Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  After that I notified the police, but it was half past two by that time, and too late, as we knew later on.

  So far as we were concerned, the remainder of the day was uneventful. At three in the afternoon I saw Bryan Dalton, perhaps less florid than usual but impeccably dressed, get out his car and drive off in it. But I did not know then that he was on his way to a downtown office, where the District Attorney and two or three other men were grouped around a desk on which were lying, carefully tagged, a handful of scorched buttons and two irregular pieces of window glass, held together more or less neatly by two rubber bands.

  “Then, as I understand it, you do not identify these buttons?”

  “How can I? I suppose automobile overalls are much alike. I wear them to save my clothes.”

  “But you admit burning your overalls the night following the murder. That’s the fact, isn’t it?”

  “Admit? What do you mean admit? I burned them, certainly. It isn’t the first time I’ve done so, either. You can ask my man, Joseph. I wear them until they’re soiled and then have them destroyed.”

  “Precisely. But isn’t this the first time you’ve done it yourself, Mr. Dalton? I mean, hasn’t this Joseph always done it before?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t remember. And before I go on, I want to know my status here. Am I under suspicion, or am I merely to help you with your investigation? If I’m under suspicion I shall want my lawyer.”

  “In a way, everyone is under suspicion just now,” said the District Attorney smoothly. “I can only remind you that an open statement of fact has never hurt an innocent person, and that I don’t think you have been particularly open so far. Now, as to this—er—exhibit under glass. You know nothing about it?”

  “Nothing whatever.”

  “You could not, by examining it, even venture a guess as to what it is? Or has been?”

  “I have examined it. I don’t know what it is.”

  And it was then that the District Attorney received a note in Herbert Dean’s writing, read it and laid it on the desk before him. When he looked up his examination took a new and different angle.

  “Mr. Dalton,” he said, “do you know of any poison ivy around the Crescent? In that vicinity, I mean.”

  “Poison ivy! Are you trying to be funny?”

  “I’m afraid not. It’s entirely pertinent to our inquiry.”

  Bryan Dalton shook his head.

  “I don’t know of any,” he said. “I suppose you fellows know what you’re talking about, but—poison ivy!” Then he smiled rather grimly. “You don’t know us or you wouldn’t ask that! Of course I can’t speak for the waste land behind us; although I’ve never noticed it there.”

  There was, I believe, a pause here. The District Attorney picked up the note from the desk and handed it to the Commissioner, who looked surprised but nodded. And it was the Commissioner who, note in hand, asked the next question.

  “Just how long,” he inquired gruffly, “on the afternoon of Thursday of last week, did you stand beside the Lancaster woodshed, Mr. Dalton?”

  He must have looked around him then at that ring of intent faces, all turned toward him. There was no pity in any of them. They were hard; set and grim, like those of men peering into a microscope at some imprisoned insect. Probably after his habit he ran a finger inside his collar, as though it was too tight for him. Then he smiled again.

  “I suppose if I refuse to answer that it will be held against me!”

  “I can only repeat what I said before, Mr. Dalton.”

  “I was there perhaps ten minutes.”

  “You are certain that is all?”

  “Absolutely certain.”

  “Will you explain just why you were there? There must have been a reason. If you’ll tell us that reason frankly, I assure you we will hold it as confidential—unless, of course, it turns out to have an important bearing on the case.”

  But there he surprised them.

  “Why I was there had nothing to do with this inquiry,” he said shortly. “If you want a reason for your record put it down that I was hunting for a golf ball. That’s as good as another. It’s as far as I care to go anyhow, and you can take it or leave it.”

  That practically ended the interrogation. There was not a man there who did not know he was concealing something, although they could not be certain that what he concealed had any bearing on the case. But there was also not a man there who did not believe that he had lied about his ten minutes, and that he had stood beside the woodshed of the Lancasters’ long enough to smoke almost in its entirety one expensive Belinda cigar, made for him in Havana.

  “Although,” as the Inspector said to me a long time afterwards, “that in itself didn’t mean a lot. It was pretty hard to believe that in the half hour to forty minutes he was there that afternoon he could have smoked a cigar of that size and still killed the old lady. And he wasn’t smoking either when his butler saw him go or when he came back.”

  A little statement which once more bears out my conviction that from the very start our servants knew more of our crimes than we did.

  We knew nothing of all this that afternoon, of course. Mother was too fagged to relieve the nurse that afternoon, and Lydia Talbot did it instead. Margaret was still shut in her room, refusing to allow Lydia to call the doctor. Mrs. Talbot was still with ire about George’s interrogation, and her Lizzie reported that she was sitting locked in her room, shouting infuriated house orders through her door. In the house nearest the gate Jim Wellington was trying to locate Helen; partly for himself and partly for Herbert Dean, who was annoyed at her absence. And next door to us Laura Dalton was nursing for jealousy and her suspicion, while I dare say Joseph watched her out of eyes that saw a great deal more than they pretended.

  Holmes was still missing.

  Chapter XXXI

  THERE HAD BEEN A little by-play enacted that Wednesday morning, however, of which I knew nothing at the time. With the household at Miss Emily’s funeral and only the nurse in charge of the Lancaster house, Herbert Dean and Inspector Briggs had gone there. The nurse opened the door, and after a short talk with her she went upstairs and returned shortly carrying a small object under her apron.

  This object the Inspector pocketed, and after that the two men went quietly up the stairs. They remained for more than an hour, the Inspector an interested bystander most of the time, and before they left Dean, as the slimmer of the two, had crawled through a small window onto the roof of the kitchen porch and had there carefully examined the guttering and the opening of the water spout. Whatever he had found inside the house, he found nothing there and at last the two had departed, Herbert to a microscope in a laboratory downtown, where I believe he examined an ordinary house-sponge, and the Inspector to that interrogation of Bryan Dalton which had so exasperated everyone working on the case.

  Mother rallied long enough that evening to eat a squab and some blanc-mange, but she was in a bad humor. Doctor Armstrong had come in at six o’clock to give her her hypodermic of iron, but he was too much interested in Holmes’s disappearance and too little in her own annoyance to please her.

  “That’s another instance of what I’m talking about,” he said. “The servants here know Holmes is taking out his clothes, but do they tell? They do not. The whole damned Crescent is a conspiracy of silence!”

  Mother eyed him coldly.

  “The people who could talk will never talk again, doctor. Besides, why go further than we have gone? This deliberate disappearance of my chauffeur can mean only one thing.”

  “You honestly believe that Holmes is guilty?”

  “Why not? He’s probably had that gold hidden somewhere all the time, and now he’s got away with it. And who but Holmes could have attacked Louisa?”

  “He was locked in, wasn’t he?”

  “How do we know he hadn’t a second key?”

  “But why attack Lou, of all people?”

  “That’s for the police to find out,” said Mother loftily
. “Although I must say what they have found so far doesn’t justify any hope in that direction. But people do very strange things sometimes, doctor. I well remember when our dear Bishop got up one night, walked into his wife’s room and simply jerked the footboard off her bed. He said afterwards that he had been asleep, but I have always wondered.”

  When I left the room to see the doctor out he voiced what I was feeling.

  “Let her think it, if she can,” he said. “Maybe she’s right at that, but I don’t believe it. Still, it probably comforts her to blame him. She’s got in him a criminal she can accept. He belongs to the class, which, according to her ideas, normally produces criminals. And she’s been afraid it was somebody else, Lou. Don’t forget that. She’s been afraid of that from the start.”

  That was at six o’clock, and both the car and Holmes remained among the missing until nine o’clock that night. Then it was Inspector Briggs who brought me the word that the one had been found, if not the other.

  “We have your car, Miss Hall,” he said. “It was abandoned quite a way out of town, and a sheriff’s car picked it up. They’ll bring it back in the morning.”

  Annie had shown him into the library, and now he sat pinching his lip as usual and with his eyes fixed on me intently.

  “You know, Miss Hall, the deeper I get into this thing—and God knows I’m over my head already—the more I believe that it’s the story we’re after. A story. Get the story and you understand the rest. And maybe when we understand—well, maybe this piece has a villain and maybe it hasn’t, if you see what I mean.”

  “It was a pretty wicked thing to kill those two women, wasn’t it?”

  “It’s a pretty wicked thing to kill anybody. And it’s a pretty wicked thing, too, to send somebody to the chair unless he deserves it. I could lie awake nights worrying about things I’ve never been so sure of as the public has been. Well—!”

  He leaned forward in his chair.

  “Let’s get this Crescent of yours clear,” he said. “Relationships, old quarrels, all the freakish ideas, like that one of Mrs. Talbot’s about locking herself in. What’s wrong between young Wellington and his wife, if anything? And even here, in this house. What about yourselves? And where does this Holmes come in? As I recall it, he had your mother out for a drive on the day Mrs. Lancaster was murdered.”

  “He did. But he has been rather queer, Inspector, ever since.”

  He listened while I told him about that night when I had seen him tearing pages out of a book, although he seemed to set rather less store by it than Herbert Dean had done.

  “Funny performance,” was his comment. “I don’t suppose you know what sort of book it was?”

  “It was a detective story.”

  “Was, eh? Well, that doesn’t mean he’s a criminal. I believe our best people read them nowadays! And don’t jump too fast to the idea that Holmes is a killer. He didn’t kill Mrs. Lancaster. That’s sure. It’s just possible that he has had all along a pretty shrewd idea of where that money is; and that as it’s heavy stuff he had a motive in taking the car today. Although even that’s curious. He takes a conspicuous limousine and wears a uniform. Now if a fellow wants to get away with something like that he generally does it at night, and as inconspicuously as he can. Still—now let’s start with this Crescent, beginning at the gate. This Jim Wellington; he was a nephew of Mrs. Lancaster’s, isn’t that it?”

  “Of her first husband. He and George Talbot are cousins. Of course his uncle has been dead so long that we always think of Mrs. Lancaster as his real aunt. Jim’s mother was a Talbot.”

  “Humph! Pretty well related, all of you, aren’t you?”

  “We are not. Or the Daltons.”

  “All right. Let’s get back to the Wellingtons. He’s an orphan, I suppose?”

  “Yes. His mother died ten years ago. She was rather queer; but Jim isn’t, of course.”

  “How was she queer?”

  “I don’t exactly know,” I said vaguely. “She was very religious, if that’s queer! And I remember that she walked a good bit, and talked to herself. She frightened me when I was a little girl. But she was all right otherwise. She was a very intelligent woman really. I—it seems rather awful, Inspector, to talk about people like this. She was really very kind. She gave a great deal to charity.”

  He nodded.

  “Well, queer or not she’s dead and out of it. I suppose you know Wellington has refused to profit by his aunt’s will? Must have money of his own, eh?”

  “He has a good income, but of course—”

  “He has an extravagant wife! But, all sentiment aside, you don’t think Jim Wellington would steal and kill. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sure of it. He—well, he simply hasn’t that sort of courage, if you call it courage, Inspector.”

  “I gather you didn’t always feel that way about him.”

  I could feel my color rising.

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  He sat forward in his chair.

  “Why didn’t you marry him, Miss Hall? That isn’t an impertinent question. There must have been a reason.”

  “I couldn’t leave my mother all alone.”

  “And she objected? Why? Because his mother was what you call queer?”

  “No. But you see she had felt my father’s death very deeply, and of course—”

  “Of course, as a good daughter, you made your sacrifice. Well, it takes all sorts to make a world. Now let’s move on. The Daltons related to anyone here?”

  “No. Mrs. Dalton inherited the place, and he came there to live when they were married.”

  “Why don’t they speak to each other? And how long has that gone on?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “My God! What a life. Do you know what started it?”

  “He used to be rather gay,” I said carefully. “It may have been something like that.”

  “Were they on good terms with the Lancasters?”

  “Very good. Rather formal, of course. We are rather formal here, you see, Inspector. We don’t do much running back and forth.”

  “And she has the money?”

  “I think he has a little of his own. I really don’t know.”

  “Now what about him and Margaret Lancaster? You needn’t worry about telling, for we know anyhow. We know he was in his garage that afternoon working in a pair of old overalls over the engine of his car, and we know that those overalls have disappeared and he’s got a new pair. That may not mean anything, of course. I’m telling you so you won’t feel—well, too scrupulous. And we know he’s been meeting the other woman. Why? Have you any idea?”

  “I never heard anything about him and Margaret Lancaster until you showed me that letter, Inspector.”

  He was not satisfied, I knew. He sat with his eyes drilling into me, but at last he moved and spoke.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s get on. Now what about the Lancasters? What about the way they got along together? How did the old gentleman like his stepdaughters? What about Mrs. Lancaster? Did she put up the money, like Mrs. Dalton, or did he?”

  I tried my best, but they had been so long a part of my exterior life that I found it hard to detach myself.

  “I really don’t know,” I said at last. “Both of them were well off, I believe. They lived quietly always, even before she got sick. As a matter of fact, she had had bad health long before I was born. I suppose that’s one reason why the girls never married. She didn’t have a stroke or anything like that, you know. She just grew more and more feeble, and at last she took to her bed. She hadn’t left it for a good many years; she couldn’t take a step. I think it was something wrong with her spine, but I don’t really know.”

  “But they got along all right?”

  “They did indeed. Of course Mr. Lancaster disliked her hoarding the gold—you know that—and Margaret was impatient sometimes. Her mother was rather fretful, especially in the summer; she fussed about her food, and Ma
rgaret was the housekeeper. But I think that’s all.”

  “In other words,” he said, “the usual rather disagreeable old invalid! Well, she’s gone, so we’ll let her alone. Now—how did the others like Miss Emily? What about her, anyhow? What sort of a life did she live? Try to think about her and make a real picture. Look back a bit.”

  I found it very hard.

  “She used to be rather pretty. When I was a little girl she was still pretty. Later on she had to sit with her mother so much that she got heavy. I really don’t know anything more, Inspector.”

  “She had no one outside the family? No close friends?”

  “I never heard of any. She adored a canary I gave her one Christmas. It was almost sad, the way she fussed over it, as though—well, you know what I mean. If she had had children—”

  He nodded again, as though even a male could understand that vicarious maternity of Emily Lancaster’s.

  “I get you. No reason then to suppose that the old gentleman disliked her, or was afraid of her, or anything like that?”

  “None whatever,” I said rather stiffly. “Why on earth should he do either?”

  He ignored that, pinching his lip thoughtfully.

  “Humph! Well, what about Miss Margaret? Not so even-tempered as her sister, I understand. Gets angry easily, isn’t that it?”

  “She’s over it in a minute, Inspector.”

  “Do you think the family knew about this affair with Dalton?”

  “No. I don’t think it was an affair.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Then according to you there’s no story in that house. Just a lot of elderly and middle-aged people living their own lives, until someone comes along and without reason wipes out two of them. Is that it?”

  “I can’t see it any other way.”

  “All peaceable and calm, until the old lady begins to hoard that gold under her bed, and somebody who knows about it takes it out and loads the bags with dress weights!”

  “But that’s not so strange as it sounds,” I told him. “We all have them. We all use them. I remember seeing a lot of them in a keg in the Lancasters’ woodshed last spring. Miss Margaret was potting some plants, and putting them in the bottoms of the pots. But I imagine she used them all.”