Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  She took in the picture instantly, and with a quick gesture she wrenched the door open again. But she was not quick enough, for Herbert Dean caught it and slammed it shut. But I gather that he was gentle with her when he spoke.

  “I see you’ve heard, Peggy.”

  “Then it’s true?”

  “I’m sorry. It is true.”

  She stood there leaning against the door and looking at nobody.

  “Dead!” she said. “He’s dead. My husband’s dead, mother; and I’m going to have a baby!”

  They were all most uncomfortable. Peggy was hysterical and beyond questioning, and some instinct of delicacy got them out of the room. They were on the whole well impressed by the mother, and whether Peggy was or was not implicated in the theft of the trunk as unimportant just then.

  “We were on a murder case,” the Inspector said later, “and Holmes hadn’t killed Mrs. Lancaster. He was a bootlegger and a thief, but he wasn’t a killer. So we let her have a little time to herself.”

  They found an overworked servant somewhere, and she showed them Miss Merriam’s room. It was still unlocked, and so far as evidence went it yielded nothing whatever. It was a front room on the second floor, and its strategic value lay in its outlook, according to the police.

  “She could be pretty sure no one she knew was anywhere around before she started out. And that was important.”

  The public library was just across the street.

  The room itself contained little of a personal character: a few simple toilet articles on the dresser, books on a table, a pathetic and half-eaten box of candy and some writing paper, pen and ink on a small desk in a corner, about completed the list. The desk blotter had been used, but nothing on it was legible, although Herbert Dean took it with him when they left.

  The only thing of any value they had extracted from Peggy was the location of Holmes’s little place in the country. This, as they had expected, was out the North Road and some six miles beyond where the body had been found; and it was to this property that they went at once, Inspector Briggs, Mr. Sullivan, a plain-clothes man whose name I never heard and Herbert Dean, still carefully holding and protecting that desk blotter.

  “Be careful, Smith!” the Inspector admonished the uniformed driver. “Mr. Dean back here has got the whole story of these crimes in his lap. Spill him and you lose your job!”

  There was no difficulty whatever about finding the place, which they reached rather late in the afternoon. Reticent as Holmes had always been about it, there was no attempt to disguise his ownership of the property, for on the narrow dirt road leading in from the highway a mail box on a post was marked W. Holmes in plain black letters.

  The car turned in there and the officers got out at the house.

  It was a neat and not unattractive cottage of the bungalow type, built of wood and with a small detached garage, and surrounded by a dozen acres or so of land which had at one time apparently been a market garden. Now it lay uncared for and weed-grown in the August sun, and after a glance around the officers turned their attention to the bungalow.

  It was locked; locked so securely that even Herbert Dean, who was according to the Inspector one of the best picklocks out of prison, was unable to effect a peaceable entry. They broke a window finally, and one after the other they crawled inside.

  The place was untidy but comfortable. There was a living room of sorts, a bedroom, a kitchen and a dining room which had clearly been devoted to other purposes. The Inspector glanced around him and sniffed.

  “Packed it here,” he said. “Where’s the cellar, Sullivan?”

  “Right under the house, I imagine,” said Sullivan cheerfully. “They mostly are.”

  Three of the men went down the cellar stairs finally, to find there what they had expected; a small still, or “cooker” as the Inspector called it, a vast array of bottles and so on. But Herbert Dean did not go with them. He was making a slow and painstaking inspection of the living room and the bedroom, which in the end yielded him nothing except a half-dozen books—entirely of the crime variety—a box of labels of an excellent English whisky, and a notebook containing the names of some of our best citizens.

  He did better in the kitchen, however. Holmes had evidently done everything in his little country place but eat there, and the stove revealed itself as a dumping place for everything from broken glass to old newspapers. When the others emerged from the cellar they found him on the dirty kitchen floor, with a bed sheet before him and on it a miscellaneous assortment of old razor blades, defective corks, cigar ends and what looked like a book until it was opened, and then revealed itself into the type of receptacle sold in a good many stores and generally used for cigarettes.

  “See you’re happy, Dean!” the Inspector said, rather grimly.

  Herbert grinned and held up the box.

  “Here’s the thing I told you about, anyhow,” he said. “Made it himself purely as an experiment; but rather a neat job at that. It would be interesting to know just how long he watched those library trips of Emily Lancaster’s before he began to suspect, wouldn’t it?”

  The men examined the box. It was an ordinary book of fair size, with the center of each page neatly cut out but leaving an inch or less of margin. These margins had then been carefully glued together, and the interior strongly reinforced with a lining of adhesive tape. The result, which I now have, is a substantial box which looks like a rather well-worn book.

  “Simple, isn’t it?” Herbert said. “She carried two or three books each time, but the duplicate of this one went back and forth pretty regularly. They’d be fastened together probably, with a strap or a piece of cord. Cord probably for I imagine it broke once, on the path to Euclid Street.”

  The Inspector was less humorous about the box than he had been about the blotter. He took it and examined it carefully.

  “He made it?” he said. “How d’you know this isn’t the box Emily Lancaster used, herself?”

  “Because Miss Louisa Hall saw him making it. As a matter of fact, he made it last Saturday night.”

  The Inspector looked annoyed.

  “Look here, Dean,” he said. “I’ll admit you’re a valuable man. Maybe I don’t always see eye to eye with you on this case, but I’m glad to have you. Just the same, I’m damned if I’ll have you holding out on me, and that’s what you’re doing.”

  “You’d have jailed Holmes in a minute if you’d got anything on him, Inspector. And I needed him. If he knew how that gold and currency had got out of the house, he might know where it went. I was watching him pretty closely myself.”

  “Oh yeah? And you lost him, didn’t you?”

  “I did. I had a man of my own on him; but he lost him Wednesday morning, at the cemetery.”

  “And because you lost him, he’s going there himself!”

  But Herbert shook his head.

  “I’m guilty on one count, Inspector,” he said, “But not on the other. None of us can allow for accident, and I think Holmes’s death was an accident. It wasn’t in the original program, anyhow. Maybe there was a fight. Maybe he’d been put off the truck and ran in front of it to stop it. But he died because a car went over his chest, and it’s pretty hard to run down and kill an active man just because you want to do it!”

  Chapter XXXVI

  THEY WERE STILL ARGUING over that, I believe, the Inspector truculent and rather flushed, when Sullivan quietly came in from an examination of the garage and reported that Holmes’s uniform was in it, and a small light truck.

  “Haven’t gone over it,” he said, “but it looks like the one we’re after.”

  It was, they discovered. There was the nail in the tire, and the unmistakable evidence that it had been driven through a freshly tarred road. Careful examination of seat and body revealed nothing else, however, although some fresh scratches in the rear looked as though it had recently carried something heavy and unwieldy.

  There was no sign of the trunk.

  It was almost s
ix o’clock by that time but still broad daylight, and so they set out to cover the dozen acres or so as well as they could. For now of course it was at least possible that Holmes had reached his garage safely, and had been killed on his way back into town. In that case he might have emptied the trunk, buried or hidden its contents and been on his way back with it to dispose of it in any one of a dozen ways. Even to return it to the MacMullen house.

  They divided, the Inspector going back into the cottage and the three men searching the ground outside. It was the plain-clothes man who found the hole, and called the others to look at it.

  The spot was well chosen. A bush had been lifted and carefully wheeled in, about three hundred feet from the house; and beside it lay the top sod, cut from an area about two feet by two. This space had then been dug out to a depth of about thirty inches, and an empty box with a wooden lid placed inside it.

  The work was recent; about twenty-four hours old. The bush showed no signs of wilting, and under the surface the pile of soil was still moist. In the Inspector’s words:

  “It was all ready, you see. All he had to do was to fill the box out of the trunk, replant his bush, replace his sod, water the lot, and then sit tight until the excitement died down. Only it didn’t work that way.”

  For that hole in the earth told its own story to the men who stood around it. Holmes had been killed on his way out with the gold. He had never reached his little place in the country with it, and somewhere safely hidden away or perhaps traveling respectably tagged on a train going nobody knew where, was Miss Emily Lancaster’s trunk with its valuable contents.

  I have written in detail of this expedition and its result; for it was the search for that trunk and its ultimate discovery which revealed the last and most shocking of our murders. But there was another discovery made late that afternoon which helped to prove Mrs. MacMullen innocent of any connivance as to the trunk itself.

  Herbert Dean, going through the pockets of Holmes’s uniform, found a letter in it addressed to that lady. It was in a fair imitation of Miss Emily Lancaster’s hand, and it read:

  “Dear Mrs. MacMullen: I am sorry not to see you again, but we are leaving in a hurry. This is my authority to give my trunk to the bearer, who will also have the key to my room.” Signed. “Lucy Merriam.”

  “All set” as the Inspector says. “Note ready in case the landlady refused without it. And of course he had a pretty good general idea of the lock on that door, or maybe he had made an impression of it. He had plenty of chances.”

  It was too late when at last they got back to the city to do more than teletype a general description of the trunk, and to send operatives to the various railroad stations. Mrs. MacMullen, again closely questioned, could give no details by which it could be identified, and had not even noticed from what store it had been delivered. Peggy was in danger of losing her child and a woman from the neighborhood and a doctor were with her, so that she could not be questioned; Mr. Lancaster had died that afternoon and any information from Margaret as to where her sister might have gone for a trunk was not obtainable, for she was shut in her room and reported to be in collapse.

  The four men ate some dinner and decided to call it a day. And that night I had a brief but rather comforting talk with Herbert Dean. Comforting in spite of the fact that he started it with a warning. Mother was over at the Lancasters’, for although Lydia Talbot always presided over our funerary ceremonies, it was and is one of our traditions that in cases of grief the family must on no account be left alone with it; and I understood from Mary that all the available Crescent, including Jim Wellington, was also there. I had begged off with a headache myself, which was real enough, and I was sitting on the porch in the dark when I heard his light active footsteps on the street and recognized them.

  At first I thought he mean to go on by, and I ran out along the walk and called to him. It was then that he read me my lecture, right there on the path.

  “I’ve been criminally remiss with you, Lou,” he said severely. “I’ve warned you not to wander around alone, but apparently that isn’t enough. Among the numbers of things I don’t know about this case is why you were attacked the other night; or why anybody wanted to get into this house at all. Nevertheless, you were attacked and you might have been killed. If it were not for the fact that you have a lot of hair—very lovely hair, Lou!—well, it doesn’t stand thinking about. Anyhow, we’ve got to keep you safe.”

  He laughed a little, as he led me back to the porch. “I seem to be increasingly interested in keeping you safe, Lou. Odd, isn’t it? That you should walk into my life at the instant I was being blown out of the Wellington kitchen! Still, I dare say many a romance has started less romantically.”

  He did not pursue that, however, although I dare say I colored.

  “I’ve had a wretched afternoon,” I told him. “You’ve left me feeling that I can’t trust anybody; not even Jim Wellington.”

  “Well, that’s something gained,” he said rather drily. “And you are quite right. Don’t trust anybody around here for a while anyhow. Don’t trust them until you can see the whites of their eyes, and then run like hell!”

  “Herbert,” I said, “you must tell me about Miss Emily. Somehow I can’t bear it.”

  And then he became grave, almost tender.

  “Who are we to judge her?” he asked. “She took it; we can take that for granted. What we don’t yet know is why. She may simply have wanted it for herself. After all, she had given up her life to that old woman. She may have been in inner rebellion for years; then suddenly she saw her chance to escape. Almost fifty and liable to the emotional upsets of that age in women, Lou my dear. She might have been in an abnormal state of mind. Such things happen.

  “Or there’s another possible explanation. She may have felt that too many people knew about that gold, and so she had to protect it. That is simply another guess. There’s a third one, but less likely; that she and another member of the family, say, Mr. Lancaster, developed the plan together to protect the money. I don’t believe it, myself. And I don’t think that this third person was Margaret, for I have an idea that Margaret all along has suspected Emily of just what she did; and maybe more than she did.”

  “You mean that Margaret thinks Emily killed their mother? Oh, no!” I wailed. “She never did. How could she think such a thing?”

  He reached over in the darkness and took my hand.

  “Listen, Lou,” he said. “I agree with you, but try to get Margaret’s point of view. You see, there are degrees even in crime. There’s cold-blooded calculated murder; and there’s the picture of Emily Lancaster, not allowed to marry, getting on in years and heavy and tired, and that old woman nagging her until she’ll do anything, even kill, to escape her. Margaret has had her share of it, too, so she’s afraid it was Emily. That’s all. And in twenty years or so, if you stay where you are, you’ll possibly understand that fear of Margaret’s yourself.”

  And he added:

  “The terrible domination of the old and helpless, Lou. Think of it!”

  I did think, to my own shame. I realized that along with the rest of us I had watched Emily Lancaster for years without ever thinking about her at all; had taken it for granted that she asked no more of life than her three meals a day, her broken sleep at night, and the servitude from which her only escape was into the books she read so avidly.

  But he was entirely convinced, for more reasons than he gave me that night, that Emily Lancaster had never murdered her mother. It was more to reassure me than anything else that he explained that afternoon as he saw it.

  “Just take the question of time, for instance,” he said. “The killing didn’t take long, but remember that she was fully dressed at three-thirty, and differently but fully dressed again at four. And she was a slow-moving woman. Even if she had stripped off her clothing and entered that room entirely naked—and that’s been considered—she would have had to go back and bathe and clean the tub. And the police examined every
tub in the house, including the outlets. The soap, too. Then there’s that story of Jim’s, that when he went up she was talking to her canary. If that was acting, for whose benefit was it? She may have known he was in the house. She could hardly have known he was upstairs in the hall.”

  My mind was too confused to work properly, but I was trying to think as best I could.

  “Still, if she knew Jim was coming that afternoon to get out the gold, wouldn’t she be pretty desperate?”

  “But did she know? It was Margaret who did the telephoning. Emily was out at the library at the time, getting some books. But wasn’t she prepared even for discovery, if it came before she could get away? I think she was. I’m not so sure about the window screen, but that flower pot was overturned; and they’re not easy to overturn. I’ve tried it. How about those stories of someone on the porch roof at night, before the murder? Weren’t they pure camouflage for her theft?—if it is theft to take what will be yours some day anyhow, and what you may feel you have earned a dozen times.”

  “Still, Herbert,” I objected, “there was no reason for her running out of the house last Saturday night, unless there really was someone there. Or she thought so.”

  “That’s different,” he said almost roughly, and released my hand. “There was someone there that night, and if I knew who it was I’d have this case settled and out of the way.”

  After that he told me some of the steps by which he and the police had reached certain conclusions. He held out much I have already told here, but as a résumé it is not without interest. He had recaptured my hand, and I felt that he was amused at my feeble effort to free it.

  “I’m holding it out of sheer gratitude, Lou darling. Nothing sentimental about it, so let it alone. You see, you set me on the track of that money.”

  “I did?”