Album (37 page)

“I knew nothing of this until my father told me later on, after Mother’s death. When Emily had gone Father managed to examine the chest, but it was locked as usual and so he went back to bed. He asked Mother after that to have the chest opened and the money recounted, but that annoyed her and he had to let it go for the time. It was more than two weeks before he finally decided to have it done, with or without her consent. Then, on the morning of Thursday August the eighteenth, he told me exactly what he had seen and I foolishly told him what I knew.

“While Emily was out at the library I telephoned to Jim Wellington to come at four that afternoon, for what Father called an audit. Father had not told Mother, and it was to tell her that he came back after he had started for his walk that afternoon. He changed his mind, however, after he was in the house. She was asleep, and he decided to wait until Jim was there.

“I do not yet know how Emily learned about the audit, and the early afternoon was as you know it. Lydia Talbot brought Mother some things for her lunch, but was too late with them. Her sister-in-law, Mrs. John Talbot, left with Father at half past three. It was my afternoon out, but I had arranged with Father not to go and was in my room.

“At three-thirty—or a little later—I saw Bryan Dalton walking from his garage toward our woodshed. Our servants could not see him from the lower floor, but I saw him from my window. Instead of going inside and leaving a report, he took up a position where he could watch the house, and that puzzled me. I thought at first he was merely waiting for the result of the audit and I paid no attention; but at last he saw me and waved to me to come down.

“I had turned on my shower, but I began to dress, and then I heard Emily screaming and as soon as I could get into my dressing gown and slippers I ran out. What I thought was that Jim had come earlier than usual, that the theft had been discovered, and that Emily was having an attack of hysteria. But you know what I found.”

Here I believe she stopped for the first time. Someone offered her a glass of water, but she refused it and after steadying her voice she went on.

“I need not go into all that. You know it as well as I do. For one thing, Bryan Dalton had thought as I did about Emily’s screams and her fainting attack, and when he saw Louisa Hall bending over her he did not go to her. Instead he came up to our kitchen porch and waited there outside. It was locked, of course. The servants were upstairs in the hall by that time, and nobody saw him.

“But I kept one thing from you then, and I am telling it now because I understand that you have certain suspicions about Bryan Dalton. When I went into that room after Emily had rushed downstairs, I found the album I have spoken of open on the bed, and the two pages were covered with fingerprints in—in blood. Fresh blood.

“Emily was still screaming, and I had only a second or two. Mother’s sewing scissors were on her bureau, and I cut them both out. I still had them in my hand when I called down the stairs to tell the servants; I hid them inside a radiator cover in the side hall. Later on, when I went back to get Father a glass of wine, I gave them to Bryan Dalton. They were stiff, but he put them inside his overalls; and as soon as he dared, at my request, he burned both the overalls and the pages of the album, out in No Man’s Land. He was afraid there would be traces of blood on the overalls.

“My father believed as I did. We knew that every door into the house was locked, and neither one of us believed that Emily was normal. All the Talbots have a queer streak in them.

“You all know what followed. My father—he was really my stepfather—was convinced that Emily had done it in a fit of insanity. What is more she had worn a glove of his, one of a pair Jim Wellington had left, and which Father had found lying about. He kept them in the housemaid’s closet on the second floor, and used them when he blackened his boots. But after the—after she had finished in Mother’s room she didn’t even try to hide it. She threw it down into our lower hall, and when I came back into the house with her after she had pretended to faint outside, I picked it up almost under the nose of a policeman.

“I hid it behind the pillows of the library couch when I fixed it for her, and later I got it out of the house. But Father saw in that glove an attempt to place the crime on him. He never spoke to Emily again after I told him about it.

“I tried to shake this conviction of his, to save a dreadful scandal. But he was certain that she had done it, and I myself have never doubted it. She herself knew that he suspected her, especially after that first night when both of us found him in the cedar room. You see, the police had found no stained clothing, and he thought perhaps she had hidden what she wore on the roof. He had been up there, anyhow, and Emily knew as well as I did why.

“The next three days were too horrible to talk about. Doctor Armstrong was keeping Emily under opiates, but Father would not even go into her room. What he thought until Sunday night was that she was definitely dangerous; not to him, but to almost anybody. And on Sunday night things reached a climax.

“He was never able to tell me, but I believe he heard me call to Emily and knew that she was going downstairs. When she left the house he must have followed her, and when she went first to the Daltons’ and got a spade—for that is what she did—it meant only one thing to him. That was that she had buried Mother’s money and then killed her.

“That meant more than insanity. It meant that it was a crime to conceal a crime, and he must have gone mad himself. He went back into the house, got his automatic, followed her to the Talbots’ and shot her. I know that, for I found his pistol on top of his dresser the next morning, and it had been fired.

“I am not guessing about this. The next night while George Talbot was asleep in our library—Monday night—I found his automatic on the floor, and I remembered something he had told me last spring at a picnic. That was that the barrels of two similar automatics can be exchanged, and that an innocent man could in this manner be charged with a crime he had never committed; since every barrel left its peculiar marks on a bullet.

“I make no defense. I knew there could be no case against George. He had no reason whatever for killing my sister. And my father was dying. He and I had been very close, just as my mother cared more for Emily than for me. I changed the barrels that night, wiped both the guns and put my father’s back where it belonged. I am sorry now, but at least he died in peace.”

That was the end of the official statement, and I shall eliminate the questions which followed it, with the exception of one, and that was asked by Herbert Dean.

“I would like to go back to that Thursday afternoon, Miss Lancaster. Just why had Bryan Dalton waited by the woodshed? We knew that he had, but he has refused to give a reason.”

“He wanted to see me.”

“Is that all?”

She hesitated, but he was relentless now. He walked forward and confronted her.

“Shall I tell you what Bryan Dalton saw, Miss Lancaster?”

“But he’s wrong!” she said wildly. “I swear that he is wrong.”

“Shall I tell you what Bryan Dalton saw that afternoon from somewhere near his garage, and what brought him over to watch your house? Or will you tell us?”

She said nothing, and he continued.

“What he thought he saw was an axe, moving slowly up the back wall of the Lancaster house. But that garage of his is some distance away, and anyhow the thing was incredible. He walked over and looked into the woodshed, and the axe was missing; but he is not a quick thinker, and he was puzzled more than anything else.

“It was not until Emily ran out shrieking that he began to understand. Even then he would not believe it. He went to the house, but the kitchen door was locked and the servants upstairs. After that I imagine he went to the ground underneath the window, and he thought he saw marks showing that the axe had lain there hidden in the planting for some time. All day and maybe part of the night. That’s true, isn’t it?”

“But he’s wrong, I tell you,” she said, more calmly. “I swear that he is wrong.”

“What was he to think?” Herbert said, still sternly. “Here was your sister, in spotless white, still in the side garden. She had not killed her mother. And when you came with those fingerprints from the album to be destroyed—! Of course he thought it was your window.”

“It was not. I swear that.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I know it was not. But you should be grateful to a very gallant gentleman, Miss Lancaster, who thinks to this moment that you had hidden that axe and later on fastened a cord to it; and that at or about three-thirty that afternoon you drew it up and through the window into your bedroom.”

“And you don’t think so?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. He simply mistook the window. The axe went into the housemaid’s closet next door.”

Somewhat later they let her go. They were of two minds about her, that group in the handsome office which as Mother would have said represented a considerable outlay of taxpayers’ money. They compromised on having her followed, but she went directly home.

There was a long argument after her departure.

“You can see how it was,” the Inspector said when it was all over. “Here was Dean; I’d watched him work and I had a good bit of confidence in him. But the D. A. and the Commissioner when I called him up were hell-bent on holding her.

“What they figured was that the affair of Holmes and the money was out. You know what I mean. Emily had hidden the money, Holmes was carrying it off and somebody else had got wise and took it from him. But this Margaret Lancaster not only knew it was gone. She knew, according to them, where it had gone to. All this story Emily had made up about a woman with a cancer probably hadn’t fooled her at all.

“You’ve got to remember this, too. Margaret’s shower was running. She could have done the thing mother-naked—if you’ll excuse me, Miss Hall—and then gone back and had a shower and been as clean as a baby. Only mistake she made, as they saw it, was that she sent away the bird cage, and that had the keys to the MacMullen house and the trunk in it. Then later on she followed Emily when she went to get them, and killed her with her father’s gun.

“Unnatural? Sure, but the whole thing looked unnatural, didn’t it? She’d changed the barrels of those guns, and it was what you might call an open question whether she did that to save him or to save herself.

“Then again, when they got Dalton back that afternoon after she had gone home Dean turned out to be right. He believed she did it, was sure it was her window that axe went into. He admitted he might be mistaken, but that’s what he thought. She was about frantic when she gave him that stuff to burn. At first he thought that was natural enough, seeing that she was so sure Emily had done it. Later on he got to thinking—about Emily’s white dress and Margaret taking a bath and so on, and he wasn’t so sure.”

I
T WAS THAT EVENING
that Lydia Talbot disappeared.

None of us at that time knew about Margaret Lancaster’s visit to the District Attorney’s office, and the afternoon was the usual afternoon on the Crescent when a normal death has taken place among us.

We called up our various florists and ordered flowers according to our tastes and means, we pressed or ordered pressed the black clothes we kept for such occasions, and from behind our immaculate window curtains we watched the cars of various old friends and city dignitaries drive up, leave cards with messages of sympathy on them, and drive away again.

Lydia Talbot had as usual taken over the duties of hostess, and stood gravely in the lower hall. To those of us who went in she gave the last details with a certain gusto, and she was talking to me while instructing the mortician, as to the moving of the parlor furniture so as to leave room for the casket.

“I understand that it was really quite peaceful at the end, Louisa. It’s very sad, but of course after all he wasn’t a young man. ‘Over there,
over there!’
she startled me by adding, ‘Put the piano there, I told you that before.’”

She darted into the parlor in her rather rusty black dress, and I do not think she even saw me when I left.

That was at five o’clock. Margaret must have been back at that time, but none of us saw her return and officially she was still prostrated in her bed, with the nurse in attendance.

Save for the discovery of the bird cage that afternoon, I can remember nothing of any consequence. Both our servants were jumpy, which was natural, and Annie’s story of the man on the third floor now included a glittering knife in his hand, although how she could have seen it in the darkness seems rather unusual. Mother fortunately had been able finally to lay the whole disturbance to hysteria, and had not missed the album; and the trunk was still undiscovered, as was the identity of the white man who had helped to get it out of the MacMullen house.

Peggy was still there, very ill after losing her child; and a careful inventory of the roomers in the MacMullen house had resulted in nothing. All of them were women with one exception, and this was the pianist at a local theater, who had been on duty all evening of the night the trunk was taken.

The discovery of the bird cage was valueless. The gimlet-eyed man and Daniels’ cart had gone with Daniels himself was back on the job that day. It was on my way back from the Lancasters’ that I encountered him. He looked white and drawn, and I stopped.

“I’m glad you are back,” I said. You haven’t been sick, I hope?”

“Yes, miss. I haven’t been myself. I see they’ve had another death next door.”

“Yes. But this at least was natural.”

“Well, maybe, miss. Although there’s such a thing as being killed by troubles. Still, as Shakespeare says: ‘what’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief.’ I meant to tell you, miss; I think there’s a bird cage belonging to Miss Emily Lancaster over on Euclid Street. I’ve seen it hanging in her window many a time. But it isn’t the same bird. It doesn’t sing any.”

I still wonder why he told me that. Was Daniels himself suspicious of the truth at that time? I think not. It sounded like and probably was purely a piece of information, passed on in case the cage was wanted again. Nevertheless I telephoned the fact to Inspector Briggs, Herbert Dean being somewhere unknown, and they got the cage that night. But it revealed nothing, nor had the family which had it any information.