Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “Shall I tell you what Bryan Dalton saw that afternoon from somewhere near his garage, and what brought him over to watch your house? Or will you tell us?”

  She said nothing, and he continued.

  “What he thought he saw was an axe, moving slowly up the back wall of the Lancaster house. But that garage of his is some distance away, and anyhow the thing was incredible. He walked over and looked into the woodshed, and the axe was missing; but he is not a quick thinker, and he was puzzled more than anything else.

  “It was not until Emily ran out shrieking that he began to understand. Even then he would not believe it. He went to the house, but the kitchen door was locked and the servants upstairs. After that I imagine he went to the ground underneath the window, and he thought he saw marks showing that the axe had lain there hidden in the planting for some time. All day and maybe part of the night. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “But he’s wrong, I tell you,” she said, more calmly. “I swear that he is wrong.”

  “What was he to think?” Herbert said, still sternly. “Here was your sister, in spotless white, still in the side garden. She had not killed her mother. And when you came with those fingerprints from the album to be destroyed—! Of course he thought it was your window.”

  “It was not. I swear that.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I know it was not. But you should be grateful to a very gallant gentleman, Miss Lancaster, who thinks to this moment that you had hidden that axe and later on fastened a cord to it; and that at or about three-thirty that afternoon you drew it up and through the window into your bedroom.”

  “And you don’t think so?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. He simply mistook the window. The axe went into the housemaid’s closet next door.”

  Somewhat later they let her go. They were of two minds about her, that group in the handsome office which as Mother would have said represented a considerable outlay of taxpayers’ money. They compromised on having her followed, but she went directly home.

  There was a long argument after her departure.

  “You can see how it was,” the Inspector said when it was all over. “Here was Dean; I’d watched him work and I had a good bit of confidence in him. But the D. A. and the Commissioner when I called him up were hell-bent on holding her.

  “What they figured was that the affair of Holmes and the money was out. You know what I mean. Emily had hidden the money, Holmes was carrying it off and somebody else had got wise and took it from him. But this Margaret Lancaster not only knew it was gone. She knew, according to them, where it had gone to. All this story Emily had made up about a woman with a cancer probably hadn’t fooled her at all.

  “You’ve got to remember this, too. Margaret’s shower was running. She could have done the thing mother-naked—if you’ll excuse me, Miss Hall—and then gone back and had a shower and been as clean as a baby. Only mistake she made, as they saw it, was that she sent away the bird cage, and that had the keys to the MacMullen house and the trunk in it. Then later on she followed Emily when she went to get them, and killed her with her father’s gun.

  “Unnatural? Sure, but the whole thing looked unnatural, didn’t it? She’d changed the barrels of those guns, and it was what you might call an open question whether she did that to save him or to save herself.

  “Then again, when they got Dalton back that afternoon after she had gone home Dean turned out to be right. He believed she did it, was sure it was her window that axe went into. He admitted he might be mistaken, but that’s what he thought. She was about frantic when she gave him that stuff to burn. At first he thought that was natural enough, seeing that she was so sure Emily had done it. Later on he got to thinking—about Emily’s white dress and Margaret taking a bath and so on, and he wasn’t so sure.”

  Chapter XL

  IT WAS THAT EVENING that Lydia Talbot disappeared.

  None of us at that time knew about Margaret Lancaster’s visit to the District Attorney’s office, and the afternoon was the usual afternoon on the Crescent when a normal death has taken place among us.

  We called up our various florists and ordered flowers according to our tastes and means, we pressed or ordered pressed the black clothes we kept for such occasions, and from behind our immaculate window curtains we watched the cars of various old friends and city dignitaries drive up, leave cards with messages of sympathy on them, and drive away again.

  Lydia Talbot had as usual taken over the duties of hostess, and stood gravely in the lower hall. To those of us who went in she gave the last details with a certain gusto, and she was talking to me while instructing the mortician, as to the moving of the parlor furniture so as to leave room for the casket.

  “I understand that it was really quite peaceful at the end, Louisa. It’s very sad, but of course after all he wasn’t a young man. ‘Over there, over there!’ she startled me by adding, ‘Put the piano there, I told you that before.’”

  She darted into the parlor in her rather rusty black dress, and I do not think she even saw me when I left.

  That was at five o’clock. Margaret must have been back at that time, but none of us saw her return and officially she was still prostrated in her bed, with the nurse in attendance.

  Save for the discovery of the bird cage that afternoon, I can remember nothing of any consequence. Both our servants were jumpy, which was natural, and Annie’s story of the man on the third floor now included a glittering knife in his hand, although how she could have seen it in the darkness seems rather unusual. Mother fortunately had been able finally to lay the whole disturbance to hysteria, and had not missed the album; and the trunk was still undiscovered, as was the identity of the white man who had helped to get it out of the MacMullen house.

  Peggy was still there, very ill after losing her child; and a careful inventory of the roomers in the MacMullen house had resulted in nothing. All of them were women with one exception, and this was the pianist at a local theater, who had been on duty all evening of the night the trunk was taken.

  The discovery of the bird cage was valueless. The gimlet-eyed man and Daniels’ cart had gone with Daniels himself was back on the job that day. It was on my way back from the Lancasters’ that I encountered him. He looked white and drawn, and I stopped.

  “I’m glad you are back,” I said. You haven’t been sick, I hope?”

  “Yes, miss. I haven’t been myself. I see they’ve had another death next door.”

  “Yes. But this at least was natural.”

  “Well, maybe, miss. Although there’s such a thing as being killed by troubles. Still, as Shakespeare says: ‘what’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief.’ I meant to tell you, miss; I think there’s a bird cage belonging to Miss Emily Lancaster over on Euclid Street. I’ve seen it hanging in her window many a time. But it isn’t the same bird. It doesn’t sing any.”

  I still wonder why he told me that. Was Daniels himself suspicious of the truth at that time? I think not. It sounded like and probably was purely a piece of information, passed on in case the cage was wanted again. Nevertheless I telephoned the fact to Inspector Briggs, Herbert Dean being somewhere unknown, and they got the cage that night. But it revealed nothing, nor had the family which had it any information.

  One of their children had found it lying abandoned in No Man’s Land some days before and had brought it home. The housewife had simply scrubbed it thoroughly, furnished it with a new bird, and thought no more of it.

  If it had borne any fingerprints they were certainly gone.

  It was Mother who brought the first news about Lydia Talbot. She had relieved her to go home for dinner at half past seven, and she had not come back when Mother returned, visibly annoyed, at a quarter to ten.

  “Really,” she said, “it is too annoying of Lydia. She said positively that she would come back as soon as she had eaten her dinner and steamed a crêpe veil for Margaret.”

  “I’ll go over and find out, if you like,
” I offered. “She may be sick.”

  But Mother, who had insisted on Annie as an escort both to and from the Lancaster house, refused to let me go.

  “The nurse is there,” she said. “And it’s too late for anyone to call now anyhow.”

  I was puzzled about Miss Lydia, but not alarmed. As I may have said, it is our custom in times of death to regard the body as a sort of neighborhood trust, and to separate the family from it with the same firm kindliness as that with which we separate the family from the world. Also we guard over and watch it during the daylight and evening hours, although in recent years we have ceased sitting up with it at night. Little by little this duty toward our dead has been passed to the spinsters of the Crescent, as being presumably free of domestic obligations, marital or otherwise; and for years Lydia Talbot had been the high priestess of our funeral rites.

  She had enjoyed these brief hours of importance, and I was slightly uneasy after Mother had gone up to bed. I tried to get the Talbot house by telephone, but evidently someone had left a receiver off and I could not do it.

  It must then have been nearly eleven when I went out onto our front porch to look across at the Talbots’, and to wonder if I had the courage to go over and see if everything was all right. To my astonishment I found George on the walk, and at first I thought he held a revolver in his hand. It turned out to be a flashlight, however, for he switched it onto my face.

  “What is it, George? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. At least I hope not. But I thought I’d take a look around. You see we can’t locate Aunt Lydia. I went to the Lancasters’ just now to get her, and she hasn’t been there since dinner. I’ve been along the Crescent. She isn’t at Jim’s or the Daltons’, and your house was dark, so I knew she wasn’t there. I—well, I just thought I’d look around. The way things have been going here—!”

  “When did she leave the house, George?”

  “About a quarter to nine, and it’s eleven now. She hadn’t a hat or anything,” he added. “I haven’t told Mother, but—well, where could she go, like that? All she had was a small box with a veil in it. I believe she’d repaired it for Margaret Lancaster.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I saw her out myself. I suppose it’s all right. She’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself, but where could she go? She wasn’t even wearing a hat.”

  “We’d better get a policeman,” I said. “And we can look around, anyhow.”

  I dare say I sounded worried, for he looked at me quickly.

  “You don’t really think it’s serious, do you? Great heavens, Lou, who would want to hurt her? She isn’t particularly pleasant or agreeable, but people don’t—well, they don’t kill because they don’t like somebody.”

  It was not difficult to find an officer around the Crescent during all of this period, and so we picked one up near the gate and took him with us. He was frankly skeptical, although polite enough, when George explained to him.

  “It was dark when she started,” he said, “and I wanted to go with her, but she didn’t want me, and said so. She’s been rather more crabbed than usual this last day or so, and I didn’t insist. But I waited until I couldn’t see her any more. She had no hat on and she carried the flat box with the veil under her arm.”

  “She hadn’t said she might go elsewhere?”

  “No. Where else could she go?”

  “Well,” the officer said reasonably, “she might have gone to a movie. Lots of women go without hats these summer nights. She might have changed her mind later on. I wouldn’t get excited yet. There’s a movie house on Liberty Avenue, isn’t there?”

  There was, of course, and both George and I knew that Miss Lydia often went there, But it would have been difficult to explain to the policeman that on occasions of death in the Crescent we do not go to the movies, or that Miss Lydia was the high priestess of our funeral rites and therefore far removed from such diversions.

  “She didn’t go to the movies,” George said stubbornly, and let it go at that.

  The three of us turned and went slowly along the street. The officer had got out his flashlight, a powerful one, and was throwing it along the grass inside the curb, and then into the shrubbery on our left; but without result until we were almost exactly halfway to the Lancasters’. Then he swooped down suddenly and picking up an object from the bushes held it out.

  “This the box?” he said.

  “It looks like it. What on earth—”

  George took the box and stared at it. It was slightly broken at a corner of the lid, but otherwise unharmed. Inside, when he opened it, lay Margaret Lancaster’s black veil, and George’s face was as pale as his chronic sunburn would permit when he looked at it.

  “I can’t go back and tell Mother,” he was saying. “It would about finish her.”

  The officer himself looked grave. He wandered about over the grass, and at last he stooped and picked up something else. He brought it to us in the palm of his hand, and turned the flashlight on it.

  “Don’t know what it is,” he said. “Maybe been there a long time. It was kind of trampled into the ground. Either of you ever see it before?”

  We stared down at it, and then at each other. Lying there under the lamp was the butterfly head of Lydia Talbot’s hatpin. I can still remember George’s dazed expression.

  “It’s hers, all right,” he said. “But listen, Lou. She went out without a hat!”

  The general alarm was raised at midnight, and for once in many years the Talbot house was unlocked and unbolted, and blazing with lights. Inspector Briggs, Mr. Sullivan and two plain-clothes men had inspected it inch by inch, but they had found nothing. Lizzie and Mrs. Talbot, examining Miss Lydia’s room, while the police looked on, were certain that nothing was missing except what she had worn that night; a rusty black silk dress, a black mohair petticoat, and undergarments, and her usual black shoes and stockings.

  On a stand near the window sill stood the electric iron with which she had pressed Margaret Lancaster’s veil.

  Lizzie was as calm as usual; a tall thin figure of a woman, not unlike Miss Lydia herself. Mrs. Talbot, however, was profoundly shaken. She could hold nothing, not even the glass of wine George got her, and her voice was a mere echo of its usual boom.

  “Her habits?” she said. “She had none, except going to the movies. As to being kidnapped for a ransom, who’s to pay it? She hadn’t a penny, and I haven’t much more. Not since this depression set in.”

  “You don’t think it might be a case of loss of memory?”

  “She hadn’t any memory to lose.”

  “Now,” said the Inspector, “you have no reason to believe that she had any enemies, I suppose?”

  “Neither enemies nor friends. She lived a life of her own, and she was as nearly negative as any human being I ever knew.”

  That was as far as they got with Mrs. Talbot. They tried to tell her that such disappearances were either compulsory or voluntary, and they asked her if she knew of any reason why Miss Lydia would have run away. Her only answer was that she had taken nothing to run away with, and that she had had a good home. Why leave it?

  By two o’clock that morning the search was in full cry. Both the Common and No Man’s Land had been searched without result, including all outbuildings facing on the latter, and the one or two policemen who had been on duty reported nothing suspicious. It was not until three A.M. that the first clue was picked up, and that proved to be the missing woman’s bag, found on Euclid Street with its beaded strap broken, and looking as though it had either broken of itself or been jerked from her arm.

  It contained only a clean handkerchief, a dollar or two in money, and an old hunting case watch with which everyone on the Crescent was familiar. It made a terrific noise, and all of us could remember Miss Lydia’s bag on a table or a chair, ticking away like a grandfather’s clock.

  Scarcely any of us went to bed that night. We gathered in small groups in each other’s houses
; Margaret and her nurse in the Talbots’, where Ms. Talbot sat like a woman stunned and Lizzie moved inscrutably about with coffee for everybody, and Jim Wellington and the Daltons with us.

  Something possessed me then to tell about the dumbwaiter incident, and I remember Bryan Dalton examining the outlets, and at four in the morning insisting on nailing them all shut again. Laura Dalton had little to say. She seemed puzzled, but she looked happier than I had seen her look for a long time. She found an opportunity to tell me that she was sorry for what she had said the other day.

  “I was hysterical,” she said. “Of course it wasn’t true. And he hasn’t been out of the house tonight, Louisa. Besides, why on earth should anyone kill Lydia Talbot?”

  For that was what it had come to. Not one of us but believed that Lydia Talbot was already dead, the third and possibly the fourth in our list of murders.

  Chapter XLI

  THE POLICE IN THE meantime were working hard. One motive after another was examined and rejected. She had neither money nor enemies, and the two remaining possibilities were either loss of memory or a killing without reason. Subjected to this new test even Margaret Lancaster’s conviction, as shown in her statement, lost much of its value; and was before many hours had passed to be proved entirely mistaken as to her sister Emily’s death at least.

  In the meantime the Bureau of Missing Persons had sent out its usual messages by teletype, with a careful description of Miss Lydia. It was not only local. It extended to other cities, and to the state police of nearby states. Her name was placed upon the general alarm, and men were visiting the morgue, our hospitals and even our hotels and jails. Already too by daylight that next morning, Saturday, circulars were being printed, using an old snapshot of Miss Lydia which someone happened to have.

  I have one of these before me now. It reads: “Missing since nine-thirty Friday night August the twenty-sixth, Miss Lydia Spencer Talbot. Born in the United States. Age fifty-two. Height five feet eight. Weight about one hundred and thirty pounds. Gray hair, parted and worn in hard knot. Flat curls on forehead. Complexion medium fair. Gray eyes. Denture with four teeth (molars) lower jaw. No identifying marks on body. Wore black silk dress, not new, black mohair underskirt, black shoes and hose. No rings or other jewelry. No laundry or other marks on clothing.”