That night, Thursday, she had searched for them, and for any letters from Margaret. He had discovered what she was doing and had tried to stop her, but she was like a crazy woman. There was no sign that he had burned anything in any of the fireplaces, or in the furnace either. But of course that idiot Daniels had had his usual fire in No Man’s Land, and during that three or four hours in the afternoon after the murder he could easily have walked out and dropped something there. Nobody would have been likely to notice. Or maybe he did it at night. She did not know.
That was the story Laura Dalton told me the Tuesday afternoon after our two murders; stripping away for once the hypocrisies and traditional reticences of the Crescent and revealing a naked and suffering soul. She had done it with a certain amount of dignity at that, save for one or two outbursts; stretching and pulling at her gloves, keeping her voice down, and even—heaven help us!—once settling her skirt so that it hung at the correct length about her ankles.
All I could do was to make her promise that she would not go to the police for a day or so at least; and at last she drew on her gloves, straightened her hat, and went away with that odd self-possession which seems to characterize all the older women of the Crescent. Time takes its toll of them, death and tragedy come inevitably, but they face the world with quiet faces and unbroken dignity.
I even heard her thanking Annie as she let her out the front door.
Chapter XXIX
I HAD ANOTHER VISITOR that afternoon; Helen Wellington looking, I thought, rather edgy, but determinedly cheerful. She came in, demanding Herbert Dean, and seemed to think I might have him somewhere in a closet.
“I thought he’d be here,” she said. “He seems to spend a lot of time hanging about this place! Either he’s fallen for you or he suspects you; you never can tell with him. Love or business, he’s equally secretive about both.”
She inspected me carefully, including my rising color.
“I hope it’s love, of course,” she went on. “I’d just as soon see you out of my way, Lou! Every time Jim and I have a fuss he spends hours secretly convinced that I’m the Big Mistake and lamenting that he missed out with you.”
“Don’t be so foolish, Helen.”
“Oh, I’m not foolish. After he has been noble and taken me back I spend hours too, telling him how interesting I make life and how you would have bored him. But it’s a fixed idea. However, don’t bother about that. I want to wash my hands, and after that I want to choke Bertie Dean with them. Do you know that I’ve spent the afternoon in the public library? Believe it or not!”
She did not explain at once. From the bathroom she kept up a running fire of talk; my own injury, the bombshell she had thrown the night before “if anyone is going to abuse Jim I’ll do it myself”—and George Talbot’s detention.
“They’ve been all around the mulberry bush,” was her comment, “and I dare say they’ll be back to us now. I haven’t a doubt myself but that your mother did it. They’ve suspected everybody else.”
It was characteristic of her to return from the bathroom carrying both a bottle of hand lotion and a towel; and that she immediately spilled the one on the carpet and mopped it up with the other. But it is also characteristic that just then Annie came up with an enormous bunch of expensive roses which Helen had brought in with her.
“Don’t thank me,” she said. They’re simply an expression of relief. Failing with my little poker last night, I now hope that Bertie Dean may carry you off out of sheer anxiety for your safety! Lou, why do you suppose he sent me to the library today? I’ll give you three guesses, and don’t guess a book. He knows me better than that.”
When she finally dropped her bantering air, it was to reveal that her errand had been to look over old files of the local newspapers; not so old, really, but from the first of March to the first of August, and to look in the proper section for someone either advertising for a room in our vicinity, the reply to be sent in care of general delivery; or for a room advertised to let, furnished.
“Although just why anybody would come voluntarily into this vicinity is a mystery to me,” she finished. “There you are. That’s what he wanted, and I never suspected that anywhere in the world there were so many bright, attractive rooms, ‘nicely furnished, run. water, use parlor, rent reasonable.’”
She had eight in all, copied out in her square modern script, and she laid them on my lap. Only one of them concerned a room in our immediate vicinity, and I could not see how it could possibly have any bearing on our situation. I read it over twice:
“Wanted: By trained nurse, furnished room near General Hospital. Must have telephone in house.”
“I can’t see how that could mean anything,” I said.
“No? Then you don’t know our Bertie. If you did you would realize that our murderer, masquerading as a lady, has probably been living in that room and stroking fevered brows between crimes, so to speak. The telephone, of course, is pure camouflage! Well, I’ve done my job. I have to save my man; he’s a poor thing but mine own. And now I’m going home to take a bath.”
Writing this record and piecing together from this and that the whole story of our crimes, I have often thought of that visit of Helen’s and wondered exactly what would have happened had those angular notes of hers reached Herbert Dean and the police in time. But they did not. She was cheerful enough when she left me, apparently even gay. I heard her whistling as she went down the street, a gesture of bravado with which she often shocked the Crescent. She was fighting Jim’s fight for him with a certain gallantry, as witness the night before.
Yet she and Jim quarreled again that afternoon, and I think there is no question but that the two deaths which followed were due entirely to that. Possibly she knows it; it is a different Helen who now lives in the house nearest to the Crescent gate. She still swaggers, but the old casual careless ways are gone.
Even John, that suave and impassive police agent who was in the Wellington house as a butler, did not know what it was about. Although he was certainly suspicious; and I have never held Jim guiltless. He was in a bad state of nerves, irascible and impatient, and Helen was not a person to stand for either.
However that may be, at seven o’clock when Annie brought up my supper tray she was pop-eyed with information.
“Mrs. Wellington’s gone again, miss.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“That I can’t say, miss. I believe they had a few words, and she just called a taxicab and went away in it. I must say it’s a poor time to leave Mr. Jim, with him needing all the comfort he can get.”
All of which, as I have said, is not important. What was vitally important was that she carried away with her in her hand-bag those notes made at the library, and that she did not go to her usual hotel. When she was finally located—she really located herself—she still had the notes in her bag, having forgotten them completely; but they were useless then.
I have wondered since what would have happened, or not happened, had Helen gone to the police that day with what she knew. The notes in her bag and her story of that Sunday night. But she did not. She was frightened, like all the rest of us.
Would we have seen it all? Perhaps it was not possible even then, although Herbert Dean came closer than any of us to guessing the truth. But as Doctor Armstrong said afterwards:
“Upon my word, Lou, if everyone on the Crescent had had a dose of some drug like hyoscine, and been so released from all his normal repressions that he’d had to tell the truth, we’d have saved some of these people. Not hyoscine perhaps; it causes fantasy; but something to put the brain censors to sleep. All we needed was a little openness, but everybody was afraid.”
Which was true enough, for it was not until that evening, Tuesday, that I learned that Peggy from the Lancasters’ had had her purse snatched from her in No Man’s Land on Sunday night; and had been so terrified to report it for fear of some reprisal that even our servants did not know it for a day or two. Here too Annie was my sourc
e of information. She came up to turn down my bed that night, and her mouth was set hard and tight. She had just heard the news, from Peggy herself.
“She’s a little fool, and I’ve told her so,” she said. “Because, Miss Lou, whatever these police may think—and so far as I can see their thinking isn’t getting them anywhere anyhow—the whole thing ain’t what you’d call natural. Why did he bring the purse back? If that isn’t the act of a lunatic, what is?”
And Peggy’s story as related by Annie had indeed an unusual element.
She had been at home that evening; she lived somewhere in the neighborhood. And as she had been late, which is a grave offense with us, she had taken the short cut across No Man’s Land. In the woodland behind the Wellingtons’, where the path is shady for two hundred feet or so, she had suddenly seen a man emerge from the shadows and come toward her.
She was startled and stopped dead, but the man said: “Don’t be afraid, please. I have no idea of hurting you. But I want that bag.”
She gave it to him. He wore a soft hat pulled down on his head and she thought a pull-on sweater, one of those with a high rolling collar which covered the lower part of his face. But he made no effort to attack her, and perhaps the most unusual thing about it was that he thanked her when she gave him the bag.
He took it and moved quickly back among the trees, and Peggy ran as fast as she could to the Lancasters’. She had been in a bad state when Ellen let her in, but she had only said that she had hurried and that she had lost her bag while running.
“And the next morning,” said Annie with unction, “when Ellen opened the porch door to get the milk, there was that bag hanging on the doorknob. All her money in it, too! If that’s not the act of a lunatic, then I’m crazy myself.”
I did not tell Mother. She was sufficiently uneasy as things were, and I gathered that she had demanded a police guard for our house that night. Which was perhaps the time when the Commissioner sent for Inspector Briggs and asked him if he would like the library on Liberty Avenue as headquarters for his operatives on the case! Or—I believe he added—should he wire the governor to send the National Guard!
Mother was very silent that night. Conditions in the house next door were simply lamentable. Mr. Lancaster had not spoken since Sunday night and was slowly sinking, and Margaret was a ghost. She did not eat or sleep, and she scarcely spoke.
“Really,” Mother said, “I don’t understand her, Louisa. She will hardly go into her stepfather’s room! I relieved the nurse for sleep this afternoon, and Jennie did it yesterday. Yet she has always been devoted to him. She is not like herself at all.”
The verdict of the inquest over Emily had been much the same as that over her mother. It had not taken long, and the funeral was to be the next day. Margaret had returned from the inquest only to shut herself in her room, and Mother had not seen her again.
I watched Mother as she talked. She was excited and unusually loquacious, but in spite of all that had happened I came definitely to the conclusion that night that Mother had shown a certain relief ever since Emily Lancaster’s death. It was much the same as she had shown that day when she had sent for Mrs. Talbot. She was bitterly sorry for Emily, but it was as though some doubt in her mind, some suspicion, had been definitely allayed by it.
It was that night that George Talbot was released on bail as a material witness. The ballistics expert of the Department was, I believe, still firing test bullets out of George’s automatic and examining the results under a microscope, for late that night he telephoned in to Headquarters a rather surprising report. George was on his way home by that time, angry and bewildered as well as more than a little frightened; and it was several days before he knew anything at all about that report.
“I’m not committing myself yet,” said the expert cautiously, “but what it looks like to me is that somebody has switched the barrels of two pistols. Mind you, that’s only a theory so far. The bullet that killed Emily Lancaster came out of this barrel. That’s certain. But I’m not sure it was fired out of this gun.”
Chapter XXX
THAT WAS ON TUESDAY night.
Perhaps I have said too little so far about the effect on our community of our two murders. That belongs here, for it directly affected our situation and what was to develop out of it. Because of it the local hardware dealers were busy selling extra bolts and locks, and also chains for entrance doors; and because one woman in our vicinity had bought such a chain for her front door, that Wednesday found us at the beginning of a new mystery and another tragedy.
The reign of terror, as the press called it, was never limited to the Crescent. The public was convinced from the start that a homicidal maniac was loose in that part of the city, although statements from the nearby State Hospital for the Criminal Insane had shown not only that no such patient had recently escaped, but also that an hour-by-hour check was made of all patients and all attendants.
The rumor persisted, however, and the killing of Emily Lancaster, apparently as motiveless as that of her mother, served to magnify it. Our delivery boys ran in with their parcels of meat or groceries and got away as fast as they could. No children slipped into No Man’s Land to play, and many of them were escorted to school and back again. Servants in the early morning peered out of windows before opening kitchen doors to take in the milk. There were no curious crowds watching from beyond our gates; and at night those people who were compelled to pass the Crescent on Liberty Avenue chose, not the long area bounded by the Wellington and Talbot hedges, but the other side of the street.
To all this had now been added the attack on me. One tabloid came out with the statement that there had been thirteen people on the Crescent at the beginning of our troubles, and went on at length to discuss the number thirteen and the almost universal superstition concerning it; the fact that no house in Paris bears that number, that it is left out of Italian lotteries, and that the superstition itself runs back into Norse mythology, although in Christian countries it is supposed to have originated from the Last Supper.
What is important in all this is that the Crescent locally at least had become taboo, a fact which left us without possible witnesses for the remainder of that dreadful week, and without even our rare visitors from other parts of town for a far longer period.
For on that Wednesday we were involved in another mystery and another death.
There is so far as I know only one coincidence in this record, and that was that the day of Emily Lancaster’s funeral was also the anniversary of my father’s death. Yet it was to have its consequences.
For twenty years Mother had observed this anniversary in almost ritualistic manner. Thus in the morning, accompanied by my Aunt Caroline, my father’s remaining sister, she visited the cemetery, and generally had a discussion and a quarrel with the Superintendent over the condition of our lot. From there she went into the city to lunch sadly but substantially with Aunt Caroline, after which they took a drive to Aunt Caroline’s husband’s grave, and the morning’s procedure was repeated there.
On this particular morning therefore the only variation was that the two first witnessed the final rites over Emily Lancaster, and on the departure of the funeral procession of cars, carried out the usual program. With a difference, however.
It was after one o’clock, and I had managed to dress and get downstairs, when Mother called me on the telephone in an exasperated voice and demanded to know if I had heard from Holmes and the car.
“From Holmes?” I said, astounded. “I thought you had him. Where are you?”
“I’m at the cemetery with your Aunt Caroline,” she said shortly. “That wretch drove us here and then simply drove away again. And the Superintendent has gone to lunch and the office is locked. I never heard of such a thing! We’ve walked for miles.”
Well, I must admit that the picture of Mother and Aunt Caroline in their best black left stranded at the Greenwood Cemetery was almost too much for me. It is miles from anywhere, and I doubt if either
of them has walked four blocks in as many years. But I agreed that it was dreadful, and to send a taxi for them at once. Which I did immediately.
When I turned it was to find Annie at my elbow.
“I suppose that Holmes has gone, miss?”
“How in the world did you know?”
“Because he carried his clothes away last night,” she said promptly.
“Why on earth didn’t you tell us that?”
“And get my throat cut?” she said darkly. “No, miss, I know my business and I value my life.”
I went back to his room over the garage at once; and discovered that Annie was right. He had slept there; with a guard around the house he had been no longer needed inside it. His bed was untidy and his bathroom had been used. But his closet was stripped bare of clothing and his battered suitcase gone from under the window where it always stood.
There was no question but that Holmes had gone, and it looked just then as though a three-thousand dollar car had gone with him.
Mother got out of a taxicab shortly after that, and limped into the house. What with the heat, her heavy black and a very considerable indignation, she was in a state of almost complete demoralization.
She sat down in a hall chair and closed her eyes, and she said nothing whatever until Annie had unlaced and taken off her shoes. Then:
“That wretch!” she said. “I never did trust him, and I never will.”
“And right you are, ma’am,” said Annie. “You’ll be lucky if you ever see him or the car again. That’s what I think, besides making you walk on that bunion in this heat. Look at it!”
“That’s arthritis, Annie,” Mother said sharply.
We got her upstairs and into bed, and I turned on the electric fan. Then Mary sent up some luncheon on a tray, and what with rest and some food she grew more calm. It was not until she was comfortable and quiet that I told her that Holmes’s clothes were gone and that whatever his reason might have been for leaving her and Aunt Caroline in the cemetery, it had evidently been planned at least a day ahead.
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