Upon which, to my intense surprise, I found myself crying. I had been calm enough comparatively until then, and I think I scared Herbert Dean as much as I astonished him.
“Stop it, Lou,” he said sharply. “You’ve been a grand girl up to now, and this is no time to heat up and boil over. Stop it, do you hear? Of course you didn’t kill the fool bird, or Emily Lancaster either. Here’s a handkerchief. And this is a nice sentimental time, when you are softened with grief, to tell you that I’m often called Bert—or even Bertie! Silly name, but these things are like warts. You don’t know what brings them on. You only know you’ve got them.”
Which I dare say served its purpose of making me laugh, for it did.
He harked back to the bird cage almost at once, however, and so I told him the story. He listened until I had finished.
“Curious,” he said at last. “If Margaret told her about it she knew the bird was dead. Of course that might account for the spade too; that she meant to bury it. Still, to start out for a thing like that after her scare of the night before simply doesn’t make sense, unless the whole business was an excuse, a sort of camouflage. But that would mean—”
He rose rather suddenly and held out both hands to me.
“Up with you, my lady Lou. Poetry, did you notice! You are going into the house and to bed. I have an idea, although I can’t see you, that you look ghastly. And young ladies shouldn’t look ghastly, Lou. It isn’t becoming.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t cared much how I look. Not for years and years.”
He stood silent in the darkness, still holding my hands.
“No,” he said. “I suppose not. Why should you? The whole effect of this Crescent has been to defeat youth. That’s a rather terrible thing, Lou. And you submit. The difference between you and Helen lies right there, you know. You submit. She revolts. She has more courage.”
“Perhaps I want peace more than Helen does,” I said.
“Peace! It is only age that craves peace, Lou my dear. It has lived and so it is willing to rest. But why should you want peace? Conflict is the very essence of life. And speaking of conflict—” He released my hands.
“You’re going to bed,” he told me, “and I am going to the Talbot stable or garage or whatever it is, to look at that bird cage; although if anyone had told me a week ago that I would start with an axe murder and end with a bird cage I don’t know that I’d have believed them.”
He gave me a little shove and started toward the house.
“I’ll wait until you’re safely inside,” he said. “And listen to this, Lou. We may be through or we may not; but I want you to promise that you’ll not do any more night investigating. There are only two theories of these crimes: one is that they are inside crimes, done by someone on the Crescent; the other is an outsider and possibly a lunatic, and he’s not eliminated even yet. And I don’t know which is the worst. Let me do the dirty work. Is it a promise?”
“I thought you said I had no courage.”
“Moral courage, child. I haven’t a doubt you would fight your weight in wildcats, but there’s a difference.”
With that he let me go, and stood watching me until I was safely inside the house. Then he swung rapidly but silently toward the Talbot garage, and I turned to the front of the house and an experience which I still cannot remember without a shiver.
One of the strangest things during all those hectic days was the comparative immunity with which our killer apparently moved about among us. Police might be scattered here and there, and usually were; we ourselves might be on guard, our houses locked and our windows bolted. But with uncanny skill both were circumvented.
Thus, although I cannot say that our kitchen door was in full view from the garage that night, it was at least dangerously close to where Herbert Dean and I sat talking. Yet in that interval of a half hour or less what followed seemed to prove later that someone had crept up the steps of the back porch and slipped inside.
I had no idea of this, of course. I remember feeling happier than I had felt for a long time, in spite of our tragedies; feeling younger too, and determined to go upstairs and get the beauty sleep Herbert Dean had suggested that I needed. I think I was even humming a little under my breath as I went forward through the dark hall, although I stopped that at the foot of the stairs for fear of Mother.
I went up the stairs quietly for the same reason. There was a low light in the upper hall, but it only served to throw the shadows into relief, and it was while I stood at the top of the stairs that I thought I saw Holmes moving back in the guest room passage.
That puzzled me. He was locked in, or should have been, and after a moment’s hesitation I went down to the landing again and back along the hall. There I tried his door, but it was securely locked; and either he was asleep or he was giving an excellent imitation of it, from the sounds beyond.
I decided then that I had been mistaken, so I wandered to the end window of the guest room and glanced out at the Dalton house. Our hall was dark, but there was a light in Mrs. Dalton’s bedroom, and the shades were up so that I could see into the room.
She was there, and so far as I could make out she was walking the floor and crying. She was in her nightdress, and without her high heels she looked small and pathetic. Old, too; I had never thought of her before as an old woman. It came to me then that there was real tragedy in the picture framed by those windows, the tragedy of loneliness and some mysterious grief which was the more terrible because it was so silent and repressed.
But it seemed almost indecent to spy on her, and I was about to turn and leave when I heard something behind me. It was not a step; it was a stealthy movement, almost inaudible. And with that something or somebody caught me by the shoulder; I screamed, and that is all I remember.
When I came to Holmes was beating on his locked door and shouting murder, and I was absolutely alone in the dark and flat on the floor. Deadly sick at my stomach, too, and with a queer numb feeling in my head. Then I heard sibilant whispering, and I knew that Mary and Annie were on their staircase and afraid to come down.
“Mary!” I called. “Please come. It’s all right.”
My voice was feeble, but they heard it and slowly emerged. I must have looked a strange object lying there in the dark, and the noise Holmes was making did not lessen the excitement. With the lights on they gained some courage, however, and Annie roused Mother and told her I was half killed—which seemed to me to be the truth at that time.
The three of them got me to bed finally, and at last someone released an outraged and indignant Holmes and called the doctor.
I had a huge lump on the top of my head, and a nausea from concussion which bothered me more than the bump. But all the time I was being petted and patted, as the doctor put his examination of my skull, the police were carefully searching the house. And they found exactly nothing, except that the kitchen door was unlocked.
The weapon was neither an axe nor a pistol, but a poker from the kitchen stove, and it bore no prints whatever.
I believe they suspected Holmes that night. Certainly they examined his room and himself for the key to his door. But as Annie observed, he would have had to jump like a grasshopper to get down and unlock the kitchen door and then get back again and lock himself in, between my scream and the time she and Mary had reached the bottom of the stairs.
So far as they worked it out, I had trapped someone in the back hall. There is a space there where the hall widens, and whoever it was hid in the angle of the wall there. Almost certainly I had passed close by the intruder in the dark, and there must have been a momentary hesitation; an indecision whether to chance an escape while my back was turned, or to put me beyond raising an alarm.
“But you raised the alarm all right,” the Inspector said that night with a chuckle. “Understand down on the Avenue they thought it was a fire engine!”
I can still see him, standing beside my bed and pinching his lips as he surveyed me. He was holding a bit of the gre
en stem of some plant or other, in his free hand.
“Well, I’m glad it’s no worse,” he told me. “It’s a good thing you’ve got all that hair. A poker’s kind of a mean thing away from a fireplace. And so you’re pretty sure you didn’t drag this in?”
“Not if you found it in that corner of the back hall.”
“That’s where it was, and close to the wall. Well, I suppose I’ve got to go back to the Commissioner and tell him I’m running an agricultural show. Three blades of grass and a piece of stem! That’s a hell of a layout to put before anything but a jackass.”
Chapter XXV
I BELIEVE THAT MOTHER and Annie took turns that night in sitting up with me, but I was in the pleasant lethargy of a small dose of morphia, where the mind suddenly develops enormous dynamic activity, and everything extraneous is so remote as to be non-existent.
Pictures succeeded one another with dazzling sharpness and activity. I was helping Margaret Lancaster take Emily into the house, and Margaret was stooping and picking up something from the floor, almost under Lynch’s eyes. I was in the upper hall, with a thin line seeping out under the door, and Peggy pointing to it and yelling “blood!” I was meeting Lydia Talbot on the street, and she was saying in a dazed fashion that she supposed “they had stood it as long as they could.” I saw Mrs. Dalton going through her house again, and the two of them in the woodshed. I saw the lid of the chest raised and the detective, Sullivan, prodding a sack with his fingertips. I watched Holmes carefully cutting pages out of a book, and after burning them stirring the ashes with his foot. And once again Miss Emily was lying in the bushes, and the street cleaner was saying: “It is as natural to die as to be born.”
That phase passed rather quickly, but it was followed by one less dramatic but no less sublimated. Hidden motives seemed entirely clear to me while it lasted, the very secret springs of the Crescent’s hidden life, love, hate, jealousy and fear. Fear? They were all afraid. I thought of that gathering downstairs earlier in the night. They were terrified. But they were more than afraid. Some common bond of secret knowledge held them together, as it had brought them together. They had sat with their carefully tended hands idle and with their eyes wary and their mouths tight; and although they had gathered voluntarily, there was no real friendliness among them.
That was my last thought when I finally fell asleep.
I wakened late to a stiff neck and an aching head, to find that Mother was taking a needed sleep and that Annie was beside the bed.
“That butler who was working at the Wellington’s—he’s downstairs, miss, and he’s got a message for you from Mr. Jim.”
“I can’t see him like this, Annie.”
“He says it’s important, miss.”
I caught her eye, and I was fairly confident that whatever Herbert Dean might do in the way of helping with our troubles, he had never fooled our servants for a minute.
“All right, Annie,” I said. “Give me something to put around me and another pillow. And—please don’t waken Mother.”
“Not me, miss,” she said, and I caught her eye again. Incurable romantic that she was, she was almost palpitating with excitement.
That is how I learned of Herbert Dean’s experience of the night before with the bird cage; and while less sinister than my own adventure, it had certain points of interest, to say the least.
After he had left me he had moved quietly along the grapevine path toward the Talbot stable. In the dark pull-over sweater and dark trousers that he wore he was almost invisible, and his rubber-soled shoes made no sound whatever. He had gone perhaps half the way to the Lancasters’ when he thought he heard a door cautiously closing behind him, and he stopped and listened.
He heard nothing more, however, and so he went on. It was after twelve by that time, and the houses were dark save for the lights in Mr. Lancaster’s room, and a low one in Margaret’s across the hall.
He was almost stunned then when, about fifty feet from the woodshed he fairly collided with a man standing there.
“He leaped me,” he said. “I was off guard, of course, and the two of us went down in a heap. I knew in a minute that he had a gun, but he couldn’t use it; and I don’t know exactly what would have happened if a policeman hadn’t heard us and come on the run. Each of us had a death hold on the other, and then the officer pulled a flash and it was George Talbot.”
“George Talbot!” I said faintly.
“George himself and no other. He’d been taking a regular round of the house and grounds, as he’d promised Margaret Lancaster. Luckily I’d had occasion to see him yesterday downtown, and he identified me to the guard so he wouldn’t arrest me. Then we got up and I went on about my business. Or tried to.”
All that had taken time, of course. The officer had never heard of Herbert Dean and was still suspicious, and George had lost a cuff-link in the scuffle which had to be found. In the end, however, they went their several ways, after perhaps ten minutes of delay, George back to the Lancasters’, the officer apparently to the street, and he himself toward the Talbots’ again.
The house itself was quiet and dark. He had an impression, however, of a light coming out of the stable; not a flashlight, but apparently matches. The light came, went out, then flared again.
“Either matches,” he said, “or somebody shading a flash every minute or two.”
The last two hundred feet he took on a run. Then he slowed down and slid around a corner to a window. There was no light inside the stable by that time, but there was someone there, moving or trying to move something heavy.
“At least that’s the way it sounded,” he said.
He waited a moment, hoping that whoever it was would light a match or use a flash; but nothing of the sort happened, and so he began to work his way toward the door again.
He had not gone half the way before a hand caught him by the shoulder, and the same officer who had found him fighting with George had a death grip on his collar and was shoving a revolver into his back.
“Now,” he said, “come along and no trouble.”
“Get the hell out of here,” Dean yelled, and made a break for the front of the garage. But he was too late. The officer caught him again at the corner of the building and neatly tripped and threw him, and there was a rush out of the garage door and then a complete silence.
“Get up, you murdering devil!” yelled the policeman, standing over him. And then he blew his whistle and all at once policemen of all sorts began to converge on the stable and the two of them there.
“There were six of them there in three minutes,” he said rather wryly, “and when I gave them my name they didn’t believe me. Well—!”
They took him into the Lancaster house finally, but they would not let him telephone. That was before Inspector Briggs had been called to our house, and he was still on duty when the call reached him.
“You have, eh? Where did you find him?”
“Outside the Talbot stable, sir.”
“What was he doing there? What does he say?”
“He says he was after a bird cage, Inspector.”
“A what?”
“A bird cage.”
“Listen,” roared the Inspector, “if you have a bird out there who thinks he’s a canary, I want to see him. That’s all.”
So they held him for the Inspector to see; putting him into a chair in that library of Mr. Lancaster’s while four of them stood around the room. They had locked out George Talbot and the nurse from upstairs, who had come running down; and although they had taken his automatic they jumped at him when he reached for his pipe.
And that was the situation when a police car screeched to a stop, and two men ran for our house while the Inspector panted into the Lancasters’ and banged at the library door. When they opened it he stood staring.
“Where is he?”
“This is the man, sir.”
And then Inspector blew up.
“Why, you blankety-blank sons of jackasses,” he s
houted. “That’s Dean. I told you he was on this case. Is this a joke, or what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
When, leaving an Inspector exhausted from sheer flow of vocabulary, the four of them accompanied Herbert Dean back to the stable they found the stable closed and the bird cage gone. Some time later we were to learn that it had been found lying in their back yard by a family on Euclid Street, and by them carefully washed and refurnished with a new canary. But when that discovery was made known it no longer mattered.
He told me a considerable amount that morning, while Mother slept and I ate the light breakfast I was permitted; although I know now that he told me only what he wanted me to know.
Thus, in spite of the Crescent’s critical attitude toward them, the police were busy with the infinitely patient detail which only they could cover. They were handicapped, of course. By the very prominence and isolation of the Crescent, there was no chance to introduce the usual operatives to watch us. No window cleaners could be brought in; the Crescent washes its own windows and polishes them until they shine. No detectives driving taxi-cabs could sit at our curbstones, eyeing all who came and went. No house painters or roofers could work on adjacent buildings while watching us, and no agents or canvassers could pass our rightly locked front doors.
True, at noon on Monday an individual in the outfit of a city park employee had, for the first time in history, appeared with the proper tools in No Man’s Land, and for the next three days raked, cut and burned while keeping a sharp watch on our comings and goings. And after Monday Daniels, our street cleaner, was superseded by a gimlet-eyed gentleman with a walrus mustache which Helen Wellington later claimed to have seen him drop and pick up hastily one day. But otherwise our policemen were frankly policemen. They came and went, or stood guard at night, uncamouflaged and known to most of us.
Their inquiries, however, had brought only negative results. Sunday had been a lost day, but in three days since Mrs. Lancaster’s murder they had located neither the source of the lead weights in the chest nor the hiding place of the gold. It looked as though the weights had been bought a box at a time, the usual box containing only two pounds and thus the process necessarily continued over a long time.
Album Page 18
