Album (22 page)

“To what?”

“Well, we may evolve some ideas about that later,” he said, and soon after he went away.

That collapse of mine is the reason I can relate the events of that day, Monday the twenty-second, only at second hand.

M
ISS EMILY HAD, IT
developed, been shot from the right side, which if she had been on her way toward the Talbot house made it appear as though the bullet had come from No Man’s Land. But as she might have stopped and turned, particularly if she had heard a sound of some sort, this was only important in view of the lack of clues elsewhere. Thus the area between the Talbot and Lancaster houses, largely garden with soft flower beds, showed no footprints whatever.

The idea had someone had fired from an upper window at a possible prowler was also not tenable. The post-mortem showed that the bullet had entered and left the head in an almost horizontal line. The time of her death was set at between one and two in the morning, due partly to George Talbot’s story of the shot, and partly to her sister Margaret’s statement that she had heard someone moving about in the upper hall at one o’clock.

The story of that night, as it gradually drifted to the rest of the Crescent, was that on hearing Emily Margaret had called out, and that Emily had replied that she was going downstairs to get an apple.

As Emily when unable to sleep often went downstairs at night for something to eat, this had not surprised her. Save for one thing, and that was the alarm which had driven her out the night before. She had thought it odd for Emily to be prowling about after that experience, and her first inclination had been to offer to go with her. She was very tired, however, and Emily knew her way about. She was not surprised that she wanted food; she had eaten almost nothing since the Thursday before. But she was sorry now, tragically sorry; she had simply gone to sleep again and let her go alone.

The evening, she said, had been quiet. Emily had slept most of the day, although late in the afternoon she had wakened and had agreed to see Lydia Talbot, who had been downstairs. Lydia had suggested nailing shut the two windows opening from Emily’s room onto the porch roof, and she and Ellen had done it together.

The two women, Emily and Lydia, had talked for some time. Although aunt and niece, there was no great disparity in their ages, and Emily had never had Margaret’s dislike of the older woman. But after Miss Lydia’s departure Emily had been restless. She had got up and prowled around the house, especially on the second floor. When Margaret found her she said she was looking for her bird, which Lydia had missed, and Margaret had had to tell her that the bird was dead.

Emily had taken the news very hard, but had become more quiet as the day wore on.

She—Margaret—and Mr. Lancaster had spent the evening downstairs. Mr. Lewis had brought out a copy of her mother’s will, and had gone at nine o’clock. After that the two of them had sat in the library discussing it. Like every other value, Mrs. Lancaster’s estate had shrunk greatly during the depression. She had, however, left some three hundred thousand dollars, including the money in the chest, and fifty thousand of this was left without restriction to Jim Wellington.

It was an old will made when the estate had been valued at more than a million dollars. Now that legacy to Jim loomed large and formidable, and Mr. Lancaster had seemed undisturbed.

He had gone up to bed at eleven, although she herself had remained below until almost midnight. Since her mother’s death her stepfather had refused to enter her mother’s room, and had in fact locked it off from his own by the connecting bathroom. When he was ready for bed, therefore, he called down to her that it looked as though it might rain that night, and for her to close her mother’s windows. She had unlocked the door, gone in and closed them.

Emily was still awake and still worrying about her bird, for she opened her door when she heard Margaret and asked where the cage was. Margaret told her that George Talbot had taken it to the stable, and Emily had seemed satisfied.

That was all she knew, and examination of Emily’s room supported this part of her story. The book Emily had been reading was face down on the table beside her chair, and her bed jacket lay across the foot of the bed. What the police could not understand, nor those of us who learned it by the grapevine, was why Miss Emily should have at least partially redressed herself later; have put on her shoes and stockings and her petticoat, in order to do what she had done so many nights before; to go downstairs for something to eat.

Miss Margaret, distracted as she was by her father’s grave illness, could give no explanation.

“She never bothered to dress,” was what she said. “She often went in her nightdress and slippers, or sometimes in a wrapper. No, I can’t understand it. The bird cage? But why in the world would she want it? She knew the bird was dead.”

That was the way the case stood until three o’clock that afternoon. Then the police, still searching for the empty shell, found two things which only added to our mystery.

One of these was a garden spade, identified by Eben as belonging to the Daltons and left by him on Saturday leaning against the wall of the Dalton garage. This spade was discovered in the shrubbery near the body, but at first seemed to have no significance. It was Eben’s identification which set them to thinking.

The other was the discovery late that afternoon of the bullet itself, deeply implanted in a small tree in No Man’s Land. There was no empty shell to be found, however, and no spot could be found where, if Miss Emily had indeed carried the spade to where it lay, she had used it for any purpose whatever.

Inspector Briggs summed it up later.

“Well, there we were again, with the newspapers howling like nobody’s business and the Commissioner and the District Attorney carrying on like two lunatics. What had we? She didn’t shoot herself; that’s certain. And we couldn’t get a search warrant and tear all five houses wide open to look for a gun. Not the Crescent! There would have been hell to pay.

“All that bullet did until we’d examined it the next day was to show us approximately where she’d been shot from; the direction. That pointed to the walk itself, or to the space between those two houses. But we couldn’t find the shell to prove it.

“What we figured was that she’d been shot from close range. It was a dark night, remember; no moon. Not exactly pointblank, but close enough. And that she was out on some business of her own, maybe the gold. She’d carried that spade. Her prints were all over it.”

“That was another thing that threw us off, for it wasn’t far from the body that we found that key to the chest and its chain. We didn’t announce that, but it was there all right; looked as though it had been buried and the rain had uncovered it. But there it was.”

“As for the prints of those heels, well—they looked pretty fresh, but by the time we’d got there women had been swarming all over the place. They might be important and they might not. Just one of those things!”

For, although we didn’t know it at the time, the search had finally revealed between where the body lay and the Talbot’s old stable, two or three prints of a high French heel. Just such heels as Helen Wellington and Mrs. Dalton wore as a matter of habit, and as I myself used now and again in spite of Mother’s protests and as a small assertion of independence.

The police made molds of them; spraying them with some sort of liquid shellac first, I believe, and then pouring in some melted paraffine. The earth was fairly firm and the molds successful, but they offered no characteristics of any sort to identify them. As the Inspector said with disgust:

“There were at least four women along the Crescent including the housemaid Peggy, who could have made those prints. But there were about a hundred thousand in the city who could have made them too.”

We knew nothing of this on that Monday, however. All we knew was that Emily Lancaster had been killed, and that our morale had for the second time been pretty completely shattered.

We carried on as best we could. Monday is the Crescent’s wash day, and murder or no murder, at or before nine o’clock its various laundresses converged on it as usual. By eleven that day the drying yards revealed as usual to all and sundry the most intimate garments of its owners, and inside our houses we were calling up the butcher and ordering soap from the grocer, much as we always had.

Not quite as usual, however, for about the middle of the morning the Talbots’ laundress, setting the pole for her clothesline into its cement foundation in the drying yard was unable to seat it properly and made an examination of the hole. The empty shell was lying in it, and with the aid of a clothespin she got it out.

But here is one of the things which I dare say has hanged an innocent man before this, or sent him to the chair. All our laundresses are negresses, and of a grade which has an almost superstitious fear of the police. Amanda therefore put the shell in her pocket and said nothing about it.

“Ah didn’ want to get mixed up with that kind of trouble,” was her later explanation.

This, when we learned it, seemed definitely to fix the position of the killer on that Sunday night as in the Talbot drying yard, a small piece of ground which borders the path toward the Lancasters’, and which is protected from the street by an open lattice covered with vines. On the side toward the garage and the path, however, there is only shrubbery, and rather low shrubbery, at that.

We knew nothing of Amanda’s discovery that day, however. Mother spent most of it at the Lancasters’, with Mrs. Talbot there also, and reported on her return that Mr. Lancaster was still unconscious and Margaret going about in a daze. She had, it seemed, decided to clear her mother’s bedroom of its personal belongings, and so the three women had unlocked the room and gone to work. Mother was hot and tired when she came back, and I noticed that she carried a square package of some sort which looked like a large book.

She said nothing about it, however, and as it was wrapped in white paper and tied, I did not ask her about it. In fact I quite forget about it until that evening when by ones and twos the neighbors drifted in.

The package was on top of one of the bookshelves, and it was Mrs. Talbot who noticed it.

“I see she gave it to you.”

“Yes,” Mother said. “She didn’t know what to do with it. I don’t know that I do, either. I suppose it will go to the third floor.”

“To the third floor” is Crescent usage for any sort of storage.

I cannot remember now that anyone except Mrs. Talbot showed any interest in the album. There was a time coming when I was to think back and try to recall that scene, but without result. George wanted to see it, “to cheer him up,” and was sharply rebuked by his mother. Bryan Dalton eyed it and then looked away, while his wife watched him. But that was all.

I myself knew it well, its imposing size and the clasps which fastened it. I could remember it lying on the Lancasters’ parlor table when I was a small girl, and the awe with which I examined the strange clothes and stranger attitudes of the people pictured inside. But now as I say it aroused no interest. We sat in an informal circle, much as we had once before, but the excitement of Thursday had given place to a strained anxiety which showed itself in Mrs. Talbot’s lowered voice and strained mouth, in Lydia’s pallor and the hands which shook over her knitting, in Mrs. Dalton’s shrill high laughter, and in Bryan Dalton’s increased taciturnity.

So far as I can recall he spoke only once all evening.

“What it comes to is this,” he said. “We have a murdering killing brute somewhere around us, and I’ve already asked for extra police protection.”

“Police!” said Mrs. Talbot. “We’ve been overrun with them, and what good are they? What we need is more bars and more locks.”

“And more fires out back!” said Mrs. Dalton surprisingly. Everyone looked at her, but she only laughed rather maliciously and on that the bell rang and Helen Wellington came in.

She stood in the doorway surveying us with her faintly ironic smile.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose you think that Jim has been busy again!”

That shocked us into action. Bad taste always does. Perhaps she had meant to do just that, for Mother got up and faced her squarely.

“Really, Helen!” she said. “If you think we have been discussing Jim in this—in this tragic connection, you are mistaken. We have done nothing of the sort.”

“Discussing or thinking or just plain wondering, I came in to tell you what I have told the police. Jim Wellington slept in my room last night, and he didn’t leave it.” And she added more lightly, seeing how indelicate most of us considered that statement: “I’ll swear that on a stack of Bibles if necessary. I’m sure the Crescent could produce a stack of Bibles!”

“Come in and don’t be silly, Helen,” George Talbot said. “We’ve been talking about self-defense here; nothing else.”

Her eyes, made up as usual but shrewd behind her mascara, swept the circle.

“Self-defense?” she said. “With everybody here but poor Jim? That’s funny!”

Then she turned and went out, and we heard the front door slam behind her.

She had effectively broken up the gathering. They all left soon after she had gone, but I noticed that where the Daltons had once walked side by side, even if it was in silence, he now stalked ahead and let her follow as best she might. At the end of the path, where it reaches the street, I saw him turn and look back toward the Lancaster house, where a light showed from the sick man’s room. After that he squared his shoulders and marched on, with his wife mincing along on her absurd heels behind him.

George stopped long enough behind his mother and his aunt to tell me that Margaret had asked him to stay the night in the house, and that he had agreed.

“She’s frightened,” he said. “And I don’t blame her. It looks like a plot to wipe out the whole lot of them.”

“You think it’s the same person, then?”

“It’s stretching things rather fine to premise two killers after one family, isn’t it?”

Then he left, and I locked up the house while Mother carried the album upstairs with her, still in its paper wrapping.