Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “She knows he wouldn’t do her any harm. He was the gentlest soul alive.”

  I went back to the garage, to find a man in rough clothes and a cap who had raised the engine hood and seemed to be entirely engrossed in what poor Holmes had always called the car’s innards.

  “Seems all right, miss,” he said, and then looked up. It was Herbert Dean, in a mechanic’s overalls and a dirty cap.

  “Sorry to be so long, miss,” he went on. “I suppose, like most women, you never notice your mileage?”

  “Considering that we never go anywhere, why should I?”

  “True. Too true!” he observed. “Of course that’s all over now,” he added cryptically. “Still, if you had it might help. Or it might not. I have an idea that if this baby could talk it would tell us a good bit about poor Holmes, and his movements yesterday. But I can make a fair guess at that.”

  “Am I supposed to ask what you are guessing?”

  He looked gratified, or pretended to.

  “Certainly you are.” But he dropped his light manner then. “I’m guessing,” he said slowly, “that at some time yesterday, probably toward noon, this car drew up at a house not far from here, but outside the Crescent; that a chauffeur in livery, Holmes, impressively delivered either a note or a message—probably a note—to a lady who rents rooms; and that in all probability this landlady was a tall thinnish woman who was duly impressed by the whole outfit, and who received that message in good faith. And—I am still guessing but I believe—that that same Holmes went back last night with a light truck of some sort and took away from that house one new trunk, which would be unduly heavy for its size, and which may have required help; say, the landlady’s son, if she had one. Most landladies have no husbands. That’s the reason they are landladies.”

  “Are you saying that the gold was in that trunk?”

  “I am guessing, dear Lou of the nice quiet eyes. But I think it’s true. And so that poor little shrimp lost his life.”

  “Then he was murdered for that money!”

  “I haven’t said that, I’m not sure. But either by accident or design he was killed, my darling. He was knocked on the head, and after that the truck—it was almost certainly a truck—went over him.”

  “It’s horrible.”

  “Well, it’s queer. And some of the other things are queer. I can understand putting his coat on to hide the tar marks on his shirt; the truck had been through tar. It was smart, you see. In nine cases out of ten he’d be picked up as a hit-and-run case, and that would be the end of it. But why lay him out neatly on the road, and then anchor his handkerchief on his chest with a stone, so that he would be sure to be found?”

  “Herbert,” I asked feverishly, “was Holmes killed by the same person who killed Mrs. Lancaster and Emily?”

  He shook his head.

  “God knows,” he said. “It is all connected somehow, but I can tell you this. So far as it is possible to be sure of anything, nobody left the Crescent last night. But all I’m certain of this morning is that somewhere, perhaps still on the road but more probably hidden somewhere in a house, is the new trunk in which—brace yourself for this—the new trunk in which Emily Lancaster hid the gold which she systematically took at night from under her mother’s bed.”

  He was getting ready to leave by that time, going by way of the path across No Man’s Land to Euclid Street, and under Mary’s prying eyes I could only stand and stare at him.

  “I think you’ll find the car all right, miss,” he said, touching his cap. Then he lowered his voice. “Oh, yes, I meant to tell you. That bit of stem from your upper hall was poison ivy. Better be careful, if you’re susceptible. The Commissioner is. I wish you could see him today!” And he added, with his attractive smile: “Are you susceptible, Lou? You are such a suppressed little person that I can’t be sure. But I hope you are, for I’m coming to see you tonight.”

  Chapter XXXIII

  HE WENT AWAY AT once and I went into the house and up the stairs, dazed and dizzy with this new knowledge, and wondering where it led us. It should have explained so much, and yet it really explained so little.

  How could I believe that Emily Lancaster was a thief? To accept that was to revalue all the Crescent, to doubt everyone of us, and to wonder whether under our cloaks of dignified and careful living we were not all frauds and hypocrites. To suspect Emily was to suspect everybody.

  I stood in the upstairs hall and gazed about me. The door was open into the guest room and where Holmes had slept, and which still seemed to retain his particular aroma of oil and grease. The sun poured in on the radiator at the end of the hall where I had hidden that glove of Jim Wellington’s, through the window from which I had watched Mrs. Dalton making her frantic search of the house that same night. And from the back window in the main hall I could see that room of Holmes’s, and his patient experimentation with the book.

  Holmes had known about the money, and that knowledge had killed him. But how long had he known that Miss Emily was carrying it away? How had he discovered where she was taking it? As I have said before, not only did he occupy a strong strategic position over the garage, but he undoubtedly used No Man’s Land for purposes of his own. Had he, like George Talbot, found some of that dropped money? Or had he followed Miss Emily for some unknown reason, discovered where she went, and then formulated his plan?

  I stood by that rear window and tried to think it out. There seemed, with the plot he had apparently conceived, no actual reason for killing Miss Emily. Whatever its details were, so far as I knew it could have been carried out as well with Emily alive as if she were dead. And that conclusion of mine was borne out only a few minutes later, while I stood at the window.

  A woman was slowly crossing No Man’s Land from the direction of Euclid Street; a tall thin woman, not unlike the Talbot’s Lizzie, and moving toward the Lancaster house. She had a rolled newspaper in her hand, and even from that distance I could see that she was both uncertain and uneasy. I lost her when she reached the woodshed, but picked her up again as, still moving with a certain unwillingness, she went up the path toward the Lancasters’ rear porch.

  There evidently Ellen turned her away. Mr. Lancaster was very low that morning, and I dare say Ellen, who had been fond of him, was extremely short with her. At all events the woman stood uncertain for a moment and then reached a decision and moved toward our house.

  All of this had interested me, and I went downstairs so as to meet her before Mary sent her off. She seemed startled when I confronted her.

  “Are you looking for somebody?” I asked.

  “I was looking for Miss Lancaster, but the old gentleman is pretty bad. She couldn’t see me.”

  “Maybe I would do. I’m a great friend of Miss Margaret’s.”

  She looked me up and down, with caution rather than suspicion. Then, right there in the path, she opened up her newspaper.

  What I had expected was the morning paper, with its report on the finding of an unidentified man killed by a hit-and-run driver, and followed by an excellent description of Holmes. But I was mistaken. What she produced was an illustrated section of one of our newspapers; and this she held out to me.

  “I just saw this picture this morning,” she said. “I was lining a drawer with the paper, and I saw it. Would you say this is Miss Emily Lancaster, miss?”

  I looked at the paper. It was a Sunday morning edition, and the picture she referred to was taken as the family had gone in to the inquest on Saturday. It was a very clear picture. In it Margaret’s black veil was down but Emily, emotionally unstrung, had raised her veil and was apparently about to wipe her eyes. In so doing she had seen the cameraman and with her handkerchief in her hand, had hesitated for a fraction of a second. That had been enough however; and the result was an excellent picture of her.

  I rolled up the paper and glanced toward our kitchen. Mary was watching with interest from a window.

  “Come into the house,” I said quickly. “It’s hot out here,
and anyhow I think you have something to tell me.”

  “I have that,” was her reply, and she followed me docilely enough around the building and into the library. Once inside I closed the doors.

  “First of all I’ll answer your question. Yes, that is Miss Emily Lancaster. I suppose you know she is not—living now?”

  She nodded.

  “But she didn’t call herself Lancaster when she rented a room from me,” she said. “I’m sorry to speak ill of the dead, but if that’s Miss Lancaster she told me her name was Merriam, and she said she was a trained nurse. But that’s neither here nor there. What worries me is about that trunk of hers. I don’t know that I’m responsible, but I’ve got my living to make, and I don’t want any trouble.”

  I reassured her as well as I could, and she told me the story.

  On or around the first of April she had read an advertisement for a room wanted by a trained nurse, and as she lived near the corner of Euclid Street and Liberty Avenue, across from the library and only two blocks from the General Hospital, she had answered it at once.

  She was a newcomer in the vicinity and did not recognize the middle-aged woman who called in reply. This woman had stated that she was a nurse with what amounted to a permanent position with an elderly invalid, and that she had only a little time now and then to herself.

  “But she said,” went on Mrs. MacMullen, for that turned out to be her name, “that she liked a place she could call home anyhow, even if she only spent an hour or two a day in it, when she went to the library for books or took a walk. She said it was the nearest she could have to a home. And she gave Miss Emily Lancaster as a reference; said she had nursed her mother at one time. Well, everyone around here knows about the Lancasters, although nobody saw them much. It sounded all right, but I did call up the house, and this Miss Emily answered herself. She gave her quite a good reference. How was I to know it was herself all the time, miss? And why did she want to play such a trick anyhow? It wasn’t as though she was a young woman. You know what I mean.”

  “No,” I said thoughtfully. “It was curious, of course. I think they did have a nurse named Merriam once for a short time, but that’s long ago.”

  The end of it was that Miss Merriam took the room, and according to Mrs. MacMullen the arrangement went very well. Miss Emily, or Miss Merriam, came in almost every other day. Usually she went first to the library, and then to this room of hers. Once in a while she would stay two or three hours, but mostly it was less. She had sent in a new wardrobe trunk soon after she took the room, and she kept it not only locked, but padlocked. Apparently this padlock arrangement did not belong to the trunk, but had been added.

  “I didn’t like that much,” the landlady admitted, “but women that age are peculiar sometimes. I never looked in a roomer’s trunk in my life; I’ve got other things to do. But she was peculiar in other ways too. I had to do the room while she was in it. Not that she mussed it much—she was very neat—but I could only send the vacuum when she was there. She kept the key herself.”

  Not once in that almost five months had she suspected that Miss Emily was other than what she seemed, and it shows very clearly the almost complete isolation of Miss Emily’s life that she could move about our own neighborhood as she had and remained unrecognized. It was Margaret who did the marketing and buying. Liberty Avenue knew her well. But Emily Lancaster remained, in all that busy life which moved along Liberty Avenue, a lonely and unknown figure, a stout middle-aged woman carrying an armful of books to and from the public library.

  Mrs. MacMullen had not finished, however.

  “I did my best to please her,” she said, “and she seemed to like me well enough. Then early this month she began to look tired and nervous, and I’d hear her walking up and down the room when she came. She’d lock the door and—well, she’d just keep moving like a woman who was too upset to sit still. You know what I mean, miss.

  “So I wasn’t so surprised as I might have been when one day about two weeks ago she came to me and said she’d liked the room very much, but that she might not keep it long. The old lady, her patient, was talking about going on a cruise around the world and taking her along. I remember she’d brought in a lot of steamer folders, and she read them while I did the room. They’re there now, as a matter of fact. And that’s why I let the trunk go.”

  She came then to the events of the last few days. On the Thursday morning of Mrs. Lancaster’s death, at somewhere around eleven o’clock, “Miss Merriam” had come in in a worse state of nerves than usual. She had been there the morning before, but only for a few minutes. This time she stayed an hour, and Mrs. MacMullen said she could hear her walking the floor again.

  “Back and forth she went, and me wondering what it was all about. Then she came out, and I asked her if there was anything wrong, or if her old lady was worse. She just acted as though she didn’t hear me, and went past me and on out like a crazy woman. Then she came right in again, and said she’d have to give up the room in a day or two; that they were going somewhere, she didn’t know where. But that she’d send for the trunk later. And she paid me up to the end of the month. That’s the last I ever saw of her, until I recognized this picture this morning.”

  It was that afternoon that Mrs. Lancaster was murdered, and the whole neighborhood thrown in a state of frenzy. Mrs. MacMullen was interested, not only because of the crime, but because Miss Merriam had given Miss Emily as a reference. The general belief was that a homicidal maniac was loose, and along with a good many others the landlady inspected her window locks, and in addition she had put a chain across her front door the next morning.

  “Some of my people didn’t like it,” she explained. “I put it on at nine every night and after that they had to ring the bell. Their keys were no good to them. But I did it to protect them as well as myself, and when that killer got Miss Emily herself on Sunday night, they stopped fussing.”

  She still, she said, had no idea that Miss Emily and Miss Merriam were the same woman. She was shocked nevertheless: “because only last spring I’d talked to her over the telephone. It was as if I knew her, if you see what I mean.”

  But on Sunday night she had had real reason to be thankful for the chain. It was about three o’clock in the morning and she was in the lower hall.

  “Miss Anderson on the second floor had a toothache, and I’d offered to go down and heat some water for a hot-water bottle. I know my house pretty well so I didn’t turn on a light—and I was in my slippers, and they don’t make any noise.

  “Well, I was down at the foot of the stairs when I heard somebody at the front door fumbling with the lock. All my people were in, and they knew about the chair anyhow. I was scared, but I stood still and watched, and that door opened! It opened as far as the chain would let it. Then—I couldn’t help it, I guess—I yelled, and it slammed shut again.”

  “You didn’t see anybody?”

  “No, miss, and I’d be glad if you kept it to yourself. I don’t want my roomers leaving.”

  I nodded absently, I’m afraid, for I was busy thinking. On Sunday night Holmes was locked in our guest room, and he was still there when I unlocked his door the next morning. Then it could hardly have been Holmes at that door and thwarted by that chain. Then who? Mrs. MacMullen was in no doubt, apparently.

  “I guess I’d have yelled louder if I’d known Miss Merriam was Emily Lancaster and that he’d killed her that very night,” she said trying to smile. “It’s easy to see what happened, Miss Hall, isn’t it? Whoever it was, he killed her to get that key, and I can only thank God that my chain held.”

  But of course she still did not know Miss Merriam’s real identity, and she only wondered why she had not come to her room since the Thursday before.

  “I thought maybe she’d gone away as she said,” she explained. “But that seemed queer with her trunk still locked in that room of hers.”

  And then, after this long preamble, she reached the trunk itself. It had been taken away the n
ight before, and the word had been brought at noon by a liveried chauffeur with a limousine at the curb. Naturally she had suspected nothing out of the way.

  “Up the steps he came, as bold as brass, and he said to me that Miss Merriam’s old lady was going out of town in a hurry, and that she’d send for her trunk that night.

  “‘And what about getting into the room for it?’ I said ‘She’ll have to send her key.’

  “He said he would get the key, and that was all.” She had not been surprised when he himself came for the trunk with a light truck. He had a negro helper, and the two went up the stairs. He had the key right enough, as she said; but the trunk was heavy and he himself was a small man. It had stuck too at the turn of the stairs, and finally she herself had gone out on the street, found a white man loitering on the pavement, and brought him in.

  “The three of them got the trunk out and into the truck,” she said, “and that’s all I know, except that he paid the helpers off and drove away by himself.”

  She took a handkerchief out of her bag and wiped her face with it. I could see that she was trembling.

  “Well, that’s all, Miss Hall,” she said, getting slowly to her feet. “I let him take the trunk. How was I to know that this Merriam woman was Miss Lancaster, or that she was dead? I gave it to him, and the police can believe it or not. I don’t know what was in it and I don’t care. Let them get him and they’ll get it.”

  “They’ll never get him, Mrs. MacMullen,” I said gravely. “I’m afraid he is dead.”

  And I was astounded to see her crumple up in a dead faint, on the floor at my feet.

  She came around before very long, after Mary over my protests had dashed a tea cup of ice water in her face. She was dazed at first, gazing at us all with blank eyes, but soon she oriented herself and tried to sit up.

  “I’m sorry, miss,” she began. “I don’t know when I’ve done such a thing.” Then memory came back and she closed her eyes and leaned back heavily against my arm as I held her.