Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “I imagine no one has seen it at all for five years, or dusted the top of it for fifteen.”

  “Somebody has. It’s been cleaned lately. Carefully wiped. Very canny, this unknown of ours. Taking no chances. I suppose the ropes are all right? I’m going up on it anyhow; but not until I’ve taken you up myself and shut you into your room and heard you lock your door.”

  A program which he would have carried out with entire success had he not on emerging from the schoolroom in the dark bumped head-on into Annie, who had finally determined to fill the pan again and was on her way to replace it.

  The resulting uproar was one to waken the dead, and although in the midst of it Herbert Dean managed to escape, to this day Annie insists that an enormous creature that night rushed at her in our upper hall, made an effort to strangle her, and only fled when she doused him with a pan of cold water. This last was true enough, for Herbert spent most of the remainder of that chilly August night on guard outside the house, drenched to the skin and furiously annoyed, and clutching a large and heavy old photograph album by which he seemed to set considerable store.

  Not that it was really as simple as all that, for Mother was up by that time and on hearing Annie’s story had at once called the telephone central and demanded the police. Herbert Dean’s insistence on my silence was put to a heavy premium after they arrived, but I kept my own council and let Annie tell her story. The result was a thorough searching of the house, followed by the discovery of Herbert himself, with the album neatly tucked under his arm, hidden away in the limousine and obviously not courting discovery.

  It was a cruising radio car which had come, and the men did not know him. So for the second time within a few days Herbert found himself under arrest. It took a half hour at the station house to get himself identified and released, and before that happened an officer who had seen him taken into the Lancaster house only a few nights before stopped and stared into the room where he was being detained.

  “Where did you get him again?” he asked the sergeant.

  “Over on Crescent Place. Hiding in a garage.”

  “And what’s that he’s got?”

  “Old photograph album. Holding onto it like nobody’s business, too.”

  The officer eyed Herbert with cold suspicion.

  “He’s crazy as a loon,” he said. “Last time I saw him he was after an empty bird cage. Told somebody after he was grabbed that he was a dickey bird of some sort, and that he wanted the cage so he’d have a place to sit down in!”

  We knew nothing of all this that night, and I did not see Herbert again until later that day. Mother was too disturbed to sleep again, however. The officers had discovered the open window in the basement and the chair we had left by the dumbwaiter shaft. One of them had even taken the trip to the schoolroom on it and had been stuck between two floors and only rescued by herculean efforts. But the whole result was that Mother’s carefully built case against Holmes seemed to have collapsed, and that when I finally went to sleep at dawn she was still up and gazing thoughtfully out of her window.

  That day the intensive search for the missing truck went on. The store where it had been bought was located and a careful description and photographs obtained. Both were sent out to all precincts and detective squads, and to all state troopers, as well as to railways, hotels and even storage warehouses, with an enlargement of the special lock Emily Lancaster had ordered to supplement the regular one. By telephone, short-wave radio and teletype the search was taken up, and by afternoon the press had the photographs and ran them that night as “Mysterious Trunk Wanted by Police in Crescent Place Murders.”

  One paper offered a reward for its discovery, and within a day or two the others followed suit. But nothing happened, and when in the course of time it was discovered, as everyone knows who reads the papers, it was too late. As the Inspector says:

  “What threw everybody off was those foreign labels. It was a smart trick, that. Pretty well plastered with them, it was; everything from steamer tags to hotels in Europe. It made the same difference that a beard and a pair of false eyebrows would make on you, Miss Hall!”

  But all they learned that first day of the search, Friday August the twenty-sixth, was the identity of the colored man who had helped to carry the trunk down to the waiting truck. He had not noticed the white helper, save that he had a short beard and was not young; and he had an alibi to bear out his statement that he had remained behind when the truck drove off. He added something to that, however. The white helper had gone along.

  He had waited until Holmes was in the driving seat, and had then got onto the truck and curled up in the rear. He had supposed it was by prearrangement, but Holmes might not have realized that he was there.

  “I dunno, boss,” he said. “That heah white man, he jes’ got in over the tail. Engine makin’ a mighty lot o’ noise jes’ then, so mebbe the other fellah didn’ know. This white man, las’ I saw of him he was sittin’ flat behin’ the trunk.”

  But that Friday, beginning with two o’clock in the afternoon, stands out in all the history of the case as its one most significant day. Not only because it was that night that Lydia Talbot disappeared, but because at two o’clock that afternoon Margaret Lancaster got into a taxicab and, driving to the District Attorney’s office, proceeded of her own free will to make a statement so surprising that even the stenographic notes were in places almost unintelligible.

  No one of us saw her go, or had any idea of her intention. She left Miss Lydia in the house, got into the taxicab and was driven downtown alone; and I have often wondered since what must have been her thoughts as, bolt upright in that cab and as carefully dressed as usual, she went determinedly to expose at last what she had fought so hard to conceal.

  She looked exhausted and old, Herbert Dean says, as she went in. She threw back her heavy black veil, took a seat across the wide desk from the District Attorney, and simply said:

  “I have come to tell the real story of my mother’s murder, and of my sister’s death following it. I suppose you will want a stenographer.”

  The District Attorney could hardly believe what he heard. He stared at her.

  “You are—you want to make a signed statement?”

  “I do. It cannot hurt anybody now.”

  They kept her waiting for a time. It was dangerous, for they knew she might weaken at any moment, and for all her quiet manner it was dear to everybody that she was close to actual physical collapse. But there would be points to check and questions to ask; and for this they needed the Inspector and Mr. Sullivan. The Commissioner had taken his ivy poisoning home to bed, but Herbert was already there.

  Someone in that fifteen-minute interval asked her if she needed some spirits of ammonia, but she shook her head.

  “I am quite all right,” she said.

  That was the only time she spoke until, with everything ready, she asked if she should start. The District Attorney said “Please,” and she drew a long breath.

  “As you all know,” she said, “I am Margaret Lancaster. And I am here to say that to the best of my knowledge and belief, my sister while mentally deranged killed my mother; and that last Sunday night, out of fear that she would do further harm, my stepfather shot and killed my sister.”

  Chapter XXXIX

  “I SHALL TRY TO be as brief as possible, and I am telling what I know because you already suspect my stepfather. I have learned from the nurse that you have his pistol; that she gave it to you. But what you cannot know is the reason he had for killing my sister. While he could not tell me, I am convinced that he considered her unbalanced mentally at times, and dangerous.

  “I had noticed nothing different in my sister Emily until last spring. At that time Mother began to worry about her personal fortune, and she finally decided to have some of it turned into gold, this gold to be kept in a chest under her bed. None of us approved, and Emily least of all, but Mother was determined.

  “She arranged with her nephew, James Wellingt
on, to make this exchange for her, and this he did under protest. I need not go into that. You know all that already.

  “It was in April that I began to notice a change in Emily. She came in one day very white, and went into my mother’s room. There they had an argument of some sort, and my mother was very angry after it. From that time on I felt that the relationship between them had changed. Emily was tearful at times, and once I found her in the storeroom with an old family photograph album. She was crying over it. Later I saw it in my mother’s room. She kept it in the top drawer of the chest beside her bed.

  “I am telling you this because the album caused me so much anxiety later, although I do not yet understand just why. I have wondered—but I must get on with this statement.

  “Emily was my mother’s nurse, and was in and out of her room at all hours. It was early in the summer that I began to wonder about the gold under Mother’s bed. Emily had been the soul of honesty, but late one night I heard her coming out of Mother’s room, and I opened the door. She heard me and she looked very much alarmed. There was a low light in the hall but I could see her plainly, and she was carrying something that looked like one of the canvas bags from the chest. When I knocked at her door she was some time in letting me in, and then she looked frightened.

  “I did not know what to do. I went to Mother’s room, but she had had her usual opiate and was sleeping soundly. The chest was closed and locked.

  “After that I watched Emily as well as I could. I examined her room over and over while she was out, but I could find nothing. She hardly ever carried a purse, and the only places she went were to the library and to a woman on Liberty Avenue across from the library who she said was dying of a cancer. I even followed her once or twice, but she went nowhere else.

  “If she had not been in such a state of terror I would have given up then. There was no gold or money in her room, and she evidently had no box in any bank. But she was so queer that at last I went to Bryan Dalton. He laughed at me at first, but he too saw the change in her and at last we agreed to keep a watch and see if she left the house at night.

  “We established a sort of post office in our woodshed, and he would drop a note there. Usually it said: ‘All quiet.’ Sometimes he said she had come downstairs at night apparently for something to eat. But she never left the house. This will explain why Mr. Dalton has been involved in the case. He had nothing whatever to do with it.

  “It was about the first of this month that my father became suspicious. Emily had professed to believe that someone was trying to get into the house at night, and that they were after the money under Mother’s bed. On the night of August first Father was sleepless and anxious—he had never approved of the hoarding anyhow, considering it dangerous as well as unpatriotic. That night he heard a sound from Mother’s room, and he went in.

  “Emily was on her knees beside the bed, and she screamed when Father spoke to her. That wakened Mother, but Emily said she was after a sleeping tablet herself and that it had dropped under the bed.

  “I knew nothing of this until my father told me later on, after Mother’s death. When Emily had gone Father managed to examine the chest, but it was locked as usual and so he went back to bed. He asked Mother after that to have the chest opened and the money recounted, but that annoyed her and he had to let it go for the time. It was more than two weeks before he finally decided to have it done, with or without her consent. Then, on the morning of Thursday August the eighteenth, he told me exactly what he had seen and I foolishly told him what I knew.

  “While Emily was out at the library I telephoned to Jim Wellington to come at four that afternoon, for what Father called an audit. Father had not told Mother, and it was to tell her that he came back after he had started for his walk that afternoon. He changed his mind, however, after he was in the house. She was asleep, and he decided to wait until Jim was there.

  “I do not yet know how Emily learned about the audit, and the early afternoon was as you know it. Lydia Talbot brought Mother some things for her lunch, but was too late with them. Her sister-in-law, Mrs. John Talbot, left with Father at half past three. It was my afternoon out, but I had arranged with Father not to go and was in my room.

  “At three-thirty—or a little later—I saw Bryan Dalton walking from his garage toward our woodshed. Our servants could not see him from the lower floor, but I saw him from my window. Instead of going inside and leaving a report, he took up a position where he could watch the house, and that puzzled me. I thought at first he was merely waiting for the result of the audit and I paid no attention; but at last he saw me and waved to me to come down.

  “I had turned on my shower, but I began to dress, and then I heard Emily screaming and as soon as I could get into my dressing gown and slippers I ran out. What I thought was that Jim had come earlier than usual, that the theft had been discovered, and that Emily was having an attack of hysteria. But you know what I found.”

  Here I believe she stopped for the first time. Someone offered her a glass of water, but she refused it and after steadying her voice she went on.

  “I need not go into all that. You know it as well as I do. For one thing, Bryan Dalton had thought as I did about Emily’s screams and her fainting attack, and when he saw Louisa Hall bending over her he did not go to her. Instead he came up to our kitchen porch and waited there outside. It was locked, of course. The servants were upstairs in the hall by that time, and nobody saw him.

  “But I kept one thing from you then, and I am telling it now because I understand that you have certain suspicions about Bryan Dalton. When I went into that room after Emily had rushed downstairs, I found the album I have spoken of open on the bed, and the two pages were covered with fingerprints in—in blood. Fresh blood.

  “Emily was still screaming, and I had only a second or two. Mother’s sewing scissors were on her bureau, and I cut them both out. I still had them in my hand when I called down the stairs to tell the servants; I hid them inside a radiator cover in the side hall. Later on, when I went back to get Father a glass of wine, I gave them to Bryan Dalton. They were stiff, but he put them inside his overalls; and as soon as he dared, at my request, he burned both the overalls and the pages of the album, out in No Man’s Land. He was afraid there would be traces of blood on the overalls.

  “My father believed as I did. We knew that every door into the house was locked, and neither one of us believed that Emily was normal. All the Talbots have a queer streak in them.

  “You all know what followed. My father—he was really my stepfather—was convinced that Emily had done it in a fit of insanity. What is more she had worn a glove of his, one of a pair Jim Wellington had left, and which Father had found lying about. He kept them in the housemaid’s closet on the second floor, and used them when he blackened his boots. But after the—after she had finished in Mother’s room she didn’t even try to hide it. She threw it down into our lower hall, and when I came back into the house with her after she had pretended to faint outside, I picked it up almost under the nose of a policeman.

  “I hid it behind the pillows of the library couch when I fixed it for her, and later I got it out of the house. But Father saw in that glove an attempt to place the crime on him. He never spoke to Emily again after I told him about it.

  “I tried to shake this conviction of his, to save a dreadful scandal. But he was certain that she had done it, and I myself have never doubted it. She herself knew that he suspected her, especially after that first night when both of us found him in the cedar room. You see, the police had found no stained clothing, and he thought perhaps she had hidden what she wore on the roof. He had been up there, anyhow, and Emily knew as well as I did why.

  “The next three days were too horrible to talk about. Doctor Armstrong was keeping Emily under opiates, but Father would not even go into her room. What he thought until Sunday night was that she was definitely dangerous; not to him, but to almost anybody. And on Sunday night things reached a climax.

&n
bsp; “He was never able to tell me, but I believe he heard me call to Emily and knew that she was going downstairs. When she left the house he must have followed her, and when she went first to the Daltons’ and got a spade—for that is what she did—it meant only one thing to him. That was that she had buried Mother’s money and then killed her.

  “That meant more than insanity. It meant that it was a crime to conceal a crime, and he must have gone mad himself. He went back into the house, got his automatic, followed her to the Talbots’ and shot her. I know that, for I found his pistol on top of his dresser the next morning, and it had been fired.

  “I am not guessing about this. The next night while George Talbot was asleep in our library—Monday night—I found his automatic on the floor, and I remembered something he had told me last spring at a picnic. That was that the barrels of two similar automatics can be exchanged, and that an innocent man could in this manner be charged with a crime he had never committed; since every barrel left its peculiar marks on a bullet.

  “I make no defense. I knew there could be no case against George. He had no reason whatever for killing my sister. And my father was dying. He and I had been very close, just as my mother cared more for Emily than for me. I changed the barrels that night, wiped both the guns and put my father’s back where it belonged. I am sorry now, but at least he died in peace.”

  That was the end of the official statement, and I shall eliminate the questions which followed it, with the exception of one, and that was asked by Herbert Dean.

  “I would like to go back to that Thursday afternoon, Miss Lancaster. Just why had Bryan Dalton waited by the woodshed? We knew that he had, but he has refused to give a reason.”

  “He wanted to see me.”

  “Is that all?”

  She hesitated, but he was relentless now. He walked forward and confronted her.

  “Shall I tell you what Bryan Dalton saw, Miss Lancaster?”

  “But he’s wrong!” she said wildly. “I swear that he is wrong.”