Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  The frantic search included one for the camping party, but without result; and it was not until noon of a hot Monday that a trunk, waiting to be called for on the blistering platform of a way station a hundred miles from the city began to excite the interest and apprehension of the agent.

  He sent for the police, and the trunk was opened, about six o’clock that night. It contained the body of a middle-aged woman, all but the head, and was at once identified by the clothing and so on as that of Lydia Talbot. The head had been removed to allow the body to be placed in the trunk, and the entire body had been wrapped in an old piece of carpet from the house at Hollytree.

  I have gone as little as possible into detail. The trunk, as I have said earlier, had been disguised by a number of foreign labels, but was readily recognized as the one Miss Emily had bought and sent to the house on Liberty Avenue. There was no sign of the gold and currency it had once held, however, and an almost microscopic examination of the premises near Hollytree revealed no trace of it there.

  This was the situation then on that Monday evening, the eleventh day after our first murder. Mrs. Talbot had collapsed; no sign had been found of Lizzie, although a nationwide search had been instituted and a general alarm had gone out at once; George Talbot had been violently sick after viewing the body; and Laura Dalton had crept on Monday night to her husband’s room, knocked at the door and been heard crying hysterically after he had admitted her.

  The general demoralization on the Crescent was utter and complete. One by one our old servants began to give notice, the Daltons’ Joseph being the first, and on Tuesday morning our colored laundresses one by one put down their irons, walked upstairs and handed in their resignations.

  Helen Wellington came in on Monday to say that John, her new butler, had vanished without pay, and that the remainder were packing their trunks.

  “I’ve told them how absurd they are,” she said, “but it’s no use. Lizzie’s done her dirty work and she’s got the money. Why on earth should she come back? Jim says she is crazy, but I wish I could be crazy for the best part of a hundred thousand dollars!”

  A dozen Lizzies had been found by Monday night, and every hour new ones were turning up. She was a common enough type of middle-aged spinster, and the numbers of spinsters of that age who had dyed their hair black was an embarrassment to the police.

  Such information as we had in our house during those two wild days was practically entirely from the newspapers. I did not hear at all from Herbert. But the new tragedy had at least brought Mother out of her retirement, and renewed our relationship on a cool but talkative basis.

  She was entirely convinced that the killer all along had been Lizzie.

  “She never liked Hester Talbot,” she said, “but she was fond of Lydia and John. She never got over the fact that when Mrs. Lancaster’s first husband died she kept all the money. He left a will leaving part of his property to them, but after he died she produced a new one cutting them off. Lizzie Cromwell always said she’d forged it! Of course that wasn’t true, but I think they all believed it.

  “Then when John got into trouble and shot this woman he’d run off with, Hester Talbot wouldn’t pay a good lawyer for him, and neither would the Lancasters. It was just by luck that he was found insane, although he really wasn’t—and sent somewhere. But there was no scandal here. He had assumed another name, and he was tried and convicted under it. It was a great trouble to all of us, and although Lydia got over it all I don’t think Lizzie ever did. I always thought she was a little in love with John herself!”

  But she added something which I now believe to be the truth.

  “I have wondered lately about poor Emily and that money she took, Louisa. She never cared anything about money, and sometimes I think—Do you suppose she had met John Talbot somewhere—he’d escaped years ago, you know—and that she took it for him? It was all so unlike her, somehow. And she was always fond of him.”

  Curious, all that, when I remember that it must have been almost at that time on Monday night that an elderly man, with thick spectacles and one side of his face drooping from an old paralysis, walked into the seventeenth precinct station house and collapsed onto a bench.

  Chapter XLV

  HE SAT THERE FOR some time before anyone noticed him. Then the sergeant sent an officer over. The man had dropped asleep by that time, and the officer shook him.

  “What’s wrong, old timer?” he asked not ungently. “Snap out of it!”

  The man blinked at him through his spectacles.

  “I don’t know,” he said, in a rather cultivated but halting voice. “I can’t seem to remember my name, or who I am.” And he added, with an apologetic smile: “Memory is like a purse, officer. ‘If it be over full all will drop out of it!’”

  The officer eyed him, and then went back to the desk.

  “Old boy’s lost his memory, or so he says. Better put him somewhere for the night, eh?”

  The sergeant agreed, and this story might have had a different ending but for that very decision. For it was when a jailer was taking him back to a cell that he noticed some stains on the man’s white shirt. He stopped in the long stone-paved passage and looked at it.

  “Ain’t hurt anywhere, are you?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  The jailer was mildly curious. In the cell he got his prisoner to take off his coat, and was shocked to find that the turned-up cuffs of the shirt were also badly stained. The unknown eyed them himself through his spectacles.

  “That’s strange,” he said haltingly. “Now how did I get that?”

  “You’re asking me!” said the policeman. “What you been doing? Killing a pig?”

  The man shook his head, and then slowly drew something out of a trousers pocket and gravely handed it to the officer.

  “This doesn’t belong to me,” he said in his halting voice. “I have no idea how I got it.”

  The policeman took it and held it up. Then he grinned.

  “Looks like you been playing Santa Claus!” he said, and still grinning carried the object out to the sergeant at the desk.

  It was a short grayish beard of the cheapest variety, and made to hook over the ears by small wires.

  When the sergeant, curious himself by then, went back to the cell, it was to find the unknown quietly asleep on his hard bed. The two men inspected the stains on him, but he did not rouse. And he was still asleep when Mr. Sullivan got there an hour later. Sullivan examined him before he roused him. He was neatly dressed, but it was evidently two days or more since he had shaved. His clothing too was incredibly dusty, and his shoes worn and scratched as with long walking over rough ground.

  Sullivan, with his usual memory for faces, had known him at once for Daniels. He himself was tired and rather sick, for he had come from examining the contents of that ghastly trunk, and his next step is excusable under the circumstances. He turned to the sergeant and pointed to the stains on the shirt.

  “There’s the Crescent Place killer,” he said. “And he’s shamming. I’ll give you fifteen minutes to bring his memory back while I get in touch with Headquarters.”

  I do not know what followed. But I do know that when the Inspector and Herbert arrived they found Daniels stretched out on the floor of an upper room, and that there were some words between Sullivan and Herbert that, as the Inspector said later, fairly blistered the paint.

  In the end they called an ambulance and took the unconscious man to the hospital on Liberty Avenue; and both Herbert and Sullivan sat with him the rest of the night. He was not hurt, it developed. He had collapsed from a combination of fright, hunger and thirst. But if they hoped that when he came to he would remember his identity, they were disappointed. He refused born food and drink, and could be induced only with difficulty to speak at all.

  “Sullivan thought he was still shammering,” Herbert has said since, “but I didn’t believe it. It was either genuine amnesia or straight hysteria. I’d seen both in the war, from shock.
I thought the poor devil had had a shock. That’s all.”

  They tried to rouse him by questioning him.

  “Listen, now. Your name is Daniels, isn’t it? Robert Daniels.”

  “Daniels?” he said after an interval. “No. I’m sorry, but that’s not it.”

  He did not reply at all when Herbert suggested that he was John Talbot, and shortly after that he lapsed into what Doctor Armstrong calls a definite catatonia. He would or could not reply to any questions at all, was stiff and rigid in his bed, and could not be roused for the nourishment he evidently needed. Some time in the night, however, after the two men had gone, he wakened in a condition of frenzied excitement. He was still confused, made terrible grimaces, and the policeman on guard in the room had some difficulty in keeping him in bed until he could be tied there. After that an interne gave him a hypodermic of some sort, and he became quieter.

  Police swarmed in and out of his room all that day, Tuesday, but without result.

  “You can get my point of view, Miss Hall,” the Inspector said a day or two later. “We knew by that time he was Talbot; Dean had wired for his prints the night before, and they came in that day. And we knew his history; knew he’d killed a woman, been sent to a state institution as insane, and had escaped from it years before. You can see how it looked, and I’ll admit the whole thing had me fooled, or Dean did, I’ve often wondered since what you told Dean to put him on the right track. He didn’t get that out of a microscope!”

  It was of no use to tell Inspector that I had told Herbert nothing, because I knew nothing. And Herbert Dean today says that the police still regard his entire success in the case as due to me!

  Nevertheless, although they believed that they had the Crescent Place killer under guard in the hospital, the search for Lizzie Cromwell still went on. She had not visited her sister’s house; and with one exception, from late Saturday afternoon when she had left the interurban car four miles beyond Hollytree she had seemingly dropped out of existence.

  She had walked back that four miles along the track, carrying her bag; for a man had seen her and so reported. He had seen her clearly in the light of another car; a tall thin woman with a valise, who had stepped aside to let the car pass. “Like one of these flashlight pictures,” he said. “But I got a good view of her. She wore black clothes with some sort of a big pin at her neck, and she had a kind of old-fashioned satchel in her hand.”

  That had been about ten o’clock at night, and was only a mile beyond the house where the pool and the drawers from the trunk had been discovered. Where and how she had spent that interval while she presumably waited for darkness nobody knew; possibly, according to the police, resting somewhere in that darkening countryside and waiting to meet the man Daniels.

  “One thing was sure,” said the Inspector. “This Daniels was in it up to the neck. We took that darky to the hospital and with that fake beard on Daniels he identified him as the man who helped carry down the trunk. Only thing in our minds was whether he’d done away with this Lizzie too, as well as the Talbot woman. You’ve got to remember that if he was Talbot—and all of us were sure of it—he’d been crazy once, and he might be again.”

  For Lizzie had not been located, although the general alarm sent out for her described her as meticulously as it had described Lydia Talbot. At Headquarters everyone but Herbert believed that our murder mysteries were solved, and that the story was written large for everyone to read. Indeed, the Commissioner himself gave a statement to the press some time that day; much against Herbert’s advice.

  In it he stated that the various crimes had been committed as part of a plot to secure the gold taken from the Lancaster house; and, although he rather hedged here, he intimidated guilty collusion between the street cleaner, Daniels, and one Elizabeth or Lizzie Cromwell, still missing but likely to be discovered before long. The gold had not yet been located, but here too the police expected results very soon.

  Nevertheless, that statement of the Commissioner’s, coupled with a further description of Lizzie, brought some result that night. Lizzie had been seen early on Sunday morning. A woman answering her description, but without a valise, had gone into a restaurant of the cheaper sort downtown and had eaten a small breakfast. For this she had rather apologetically tendered a bill of large denomination in payment, and had waited until the cashier sent out for change.

  She had seemed very tired, but she had been neat in dress and quiet of manner; “very ladylike.” And the cashier remembered a cameo brooch.

  From the beginning the police had believed that this valise had held the missing head, and now to the search for Lizzie was added an intensive one for the satchel.

  Late as it was, men were sent out again; not only to cover the check and baggage rooms of the railway stations and such express offices as they could reach, but outside the city line the county officials collected troopers and local constables to search beside all railway tracks and public roads leading into town. But as everyone who followed the case will remember, the bag was not recovered until much later. Then in dredging a new channel under one of our railroad bridges, it was brought up one day with a load of sand, with its gruesome contents still inside.

  I knew very little myself that day of what was going on. The Crescent had sunk into a lethargy which amounted to fatalism. Our servants were packing to leave, and Aunt Caroline was demanding over the telephone that we close the house and stay with her downtown. At noon the police had asked Margaret Lancaster to identify the man in the hospital, the prints sent by mail not having yet arrived and Mrs. Talbot having refused to leave her bed. She came over first to us, a mere shadow of herself and looking incredibly old.

  I remember thinking that Laura Dalton could never be jealous of her again; and as she had come without a hat, noticing with a shock that the hair I had always admired had been dyed hair, and that it was now gray at the roots.

  I admitted her myself, Annie being upstairs packing a trunk.

  “May I come in, Lou?” she said. “I have to go to the hospital, and I shall need that album I gave your mother. I don’t know why Hester Talbot won’t go. It’s certainly her affair, not mine. If Uncle John is so changed that he could work here for months and none of us recognize him, how on earth am I to do it now?”

  She wanted the album, she said, because there was an old photograph of John Talbot in it. She could take it with her, and it might help. Anyhow it was all she could think of.

  I did not know what to do. Mother came in just then and said the album was in the old schoolroom. But of course it was not, and at the end of an hour of frantic searching Margaret went away without it.

  That was the first of two visits that afternoon for the same purpose. The second was George Talbot, in a savage humor and looking as though he had not slept for days on end.

  “Mother wants that album Margaret Lancaster gave your mother,” he said. “I’m damned if I know why. And I’m to bring it as it is, tied up and everything! I give you my word, Lou, that house is like a madhouse. She won’t open her door until she knows who is outside, and I’ve had Doctor Armstrong there twice, but she won’t let him in. As for getting her to see that poor old chap in the hospital—! After all he’s my father. I’ve told them to give him the best there is.”

  “Then you don’t believe—?”

  “Believe? Don’t be a fool, Lou. As far as I can make out he was living the life he liked. He had his books, and he had work to do.” And he added: “I wish I’d known who he was, Lou. Imagine me passing him day after day, and giving him a nod when I felt like it. Well, where’s the album?”

  I had to tell him then that we could not find the album, and he looked rather dismayed.

  “More hell!” he said as he got up. “Let me know when it turns up, will you? There’s a picture of him in it, and she wants it. God knows why!”

  I remember watching him as he cut across the Common to his house, and wondering whether I should have told him the truth; that the police had taken
the album for some mysterious purpose of their own. But I am glad now that I did not.

  Chapter XLVI

  THAT NIGHT STANDS OUT in my mind as one of gradually accumulating horror.

  It started with confusion, for at a dinner that evening served by a neat but sullen house-parlor maid Mother suddenly determined to go to Aunt Caroline’s.

  “You and Mary,” she told Annie, “can stay for the night or go. As you are deserting me after all these years, I feel that I am quite right in abandoning you.”

  Annie then retired in tears, and then followed a period of hectic packing. When Mother travels, even if it be only the equivalent of thirty city blocks, she travels; and I spent a wild hour or two collecting the small pillows, the slumber robes and bed jackets and even the framed photograph of my father which always accompanied her.

  Both maids were ready before we were, and I remember the bumping noise of their trunks as they were taken downstairs, and my own sense of loss as I paid them off and saw them go.

  To all this was added the hottest night of the summer, with a heavy storm threatening and the incessant roll of distant thunder; and when at nine o’clock the doorbell rang, I was distinctly nervous as I went downstairs. I turned on the porch light before I opened the door, but it proved to be Herbert Dean and I let him in.

  “Getting out?” he said when I told him. “Well, that’s sensible, darling. I’ll be a lot easier in my mind.”

  “But if you’ve got the killer, as the papers say—”

  “We’re not entirely through yet,” he said evasively. “The main thing just now is to keep you safe at least until—well, until somewhere around the end of September.”