’clock its various laundresses converged on it as usual. By eleven that day the drying yards revealed as usual to all and sundry the most intimate garments of its owners, and inside our houses we were calling up the butcher and ordering soap from the grocer, much as we always had.

  Not quite as usual, however, for about the middle of the morning the Talbots’ laundress, setting the pole for her clothesline into its cement foundation in the drying yard was unable to seat it properly and made an examination of the hole. The empty shell was lying in it, and with the aid of a clothespin she got it out.

  But here is one of the things which I dare say has hanged an innocent man before this, or sent him to the chair. All our laundresses are negresses, and of a grade which has an almost superstitious fear of the police. Amanda therefore put the shell in her pocket and said nothing about it.

  “Ah didn’ want to get mixed up with that kind of trouble,” was her later explanation.

  This, when we learned it, seemed definitely to fix the position of the killer on that Sunday night as in the Talbot drying yard, a small piece of ground which borders the path toward the Lancasters’, and which is protected from the street by an open lattice covered with vines. On the side toward the garage and the path, however, there is only shrubbery, and rather low shrubbery, at that.

  We knew nothing of Amanda’s discovery that day, however. Mother spent most of it at the Lancasters’, with Mrs. Talbot there also, and reported on her return that Mr. Lancaster was still unconscious and Margaret going about in a daze. She had, it seemed, decided to clear her mother’s bedroom of its personal belongings, and so the three women had unlocked the room and gone to work. Mother was hot and tired when she came back, and I noticed that she carried a square package of some sort which looked like a large book.

  She said nothing about it, however, and as it was wrapped in white paper and tied, I did not ask her about it. In fact I quite forget about it until that evening when by ones and twos the neighbors drifted in.

  The package was on top of one of the bookshelves, and it was Mrs. Talbot who noticed it.

  “I see she gave it to you.”

  “Yes,” Mother said. “She didn’t know what to do with it. I don’t know that I do, either. I suppose it will go to the third floor.”

  “To the third floor” is Crescent usage for any sort of storage.

  I cannot remember now that anyone except Mrs. Talbot showed any interest in the album. There was a time coming when I was to think back and try to recall that scene, but without result. George wanted to see it, “to cheer him up,” and was sharply rebuked by his mother. Bryan Dalton eyed it and then looked away, while his wife watched him. But that was all.

  I myself knew it well, its imposing size and the clasps which fastened it. I could remember it lying on the Lancasters’ parlor table when I was a small girl, and the awe with which I examined the strange clothes and stranger attitudes of the people pictured inside. But now as I say it aroused no interest. We sat in an informal circle, much as we had once before, but the excitement of Thursday had given place to a strained anxiety which showed itself in Mrs. Talbot’s lowered voice and strained mouth, in Lydia’s pallor and the hands which shook over her knitting, in Mrs. Dalton’s shrill high laughter, and in Bryan Dalton’s increased taciturnity.

  So far as I can recall he spoke only once all evening.

  “What it comes to is this,” he said. “We have a murdering killing brute somewhere around us, and I’ve already asked for extra police protection.”

  “Police!” said Mrs. Talbot. “We’ve been overrun with them, and what good are they? What we need is more bars and more locks.”

  “And more fires out back!” said Mrs. Dalto
n surprisingly. Everyone looked at her, but she only laughed rather maliciously and on that the bell rang and Helen Wellington came in.

  She stood in the doorway surveying us with her faintly ironic smile.

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose you think that Jim has been busy again!”

  That shocked us into action. Bad taste always does. Perhaps she had meant to do just that, for Mother got up and faced her squarely.

  “Really, Helen!” she said. “If you think we have been discussing Jim in this—in this tragic connection, you are mistaken. We have done nothing of the sort.”

  “Discussing or thinking or just plain wondering, I came in to tell you what I have told the police. Jim Wellington slept in my room last night, and he didn’t leave it.” And she added more lightly, seeing how indelicate most of us considered that statement: “I’ll swear that on a stack of Bibles if necessary. I’m sure the Crescent could produce a stack of Bibles!”

  “Come in and don’t be silly, Helen,” George Talbot said. “We’ve been talking about self-defense here; nothing else.”

  Her eyes, made up as usual but shrewd behind her mascara, swept the circle.

  “Self-defense?” she said. “With everybody here but poor Jim? That’s funny!”

  Then she turned and went out, and we heard the front door slam behind her.

  She had effectively broken up the gathering. They all left soon after she had gone, but I noticed that where the Daltons had once walked side by side, even if it was in silence, he now stalked ahead and let her follow as best she might. At the end of the path, where it reaches the street, I saw him turn and look back toward the Lancaster house, where a light showed from the sick man’s room. After that he squared his shoulders and marched on, with his wife mincing along on her absurd heels behind him.

  George stopped long enough behind his mother and his aunt to tell me that Margaret had asked him to stay the night in the house, and that he had agreed.

  “She’s frightened,” he said. “And I don’t blame her. It looks like a plot to wipe out the whole lot of them.”

  “You think it’s the same person, then?”

  “It’s stretching things rather fine to premise two killers after one family, isn’t it?”

  Then he left, and I locked up the house while Mother carried the album upstairs with her, still in its paper wrapping.

  Chapter XXIV

  HOLMES SLEPT IN THE house again that Monday night, and locked in once more, although he did not know it. Miss Emily’s death had destroyed any theory I might have had about him, and I was confused and rather hopeless. Even granting that he could have escaped by the window, there was no possible way by which he could have reentered the house. Unless—and that came to me suddenly as I commenced to undress—he had dropped out the window, reentered by one of the long ladders we all have for tree pruning, and in the morning taken it away again.

  Somewhere I had read that such a method had been used, and discovered by the marks left in the earth by the ladder. So, because I was not sleepy and because I could not hear Holmes snoring loudly in his comfortable guest room bed, I decided to go downstairs and investigate for myself. There seemed nothing else to do. Since the morning of the day before I had lost all contact with Herbert Dean.

  Mother was tired, and after locking all her windows for her and placing a vase on each sill, “in case someone tries to enter,” as she said, I went downstairs and out the front, door.

  It was another cloudy night, with another storm in the air but with no wind; which was fortunate, Mother having demanded our only flashlight and I being armed merely with a box of matches. I had lighted one and found no marks, and was stooping with my second one when a low voice suddenly said:

  “Don’t be frightened, Miss Lou. It’s Dean. And put out that match. There’s nothing there. I’ve looked.”

  The shock made me tremble violently, and I imagine he knew it, for he caught me by the arm and drew me away.

  “Steady!” he said. “And where can we talk? The cellar?”

  “The garage is all right,” I managed to say.

  “Oh! Then Holmes is in the house again tonight?”

  “Yes. How did you know he was, last night?”

  “Knowing about Holmes is my business. Not for what you think, however. Your Holmes is a smart young man, as I believe I’ve said before. Some of these days he and I are going to have a good old-fashioned gam.”

  “A gam?”

  “A talk, a gossip. Whatever you like to call it. In the meantime, can’t we have one ourselves? I need to know a lot of things.”

  This I agreed to and so I went back into the house, closed and bolted the front door, and on reaching the kitchen porch found him waiting for me on the back path. His matter-of-factness was solid and dependable. In silence he led the way to the garage, put me on a bench, sat down on the running board of the car and got out his pipe.

  “Well!” he said at last, “things are getting interesting! Day by day, in every way, they’re getting hotter and hotter.”

  That surprised me. “You’re hardly human, are you?” I said. “I believe you actually like this situation!”

  “Human enough, but it’s my business,” he said calmly, and smoked thoughtfully and in silence for some time.

  “I understand Helen broke up the meeting tonight,” he went on after the pause. “Very typical of Helen, if slightly indiscreet. Still she had a good enough reason, although I’d have kept her back if I’d known, but you see I’m not there any more. She’s filled up the place with servants, and I had to get out.”

  “What was her reason? She was rather dreadful.”

  “She was scared,” he said quietly. “You see, Jim owns a forty-five automatic. However, the police have the bullet now, and by tonight or tomorrow the experts will know that his pistol never fired that shot.”

  He had little to say as to his own movements during the day, and he flatly refused to discuss the second glove.

  “I’ll tell you all about that some day.”

  But he was more concerned about Miss Emily’s murder than he had seemed at first.

  “You see,” he said, “there can be only two or three reasons for killing her. First, that she was mistaken for someone else—possible, but unlikely to my mind. Again, she may have had to be put out of the way for some reason we don’t know; because she knew something or obstructed some plan. I have an increasing feeling that there is a plan. And still again, she may have had something in her possession which somebody else wanted or had to have. I say all this because we have to count out the usual motives of revenge or jealousy or love. She was hardly a person to inspire any of them. And of course there’s the possibility of a lunatic. We can’t eliminate that entirely.”

  “But you don’t believe that, do you?”

  “No. You see, Lou,—you don’t mind my calling you Lou, do you? it’s easier—you see there are two types of killers, roughly speaking. One is a low type, a subnormal mentally, who generally belongs to the underworld and who kills impulsively, out of fear or rage or liquor. The other type is the intelligent one. Its crimes are carefully planned and subtly carried out. But that of course is its great danger. Everything in such a plot depends on something else; it’s all fitted together like a machine. Then a cog slips and the whole business goes to pieces.”

  “Does that mean that poor Emily Lancaster was such a cog?” I asked.

  “It’s possible. Why else kill her? She was inoffensive, to say the least. If she knew anything she hadn’t told it, at least to the police. You see, Lou—I rather like calling you Lou. I hope you do too!—it’s my belief that somewhere buried in this Crescent is a story. I’m leaving the rest to the police and going after that story. But I don’t mind telling you that if and when I get it, it won’t be from the Crescent itself. Of all the tight-lipped mind-your-own-business people I’ve ever seen! But let’s forget them. Are you tired? Do you want to go in?”

  “Not unless you do?”

 
“What, me? With a pretty girl and a summer night and a handsome running board to sit on? Never. Besides, it helps me to talk out loud. You’re a good listener, you know; any man prefers no voice even to a soft low voice in a woman at times.”

  Then he dropped his bantering air.

  “What gets me,” he said, “is why she left the house last night at all. It doesn’t fit, Lou. Why did Miss Emily get up, put on part of her clothing, eat an apple on the porch and then go out? She wasn’t scared off that porch. She’d have rushed into the house and locked the door. Unless,” he added, “she was afraid of someone in the house. And in that case, why the apple?”

  He was annoyed, I could see. He had had a theory of some sort which had satisfied him, and then along came something, which, as he said, didn’t fit.

  “One night she runs out of the house and hunts sanctuary at the Talbots’,” he went on, “and the next she sits on the back porch at one in the morning with that damned apple and then goes and takes a walk! Lou, we’ve got to find out why she took that walk.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “Of course,” I said, “she might have gone for the bird cage.”

  “The what?”

  “Well, Margaret had told her that the bird was dead, and about giving the cage to George Talbot to put in their stable. And she would know that he doesn’t lock the stable at night. He’s been hoping for years that someone would steal his car.”

  He put his hands to his ears with a wild gesture.

  “I look at you, Lou,” he said, “and you are uttering words in a very nice voice. But they don’t mean anything. What is this about a bird cage? Do you mean that Miss Emily Lancaster would go after it at one o’clock in the morning? Why would she do such a thing?”

  “She was terribly fond of the bird. But of course she knew by that time that it was dead—You see, I really killed it. I put it in a back room and nobody gave it any water. I—I really can’t bear it, Mr. Dean. If she was after that cage when she was killed I’ll carry a scar all my life.”