Album (35 page)

“We considered that, but the two older women seemed to have no outside life at all, and Peggy’s mother we found to be a widow named MacMullen who kept a highly respectable lodging house on Liberty Avenue. Yes, we knew about Mrs. MacMullen before she came to you. Then you came along with your story of Holmes and his book, and suddenly I saw a light.”

“I wish I did,” I said despondently.

“Well, you see, from the first it was clear that Holmes occupied a highly strategic position in that room and bath of his. Also that he had plenty of time to use it. And Holmes wasn’t tearing leaves out of a book. He was cutting them, one or two at a time. In other words, Holmes was making an experiment with a book, some glue and a spool of adhesive tape.”

“I see,” I said slowly. “He was making a box out of a book.”

“Precisely. His experiment proved that, given a fair-sized book, it could be made to hold a good bit of flat gold money or currency. And Holmes was no angel. He was on the track of something, and that something was a fortune to him. Here was Miss Emily, making her almost daily trips to the library, and carrying two or more books each time, probably tied together.

“He had access to the MacMullen house, too, through Peggy; he almost certainly knew that Miss Merriam was Emily and the papers had told him that the gold had not been found. Then
he
saw a great light, and I’m sadly afraid, Lou, that he followed it to his death.”

He told me then about the cottage, and about the conclusion he had come to as to how Holmes had met his end.

“There were one or two odd things about the way he was found,” he added thoughtfully. “They’re rather hard to explain. In the first place, he was neatly laid out on that road, and his white handkerchief was placed on his chest and anchored there with a stone; as if to insure that the body would be seen. Then again, the autopsy showed nothing that would indicate that he had been struck down and then deliberately run over. If it didn’t rather strain my imagination, I’d say he’d been run over by accident, and that by his own truck!”

But he added, after a pause:

“We have to remember this, of course, little Lady Lou; and maybe it will make you more careful. Holmes, tragic and puzzling as he is, only enters the picture after that first murder. In a sense, he was only an interruption. He interfered with a carefully laid plan; much as did Margaret Lancaster the other morning.”

“Margaret interfered?” I asked. “How did she interfere?”

“She sent away the bird cage,” he said, rising and smiling down at me. “And the cage had Emily’s keys in it. Do you see? Holmes didn’t need those keys; not enough at least to kill her to get them. But somebody else did. When we know who that is—!”

Across at the Lancasters’ the front door had opened, and a broad beam of light gleamed out on the trees and the walk. He got up quickly.

“Just one question, Lou,” he said, “and we’ll have to be quick. After Mrs. Lancaster’s murder somebody burned what might have been a photograph, on very heavy board; one of the old types of mountings. Or it might have been something else, pasteboard anyhow with a beveled edge and gilded. Does that mean anything to you? I think, but I’m not sure, that it came out of the Lancaster house.”

There were no voices on the porch across by that time, and I had to think quickly.

They had quantities of old pictures,” I said. “Some were framed, but I haven’t missed any. Of course I haven’t been there much since. And there’s the old photograph album, of course. Margaret gave it to Mother.”

“Margaret gave it to her,” he said slowly. “When? Since her mother’s death?”

“Yes. It’s upstairs now somewhere. I think it has never been unwrapped.”

“Unwrapped? You mean it was tied up when it came? Lou, I’ve got to have that album, and I’ve got to have it soon. It’ll be back here at twelve o’clock, and don’t open the door until you’ve turned on the porch light and seen who it is. Is that a promise?”

I agreed, and to my stunned amazement he bent down and kissed me lightly on the lips.

“That’s for being a good girl,” he said, and a moment later he had disappeared down the street.

It was not until he had gone that I remembered that I had not asked about the poison ivy.

T
HE NEIGHBORS WERE LEAVING
the Lancaster house now. I could hear their low decorous voices and the subdued sound of their feet on the steps of the porch, and it was almost a shock to hear that even Mrs. Talbot had ceased to boom. At the street pavement they separated into two groups, the Talbots turning right, the others coming toward me; Jim, the Daltons and Mother. The men in their dark clothes, the women in black, as they approached their faces looked like four disembodied and slightly swaying white balloons; and this illusion was increased by the fact that they were not talking at all. As they came closer I saw that Jim was slightly ahead, and that with his hands thrust deep into his pockets he was apparently lost in thought.

At the foot of our walk he stopped and faced them, like a man who has made a decision of some sort.

“Look here,” he said. “I suppose there’s no use expecting an honest answer, but isn’t there a chance that
he
is mixed up in this somehow?”

“Nobody has heard of him for years,” Bryan Dalton said. “In any case, since you’ve brought the matter up, why the Lancasters? He was fond of Emily, even if he hated the old lady.”

“He had plenty of reason to detest her, I gather! What’s the use of all this secrecy anyhow?” Jim demanded. “I didn’t know it myself until a day or two ago—I dug it out of the Talbots’ Lizzie, if you want to know—and George Talbot doesn’t know it yet. If that isn’t like this Crescent, I don’t know what is. I’ve kept quiet on George’s account but I’m damned if I care to go on. That story’s got to be told. If he was crazy then he’s crazy now.”

“He was just about as crazy as I am,” Bryan Dalton said shortly.

“Would you know him if you saw him? Any of you?” Jim persisted.

They were all certain that they would, but Jim himself, it appeared, had never seen this unnamed individual at all; at least not since he was a small child. He was impatient and irritable, as I could tell by his voice.

“He may be right here among us,” he insisted. “He may be your Joseph, Dalton! Or he may be this new butler of ours. He’s a queer egg. If he’s a butler than I’m a housemaid!”

“Joseph has been with us for years,” Bryan Dalton said stiffly.

“And John Talbot’s been missing for years too!” Jim persisted.

I sat up suddenly in my chair. So it was John Talbot they were talking about, the man of the crayon portrait in the stable loft, and of whom Lydia only that very morning had said that he was the gentlest soul alive. And at one time he had been considered a lunatic, but not by everybody!

Mother was speaking, in her clear high-bred voice.

“You are being absurd, Jim,” she said. “For years all of us have tried to keep that unfortunate story from George. Do you want George to learn it? Or the police?”

“The police! My God, why shouldn’t they know? It’s their business to know. What sort of a conspiracy of silence is this, anyhow? If John Talbot liked Emily, how do you know she didn’t let him into the house last Thursday? She might have thought he was sane, and then he got out of hand; and then later on he killed her too. Are you going to ignore a thing like that to conceal an old scandal or whatever it was?”

“Listen, Jim,” Laura Dalton said. “If anyone of us really thought John Talbot capable of such a thing, we would tell it. We simply don’t, that’s all. That other was a crime of passion. She’d ruined his life and cut him off from his family.”

“Someone,” said Bryan Dalton, “might say to my wife that I do not regard that as an unmixed evil!”

But Jim was not listening.

“Nevertheless,” he persisted, “he shot the woman he had eloped with, and was shut up with the criminal insane, wasn’t he? Is he there now? Does anybody know?” And when he received no answer I saw him under the street light make a furious and hopeless gesture.

“There you are!” he said. “And I’m not to tell the police! Well, I’m saying here and now that I intend to tell the police, and you’re all going to take it and like it. By God, I believe the whole lot of you would let me go to the chair, if it came to that, rather than admit that a man tried under another name in another state for murder was a Talbot of Crescent Place!”

He turned angrily and swung away toward his house, leaving them staring after him.

Mother went into the house without seeing me, and she asked no questions when I followed her into the library. She looked tired and all she said was that Margaret Lancaster was taking her stepfather’s death very well, but that she looked rather dreadful.

“I wouldn’t say anything about this, Louisa,” she told me, “but she is uneasy. You see, she cannot find her father’s revolver. He always kept it in an upper bureau drawer, but it is not there now. She has searched everywhere for it.”

I was startled.

“When did she miss it?”

“Last night, I think. It’s really odd, for only the nurse and the doctor went into that room. And Margaret herself, of course.”

She was more disturbed than she cared to admit; and it was very late before at last I got her settled into bed, with the usual vases on her window sills and her hall door locked.

“You
will
lock your door carefully, Louisa?”

“I always do, Mother, where is the album you brought from the Lancasters’ the other night? I’d like to look at it.”

She looked surprised, but not at all startled.

“The album?” she said. “I did put it somewhere. Yes, I took it up to the third floor. Surely you don’t want it tonight?”

“I just wanted to know where it is,” I said evasively, and went out.

It was almost midnight before through the connecting bathroom I heard the click of her lamp as she switched it off. Even after that she turned restlessly for some time, and I was almost in despair when at last her deep and regular breathing told me that she slept. Then at last I was free, and the next half hour stands out in my memory as one of a general misery leading gradually to sheer terror.

As I may or may not have said, in both the Lancaster house and our own only one staircase leads to the third floor. This takes off from the rear hall on the second floor, and it was on this staircase that Mary and Annie had established their absurd barricade. The first thing I had to do therefore was to move the chairs, which seemed just then to have as many legs as a centipede and the viciousness of all inanimate things in the dark at night. Then, having at last aligned them in the second floor hall and climbed the staircase as silently as possible, on the top landing I stepped without warning into a pan of cold water, evidently also a part of the defense system, and then and there in the dark I almost sat down and wept.

Time was short, however, and with that complete loss of self-respect which comes of wet feet and bedraggled skirts, I at last reached the cedar room and having closed the door turned on the light. Like the same room at the Lancasters, it too had a trapdoor to the roof, and I looked at it nervously. It was closed and bolted, however, and with increasing courage I began my search.

It was not difficult. The Crescent not only wraps what it stores, but labels each parcel; and thus I found myself confronting packages of all sorts ranging from one marked “L’s first party dress,” to more recent ones tagged modestly as “woolen undergarments, medium weight.” Of the album, wrapped or unwrapped, there was not a trace, and my wrist watch told me that it was already five minutes past twelve.

There was only one other place possible, and that was my former schoolroom over the old part of the house; Mother used it now and then as a sort of extra storeroom for odds and ends, and I went there with rather a crawling of the spine. Early impressions stay with us, I find, and although it was twenty years since it had happened, I could still remember the sheer horror of the night when, the governess out of the room and the dumbwaiter bell ringing, I had heard my supper tray coming up and had seen instead a dreadful black face making horrible grimaces at me from the shaft.

It had caused quite a stir in the neighborhood, for I had fainted flat on the floor; and even the discovery that it had only been “Georgie” Talbot on the top of the slide had not entirely removed the horror of that moment. Indeed, the first glance I took after I had switched on a light was toward the shaft. But the sliding door was closed, and thus reassured I set about my search.

The album was there, still wrapped as it had been, and lying on my scarred old schoolroom table. I picked it up and stood for a moment looking about the room. I was a child again, being told to be a little lady. I was an adolescent girl, curious about a thousand things which no one thought I ought to know. And I was a young woman, slipping up there to write my first and almost my last love letter, and crying my heart out because if I married I would leave a still grieving mother alone.

But mostly I was a child, left alone in a room where there was a horror; a sliding door which at any time might open again and show a grinning monster. Then, just as I had put out the light and was working my way in the dark toward the hall, I heard something fumbling at that door again.

I could not believe it. I could feel the very hair on my head fairly rising, but still I did not believe it. Nor could I move. There were weights in my feet, and my legs were like the legs of a sleeper with nightmare, who must escape and cannot move them. And still that dreadful fumbling went on.

So familiar was I with the door to the slide that I knew to the instant when there was space for fingers to catch the edge of it, and I could follow inch by inch its slow movement upward. Infinitely stealthy, all of it; as though time were nothing and only caution mattered. Then at last the power came back into my legs I ran as I have never run before, crashing into the pan at the top of the stairs and accompanied by it and in a deluge of water fell the entire length of them and brought up in a sitting position in the hall below; without breath left in me even to scream.