But I was less easy about her after George Talbot had been in to see me that evening. He had been following all sorts of police clues throughout the day, and he looked dirty and tired. Mother was still shut away in high dudgeon when he came into the library and put a copy of the tabloid into my hands.
“I suppose you’ve seen this dirty stuff, Lou?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew the story before?”
“I really don’t know any story, George. I overheard some talk a night or two ago, but—”
“And that’s been the Great Secret!” he said disgustedly. “All these years I’ve known there was one. I’ve known damned well too that everybody else along here knew it, except you perhaps. And now this filthy paper brings it out and just about intimates that my father’s back and at the old tricks. By God, for a plugged nickel I’d go down and beat up the lot of them!”
He quieted down after a time. He seemed indeed more annoyed that this Great Secret had turned out as it had than for any other reason.
“Look what it’s done to us!” he said. “We lived locked up and bolted away! And why? He wasn’t crazy. That was a trick to save his neck, and I’m darned glad he did. Glad he escaped from their lunatic asylum too. A man gets caught by a pretty face, runs away with it, takes another name, and then is found one day in a hotel room with a gun in his hand and the woman dead. She’s wrecked him, and he finishes her. And for almost thirty years Mother expects him to come back and shoot her too! Why? She didn’t mean anything to him. I doubt she ever did.”
With which unfilial remark he got up.
“The only decently normal person left in the house was Lizzie,” he said. “Now I suppose you know she’s left. Driven off, I suppose, like Aunt Lydia.”
“George! Do you think your Aunt Lydia simply went away?”
He made a despairing gesture.
“How do I know?” he said. “She’d wanted to go. Wanted it for years. I never blamed her much, although I didn’t like her. But Lizzie is different. She didn’t want to go. Why should she leave what’s been her home for more than thirty years? There’s something very queer there, Lou.”
He got up.
“Well, I’ll take that rotten sheet and get out,” he said. “I’ve still got to take my sleuth for his walk before I go to bed!”
He took the paper and went away. I had read it, and its implication was plain enough. But both George and I were wrong that night. The tabloid contained only a part of what he called the Great Secret, and we were to have another tragedy before we learned the rest of it.
Chapter XLIII
IF GEORGE TALBOT WAS tired and dirty that night, he was nothing to Herbert when, at half past nine, he rang the doorbell. He had abandoned all pretension to being other than he was, and that Annie appreciated this was shown by the avidity with which she agreed to bring him the tray of any sort of food she had, which he asked for.
“I hope you don’t mind, Lou,” he said. “I haven’t eaten today, and tonight I’m worried. That’s feeble for the way I feel. Where’s your mother?”
“She’s in bed. I’m afraid she is sulking.”
He ignored that and at once stated his intention of spending the night in the house, and on guard.
“On guard? Here?” I asked.
“Where else? In the first place, I want to be sure you’re safe. That’s vital. But in the second place, so long as our killer thinks there are dangerous prints in that album, and thinks that that album is here, there may be other attempts to get it.”
He went on to explain, leaning back like the tired man he was, in his big chair. There were new lines on his face, and he looked fairly exhausted.
I cannot recall all that he said. It had something to do with the fact that a carefully premeditated killing like that of Mrs. Lancaster, implied more than the sequence of events leading to it. It meant another sequence to follow it, and this sequence could only be planned in advance. If then any part of this following sequence was altered, even in the smallest degree, every other part of it was changed.
In this case the album had slipped, or it was the gloves perhaps. They were too clumsy; the wearer could not take something badly wanted out of the album. The gloves had to be abandoned and an attempt made to tear out the page. But the page was mounted on cloth, and time was at a premium. Then there was probably an alarm of some sort. That might have been when the desperate attempt was made to raise the screen.
Whatever it was, the original plan had slipped then and there and with it all the rest of the sequences which had been meant to follow.
Annie brought the tray about that time, and he ate like a famished man. I had asked no questions and I let him finish in silence. It was after he had pushed away the tray that he came over and put a hand on my shoulder.
“What a restful person you are, Lou,” he said. “And when this is all over—”
Annie came back for the tray then, and whatever he had meant to say never was finished. He was absorbed in our crimes again, the lone wolf in spite of his disclaimer, still following an idea of his own against the open cynicism of Inspector Briggs. What he maintained, and what has since been accepted as a fact, was as follows:
On the day of Mrs. Lancaster’s death an unknown person had gained access to the house. The method was still in doubt, although he himself was fairly sure of it. At some previous time this unknown had visited the housemaid’s closet on the second floor, and after tying a long cord to a pipe there, had slipped it under the window screen, where it hung concealed beside or behind the tin drain pipe from the roof. If discovered, it would mean little or nothing. If not discovered, it offered a practical method of bringing the axe into the house.
That Thursday was chosen because it was the housemaid’s day out, and the closet would presumably be undisturbed that afternoon.
Having then got into the house and being concealed there and probably locked in, one of two courses was followed. Either the outer clothes were taken off or something put on over them which could later on be discarded and destroyed. The closet offered a wash bowl and running water, and it was close to the head of the back stairs. Escape had been made later on by those kitchen stairs and the kitchen porch; and the killer could walk away or even be seen, without any trace of blood to betray the grisly secret.
Both the police and he had agreed on this theory of his, provided the crime was not an inside one. The purpose of the glove thrown down into the hall had been to indicate an escape in that direction, but for some reason the second glove had been kept. The problem of disposing of it had been solved by placing it in the top of the drain pipe, and the heavy rain that night had washed it down to where I had found it.
“The Providence of God, Lou,” he said gravely. “For that glove could only have come from the pipe, and the only access to the pipe was that closet window! There, in that closet, you see, was the story.”
The Inspector and he had come to the parting of the ways, however, over Margaret Lancaster’s story; and Helen Wellington’s testimony that day as to Sunday night had resulted in a definite schism between them.
“That blows it wide open, Dean,” the Inspector had said, banging a fist on his desk. “I don’t care what you think or say. What about that closet anyhow? It’s my opinion that it was Margaret who was in it. You’ve got to go a long way to get some outsider through a locked door into that house, but this woman was there all the time. Then what does she do? She gets that first glove out, by giving it to Lou Hall. She gives Dalton something to burn, and we’ve only her word as to what it was. And after Emily is shot she switches the barrels of those two guns and keeps it quiet until she misses her father’s from his room.
“That scares her. Maybe that nurse told her we had it. So she cooks up a story and brings it to us. The old man is dead, so she hangs that second killing on him. It’s safe, and it’s good. I’ll say it was good! Only the Wellington woman turns up and knocks it over the fence and out of bounds.”
&nbs
p; Apparently he went even further. He considered it highly probable that Margaret had either employed Holmes to get the trunk, or had known it was to be taken and had found someone else to take it from him. “Easy enough these days,” was what he said. “One grand would get fifty fellows to do that job—unless they knew what was in it!”
Herbert had pointed out the absurdity of that. If Margaret knew where the money was, why steal it? It was hers anyhow. All she had to do was to tell the police that she suspected where Emily had hidden it, and she had it.
“Not if she’d killed her sister,” the Inspector said stubbornly. “Maybe Emily kept a diary in the trunk, or something to show that she was afraid of her. She may have told Margaret that. For she was afraid. She was scared stiff, and that’s a fact. She had more than three days after her mother’s death to tell the truth, but did she? She did not. Then on Saturday night someone tries to break into her room and she beats it! For where? She gets out of that house, and when the Talbots let her in she says that ‘they’ are after her. Who are ‘they,’ Dean. Her own people, that’s what.”
It was all rational enough, although Dean pointed out the device by which the axe had been taken into the house as destroying much of it. It was awkward and inept, he maintained. The axe was not used in the summer, and Margaret could have taken it in at night—any night—without discovery. The very fact that Bryan Dalton had seen it in that cautious ascent showed that the method was dangerous in the extreme.
But his case, he said, lay largely in the old album and that, he added, was why he had come out that night.
“Not that I don’t always want to come, light of my life,” he said, with something of his usual cheerfulness. “But if I’m guessing right there have been two attempts to get the thing, and there is likely to be another. That lets Margaret Lancaster out. She knows those fingerprints are burned. But there is someone who doesn’t know it, and who thinks that the album is still here.”
Then he grinned at me.
“I’ve been rechecking the alibis for that Thursday afternoon,” he said. “About the only one we can check absolutely is your mother’s, and there is an old axiom that the more perfect the alibi the more suspicious it is! And how do we know, my love, that you were sitting sewing at your window, as you say you were? Or that Helen was shopping and running up more bills? Or that Jim after all didn’t need that legacy to pay them?”
“But you know better,” I said sharply.
“Oh, yes, I know better. I even know who did it, or think I do. Someone, my dear, who had easy access to that house. Who knew its habits to the last minute. Who was ordinarily calm on that surface, but was capable of terrible rages. Maybe someone who was sane enough but not quite normal. But how am I to prove it?”
Suddenly I thought I saw a real light. I sat bolt upright in my chair.
“It was Lizzie!” I said. “Lizzie from the Talbots’! It must have been. She loathed Mrs. Lancaster, but she was always in and out of the house. And she’s terrible when she’s angry. I’ve seen her angry.”
He was lighting his pipe.
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “let’s consider Lizzie. I’ve done it already. She—”
“But she’s gone, Herbert. She ran away this afternoon.”
“Ran away? Where?” he asked sharply.
“I don’t know. To her sister’s, perhaps.”
I told him what Annie had said, and he sent for her and questioned her quickly. He looked sober and anxious, and after making me promise not to leave my room that night and assuring me that there would be a guard outside, he merely put a hand on my shoulder for a second, caught up his hat and left.
A minute later I heard him driving out of the Crescent like a crazy man.
That was at half past ten on Saturday night, August the twenty-seventh. But it was not until almost midnight that the police located the driver of the interurban car Lizzie had taken, and discovered that she had left it some four miles beyond Hollytree at a stop which was nothing but a dirt road crossing the track. Within fifteen minutes of that time city police, the sheriff’s car and two or three hastily notified state troopers were converging on the Hollytree district, their orders being to trace if possible a tall thin woman dressed in black and carrying an old-fashioned valise, who had left the car at that point; and also to find the farm belonging to her sister.
They found the farm; a small down-at-the-heel place, and finally roused the family. But Lizzie had not been there. From the moment she had stepped off the platform of that interurban car she had apparently disappeared into a void.
It was ten o’clock the next morning before they had any clue whatever. Then a man living on the outskirts of Hollytree telephoned in to Police Headquarters in the city.
“I’ve got a white dog out here. He’s a wanderer, and he came home about an hour ago covered with blood. He isn’t hurt. He looks as though he’d been swimming in bloody water, and I thought you’d like to see him before I wash him. It looks queer to me.”
Chapter XLIV
HERBERT AND SULLIVAN WENT out at once, and the Inspector followed with the Police Commissioner, who was in golf clothes and rather irritated at losing his Sunday morning game. The dog was in an enclosure behind a small house, and a half dozen curious neighbors were staring at him over the fence. He wore a muzzle “so he couldn’t lick the stuff off, sir.”
There was no doubt among any of the men that “the stuff” was blood. There was a serious question, of course, as to whether it was human or not. The result was that Herbert Dean cut off some of the hair and went back to town with it to make the usual test, and that he missed the search which followed.
Judging from the newspapers the next day it was an exciting one. It was a Sunday morning, and that part of the local population which had not gone to church turned out with a will. Orders were to look, not necessarily for a lake or stream, but for some small and stagnant body of water where blood would lie. They were warned also that blood changes in sunlight, or even assumes the color of its background, and were to mark and report any suspicious body of water, however small, whether it bore any indication of what they were after or not.
In the meantime Dean had telephone that the microscope showed that the specimen was undoubtedly human blood, and as soon as possible he rejoined them. He was too late, however.
On the outskirts of the town itself, and only a hundred feet or so from the main road, was an empty house which had a local reputation for being haunted. It had been for rent, furnished, for the past five years. Recently, however, it had been rented. A week or so before a man had called the owner over the telephone and taken it for the summer. He had sent two months’ rent in advance and had ordered the key left in the house on a certain day.
Strange as all this was, the owner had formed a theory. Once or twice members of the local psychic society had held sittings there, and as those people often preferred to be anonymous, he had accepted the terms without question.
He had not been asked to make any repairs, and he had made none. No tenant had moved in, although on the Wednesday night previous the neighbors had reported that a car had stopped there and that something had been moved into the building. As the nearest house was five hundred yards away, the identity of this object was not known. But on that Sunday morning while the search was going on this owner, a man named Johnson, decided to walk over to see if his new tenant had arrived.
He was uneasy, for the drain pipe which carried the waste water out of the house had broken, and if used the water would collect in a low-lying bit of ground behind it.
He saw no signs of occupancy, and walked around the house to the rear. Here he saw a largish pool, covering an area about eight by eight feet and several inches deep in the center. But he saw more than that. He saw that this pool was covered with a thin film of what looked like blood.
He did not enter the house at all. He rushed back into town and got the police, and together they broke down the door.
If they had expe
cted to find any sign of crime, they were mistaken. The house, was bare, clean and without signs of occupancy; but a damp spot on the bathroom wall over the tub looked as though it had been washed recently. This wall was papered, and the washing had loosened the paper, which was still moist.
“How long ago, Dean?” asked the Inspector.
“Six hours, maybe. It’s hard to tell.”
The first search revealed nothing else. The cellar floor had not been disturbed, nor could they find any indication outside that anything had been buried on the property. A second and more thorough examination, however, revealed something of vital importance.
In the cellar, piled behind a stack of cut wood, they found the drawers of a new wardrobe trunk of good quality, and not one of them doubted their significance. Whether all this related to the disappearance of Lydia Talbot or not, they were on the heels of a crime, and none of them but felt confident that a body had taken the place of those drawers in a trunk.
Here they found unexpected corroboration. A dairyman in the vicinity, driving with his cans to the station early that morning, had seen a trunk being taken out of the house by the Hollytree expressman, whom he knew well by sight.
“And right there,” said the Inspector later, “we ran into the worst luck of all that unlucky business; for this fellow who does the local hauling had piled his whole family in his truck and gone for a week-end camping trip. And he never showed up until late Monday night!”
In spite of the hot trail, however, inquiry for the trunk brought no results that day. It had not been shipped from Hollytree or any station nearby, and at last they fell back on the city itself. Here they faced the usual baggage room congestion of the summer months, and they were in the position of men certain that a terrible crime had been committed and without a single clue as to where to find the body.
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