Album (44 page)

“You see, she was killed for two reasons: to keep her quiet and to get that identifying photograph of Talbot out of the album. The money in a way was incidental, and even the second reason was not vital; it only became vital when those prints were left in the album itself.

“That killing, by the way, was as reckless and yet as cunning a piece of work as I have ever seen. There was in all that careful preparation only the one slip, and that was beyond control; that was the leaving of the album with the prints, as the result of some alarm. You see, time was vital, and she had found the old lady out of bed! That meant getting her back and covering her, to delay discovery as long as possible. She got back, but she was
on
the sheet! Little things, all of them; but not in the plan. Then one other thing went wrong also, for the screen would not lift. That careful method of showing an escape by the porch roof was out. No wonder she forgot the album!

“Perhaps the grass was put there then. Perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps poor old Emily, terrified of the discovery that the money was gone and trying to shout ‘wolf’ for the family to hear, put it there and overturned that pot herself. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter now.

“What does matter is that the killer had to indicate an exit from the house while still remaining it in. Hence—and that was quick thinking—the glove thrown down into the hall. Then the slipping into the housemaid’s closet, the door locked, and the careful stealthy removal of all signs of blood.

“But there were some bad minutes in that closet or later on. They came when the album was remembered, and they must have been pretty terrible. How could this killer know that Margaret Lancaster had destroyed those prints, or had had Bryan Dalton do it for her?

“The next step was the gold itself; for there it was, with all its potentialities. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth about it. For instance, how would this unknown know about it? Was Emily seen going into the MacMullen house? Was it via Peggy and the grapevine telegraph? Did someone else besides Holmes get onto the book trick? One person at least had picked up a piece of gold after that unlucky spill in No Man’s Land, and may have mentioned it. Or—and this is worth consideration—did Emily in her distress take a confidant.

“She may have. She may even have told where her keys were kept in the bird cage. I think myself that she did, or why did poor old Talbot have to climb that porch roof to try to get them? For that’s what he did, game leg and all, on that Saturday night.

“The cage was gone, however. You’d seen to that!

“Then, to come to the night of Emily’s death: it was late when she heard where the cage was, and having slept all day she was wakeful. But she was not the only person who had learned late that night that the cage was in the stable. When George Talbot came home he was told that Emily had been inquiring about it, and he told Mrs. Talbot and Lydia, in the presence of Lizzie Cromwell, just where it was.

“Nevertheless, probably no murder was intended that night, and it is a strange fact that had not one of those three women been in the laundry later that night, secretly washing those bloody undergarments which had been hidden away since Thursday, in all likelihood Emily Lancaster would still be alive. But one of them was there, and she heard a sound outside; perhaps when the gun fell.

“I have no doubt but that it was the intention to secure the keys that night anyhow, although the washing was more vital. But however it happened, one thing is sure. This woman found the automatic, shot Emily and got the keys from her. By the time George was aroused she was safely inside the house by the basement door.

“But the keys were valuable only if they could be used, and there was a period of uncertainty following that. Talbot says that although he had been relieved of his job to let a police operative take his place, no plan was made at that time. For one thing it was too dangerous. There were police and detectives all over the place, and although this killer of ours knew by that time that the money was in the trunk, she could think of no way to get at it. And I’d better say here that until Saturday night Talbot had believed what Margaret Lancaster had believed about the two murders: that Emily had killed her mother, and that the stepfather had shot Emily.

“It would be interesting to know if that theory originated with Margaret, or if someone else did not suggest it to her!

“Still acting more or less under duress, Talbot finally agreed to rent the house near Hollytree, and to take the trunk there if and when some plan could be arranged to get it. In the interval he hung around the MacMullen place. Those were Lydia’s orders, and he had to obey them. If he didn’t it meant back to the asylum for him. What hope had he of proving his case, even if it could be reopened? And to give up his job meant the bread line.

“That is why he was on the pavement the night Holmes took it away, and he rode right out into the country on the tail of the truck, with Holmes not suspecting he was there. The rest is about as I had imagined. He threw Holmes off the truck, after forcing him to stop it. But the poor little devil made a lunge toward it just as Talbot let in the clutch, and the thing went over him. Talbot went on. He had to go on. He had known from Holmes himself where his place in the country was, and after he took the trunk to the Hollytree house he simply took the trunk back there and left it. Simple, isn’t it? But he was feeling pretty sick about Holmes himself. He went back to the place where he had left him, lying there with that handkerchief on his chest, but the body was gone.

“After that it was plain hell for him. He had been in Europe, as well as a lot of other places, and with that search for the trunk going on he disguised it with those labels from his own baggage. But he was terrified by that time. Here were three deaths already connected with that money, and he began to fear that he would be involved, and perhaps too to grow suspicious. He gave up his room and left his books, going to one far downtown, and waiting there for a message.

“Then at last it came, on Saturday. That was when he went out to the house at Hollytree late in the evening; and what he found was Lizzie Cromwell shot to death in an upstairs bathroom, and his sister Lydia trying to get the body into the tub.”

S
O LYDIA TALBOT HAD
been our killer!

She never made a statement, and she died of pneumonia shortly after her arrest. Perhaps Doctor Armstrong is the only one among us who feels any pity for her, and he quotes now and again that theory of murder being a reaction from extreme repression. But she had, he says, been a psychotic for many years, and he laid that terrible two weeks to a definite unbalance at the end.

“Like most of you, she lived an unnatural life,” he said. “Maybe she started only by wanting to escape that, and the money would do that for her. But there was something else, too. She’d shot and killed that woman years ago, and her brother had suffered the punishment for it. That must have weighed on her for many years, and now came the old woman’s threat to send him back to it, and she went plain crazy.”

Here, however, he added something which explains a great deal that puzzled me for years.

“You can take one thing as a fact. Mrs. Talbot wasn’t only locked away from her husband. She was locked away from Lydia. And Lizzie Cromwell was as much Lydia’s keeper as anything else. For Hester Talbot not only knew that Lydia had killed that other woman in a fit of jealous rage—Yes, jealous, Lou! You find things like that now and then. The human mind is a queer thing—but that she had been abnormal for years.”

Even now I have no details of that early crime of Lydia Talbot’s, save that she had resented her brother’s flight, had followed him and in some wild fury killed the girl in a hotel bedroom. What was outraged pride and what was actual jealousy no one now can ever know. But she had let him take the punishment and never spoken; and if Mrs. Talbot suspected the truth she had never whispered it.

In a way, harboring Lydia after that must have been her revenge on the husband who had deserted her—

I was married—by edict!—late in the September following, and if Mother was resentful she at least provided me with the usual dozens of this and that which the Crescent regards as essential to any bride. But Helen Wellington and I bought my trousseau, and I can still see Mother eyeing a chiffon nightgown, and then stiffly leaving the room.

We are very happy, Herbert and I, but now and then since I have found myself still wondering about different incidents of our crimes which I had failed to understand. Naturally too as a bride I was interested in Herbert’s part in the final capture of Lydia Talbot. And the entire story, as I have gradually learned it from Herbert, is interesting as showing the manner in which he reached his own conclusion as to the criminal.

From the beginning it seemed probable that the murderer of Mrs. Lancaster either lived in the house or had been able to enter it without suspicion. He and the police were agreed on this. But ever since the hoarding had commenced the house had been kept locked, and it was Mr. Lancaster’s custom to make the rounds two or three times a day, examining all doors and windows.

The cellar windows were also protected by iron bars, and the door to it was padlocked. All other windows and doors were found to be locked, and although by inside collusion this might have been arranged, careful investigation of the servants drew a complete blank. Two of them were quiet and respectable women who during the entire investigation were carefully watched without result. Peggy MacMullen, or Peggy Holmes, was young and pretty; but she had been on the back porch, carefully dressed and made up for her afternoon out, when the alarm was raised.

The family then came under consideration. Unnatural crimes are not new to the police, and the overturned flower pot, the bits of grass on the porch roof and the raised screen looked like something prearranged to show escape by the roof. But in the family the police included Jim Wellington. His presence in the house, his later admission that he had been in the room, his own production of clothing stained with the dead woman’s blood, and the final argument that he stood to win by her will were certainly all suspicious.

Added to this was the fact that a substitution had been effected for the gold in the chest. There was not one of them, on the morning the chest was opened, who did not believe that whether Jim had killed his aunt or not he had certainly systematically robbed her; and there is not a doubt in the world that had they found that old glove of his which Margaret had smuggled to me on Thursday night, he would have been arrested and later on indicted for the murder.

But intensive search of his house and of the grapevine path, as well as all open ground in the neighborhood, produced no gloves. They had even—all this was news to me—examined the ashes of Daniels’ fire in No Man’s Land; but all they found were a few buttons from an old suit of overalls, and one of these went back to Headquarters, but was ignored there.

The search, however, included more than the gloves. Miss Emily’s wild excitement over the missing key and chain from her mother’s neck puzzled them; and in fact it is still not quite clear to Herbert, or to any of them, just why it was found where it was.

“You can see why Emily was worried about it,” he says. “If she could find it and hide it it might mean a delay in the discovery that the chest had been looted. On the other hand, the taking of the key and chain may have been a clever move on Lydia’s part to prevent the opening of the chest until she had managed to get away with Emily’s trunk. I imagine that’s the real answer; but things got too hot for her. She buried it where it was found later on, and I’ve wondered since whether Lizzie Cromwell didn’t see her do it. Something made Lizzie suspect her even before the night Emily was killed. That’s certain.”

Before I leave the keys and get back to the first murder, I should explain here that Herbert is confident that Emily had a second key to the chest, since she could not have used the one her mother wore around her neck.

“And I fancy that there is where Holmes first came into the case,” he says. “He was handy with tools, and either she gave him a tracing of the key she wanted and had him make her one, or she asked him to get one from a locksmith. That would have been in the spring, but Holmes was shrewd. He knew through Peggy that the gold was in the house, and he knew of that room she had taken at the MacMullens’. When he learned that the money was missing, all he had to do was to figure how it had been taken out, so he made his book into a box and—well, it killed him.”

The District Attorney that first night was unwilling to hold Jim. He had made a good witness. Also he was well and favorably known, and the police could not afford to make any mistake.

But also Mr. Sullivan, who had had more than one axe murder in his experience, had examined those clothes of Jim’s, and he maintained that the stains on them were not the stains which would have come as the axe was lifted for one blow after another. They looked, according to the detective, to be exactly what Jim had said they were. If he had raised the axe there would have been drops on his coat and shirt. There were none there.

In the end they let him go, but he was under careful surveillance from that time on.

Up to that point Herbert and the police were in agreement. But now they split.

“They had made two divisions,” he explains. “The people in the house and someone outside. I made three, for I included the visitors that day, Jim himself, Mrs. Talbot and Lydia, and it was at the inquest on Saturday that I got a bit of light.

“Lydia Talbot had been admitted by the front door with her basket for Mrs. Lancaster, had later taken the basket to the rear of the house and gone out by the kitchen door. Natural enough, probably; but if you are up against a locked house where no one could get in but someone apparently had, you have to begin somewhere.

“And I didn’t like her. She was a neurotic. It was in that flat voice of hers, was written all over her.”

What he wondered that day was just what Lydia had done after she left Mrs. Lancaster’s room and before she appeared down the back stairs to the kitchen porch to leave her basket and its contents.