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“I want to talk to you,” he said in a low voice. “How about the garage? Where’s Holmes?”

“Eating his breakfast.”

We sauntered as casually as possible toward the garage, George swishing his club about as though looking for a lost ball. Probably all this was unnecessary, for I knew the servants would have joined Holmes at the table, and except for the Daltons no one else could see us. Once inside, however, George’s manner changed.

“Listen here, Lou,” he said. “There was hell to pay last night. See what you make of this.”

Then he told me. He had been out to dinner and bridge, and got home at one. His mother had been hard to rouse, but at last his Aunt Lydia had heard him, and securing the front door key from Mrs. Talbot, had let him in. He was in a bad humor, apparently.

“It’s such senseless absurdity,” he said. “And she’s getting worse, Lou. She’s had bolts added to some of the window locks since the murder, and getting into her room is like getting into the Bastille. That with a woman who is normal in every other way! I’ve tried to get her to a good psychiatrist, but you’d think I’d suggested giving her poison.”

The story, however, had little or nothing to do with Mrs. Talbot’s aberration or whatever it was, except that Miss Emily was apparently escaping from something, and had chosen the safest place she could think of.

George had been too irritated to go at once to sleep. He had tried reading instead, and at two o’clock he heard someone ringing the bell and then pounding on the front door. He heard Lydia moving in her room, and he met her in the upper hall. She still had the front door key, and he snatched it from her and ran down the stairs.

Emily Lancaster almost fell into the hall when he opened the door. She was as white as paper and looked wild and terrified.

“Hide me, George,” she gasped. “Hide me somewhere. They’re after me.”

He fastened the door behind her, and she seemed to come to herself again, enough at least to draw her dressing gown around her. Lydia had come down by that time, and Emily had collapsed into a hall chair and was staring ahead of her with a strange look in her eyes. As George said, there was no sentiment about his Aunt Lydia, so she went to her and shook her by the shoulder.

“Don’t be an idiot, Emily,” she snapped. “You’ve had a nightmare; that’s all. Who on earth could be after you?”

George had brought her some brandy by that time, and she gulped it down. She looked better, but it had the effect of making her sorry for herself, and for the next few minutes she cried and told of her long years of service and no life of her own. But they could not get her to say what she was afraid of, or to tell who she thought was after her.

In a half hour or so she was better, however, and her story was an odd one.

Her room is on the front of the house, as I have shown, and across the hall from her mother’s. She had gone to bed early, after taking another sleeping powder. Her stepfather and Margaret were shut in the library talking, she thought, about her mother’s estate. And she went to sleep almost as soon as she went to bed. She had locked her door, of course. They all did, since what she referred to as their trouble.

She did now know how long she had been asleep when something roused her. It was a movement or a sound on the porch roof, and she sat up in bed and saw a figure outside. It was quite clear in the moonlight, but not clear enough for identification, and it seemed to be crouching and trying to raise her window screen.

She herself was too frightened even to scream. She slid out of her bed and caught up her dressing gown and slippers. Then she unlocked her door quietly and escaped into the upper hall. She tried her sister’s and father’s doors, but they were both locked; and then she thought she heard the screen being raised, and she simply ran down and out of the house; much as she had run the day of her mother’s death. Only this time she had used the kitchen door.

That was her story, and although by the time he got it more than a half hour passed, George got his automatic and went at once to the Lancaster house. He examined it carefully from the outside, finding no one, and had finally rung the doorbell. After some time Margaret admitted him, opening the door on the chain first, and only taking off the chain when she had turned on the porch light and identified him.

She had been fairly stunned by his story.

“Emily!” she said. “Do you mean she is at your house now?”

“She is. Aunt Lydia is putting her to bed.”

“But I don’t understand. Why didn’t she rouse us? Father sleeps heavily, but I am easy to waken. Of all the ridiculous things to do!” She was puzzled and indignant, but George was not interested in how she felt.

“I’d better take a look at that screen,” he said. “She may have dreamed it, but again she may not. I imagine,” he added drily, “that it would be a pretty real dream to send her out of doors in her dressing gown and slippers at this hour of the night.”

They went up the stairs quietly, so as not to arouse the household, and into Emily’s room. The coverings on the bed had been thrown back, and on a chair neatly folded were her undergarments. Everything was neat and in order; her tidy bureau was undisturbed, her bookcase, her desk.

Only the hook where her bird cage usually hung beside a window was empty, and it was at this screen that Emily had seen the figure.

From the inside the screen had apparently not been disturbed, and Margaret was willing to let it go at that. George, however, was wide awake by that time and pretty thoroughly interested. He raised the screen and got out onto the porch roof, and there lighted a match or two to examine it.

“And if someone hadn’t tried to lift it from the outside, I’ll eat it,” he said. “He’d put a chisel or something of the sort underneath to raise it; enough to get a fingerhold, I suppose. Then, he heard her either in the room or running out of the house, for he lowered it again and got away. Slid down a porch pillar and beat it. It was no dream of Miss Emily’s, Lou. Somebody was there, and that with one policeman at the gate and another patrolling the Crescent. It doesn’t make sense!”

“But why?” I asked. “Who would want to get at poor old Emily Lancaster? Who wants to wipe out the family, George? For that’s what it looks like.”

He sat on the step of the car, making idle circles with his mashie on the cement floor, and I noticed that his face had darkened.

“I had no idea once that maybe I knew,” he said, “but this kills it.”

“What sort of idea?”

“Oh, nothing much. If it had been our house I’d say that the thing one’s afraid of is the thing that happens—whatever that may be. Meaning Mother!” He spoke lightly. “But this washes that out, of course.”

He got up.

“I just thought I’d tell you. Otherwise we’re to keep quiet about it, and I’ve advised Emily to have some bars up on the windows tomorrow. Now, if we had an alibi for old Jim for last night we’d be all right. As it is—”

“George! You don’t think it was Jim?”

“No, but who cares what I think? There was somebody there, that’s sure. You can see the marks he made climbing one of the porch pillars. He broke a part of the lattice too. Well, I’ve got to go. I’ve promised Margaret to bury Emily’s bird.”

“The bird?” I said. “It’s not—dead?”

“Pretty thoroughly dead. No water. Everybody forgot it, and water evaporates pretty fast this kind of weather. Margaret asked me to take it, cage and all, for fear Emily finds it. If anyone wants it later and I’m not around, it will be behind the old barrel in the corner of our stable. No need to leave it where the poor old girl might see it and have a fit.”

He went along then cheerfully enough, but leaving me filled with dismay and remorse. Long after he had disappeared I remained in the garage, grieving over a little yellow bird which had had to die of hunger and thirst. Indeed I was still there when Holmes came out, after his breakfast.

He did not see me at first. He came into the garage whistling and moved directly to a corner, where with his foot he stirred up and scattered a small heap of fine black ashes on the cement floor. It was only when that was done that he managed a grin.

“Burned some letters last night,” he said. “Never keep anything around that will get you into trouble. That’s my motto, miss. And your mother is down for breakfast.”

I went out, my mind confused in many ways but entirely clear on one point. Mr. Dean would never find the pages Holmes had cut out of his book.

I was depressed when I left the garage. It seemed to me that we would never solve our problem, that clues came and went and still led nowhere. And yet it was that very morning that I found the second glove; found it indeed in a spot which had been examined over and over the afternoon and evening after the crime.

This was under the dining room window at the back of the Lancaster house, and almost directly beneath Margaret Lancaster’s bedroom.

O
UTWARDLY THAT SUNDAY MORNING
on the Crescent differed little from any of the innumerable ones which I can remember. Our servants divided as usual, one out and one in; where there were three one took the day off, one went presumably to eleven o’clock service and one remained at home to prepare the heavy midday dinner which after the week’s light luncheons sent most of us into a coma during the afternoon.

And the Crescent allows no decent interval for grief. One submits to what Mother calls the Eternal Will, puts on one’s heaviest black, and shows to the world an unbroken front of submission to God.

At a quarter to eleven then the road was lined with cars, the Daltons’ sedan, our own limousine, the Lancasters’ hired car and George Talbot’s aged roadster with Lydia in the rumble seat, where she got all the dust and wind. But Emily Lancaster did not appear. She had been brought home and put to bed, and our Mary reported that she had looked like a ghost.

I was an interested onlooker at all this, have begged off with a cold which was real enough at that. I stood on the porch and waved Mother off, and I remember watching the other cars go by, each laden with black-draped figures; and wondering if there was not someone in that funereal group who would kneel that morning under the stained glass windows of St. Mark’s and beg an unseen God for forgiveness and mercy.

It was a bright morning. The cold spell had gone, but there was a hint of autumn in the garden. Back in No Man’s Land a small child, as if aware that the overlords had departed, was trundling a red wagon, and across the intervening strip I could see that Mrs. Lancaster’s windows had been raised, as though by airing the room they could somehow remove the last trace of the little old woman who had died in it.

Except for those opened windows and what they suggested, the Crescent had resumed its normal appearance. The curious crowd had gone from the gate; hereafter it would follow our story in the newspapers and not on its feet. Reporters no longer lay in wait to trap us as we entered or left our houses. Even the guards were gone, and either the police were taking a Sunday holiday or the search in No Man’s Land had been abandoned.

But if the front of the Crescent was quiet, the rear was not. The moment the cars had all departed it bloomed into life and activity. The maids sang or laughed, and after a time there was a gradual emergence from the houses, and a conversation apparently on the kitchen porch of the Dalton house, where I gathered that tea, and probably cake, was being served. Ellen from the Lancasters’ was the first to go, followed by our Mary, Annie being out that day. And before long the austere black-robed figure of Lizzie from the Talbots’ came into view along the path, and she too joined the party.

The thing interested me. It was the first time I had seen our grapevine telegraph in full operation, and I watched it from the rear window of the upper hall. What did they talk about together, these servants of ours, so many of whom had lived with us for many years? What did they think? What did they know? For I was certain that they knew something, perhaps many things.

What, for instance, did Mrs. Talbot’s Lizzie know about that strange locking up? Or the Daltons’ Joseph of that search a few nights before? Or about the quarrel which long ago had separated master and mistress?

All this was running through my mind when I saw Mr. Dean emerge from across No Man’s Land, casually following the path and looking in his dark clothes very much indeed like a gentleman’s gentleman returning from a Sunday ramble. I saw him glance toward the Dalton porch and then look away; and I saw him finally reach our garage, well shielded from that porch, try the door to the staircase which leads to Holmes’s living quarters, find it locked, and then—sheltered from any but my observation by the shrubbery—take a key book from his pocket and carefully experiment with the lock. It was less than a minute until the door opened and he disappeared inside.

St. Mark’s is well downtown, and I was confident that he had an hour at the least before Holmes would return. Nevertheless, I was relieved when in some ten minutes Mr. Dean reappeared, cautiously closed the door, which has a snap lock, and then entered the garage below. But all this was more than any anxiety could bear, so I snatched up my garden scissors and a basket and was in time to come almost face to face with him as he emerged. He touched his cap and greeted me cheerfully.

“What! Not at church?”

“I had a headache. Or a cold. I forget which.”

He laughed at that, and glanced quickly toward the Dalton house.

“Better cut some flowers,” he said, “and I’ll stand at a respectful distance. I don’t think they can see us, but they might. Your man Holmes is a pretty clever rascal, Miss Lou.”

“Then it was a crime book?”

“It was; it had to be. He has no other sort! By the way, you haven’t missed any glue from the house lately, have you?”

I almost dropped the scissors.

“We have indeed,” I told him. “Mary keeps some in the pantry, and she said yesterday it was gone.”

He nodded, without surprise.

“You have no idea when, I suppose?”

“Some time in the last week.”

But apparently he had no intention of explaining what he meant, and his next question surprised me.