Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “Just taking him around the block before I turn in. I’ve offered to put him on a leash, but he doesn’t fancy the idea.”

  It must have been about the time in our reign of terror that the Commissioner of Police sent for Inspector Briggs and asked him ironically if he would like to take over the public library on Liberty Avenue as headquarters for the men on the case.

  It was after luncheon on that same Tuesday that Mrs. Talbot and Lydia heard the news of George’s arrest, and they reacted in characteristic fashion. Mrs. Talbot at once called a taxi and fairly took Police Headquarters by assault.

  “Where is my son?” she boomed. “Get out of my way, young man. My son is being illegally detained, and I’ll get him out of here if I have to engage every lawyer in this town.”

  Lydia, indignant and frightened as well as agonized at being left behind, came in to see me.

  “Of course he didn’t do it,” she said sitting as usual bolt upright on the edge of her chair. “Why should he? Anyhow I heard him getting out onto that shed roof, and there was no shot fired after that.”

  “You should tell them that, Miss Lydia,” I said.

  “I’ll tell them when they ask me.”

  If she was alarmed for George, she was also highly curious about my own adventure. I had to sit and wait while she went back to look over the scene of it, and I can still see her after she came back, prim and late-Victorian on the edge of her chair, opening that bead bag of hers and taking out the clippings from the morning papers and giving them to me to read.

  “I have kept them all,” she said. “I’m pasting them into a book, but I haven’t told Hester. It’s surprising, Louisa, how many there are.”

  Strange, that casual little speech of hers, when I am writing this story largely from that very book, so neat and yet so lurid.

  She did not stay long. She wandered into Mother’s room to see if a camera man who had been hidden in the bushes all morning was still there, and on discovering that he had gone she went away.

  “I sent Lizzie out to drive him off,” she said, preparing to go. “But he only offered her ten dollars if she could get you to the front porch with a bandage on your head. Or he said a towel would do!”

  I rather affronted her by laughing at this, and finally she went away. I remember watching her go out the door, and smiling at the butterfly hatpin in her hat. It was set on a bit of coiled wire so that the insect took on a curious activity as she walked, jerking and glittering uncannily. There was certainly nothing that morning to tell me that the time was near at hand when I was to see that same butterfly trampled into the ground; or that Lydia Talbot herself was soon to be added to our list of tragic mysteries.

  I was much stronger that afternoon, and after she left Annie helped me into a dressing gown and put me into a chair. Mother, who had escaped the moment she saw Lydia, was still at the Lancaster house; for Margaret had had to go to the inquest over poor Emily, and somebody had to stay in the house.

  It was still, incredible as it seems to me now, only Tuesday. The smell of hot irons on wet linen penetrated to my room, and now and then far off I could hear the thud of one as our own black Lily thumped it on the stove. All along the Crescent, though death and trouble seemed everywhere, the same process was going on. Dark hands were taking dampened rolls of this or that from our baskets, spreading them on tables and boards and ironing them. On clothes horses the finished products were hung to dry, and then folded down into their various hampers, Ruffles were fluted with fluting irons, and old damask carefully polished until it shone.

  Yet the situation that Tuesday afternoon was strange enough, what with suspicion suddenly shifting from Jim to George Talbot; with reporters ringing our doorbell; with Mr. Lancaster slowly sinking in the white house across from my windows; with poor Emily still lying on a slab in the morgue, and nothing so far discovered as to the hiding place of the stolen gold.

  Of actual physical clues, in the sense of something material, there were still only a half dozen. The police, so far as I can recall now, had only the series of photographs taken after each of the crimes; a number of fingerprints on cards, each card carefully marked; an automatic pistol, an empty shell and a bullet; the chest under the bed, and George Talbot! Somewhere put away they probably had those stained clothes of Jim Wellington’s, but I do not know. Also I dare say they still had those ridiculous and now withered blades of grass from the porch roof, but the sliver of wood from the screen I know had been mounted on a card and carefully kept.

  I know that because after the whole thing was over the Inspector presented it to me!

  They did not have the bit of stem which had been found in our hall, however. That the Commissioner of Police had gravely handed to Herbert Dean.

  “Briggs here seems to think I need a salad!” he said. “He’ll be bringing me a rose geranium leaf next and asking me to smell it! Maybe you can find out what that stuff is, Dean. Not that I think it matters, but—well, take it along if you like.”

  However, the police added another clue that Tuesday, and then sat around a desk at Headquarters and wondered just where it left them. That was the magnified photograph of a fingerprint from the bell which hung over Mrs. Lancaster’s bed, presumably hers, and beside it another one, of the thumbprint from the chest which had contained the money. There was no question but that they were the prints of the same thumb, and I believe the District Attorney sent for the Inspector on the strength of his discovery and told him he was the only man on the job worth a hill of beans.

  “Good work, Briggs,” he said. “Now I suppose we have to guess whether the money was taken out of the chest by the old lady and hidden somewhere; or whether she found out it had been taken and was killed before she could make a fuss. No chance it’s still in the house, I suppose?”

  “Not a chance, unless someone there is smarter than I think.”

  Nevertheless, I believe they made another intensive search of the house that day, rapping walls and even examining the chimneys and the roof. But they found nothing whatever.

  “And of course, Miss Lou,” the Inspector told me later, “it was still only a presumption that those prints were the old lady’s anyhow. The whole thing was guesswork, and how could we prove it? We didn’t like to ask for an exhumation order; the family would never have given it. And under the circumstances we hadn’t printed her before she was buried.”

  Herbert Dean had one or two bits of evidence which he had not given to the police, however. Among these were the gloves, a short piece of hemp cord, and the buttons and charred paper from the fire in No Man’s Land. Also he now had the stem of the unidentified plant, over which that same day the botanical department of our local university was working. But he also had, carefully stowed away, the end of a rather expensive cigar, flattened as though it had been trampled into the ground.

  These—“and an idea”—he says, were his total equipment up to four o’clock that day when, Mother still at the Lancaster house, Laura Dalton rang our doorbell, pushed Annie aside, walked deliberately up the stairs and into my bedroom, and locked the door behind her.

  Chapter XXVIII

  I HAVE THOUGHT A great deal about Laura Dalton since that day. In the Crescent her position was somewhat isolated; not because she did not belong, for she had been born there. But as Herbert says, she was suspended like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth. She was too young for that close triumvirate which had consisted of Mother, Mrs. Lancaster and Hester Talbot, and her marriage had placed an unbridgeable gulf between the local spinsters and herself.

  Doctor Armstrong, calling that morning to look me over, had expressed some anxiety about her.

  “It’s the wrong time of life for her to go through all this,” he said. “Head looks all right to me, Lou; you can go down to dinner if you feel up to it. But I’d be glad if you could talk to her a little. She’s got something on her mind. She’s still pretty much in love with Bryan, you know, and I imagine she’s got some sort of bee in her bonnet a
bout him.” He went into the bathroom, washed his hands carefully and came back still holding the towel.

  “I suppose people make their own hell in this world,” he went on. “They’re fond of each other, you know; probably a good bit more than that. But they’re both stubborn. It’s twenty years since she locked her door against him for some peccadillo or other, and I haven’t a doubt myself that there have been a good many times since when she’s unlocked it; and others when he had brought himself to try it, and had to go away. Pitiful, isn’t it, with life so short!”

  All that was in my mind that afternoon when Laura Dalton walked into my room and locked the door behind her. I can see her now, in her pale lavender summer silk, her too-youthful hat sitting high on her head, and under it a pair of devastated eyes and a mouth that twitched with nerves.

  She did not even explain that locking of the door. She moved directly across the room and stood over me, and for a moment I was startled. She did not look quite sane. She wasted no time in preliminaries.

  “Is it true,” she demanded, “that they have arrested George Talbot?”

  “I don’t know about an arrest. They have taken him to Headquarters.”

  “The fools. The fools!” she broke out. “Listen, Louisa, George never killed Emily Lancaster, or her mother either. I know that. But I can’t tell the police. I can’t. I can’t.”

  It was some time before I could quiet her, and at first I did not realize what she was trying to tell me. It was only after a full half hour, while I listened to the bottled-up miseries of a jealous and suspicious woman, still passionately in love with her husband and now terrified beyond all control, that I knew that Mrs. Dalton believed that her husband, with the assistance of Margaret Lancaster, had killed both Margaret’s mother and her sister!

  Stripped of inessentials, her narrative ran something like this:

  Years ago, Margaret Lancaster had been engaged to Bryan Dalton. He did not live on the Crescent then; but he used to come in his high trap and take Margaret for drives. Mrs. Lancaster had opposed the match, however.

  “She didn’t like Bryan,” was what she said. “And when Margaret insisted on marrying him anyhow she simply went to bed for six months. I was very young then,” she added quickly, “but my father had built here where we are now, and I can remember my own mother saying that Mrs. Lancaster had gone to bed because it was the one way she could keep Margaret at home.”

  Then one day Bryan asked her to drive with him, and after that they became engaged and were married. “And I had the house by that time,” she said, “so he came to live on the Crescent, although it wasn’t the Crescent then. It was just country, and he never really liked it.”

  It was to that, his boredom and his revolt against the Crescent, that she laid his unfaithfulness. There had been somebody else, as she put it, every now and then since. And for the past few months it had been Margaret Lancaster again.

  She was, I thought, trying to explain something to herself rather than to me, for all this came out only by degrees. She would stop, stretch the fingers of the gloves on her lap and start again, as though by going over the whole business and trying to coordinate it for me, she was trying to follow the steps by which she had come to her tragic conviction.

  “I thought it was all over,” she said. “I still can’t see—I think she led him on, Louisa; for her own purposes. He hadn’t been faithful. We separated years ago over a maid in my own house. But after all a man of fifty—well, I thought all that was over. I suppose,” she added doubtfully, “that I shouldn’t be telling you all this, Louisa. You’re still a young woman.”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” I said briefly. “I don’t think you’re telling me much I don’t know. I can’t believe what you are telling me about Margaret Lancaster. That’s all.”

  I was, however, uneasily remembering that anonymous letter sent to the police, and I felt that my voice lacked conviction. If it did she did not notice.

  “It’s true,” she asserted. “I don’t know how far it’s gone, but she’s smart and not bad-looking; and after all the time comes when any man has to learn that young women aren’t interested in him.”

  There was apparently no mistake about the situation. He had even taken Margaret out driving, meeting her some place downtown; that was early in August, and once she had found Margaret’s bag in the car. It had slipped down beside a seat cushion, and she had given it to her husband without speaking. He had simply shrugged his shoulders and taken it. But she had no other proof. She had set herself to watch, but so far as she could tell no letters passed between them. She believed now that they had; that they had used the woodshed on the Lancaster place as a sort of post office.

  The affair, so far as she knew, had commenced late in June or early in July.

  Then abruptly she went on to the day of Mrs. Lancaster’s murder.

  “Bryan was in the garage,” she said. “He had put on a pair of old overalls, and I was at a window at the back of the house upstairs. I wasn’t watching him,” she added. “I was measuring a window for new curtains. And at half past three I saw him, in his overalls, go toward the Lancaster woodshed. I could not see him all the way, of course. The path curves, and you know how the shrubbery has grown. But I was curious and I waited. And he didn’t come back until a quarter after four.”

  She began to cry again, and I saw that she was trembling violently.

  “Look here,” I said, “haven’t you just worked yourself into a state of nerves over all this? Suppose he was near the Lancaster house at that time? How could he get in? And why in heaven’s name would he want to get in? It all sounds rather silly to me.”

  “It won’t sound so silly when I’ve finished, Louisa,” she said with a return of her dignity. “I’m not an utter fool. Perhaps I would be a happier woman if I were!”

  I was inclined to agree with her as she went on; for she did go on. What she believed was that for a long time Margaret had been taking gold from the chest under the bed, either with a duplicate key or by securing at night the one from her mother’s neck. That she had carried it out of the house, a little at a time, and hidden it; and that all of this was known to Bryan Dalton. That it was in effect a part of their plan to run away and live together somewhere, probably in Europe or South America.

  “You see,” she said, as though the entire Crescent did not know it, “I have the money. Bryan has very little of his own.”

  Then, on the day Margaret had telephoned Jim Wellington that her father wanted an audit and to examine the chest, they had both known the game was up.

  “He might have found a note in the woodshed, telling him,” she said. “And of course there was the axe, right there in plain sight. I know it sounds crazy, but wait, Louisa. How do we know he didn’t slip around the house, and Margaret admit him by the front door?”

  I am afraid I shivered, for she said then that she should not have come to me after my own dreadful adventure; but that she was simply desperate.

  “I can’t let them hold George Talbot,” she wailed.

  “Listen, Mrs. Dalton. Do you think Bryan Dalton shot Emily Lancaster, or did this to me last night? Because I don’t.”

  “God forgive me, Lou! I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do know,” I told her. “He never left the house last night. They had two men watching it.”

  I remember that she got up then, her face colorless and still twitching.

  “Then they suspect him! What am I to do, Lou? What am I to do? For he’s guilty, Lou. He must be, or why did she give him that note last night to burn his overalls? He did burn them, last Thursday night. There was a fire still going out there and they disappeared. What else could he have done with them?”

  I was too stunned to speak.

  “And why, when he heard Emily run out screaming, didn’t he go to her? He must have been near enough to hear her. Who could help it? And why did he come into the house from the garage after he took off his overalls and tell Joseph to get him some whisky
? In thirty years I’ve never known him to take a drink before dinner. I tell you, Louisa, Bryan Dalton knew that afternoon that Mrs. Lancaster had been murdered; for all his asking Joseph to tell me that night, as though he had just read it in the newspaper.”

  When he came back into the house that afternoon she had been quietly drinking her iced tea, and he never knew she had seen him. But of course she still knew nothing of the murder. She was still without suspicion that evening, in the library after dinner. He had looked very strange when he called Joseph, however. She remembered that later on when they had reached the Lancaster house. They did not enter it together. Bryan rang the front doorbell. She herself had gone around and in by the kitchen, fully aware that the servants would be more talkative than the family. It was still only a crime to her, bad as it was.

  But on emerging from the service wing into the side hall, she had seen her husband and Margaret together for a second near the foot of the front stairs. The Talbots were there also, but she had seen Margaret slip a note into Bryan’s hand, and he had slid it into his pocket. She was fishing in her hand-bag while she was telling me this, and I do not even now know how or when she had got it from him later on. She passed it to me, and I must say my flesh crept when I read it. It was in Margaret’s clear strong hand.

  “Please burn all letters at once, and destroy what I gave you this afternoon. M.”

  Just how she got possession of that note I do not know, nor did she say. He had no idea that she knew he had it, and certainly she got it. But after that, I imagine, all hell must have broken loose in the house when she read it. To her, then, and since, it had meant only one thing: that Margaret and Bryan Dalton had killed Mrs. Lancaster as a preliminary to a flight together, and that the crime was the result of a plot long concocted and carefully carried out.

  For she had never found the overalls.