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Sullivan had been doing some figuring on an old envelope. Now he picked up one of the handles of the chest and lifted it. Inspector Briggs watched him, but said nothing.

“Sure is heavy,” was Sullivan’s only comment.

“Just one thing more,” Margaret said. “I’m sure Mr. Lewis will agree with me, and I know the family will. I’d be glad if that money went back to the banks, and now; today. Under police protection. It can all go to the First National and be counted there.”

Then she went out, followed very shortly by Johnny with his bag. The others remained for some time, having closed the door on me, and so again it was not until the afternoon papers came out that the Crescent as a whole learned that there was no gold to go back to any bank; that practically all the currency was gone, that most of the brown envelopes with their tapes contained merely scraps of the local newspapers, and that the canvas bags had been looted of their gold and carefully filled with lead weights.

Just such lead weights, indeed, as Miss Mamie uses to hold down the none too modern dresses she makes for most of us, and which all of us buy to weight the bottoms of flower vases, and plant crocks, so that they will not upset in a wind.

But I knew nothing of that that morning. I went back home convinced that everything was all right, and that there was no need of the search George Talbot had suggested in No Man’s Land. Which was as well, for Mother with a sick headache is rather difficult and I spent the remainder of the morning putting iced cloths on her head—we do not approve of rubber ice caps—and in raising and lowering the window shades.

At two o’clock Doctor Armstrong, who is the Crescent doctor as Mr. Lewis is its attorney, came in and I sent him up to see her. Before he went he followed me into the library, and I saw that he looked anxious and as though he too had not slept much.

“It’s a bad business, Lou,” he said. “Any way you look at it. Matter of fact, this whole Crescent is bad business.”

“I don’t understand, I’m afraid.”

“It’s not hard to understand,” he said testily “It’s neurotic; it’s almost psychopathic. That’s what the matter is. Outside of yourself and the Wellingtons—and even then Helen Wellington is not all she might be—there is hardly a normal individual in the lot of you. By circumstance or birth or exclusion of the world or God knows what, this Crescent has become a fine neuro-psychiatric institute!”

“We are a little cut off,” I agreed.

“Cut off! Look at the Talbot woman, with her mania, no less, for locking doors! Look at Lydia, suppressed within an inch of her life! Look at Laura Dalton! Look at your own mother. Is it normal for a woman to wear deep mourning and shut out the world because of the death twenty years ago of a man—of her husband? Unless there’s remorse in it? About fifty per cent of these crêpe-draped women are filled either with remorse or self-dramatization!”

Then he realized what he had said and apologized rather lamely.

“Your mother is different,” he added. “With her it is escape. People and the world generally rather bore her, so she escapes. But take the Lancasters. Margaret has apparently managed, with the aid of an outside life, to keep fairly normal. Emily has been on the verge of a nervous breakdown for a year or two. Even Mr. Lancaster has felt the strain of the last two years. Now on top of all that this comes, and—well, I’m uneasy, Lou. Something or somebody over there is going to blow up. I’ve been in and out of this Crescent for ten years, and it’s—well, I’ve said what it is!”

He was a youngish man, with a thin tired face and a habit of drumming nervously on his professional satchel while he talked.

“What do you mean by blow up, doctor?” I asked.

“How do I know? Yell, scream, go crazy, escape! Take your choice, Lou, but keep normal yourself.”

He got up then, and prepared to see Mother. But he turned back at the door.

“You found Mr. Lancaster in the library, didn’t you? Well, what was your idea of the old gentleman’s reception of the news? How did he take it?”

“He was shocked, of course. He said very little, but he looked faint. He asked Emily if it was she who had found the body, and later on he asked if anyone had looked under the bed.”

“Who was there when he asked that?”

“Both the sisters.”

“Not too shocked, then, to think of the money! Well, what about the two women? How did they react?”

“Emily was hysterical. Margaret was calm. I think she was angry with Emily for acting as she did. That’s really all I noticed.”

“In other words, they each conformed to the pattern you’d have expected.”

“I suppose so. I was pretty well excited myself.”

When some time later I let him out he said rather whimsically that he had given Mother a sedative, and that so far he had doped practically the entire Crescent, beginning with Lydia Talbot; and that the only reason he had omitted Helen Wellington was because she was not there.

“Although I’ve got an idea that she ought to be,” he said. “This is no time for the police to know that Jim’s wife has deserted him. They may not understand that little habit of hers!”

Which explains in part what I did later that afternoon, with Mother safely asleep in her bed and the usual Friday turning out and cleaning being done in a sort of domestic whisper.

What I did was nothing less than to call on Helen Wellington, and to beg her to come home.

I had meant to go in, calm and collected, and merely tell her the situation, but circumstances changed all that. On my way downtown in a taxi I heard the newsboys calling an extra and bought one. That was how I learned that the money was gone, and I remember leaning back in that dirty cab, strewn with cigarette butts and ashes, and feeling suddenly faint again and as though I needed air.

I had pulled myself together somewhat when I reached Helen’s hotel, but I must have looked rather queer when I went in. And I knew there was no use appealing to either her pity or her pride the moment I had entered that untidy little suite strewn with her belongings, and where she met me in a gaudy pair of backless and sleeveless pajamas, a cigarette in her hand and a cool smile on her face.

“Come in, Lou,” she said. “Wasn’t it just my luck to leave the Crescent when it was about to provide some real excitement? I wouldn’t have missed it on a bet.”

“Well,” I said, “it isn’t too late. Helen, Jim’s there alone, and he certainly needs you.”

“Did he send you?” she asked sharply.

“No. But the servants have gone, and the way things are—”

She laughed a little, not too pleasantly.

“Gone, have they? Well, they were a poor lot anyhow,” she said. “Always wanting money, the wretches! So Jim’s there alone, and you think I ought to go back to make his bed and cook for him!”

“I think he needs moral support, Helen.”

“Ask Jim if he would expect moral support from me! I’d like to see his face.”

“There’s another reason, too,” I said soberly. “It doesn’t look well just now.”

“Yes, the Crescent
would
think of that!”

“Not to the Crescent. To the police.”

But she waved that off with a gesture.

“They’ve been here already. They know I don’t believe Jim did it. He had too much common sense. It was his common sense that separated us, by the way; always asking me to be sensible and taking the fun out of life. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m not going back just to save Jim’s face, and that’s flat.”

“You mean never?”

“Well, never’s a long time. Don’t be too hopeful! But I’m very comfortable here.”

“Listen, Helen,” I said. “Probably Jim would want to kill me if he knew I’d been here, but I must tell you how things are. Then maybe you’ll reconsider.”

I did tell her, from the stains on his clothes to the money in the chest. It was not until I reached the money, however, that she really sat up and became intent.

“And to think he never told me! How much was there?”

“I don’t know. Between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars, they say.”

Her reaction to that was typical. She simply lay back on her hotel sofa and groaned.

“What I could do with all that money,” she wailed. “I owe everybody, and I’m completely out of clothes. Now some fool has got it and buried it, and will turn it into government bonds and live on the interest! I simply can’t bear it.”

After that I went away. Thinking it over since, I believe she staged a good bit of that for my benefit, and that she deliberately overplayed her attitude of indifference. That had always been her reaction to the Crescent, and it still remains so; a carefully thought-out defiance.

I still remember her last words as she stood in that untidy room, with the scent she affected almost overwhelming and her eyes shrewd and keen.

“Sorry Lou,” she said. “I’m not a very satisfactory person, am I? But your Crescent scares me to death. Too much steam in the boiler and no whistle to use it up.”

I
FOUND ANNIE CARRYING
a tea tray in to Mother, and a copy of the extra on Mother’s bed. That newspaper alone, if nothing else, would have marked the change in our habits since the murder. But I was astonished to find Mother looking relieved and almost cheerful.

She looked up as I went in.

“Get that tray fixed and get out, Annie,” she said, “and close that door behind you.”

Annie went in a hurry, and Mother turned to me.

“I suppose you’ve seen this?”

“No. But I dare say I should have suspected it. I was there when they opened the chest.”

“Oh, you were, were you? Really, Louisa, sometimes I wonder how I ever bore a child so—so undutiful. To think—!”

“You’ve been sick all day, mother. Anyhow, I wasn’t certain. I was there when they opened the chest, but not the bags in it. I simply remember now that one of the detectives looked skeptical when he touched the bags. That’s all.”

She eyed me.

“I suppose you realize that this will probably be very damaging to Jim Wellington, to say the least.”

“I don’t see it,” I said stubbornly. “Anyone who knows him—”

“Stuff and nonsense. Do use your head, Louisa. Who else could have done it? It would have been easy for him. All he had to do was to show her one bag, and have another ready to put into the chest.”

“You can’t believe that, mother! You can’t.”

“Never mind what I believe,” she said sharply. “What I want you to do is to get Hester Talbot here. I’ve got an apology to make to her.”

That must have been at five, or perhaps later. At six o’clock Mrs. Talbot came, carrying her bag of keys as usual, and from then until almost seven she and Mother were shut away in Mother’s room. When she came out I thought she had been crying, a fact so astonishing that I should have been less startled if I had seen a hippopotamus weep. But her voice was as loud and resonant as ever when she met me in the upper hall.

“Well, I understand they’ve taken Jim Wellington in again for interrogation. It’s about time they took him and kept him!”

“If all the Crescent is determined to think him guilty it
is
time, Mrs. Talbot.”

I let her out myself. It was dark and windy and growing much colder. But I was too utterly miserable to notice it then. I was thinking as hard and as fast as I have ever done in my life. If the police found that money buried in No Man’s Land, I knew what it would mean, especially if it was buried among the trees where George had found the gold piece. That bit of wood was not far from the Wellington house, and began perhaps two hundred feet from the end of the tennis court.

I went back to the kitchen and told Mary I should want no dinner. Then I put on a heavy coat and started out. On the back path I met Holmes coming in, and it seemed to me that he stopped and looked after me; but I was beyond caring. Nevertheless, I did not strike for the wood land at once. Instead I took the grapevine path which connects the rear of each house with the other; and I remember wondering to see the Dalton place as quiet and orderly as ever, with Joseph in the dining room and a faint aroma of something spicy coming from an open kitchen window. It was hard to believe that I had actually seen what had occurred the night before.

It was beyond the Dalton garage that the Wellington house, as it came into view, surprised me by showing a light in the kitchen. My first feeling was one of relief, that Jim had been released once more and was at home again. That changed to surprise, however, as I kept on until I was close under the kitchen porch.

There was a man inside, a tall man in an apron, who was smoking a cigarette and eyeing rather dubiously a can of something or other which he held in his hand. He might easily have seen me, but he did not, and as I watched him I felt certain that I had seen him before. I had no time to think about that, however, for the next moment he commenced a curious performance which kept me rooted to the spot in amazement.

That is, he first did something or other to the gas range and then backing off from it, began to toss lighted matches at it from a distance. On what I think was the third try the effect was simply astounding. There was a roar of exploding gas, and the door to the stove oven came hurtling through the screen and landed on the rear porch, followed almost instantly by the strange man himself, who proceeded to fall over it.

There was a second or two of silence. Then the man sat up and commenced a soft and monotonous swearing which I interrupted.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“Hurt! I’ve damned near broken my leg.”

He was getting up by that time, and now he looked out and saw me.

“Sorry, miss. I must have turned on the oven and forgotten about it. I’m not used to a gas range.”

“So I imagine,” I said drily. “Has Mr. Wellington come back?”

“No, miss.”

“Then you’d better let me come in and show you about that stove.”

He did not want me; I saw that. But he put as good a face on it as he could, and I went in and lighted the stove properly. He watched me carefully.

“It’s really quite tame, isn’t it, when you get the hang of it?” he said, and then added “miss” as an afterthought. I noticed then that he had lost his eyebrows and some of his front hair, but he was distinctly amiable in spite of it. “You see, miss, I’m not a cook; but I told Mr. Wellington I’d try to carry on until—well, until things got settled.”