Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  He was thoughtful for a moment. Then he reached into his pocket and drew out his notebook. After examining it, he glanced at me.

  “What about this seamstress, anyhow? She must know a lot about this Crescent, and the people in it. Is she a tall thin woman, angular, with gray hair?”

  “Miss Mamie! No. She’s very short and very fat.”

  “Can you place such a woman, anywhere in the Crescent?”

  “Only Miss Lydia Talbot, and a maid of theirs, Lizzie Cromwell. Our own cook, Mary, is rather like that, too.”

  “All right,” he said as he put the book away. “Now we’re up to the Talbots, and a queer kettle of fish they are. What do you know about them? What goes on behind those barred windows and locked doors? Or do you know?”

  I tried to tell him. How Mrs. Talbot rarely left her room at the back of the house, but sat there with her doors locked doing enormous quantities of crocheting—not a house in the Crescent but duly received its gift at Christmas of some terrible thing which it was supposed to use and display—and reading voraciously book after book. How she dominated her household, which was all in deadly fear of her except Lizzie Cromwell, who had been there for years, and in less degree George Talbot himself. How she measured out each morning the day’s supplies from the store closet off the kitchen, and then locked the door; and how woe betide any cook who demanded an extra egg or spoonful of tea thereafter. Also how her sister-in-law, Miss Lydia, had to live there because it was all the home she had; and although she did the buying, was carefully audited to the last cent.

  And yet, with all of this, how Mrs. Talbot was the first on hand in case of trouble; as witness her visits to Mrs. Lancaster, who was her sister-in-law by her first husband and who, in view of the fact that Mrs. Talbot had been deserted by that husband’s brother, might well enough have been let alone, or ignored.

  He listened carefully, his eyes intent and penetrating.

  “Good friends, were they?” he asked. “She didn’t resent Mrs. Lancaster’s second marriage, or anything like that?”

  “I think they had been better friends in the past few years,” I said cautiously. “Before that there was some sort of trouble. I’ve never known what. Just a family quarrel, I believe. But that was years ago.”

  “You don’t know what it was about?”

  “I haven’t an idea. I’ve always thought it was because when Mr. Talbot died—Mrs. Lancaster’s first husband—his will didn’t provide for Miss Lydia, who was his sister, and Mrs. Lancaster left her to Mrs. John Talbot to look after. But it may not have been that at all.”

  “Probably was,” he agreed. “The more money people have the more care they take of it. That’s why they have it. Well, we’ve got to the son there, George. How does he manage with all this locking up? It isn’t a normal life for a young man. You’ll grant that.”

  “He’s never known anything else. Of course he realizes it’s unusual, but he is really fond of his mother. He dodges some of it by living his own life outside. That’s only natural.”

  “What do you mean by his own life?”

  “Tennis, golf, clubs.”

  “And women?”

  “I don’t believe so. I’ve never heard anything of that sort. But then, of course, I wouldn’t.”

  It was nearly ten o’clock when he left, leaving me rather exhausted. I went to bed shortly afterwards, and I was sleeping soundly when between twelve and one o’clock that same night a motorist on the North Road found the body of Holmes lying on the cement a dozen or so miles out of town.

  Chapter XXXII

  ALTHOUGH WHEN HE ABANDONED Mother and Aunt Caroline he had worn a smart uniform, when found he was dressed in shabby clothes, and a cap which was badly worn lay a foot or two away. Apparently he had been struck by a hit-and-run driver, and with the feeling that he might be still alive the motorist brought him in, with his horn blowing like a police siren, to the General Hospital not far from us on Liberty Avenue.

  The hospital, finding nothing on him to identify him and having discovered without any peculiar emotion that he was dead, then sent him downtown to the morgue. And it was at the morgue the next morning that Detective Sullivan of the Homicide Squad, taking what he called a general look-see after what looked like a double suicide but might be murder, saw him and found his face familiar.

  “I’ve seen him somewhere,” he said. “Seen him lately, too.”

  He walked away, intent on his other problem; but Holmes bothered him. He has, I believe, a reputation in the Force for a tenacious memory, and at last it came to him. He had queried this man on the Lancaster case, along with the other servants.

  He shot back to the table and looked the body over carefully. There was no real indication that the man had been murdered, although there was a rather bad contusion on the back of his head. It looked like another hit-and-run case; but he knew that our car had been missing the afternoon before and found abandoned later, although not on the North Road. In almost the opposite direction, in fact.

  It did not fit.

  “Let’s see this fellow’s uniform,” he said at last. “There’s something not just right about this. Get his clothes, somebody.”

  Somebody did, laying them out on a white table, and Sullivan surveyed them with some surprise.

  “Sure these are his? Last time he was seen he was in full uniform with breeches and puttees, and driving a limousine”

  “Seems to have lost the lot, then,” said the attendant; “including the car! Those are his, all right.”

  Mr. Sullivan looked over the layout. There were no papers. There was a five-dollar bill and some small change, and a very soiled handkerchief. For the rest, a suit of summer underwear, a new shirt, old and worn overall pants and a coat, a nondescript belt, the battered cap and worn shoes and socks. There was not a mark on anything that could identify him, but there was one thing that was peculiar. His left-hand pocket was filled with keys, small keys of almost every sort and description. There were about two dozen of them.

  “Looks like a housebreaker,” said the attendant. But I believe Mr. Sullivan made no comment. He was examining the shirt carefully, a new white shirt of an inexpensive type.

  “Had his coat on when he was brought in, did he?”

  “Yes, Mr. Sullivan. I took it off myself.”

  Sullivan was no talker. He gathered up the shirt, being careful not to smear certain marks on it, and carried it away under his arm. Then, having pocketed that vast array of keys and with a parting glance at the quiet figure on the slab, he simply walked out again.

  It was eleven o’clock on that Thursday morning when he rang our doorbell. I was in the lower hall arranging the flowers; it being one of our traditions that a gentlewoman attends to the house flowers in the morning, and that the daughters of the house are particularly fitted for this task. Mother was fussing with Mary in the pantry, but she came forward when the bell rang, and I must say she received the news of Holmes’s death heroically.

  “Dear me,” she said. “And almost a month’s wages due him! Had he a family, Louisa, do you know?”

  “I think not. He had a little place in the country. He never mentioned a family.”

  Which represents very clearly our attitude toward our men servants, when we have any. Our women are different. We watch over their health, their relatives and their morals, and in effect ring a curfew for them every night at ten. Our men, however, strictly preserve their anonymity. Even today I doubt if the Daltons know whether Joseph when he goes out leaves them for a family, for some less regular relationship, or to go to the movies! And it is also a fact that when Mr. Sullivan asked us what was Holmes’s given name, we were obliged to consult Mary and eventually Annie before we remembered it.

  “William Holmes,” said Mr. Sullivan. “Well, that’s something anyhow. And now, he’d better be identified. If either one of you ladies—”

  To my astonishment Mother at once volunteered to do so.

  “I do not want Louisa in such a pla
ce,” she said, referring to the morgue and ignoring the fact that violent death and I were no longer strangers. “I shall go myself, Louisa. Order the car.”

  Then she remembered, and she showed for her what was almost emotion.

  “Poor Holmes!” she said. “He was always so careful, especially at the corners. Order a taxi, Louisa.”

  It turned out, however, that Mr. Sullivan had his own car; a low open sports roadster. It took some effort to get Mother into it at all, and I still remember the almost shocked look of surprise with which she found herself, as they drove away, with her feet almost straight out in front of her, while of necessity she was more or less sitting on the small of her back.

  Our household received the news without any great emotion. Neither of the two maids had cared for Holmes, and while they were shocked, they made no pretense at grief.

  “Always snooping, he was,” Mary said. “Not that I want to speak ill of the dead, miss; but it’s a fact. He spent more time up in his room watching out the windows than he ever did over his work.”

  While Mother had prepared for her visit to the morgue, Mr. Sullivan had visited and closely inspected Holmes’s quarters over the garage. Also he had questioned the servants. The sum total of their knowledge was unimportant. He was apparently unmarried, or at least had never mentioned having a family. He had the little place in the country I have mentioned, but he had never told where it was. And they believed that he had done a little polite bootlegging for George Talbot, the Daltons and the Wellingtons; and perhaps more than a little less polite liquor dealing elsewhere.

  I went back again to his quarters after Mr. Sullivan had driven Mother off, going at the pace for which she would have instantly dismissed Holmes, or any chauffeur. The door to the staircase was locked as usual, but I had taken the house keys with me and I had no difficulty in opening it. The stairs were dirty, for, whatever Holmes’s virtues, neatness was not among them. At the top they opened at the right into his bedroom, which with a most untidy bathroom comprised his living quarters.

  There was no question as I looked about but that when Holmes left Mother and Aunt Caroline at the cemetery the afternoon before, he had not intended to return. As I have said before, his clothes were gone. On a shelf were a few books, all of them detective stories; a torn magazine lay on the floor, and on the table by the window was the missing tube of glue, and an empty tin spool which had once held adhesive plaster. The bed had not been made, and for all my suspicions it looked pathetic. Whatever he had done, he had arisen from it alive and well only the morning before, and now he was dead. For somehow I had no doubt that it was Holmes who lay on that slab in the morgue.

  The bathroom showed only a soiled towel or two, and a worn-down shaving brush.

  I realized, however, as I wandered around that these quarters of Holmes’s offered a peculiar advantage to anyone who for any reason whatever, was interested in what went on in the Crescent. Our garage was set well back of the house, and from the windows on both sides he commanded portions of the Lancaster and Dalton houses, and even a small part of the Talbots’ and the Wellingtons’. From the rear he could look out over No Man’s Land, and his front windows almost impudently stared at our house.

  To Holmes, then, the Daltons’ garage and the Lancaster woodshed were in plain view, and even the rear end of the Talbots’ old stable where George now kept his car. The trees which obscured us from each other did little to shield us from him, and he was high enough to see easily over our shrubberies.

  He must have known a great deal about us, I thought; through Peggy he could have known about the money under the bed, and it might be that he had killed Emily Lancaster. But now he was dead himself. Who had killed him? Was it some bootleggers’ quarrel? Or had he finally got away with the gold and had there been, on that remote road, some quarrel over it? Or had it been, after all, one of those accidents which no shrewdness seems able to prevent?

  I was still thinking as I went slowly back to the house. I reflected uncomfortably that suspicion, having moved from house to house along the Crescent, had finally and at last involved ours; and Doctor Armstrong, coming in again around noon and reporting that he could make no more money out of me as a patient, put that into words for me.

  “That finishes the roll call, doesn’t it?” he said. “Everybody’s involved now, and I doubt if even that smart young man of yours, Lou, ever had anything like it.”

  “He is smart, but he is not my young man, doctor.”

  “Well, I hope to God he will be,” he said, tapping his fingers on his bag as usual. “Too many virgins here now, and not only the unmarried ones at that. Virginity is a state of mind, when all’s said and done. But to get back to your young man; if Holmes was murdered it begins to look like a syndicate, and I think myself he was.”

  “Why a syndicate?”

  “Well, take the average killer; the fellow who takes life the way he’d take a dose of salts. He’s got his method and he sticks to it. The hammer killer sticks to his hammer, the rod man to his gun, and the bag murderer puts all his victims in sacks and leaves them around somewhere. But what have we got here? An axe, a pistol, a poker and probably an automobile. Let your criminologist make something out of that if he can!”

  Not that he decried criminology, he said. It was a new profession and a hard one.

  “Fellow’s got to be an expert in a lot of things,” he said. “Got to know everything from ballistics and chemistry to bloodstains and fingerprints; also photo-micrography, which is a big word you needn’t bother about! But he’s got to know psychology too, and that’s where most of them fall down. They forget that most of us are naturally aggressive, and that enough repression of all the aggressive instincts drives us to extreme violence the moment we get upset. Even to murder. Your criminologist forgets that. He’s dedicated to pure fact.”

  A conclusion which would have been borne out, had he known it, by what I now know to have been Herbert Dean’s occupation that morning. He was, as a matter of fact, bending over that white shirt of Holmes’s, examining the tire marks under a microscope and then photographing and enlarging them.

  The result was a teletype from Headquarters ordering a search for a small light truck, showing signs of having been driven through tar, and of which the right front tire was of a certain designated make and carried embedded in it a short nail with a broken head.

  That was at noon on Thursday. Mother had not returned at lunch time, nor by two o’clock, when she was due at the Lancasters’; so I telephoned to Lydia Talbot that she had been called downtown, and Lydia agreed to substitute for her. Somewhat later however she appeared at the house and said that her sister-in-law had gone instead.

  “Hester seems to think I’ve been butting in where I’m not wanted,” she said. “And she’s so queer. Really, Louisa, I feel as though I’ve got to get away from here. I’ve got to. My nerves are going. I told Hester this morning and she’s furious. She says she’s given me a home for more than twenty years, and that’s true. But a home isn’t a life. I’m not as young as I used to be, and it’s like living in a jail. I don’t care where I go. I have a little money, and I can still work. I work where I am for that matter, only I don’t get paid for it.”

  Her voice was more bitter than her words. All my life I had seen her about, had known her as well as any woman of my age could know a woman of fifty or so. Her thin figure plodding on its innumerable errands was almost as familiar to me as my mother’s. But now she looked actually desperate.

  “I’m sure it hadn’t been easy,” I agreed.

  “Easy! It’s been plain hell. As though John Talbot would ever come back and bother her again, or want even to see her! The house locked and barred as though—” She caught herself then, and I saw that her face was twitching. “I’ll have to get away, Louisa,” she said. “Look at me. And she won’t let me go.”

  “Do you mean,” I said, “that she has locked herself away all these years from—from your brother?”

  �
��I didn’t say that,” she said more calmly. “No. She knows he wouldn’t do her any harm. He was the gentlest soul alive. I—” She lowered her voice and looked about her. “Sometimes I worry about Hester, Louisa. She’s not herself. She’s very queer sometimes; and lately I’ve thought even Lizzie is not herself. Maybe I’m only nervous, but—”

  She checked herself then and got up, dropping her gloves as she did so.

  “I do hope you won’t say I’ve said all this, Louisa. I just had to talk to somebody. I feel better now. And of course it’s all nonsense about my going away. Where would I go?”

  She hurried off through the August heat, and I went into the house. It seemed strange to me that day to remember how, only a week ago, we were living our complacent orderly lives; that on the surface at least we were a contented group of householders, and that our only skeleton was the occasional violent separations between Jim Wellington and Helen. The Daltons too, but we were so accustomed to that situation, and it so little affected our normal living that we hardly noticed it.

  Now every house on the Crescent had been shown to have its story, for the death of Holmes had involved even ours. Under those carefully tended roofs, behind the polished windows with their clean draped curtains, through all the fastidious ordering of our days there had been unhappiness and revolt. We had gone our polite and rather ceremonious way while almost certainly somewhere among us there had been both hatred and murderous fury.

  I remember standing in the darkened hall and once again calling the roll. It could not be; but when Annie came to say that our car had been brought back and the driver wanted to see me in the garage I was gazing fixedly through the door into the library, where my father’s portrait in oil hangs above the mantel. I was not seeing it, however. I was seeing instead the old crayon enlargement of George’s father which used to be in the stable loft, and hearing Lydia’s flat voice: