Album (4 page)

She tried to cover that up the next moment, saying she was upset and not responsible, and that the girls had been devoted daughters. But I remembered the strange look Mr. Lancaster had given them one after the other, only a short time before, and I wondered if he had not had the same thought as Lydia.

That is all I really saw or heard that afternoon. Now I know something of what went on in that shambles of a room upstairs in the Lancaster house: of the discovery of the axe, thrown on top of the big tester bed and discovered by the stain which had seeped through the heavy sateen; and the further discovery that it was the axe from the Lancaster woodshed, and that the only prints on it were old ones, later found to be Eben’s, and badly smudged. I know that they took measurements of this and that, and opened the windows and looked out, and that the medical examiner arrived with a black bag some time later, and went upstairs as briskly as though we had a daily axe murder in the Crescent.

When I say that I know all this, I mean that all the Crescent knows. It knows the exact moment when Mrs. Lancaster’s body was taken away, the exact moment when the police decided to hold Eben for further interrogation, and the exact moment when Miss Emily toiled feebly up the stairs and asked if there had been a key on a fine chain around her mother’s neck.

“A key?” one of the detectives is said to have asked. “Anybody find a key on a chain?”

Nobody had, and our information was that Miss Emily immediately began to tear apart that dreadful bed, crying and moaning as she did so. But that no key or chain had been found, either there or elsewhere; elsewhere in this case being the morgue, a word which we avoided on general principles.

But the Crescent still knew practically nothing at all of what had happened when I went home that late summer afternoon to break the news to Mother. Save for Mrs. Talbot, who heard the news from Lydia and rushed over at once, only to be summarily if politely ejected by the police, the rest remained in ignorance for a good two hours, and the Daltons even longer. The usual crowd which follows police cars had either been daunted by our gates or was being held outside them by a guard. Helen Wellington was away, having made one of her periodical breaks. The Lancaster servants were being held incommunicado, and even the reporters who had converged on the spot had, due to our planting and our semi-isolation, failed to rouse any suspicion.

This is shown by the fact that I found Mother sitting on the porch when I returned. She was fanning herself, and complaining of the heat.

“I wondered where you were,” she said rather fretfully. “Is Mr. Lancaster worse? I see a car there.”

This was not surprising, since by that time there were at least six cars in a row before the Lancaster walk which led to the house. But I had to break the news to her, and I did it as tactfully as I could. That she was shocked and horrified I could see, but the Crescent carries its emotions, when it has any, to its bedroom and there locks the door. Never by any chance does it show them to the servants or to the casual passer-by. She got up suddenly.

“I must go over at once,” she said. “They will need help.”

“I’m afraid the police won’t let you in, mother.”

“Don’t be absurd. They let you in.”

“They wanted to ask me some questions.”

“Precisely,” she said drily. “My only daughter is interrogated by the police, and I am not even consulted! Besides, the Lancasters are my best and oldest friends, and when I think of that lonely old man and those two devoted daughters—”

Well, that is as may be. Mother had hardly spoken to Mr. Lancaster for years, due to a disputed boundary line, and I had frequently heard her refer to the daughters as two spineless women who allowed themselves to be dominated by an unscrupulous and hard old woman! But the tradition of the Crescent is more or less to canonize its dead, which is not so bad after all.

I got her into the house finally, and there she asked for such details as I knew of the crime. It seemed to me that she listened with singular intentness, and that toward the end she relaxed somewhat.

“You say that all the doors were fastened?”

“The maids say so. You know how particular they are.”

“And Emily, when she ran out? She was fully dressed?”

“In pure white, mother,” I said, and smiled a little. “With not a stain on it!”

She looked up quickly, startled and annoyed.

“What on earth do you mean by that, Louisa?”

“Just what you meant, mother,” I told her, and went across to my own room.

I
DARE SAY EVERY
woman retains a sentiment for an old lover, even if he is inevitably lost; retains it at least until a new one effaces him. And at one time, ten years before, when I was eighteen and Jim was twenty-five, we had been engaged. Nothing came of it, for Mother had never wanted me to marry and leave her alone, and Jim made things rather painful by accusing her of selfishness and declining to share me with her. All in all it had been an unhappy business, and two years later he had married Helen and had now been married to her on and off for eight years.

The women of the Crescent had never much liked Helen. That was natural, for she flouted their prejudices and was openly scornful of their profoundest convictions. Besides she was young and attractive, a combination they found it hard to forgive.

“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?”