Album Read online

  “A silly flighty little fool,” Mrs. Dalton said one day, shortly after the marriage. And Bryan Dalton had smiled into his teacup.

  “You might say to my wife,” he stated to the room at large, “that she is very easy to look at.”

  But Helen or no Helen, I carried into my room that late afternoon a terrible and gnawing fear. It could not be long before the police discovered that Jim Wellington had been in that house at or about the time the crime was discovered, that he had slipped away without letting his presence be known, and that I had concealed that fact from them.

  I was bewildered, too. Why on earth run away from a thing like that, if he knew what it was? Why not raise an alarm, shout, call for the police, do any one of the normal things which normal people do under abnormal conditions? I dressed—the Crescent would dress for dinner in the middle of an earthquake—in a state of anxiety bordering on frenzy; and dinner itself proved to be trying beyond words, for Mother had found a grievance and was worrying it like a dog a bone.

  “What I cannot understand, Louisa,” she said, “is that you did not come back and tell me at once. I was back here by four-thirty. You seem to think you owe me no consideration whatever.”

  Perhaps my nerves were not what they should have been, for that upset me.

  “I’ve shown you every possible consideration for twenty-eight years, mother,” I said; and what with one thing and another I burst into tears and left the table to find the Daltons coming up our porch steps, and the three Talbots not far behind them.

  It is not strange, to anyone who knows the Crescent, that the news had not spread its entire length until the late extra edition of the evening papers came out! For one thing, our servants, as I have already said, provide our grapevine telegraph, and the Lancaster servants were being held strictly incommunicado in the Lancaster house. For another, so well has our planting grown in the last forty years or so, that we ourselves are practically incommunicado unless we choose otherwise. Whatever its faults, the Crescent considers it a sin to cut down a tree or prune back its shrubbery.

  The Crescent reads the evening paper after dinner, not before it. When the paper is finished, it is carefully refolded and sent back to the servants. And the Crescent never reads extra editions. When the reporters from the various papers, having exhausted the patience of the police, began to ring doorbells along the road, most of the occupants were concerned with the sacred rite of dressing for dinner, and later with the even more sacred rite of dining.

  Not one of them gained access to any of the five houses. But undoubtedly they told the servants, for Lizzie at Mrs. Talbot’s sent her down to dinner that night in a pair of odd shoes, and the Dalton butler, Joseph, forgot to place dinner napkins for the first time in twenty-five years. But as our servants speak only when spoken to, it was fully seven-thirty when this same Joseph walked into the library with a tray on which lay a neatly folded copy of an extra edition of an evening paper and then quietly retired. And it was seven-thirty-one when Mr. Dalton, leaping to his feet, pressed the library bell for him again and said:

  “Will you tell Mrs. Dalton that Mrs. Lancaster has been murdered, brutally killed with an axe?”

  Incredible all of it, of course, unless one knows us.

  It was after half past seven then, by the time the Crescent was fully informed, front and back; and only slightly after that when, having made their polite inquiries and offers of help at the Lancasters’, the Talbots and the Daltons gathered at our house. I showed them into the drawing room, Mrs. Dalton mincing along on her high heels, Bryan Dalton looking immaculate but shocked, Lydia carrying and dropping a knitting bag, and Mrs. Talbot laden as usual with the heavy old-fashioned reticule which carried her innumerable keys. George trailed behind them all, uncomfortable and apparently feeling that, being more or less in the presence of death, he should walk on his tiptoes.

  Or perhaps for fear that because of his youth—he is only thirty—he might be sent away if noticed. George and I still constitute the children of the Crescent.

  “Looks like a coroner’s jury!” he whispered to me. “Be careful. And anything you say may be held against you!”

  Actually it turned out to be something of the sort, with his mother acting as a sort of star witness who regarded the entire catastrophe as a direct result of old Mrs. Lancaster’s failure to lock herself in.

  “Always told her that,” she boomed in her heavy voice. “Told her to lock things up. Told her to have her bedroom door locked. Told her so this very day. Her lying helpless in that bed, and all this crime going on!”

  For, as it turned out, Mrs. Talbot had been the last one outside of the family to see Mrs. Lancaster alive.

  “Except the man with the axe,” she boomed, and all of us shuddered.

  She was a kindly woman, in spite of her eccentricity, and for many years almost her only outside contact with the world had been her occasional visits to Mrs. Lancaster, who was connected with her by marriage. Mrs. Lancaster’s first husband having been a brother of the crayon portrait.

  We listened to her story with avid interest. She had gone at two-thirty to sit with the invalid, as she sometimes did. Everything had been normal at that time; the old lady lying quietly in the big four-poster with the tester top, and Emily with her. It had been Margaret’s afternoon off, for the sisters alternated that part of the day in the sickroom, and she was shut away in her room.

  Old Mrs. Lancaster, however, had been rather fretful. She was feeling the heat, and as she did not like electric fans Mrs. Talbot had taken the palm leaf fan from Emily and sat beside her, fanning her.

  “Then I noticed that key she wore on a chain around her neck, and I gave her a good talking to,” she said, or rather shouted. “In the first place, I hate people who hoard gold these days, and I told her so. Then I said that I was certain that more people than she believed knew she was doing it, and that it wasn’t safe. But she told me Margaret had been protesting too, and to mind my own business!”

  That was the first time I had heard of any gold, and I sat up in my chair.

  “Where did she keep the gold?” Mrs. Dalton asked curiously. “I’ve often wondered.”

  “In a chest under her bed, of all places. I told her anybody might climb the porch and get in a window, but she wouldn’t believe me. She said: ‘I’ve still got my voice. I keep telling the girls that. Emily’s so nervous that she’s always hearing burglars on the porch roof.’ And now,” Mrs. Talbot finished with a final boom, “I haven’t a doubt that it’s all gone. Or most of it. George says it would be too heavy to carry away in one trip.”

  “Has anyone an idea how much she had?” Mr. Dalton asked; and looked at George, who is in a bank in town.

  “No,” George said. “She got plenty from us. I don’t know how many other banks she looted. But does anyone know it is gone?”

  “The key’s certainly gone,” Mr. Dalton said decidedly. “I saw Margaret for a moment before we came here. They’ve hunted everywhere, there and—elsewhere. The police are opening the chest tomorrow.”

  I sat as well as I could through all the talk. It is characteristic of the Crescent’s attitude toward what it calls the younger generation that this evening was the first time I had known that Mrs. Lancaster had been hoarding gold under her bed. But I felt a sense of relief. Here was a motive at last, and vague as I was as to the weight of gold coins in quantity, I knew that Jim Wellington had left the house empty-handed.

  Lydia Talbot’s story differed little from that of her sister-in-law. She too had seen Mrs. Lancaster that afternoon. At a quarter to two she had carried over a small basket containing a bowl of jellied chicken and some fresh rolls for the invalid. The front door as usual was closed and locked. Jennie had admitted her and she had carried her basket upstairs. She was sure Jennie had locked the door behind her.

  “I sat with her for a while,” she said, as Emily wanted to clean her bird’s cage. We talked a little, but nothing important, except that I thought she seemed upset
about something. But she kept things pretty much to herself, always. When Hester came I left. Ellen let me out by the kitchen door.”

  “What do you mean, upset?” boomed Hester, who was Mrs. Talbot. “She wasn’t upset when I got there. Only peevish, and that was nothing new.”

  Miss Lydia colored and looked rather frightened.

  “I don’t know. Emily looked queer too. I thought perhaps they had been quarreling.”

  Everybody felt uncomfortable at that, and Mrs. Dalton chose that moment of all moments to throw a bomb into our midst.

  “The police think it was an inside job,” she said maliciously, and smiled.

  Her husband glared at her.

  “Will someone have the goodness,” he demanded furiously, “to ask my wife where she got an idea as outrageous as that?”

  “From the servants,” she said, triumphant over her sensation. “While Mr. Dalton was ringing the front doorbell tonight I went around to the back of the house. I found Ellen in tears, and the others in a fine state. The police have not only searched the entire house from roof to cellar, including the furnace and the soiled clothes hampers and the coal pile—there’s a man still moving the coal—but they actually got a woman there and made the women take off their clothes! Or at least show what they had on. To see if there was blood on them.”

  The Crescent, as represented there, sat in a stupefied silence; not so much because an inside job was suspected, but at the power of a police force which could thus violate its privacy and offend its dignity.

  It was only George Talbot who grinned.

  “I’d better be getting home,” he said. “I had a nose-bleed yesterday, and I have a little washing to do!”

  But no one laughed. The picture Mrs. Dalton had drawn was too graphic. For the first time in its existence the Crescent was threatened with the awful majesty of the law, and it did not like it. It covered its fear with talk, much of it rather pointless. Nevertheless, out of that welter of talk and surmise, certain things finally emerged.

  The afternoon at the Lancasters’ up to or about four o’clock had apparently been quiet enough. The family had lunched at one, and at one-thirty Jennie had carried up the invalid’s tray. Miss Emily had fed her, and the tray had gone down at two.

  At a quarter before two Lydia had brought her basket, too late for lunch, and had been admitted by Jennie, who cautioned her with a gesture that Mr. Lancaster was asleep in the library. As she had gone out by the kitchen door shortly after her sister-in-law arrived, she had not seen the old gentleman again.

  At two-thirty Mrs. Talbot had gone in, remaining until half past three, which was when Mrs. Lancaster took her afternoon nap. When she went downstairs she found Mr. Lancaster awake and in the hall, and about to take the brief half-hour saunter which was his daily exercise. Emily had gone downstairs with her; and she had not only seen them out, she had for Mrs. Talbot’s benefit shown her that the spring lock was on the front door, and in order.

  “I’m not afraid of the door,” Emily had said. “But I don’t like the porch roof off mother’s room; especially just now.”

  “It’s a fool idea anyhow,” Mr. Lancaster had said. “If a good bank isn’t safe, then nothing and nobody is.”

  He and Mrs. Talbot had then gone down the walk to the street together, separating at the pavement; he going left toward Liberty Avenue and Mrs. Talbot going back home. The last thing Emily had said was that she was going to put on a fresh dress, since Margaret intended to go out. This fresh dress we all understood perfectly, since most of us dress before four in the afternoon to receive the callers who are more of a tradition of past social importance than present fact.

  From that time, three-thirty or so, until Miss Emily came in that awful fashion through the side door, no one knew anything of what had happened. Emily had dressed, Miss Margaret had taken or prepared to take her shower, Eben had cut the grass, Ellen had beaten up her cake, Jennie had polished her silver, and up in the hot third floor Peggy had prepared to go out.

  Not once in all this, however, had anyone mentioned Jim Wellington’s name. It was George Talbot who came nearest to it.

  “It looks like a premeditated thing, all right,” he said. “Somebody who knew that Mrs. Lancaster always slept at three-thirty and that the girls dressed then.” They are, of course, still the girls to us. “Also that the old boy always took his walk at that time.” He looked around the room mischievously. “Might be any of us!” he said, and grinned. “Anyone along the Crescent, from Jim Wellington at one end to me at the other. Of course he’d have to know the axe was kept in the woodshed, too. That’s another point.”

  “That isn’t funny,” said Bryan Dalton.

  “Well, even you knew it was there, didn’t you, sir?” said George, still grinning. “Matter of fact, I saw you near there early this morning.”

  “And what were you doing there yourself?” said Mr. Dalton, red with anger.

  “Looking for a golf ball I lost yesterday,” said George, smiling and unruffled. “And you, sir?”

  “That’s none of your damned business,” Mr. Dalton shouted, and would have continued in the same vein had not his wife hastily risen.

  “Will someone tell my husband,” she said sweetly, “that it is time to go home? And that I do not like his language?”

  Almost he spoke to her! We all waited breathlessly, for it was common opinion among us that, the ice once broken, they would get along at least amicably. But he remembered in time, gave George an angry glare and stalked out. Mrs. Dalton followed him, tripping on her high heels, and at the foot of the front steps he waited for her. I watched them going side by side down the walk, in their usual silence; but it seemed to me that night that it was less companionable than usual, if a silence can be companionable, or if people can be further separated who are already entirely apart.

  Chapter V

  MRS. TALBOT REMAINED THAT night after the others left. Lydia had pleaded fatigue, and so George took her home. Probably the line-up of cars on the street had changed since afternoon, but there were still several there, and the Lancaster house seemed to be lighted from attic to cellar.

  I knew Mother and Mrs. Talbot were settled for at least an hour, so I slipped on a dark cape in the back hall, and letting myself out the kitchen door, took an inconspicuous route toward Jim Wellington’s.

  This was not the grapevine path the servants use, but one even more remote. Behind all our houses lies a considerable acreage of still unoccupied land, which since the war we have called No Man’s Land. Children used to play in it, but the Crescent frowned on that after some one of us got a baseball through a pantry window. Now it is purely a waste, where George Talbot and sometimes Mr. Dalton practice short golf shots; a waste bordered on one curved side by our properties, on a rather narrow end by the bustle and noise of Liberty Avenue, and directly behind us, but some distance away, the rear yards of the modest houses on Euclid Street. The Talbot’s old stable, now a garage for George’s dilapidated car, bordered on it; as did the Lancasters’ woodshed, our garage and the Daltons’, and what was once the Wellington tennis court but was now the weed-grown spot where Helen—to our horror—took sunbaths in a steamer chair and a very scanty bathing suit. She and Jim had no garage. Their car was kept in a garage on Liberty Avenue.

  This area did not belong to us, of course, but during the process of years we had adopted it as our own. Thus a path led across it and through some trees and an empty lot to Euclid Street, and was used by our servants and sometimes ourselves as a short cut. Also Eben burned there our dead leaves in the fall; and even the street cleaners, finding their little carts overfull, had been known to slip back and surreptitiously empty them there, sometimes setting a match to their contents.

  It was through this waste land that I made my way that night. Not too comfortably, for there is something about a murder—any murder—that disturbs one’s sense of security. However, I had a little light at first. Holmes, our chauffeur, was evidently in his room over the g
arage, for his windows were fully illuminated, and out in No Man’s Land itself there was still the flicker of a small fire.

  But beyond the Dalton place I found myself plunged into thick darkness and a silence closed about me which the distant noise on Liberty Avenue did nothing to dispel. Then something caught at my cape and held it, and I stopped dead in my tracks and went cold all over. It was only a briar, but that unexpected stop had done something startling and rather terrible. It had enabled me to hear that someone was close behind me, someone who had stopped just too late to save himself from discovery.

  I never even turned to look. Pell-mell I ran on, blind with terror, until I fetched up with a crash against the wire netting of the tennis court and there collapsed onto the ground. When I dared to look back it seemed to me that between me and the fire someone was standing and watching; but he made no move and so at last I pulled myself to my feet.

  It was a picture of demoralization I must have presented to Jim Wellington when, a few minutes later, he himself answered my ring at the door.

  “Good heavens, Lou!” he said. “Come in and sit down. You look all in.”

  I obeyed him in silence. To tell the truth, I was almost unable to speak. He led the way, himself silent, back to his den and pulled out a chair for me.

  “It’s not very tidy,” he explained. “Helen’s gone again, as you know. And as I find she hadn’t paid the servants for two months—” he shrugged his shoulders—“they’ve gone too.”

  Well, not very tidy was a mild way of putting it. But that night I was not interested in Helen’s slovenly housekeeping. I was looking at Jim, neat enough but tired and pale. I saw that he had changed his clothes.

  “Aren’t you going to sit down?”

  I shook my head.

  “Jim, I was followed here.”

  “By the police? Well, does that surprise you?”

  “I hadn’t thought of the police. I thought it might be whoever killed Mrs. Lancaster, Jim.”