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“If you carry on the way you’ve started, they’ll never be settled. And you can tell him, when he comes back, that Miss Hall called. Louisa Hall.”

He gave me a quick look, seemed to hesitate and then opened the screen door, or what was left of it, for me.

“Very well, miss,” he said. “I’ll tell him.”

I started out from there for the wood land toward Euclid Street, but once I turned to look back, and he was at the window watching me. Take it all in all, I was puzzled and not too easy. Had the police taken over Jim’s house in his absence, and was this man an officer of some sort, trying to get himself a bit of a meal? Or was he a friend of Jim’s, there for some purpose I could not know? He was no servant. That was certain.

But I could not take a chance on him. I looked regretfully toward the wood land and then turned back home, to see when I turned the corner of the Dalton house something which set me running as fast as I ever ran in my life. That something was a thick column of smoke from one of the chimneys of our house, and I knew that Mother had ordered the furnace to be lighted.

That, with all the Crescent, meant that immediately the water pans on all the radiators would be filled.

I ran like a crazy woman. Luckily it was now dusk and the dinner hour, so that the kitchen windows which are like so many eyes peering out were untenanted. I shot into our own kitchen, collided with Annie in a passage carrying down Mother’s tea tray, and took the stairs two at a time. But I was too late. Mother in her dressing gown was standing by the radiator in the wing, and gazing down at that awful glove.

“Is that you, Louisa?” she called. “Come here a moment. What do you think this is?”

“It looks like an old glove,” I said as calmly as I could.

“Then what is it doing there?”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” I picked it up and looked at it. “It has stove polish on it or something. I’ll throw it away.”

But Mother reached out and taking it from me, delicately held it to her nose and sniffed at it.

“It’s boot polish,” she said.

I knew at once that she was right. It was boot polish. That was the scent that had escaped me; a scent which took me back to my childhood days, with my father standing with one foot on an old-fashioned boot-box and fastidiously rubbing at his shoes.

“But who in the world polishes boots in this house?” Mother said. “Not Holmes. He never polishes anything unless he’s forced to do so. I must ask Annie.”

But the one thing I did not want was that Mother should ask Annie, or show her that glove. Luckily the collision and the resulting damage had delayed her somewhat, but I could now hear her slowly plodding up the stairs, ready to see the significance of that glove, or of the stains on it that Mother’s older eyes had overlooked. Ready to run downstairs with it, examine it, talk it over.

I thought desperately of some way to divert Mother’s attention. She was still holding the glove, and Annie was on her way down the hall with a pitcher with which to fill the pans.

“There’s a new butler at Jim Wellington’s, mother,” I said breathlessly. “And he blew up the kitchen range.”

“He
what
?” said Mother.

“Blew up the range. I was walking by, and the explosion blew him and the oven door out onto the back porch.”

“And serves him right,” said Mother, outraged at this crime against domestic order. “I never heard of such a thing. It was a new range, too. They only bought it last year.”

But this expedient had had the proper effect. Glove in hand and still indignant, Mother watched Annie fill the radiator pan and then sailed back to her room. Inside it she looked absently at the glove, seemed surprised to find she still held it, and finally dropped it into her wastebasket.

This did not mean necessarily that the glove was safe. Rather the contrary indeed, the Crescent expecting that its wastebaskets be emptied at night when the beds are turned down, just as it demands fresh towels in its bathrooms. And this waste goes into cans provided for the purpose at the extreme rear end of each property. Rain or shine, bright morning or late evening, our servants make these excursions. And I knew enough about police methods by that time to realize that examination of waste cans might well be a part of their routine.

Even if the glove escaped Annie’s sharp eyes, there was the question whether I could safely make a night trip for its recovery. Lightning did not strike twice, and I could hardly hope to repeat the Dalton’s foolhardy and reckless excursion. I managed to drop the advertising portion of the paper into Mother’s basket so that it covered the glove, and when Annie came up to turn down the beds I waylaid her in the hall.

“Annie,” I said, “I don’t think I’d go out by the rear door at night for a while. We don’t know what all this is about, but it might not be safe.”

“I haven’t any intention of doing that, Miss Louisa. Not with a murdering lunatic about.”

“You might suggest to Holmes that he bring the waste cans onto the kitchen porch.”

“They’re there now, miss,” she said primly. “Although what your mother will say I don’t know.”

“I’ll take the responsibility for that, Annie.”

She gave me a small and cynical smile. Both of us would get it, it implied, when the time came. But there was appreciation in it too. Annie and I understood each other.

“Very well, Miss Louisa,” she said. “And it’s Mary’s evening out, and she says she’s going out by the front door. I suppose you haven’t a key for it?”

“You know very well that I have no key for it, Annie.”

She was standing beside me with the coffee tray in her hands, and I was surprised a look of sympathy on her face. She knew that I had no key, had never had a key of my own.

“I’ve told her I’d wait up, so she needn’t ring the bell, miss. She’ll be back at eleven.”

I agreed, of course. It meant that I, too, must wait until eleven or later before I could retrieve the glove, but there was nothing else to do. And I have reported this conversation in detail because it led to what was to be the most exciting night of my life up to that time.

I
GOT MOTHER TO
bed by ten o’clock, putting her book and her glasses on the table beside her, along with her folded clean handkerchief and her glass of water. Her prayer book, of course, always lay there. And as I did it I wondered about Miss Emily next door. What was she feeling that night, after all her years of service? Was she utterly lost? Or was there some sense of relief from the demands of that petulant and querulous old woman, with the stick by her bed with which to summon Emily remorselessly, day or night?

She had built herself no life at all, had Emily, save for her incessant reading, her trips to the library for books. Margaret was different. She had a life of her own, slightly mysterious but very real. She dressed carefully, went out—to concerts, to the theater now and then. It was even rumored that she had a small group where she played bridge for infinitesimal sums of money; something of which the Crescent disapproved on principle, although it bought lottery tickets at hospital fairs without compunction.

When at last I went back to my room I was still wondering. Not only about Emily and Margaret; about all our women. Save Helen Wellington, none of us lived interesting or even active lives. It was as though our very gates closed us away. The men went out, to business, to clubs, to golf. They came back to well-ordered houses and excellent dinners. Even old Mr. Lancaster had a club, although he rarely went there. But the women! I remembered a call I had made on Helen Wellington shortly after she married Jim.

“What do you do, all of you?” she asked. “You’ll got twenty-four hours a day to fill in.”

“We have our homes, of course. You’ll find that we consider them very important.”

“And that’s living? To know how many napkins go into the wash every week?”

“We manage. It isn’t very exciting, of course. It was harder when I first came back from boarding school, but I’m used to it now.”

“Used to it! At twenty! That’s ridiculous.”

And because she too was young I had told her about having to let down my skirts before I came back for each vacation—that was when skirts were very short—and turning them up laboriously as soon as I reached the school again. She had thought it so funny that she had screamed with laughter. But I wondered that night if it was really funny at all.

“Twenty,” she had said, “and they’ve got you. Well, they’ve never get me.”

And perhaps it was as a result of those reflections that I took a book that night and went down to the library.

By years of custom, on nights when Mother has gone to bed early I have sat in my room with the door open, in case she might need something. Now I went down and turned on all the lamps. Not the few we ordinarily use, but all of them. And it was into this blaze of light that, at ten-thirty, Annie showed Inspector Briggs.

He came in, pinching his lip thoughtfully, and with a faintly deprecatory smile.

“Sorry to bother you again, Miss Hall.”

“That’s all right. I’m interested, naturally, if that word is strong enough. That’s a good chair, Inspector.”

He sat down, remarking that the night was cold and the room warm; and then said rather abruptly that he had dropped Jim Wellington at his house on his way in.

“I thought you’d like to know,” he said, rather too casually.

“I can’t see why you took him in the first place,” I said.

“Well,” he replied, smiling again, “the police aren’t miracle workers. They are only a hard-working plodding lot at the best, and the fact that we’ve released Wellington doesn’t mean so much at that. The plain fact is that we’ve got a fair case against him now, but nothing to take before a jury. There’s a difference, Miss Hall!”

“And you’ve come here for help?”

He shook his head cheerfully.

“No,” he said. “I hadn’t meant to come here at all, but I saw the lights, and you’re an intelligent young woman and as near to a witness as we’ve got. I’d like to know, of course, what you dropped on the pavement last night and went back for, but I suppose you won’t tell me, eh?”

“My handkerchief.”

“You would swear to that, on the witness stand. Under oath?”

I was silent, and he nodded.

“You see what we’re up against,” he said. “I’ll not try to bully you. Whatever it was, you’ve probably destroyed it anyhow. But it’s just possible that that sort of silence can send the wrong person to the chair. You might think it over. Our man thinks it was an envelope of some sort.”

And when I still said nothing, he went on:

“We’ve followed up Daniels, the street cleaner you spoke of. Nothing doing there, no blood, no indications whatever, no police record. He’s a quiet man, rather eccentric, living alone on a street behind the hospital. Has lived where he is for the last ten years with no interruptions. Got a bit of shrapnel in his leg in the war. Seems to have volunteered early in spite of his age, and not to have asked for any compensation since. Rather likeable chap, but reticent. Better than his job, I imagine, although he doesn’t say so. In these times a man takes what he can get.”

“So, because you like him, you would rather suspect Jim Wellington! Is that it?”

He grinned.

“Well,” he said, “you see this shrapnel lamed him. He might have climbed a pillar of that porch, but he’d need two arms and two legs. And I don’t see him carrying the axe in his teeth.”

I had to confess that I had not noticed that the man was lame.

“I suppose nobody ever really sees a street cleaner,” I said. “You just take them for granted.”

He nodded absently; he had already eliminated Daniels from his mind.

“These two women over there, the daughters. They are Mr. Lancaster’s stepdaughters, I understand.”

“Yes. I suppose they really should be called Talbot; but they were quite small when their mother married again. They have always used Mr. Lancaster’s name. The Talbots didn’t like it much at first, I’ve heard.”

After that he asked me once more to go over what I had seen the afternoon before, both inside and outside the Lancaster house. He was particularly interested in my entrance when Margaret and I helped Emily inside.

“Mr. Lancaster was in the library?”

“Yes. Lying back in a leather chair with his eyes closed.”

“Can you remember what he said?”

“Margaret asked him who had told him, and he said Eben. Then she asked him if he had been upstairs, and he said no. She went out to get him a glass of wine, and then he asked Emily if it was she who had found Mrs. Lancaster, and if she had heard anything.”

“What did she say to that?”

“She said that she was dressing with her door closed, and that when she ran to tell Margaret, she was running a shower. That about all, Inspector. It was not until after he got the wine that he asked about the money.”

“Oh, he asked about the money?”

“Not in so many words. He asked if anybody had looked under the bed. Then Miss Emily remembered the gold, and she sat up and asked him if that was what he thought. He said: ‘What else am I to think?’”

The Inspector considered this for some little time.

“Then, in your opinion, all these people acted as people would normally act, under the circumstances?”

“I don’t know what is normal in such circumstances, but I should think so.”

“Shocked, rather than grieved, eh?”

“Perhaps. I really don’t know.”

“You didn’t think Miss Margaret rather cool?”

“She is always like that, Inspector.”

“And you yourself, you have no suspicions whatever? Now listen, Miss Hall. A particularly brutal murder has been committed. This is no time for scruples. People are not sent to the chair on suspicion anyhow. It takes a water-tight case before any jury imposes a death sentence, and they don’t do it easily even then. It’s a pretty serious matter for any group of men to send another one to the chair.”

I shivered, there in that warm room.

“I’ve thought of nothing else since it happened, Inspector. I am being as honest as I know how when I tell you that I simply cannot conceive of anyone I know killing that poor old woman.”