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One of their children had found it lying abandoned in No Man’s Land some days before and had brought it home. The housewife had simply scrubbed it thoroughly, furnished it with a new bird, and thought no more of it.

If it had borne any fingerprints they were certainly gone.

It was Mother who brought the first news about Lydia Talbot. She had relieved her to go home for dinner at half past seven, and she had not come back when Mother returned, visibly annoyed, at a quarter to ten.

“Really,” she said, “it is too annoying of Lydia. She said positively that she would come back as soon as she had eaten her dinner and steamed a crêpe veil for Margaret.”

“I’ll go over and find out, if you like,” I offered. “She may be sick.”

But Mother, who had insisted on Annie as an escort both to and from the Lancaster house, refused to let me go.

“The nurse is there,” she said. “And it’s too late for anyone to call now anyhow.”

I was puzzled about Miss Lydia, but not alarmed. As I may have said, it is our custom in times of death to regard the body as a sort of neighborhood trust, and to separate the family from it with the same firm kindliness as that with which we separate the family from the world. Also we guard over and watch it during the daylight and evening hours, although in recent years we have ceased sitting up with it at night. Little by little this duty toward our dead has been passed to the spinsters of the Crescent, as being presumably free of domestic obligations, marital or otherwise; and for years Lydia Talbot had been the high priestess of our funeral rites.

She had enjoyed these brief hours of importance, and I was slightly uneasy after Mother had gone up to bed. I tried to get the Talbot house by telephone, but evidently someone had left a receiver off and I could not do it.

It must then have been nearly eleven when I went out onto our front porch to look across at the Talbots’, and to wonder if I had the courage to go over and see if everything was all right. To my astonishment I found George on the walk, and at first I thought he held a revolver in his hand. It turned out to be a flashlight, however, for he switched it onto my face.

“What is it, George? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. At least I hope not. But I thought I’d take a look around. You see we can’t locate Aunt Lydia. I went to the Lancasters’ just now to get her, and she hasn’t been there since dinner. I’ve been along the Crescent. She isn’t at Jim’s or the Daltons’, and your house was dark, so I knew she wasn’t there. I—well, I just thought I’d look around. The way things have been going here—!”

“When did she leave the house, George?”

“About a quarter to nine, and it’s eleven now. She hadn’t a hat or anything,” he added. “I haven’t told Mother, but—well, where could she go, like that? All she had was a small box with a veil in it. I believe she’d repaired it for Margaret Lancaster.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I saw her out myself. I suppose it’s all right. She’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself, but where could she go? She wasn’t even wearing a hat.”

“We’d better get a policeman,” I said. “And we can look around, anyhow.”

I dare say I sounded worried, for he looked at me quickly.

“You don’t really think it’s serious, do you? Great heavens, Lou, who would want to hurt her? She isn’t particularly pleasant or agreeable, but people don’t—well, they don’t kill because they don’t
like
somebody.”

It was not difficult to find an officer around the Crescent during all of this period, and so we picked one up near the gate and took him with us. He was frankly skeptical, although polite enough, when George explained to him.

“It was dark when she started,” he said, “and I wanted to go with her, but she didn’t want me, and said so. She’s been rather more crabbed than usual this last day or so, and I didn’t insist. But I waited until I couldn’t see her any more. She had no hat on and she carried the flat box with the veil under her arm.”

“She hadn’t said she might go elsewhere?”

“No. Where else could she go?”

“Well,” the officer said reasonably, “she might have gone to a movie. Lots of women go without hats these summer nights. She might have changed her mind later on. I wouldn’t get excited yet. There’s a movie house on Liberty Avenue, isn’t there?”

There was, of course, and both George and I knew that Miss Lydia often went there, But it would have been difficult to explain to the policeman that on occasions of death in the Crescent we do not go to the movies, or that Miss Lydia was the high priestess of our funeral rites and therefore far removed from such diversions.

“She didn’t go to the movies,” George said stubbornly, and let it go at that.

The three of us turned and went slowly along the street. The officer had got out his flashlight, a powerful one, and was throwing it along the grass inside the curb, and then into the shrubbery on our left; but without result until we were almost exactly halfway to the Lancasters’. Then he swooped down suddenly and picking up an object from the bushes held it out.

“This the box?” he said.

“It looks like it. What on earth—”

George took the box and stared at it. It was slightly broken at a corner of the lid, but otherwise unharmed. Inside, when he opened it, lay Margaret Lancaster’s black veil, and George’s face was as pale as his chronic sunburn would permit when he looked at it.

“I can’t go back and tell Mother,” he was saying. “It would about finish her.”

The officer himself looked grave. He wandered about over the grass, and at last he stooped and picked up something else. He brought it to us in the palm of his hand, and turned the flashlight on it.

“Don’t know what it is,” he said. “Maybe been there a long time. It was kind of trampled into the ground. Either of you ever see it before?”

We stared down at it, and then at each other. Lying there under the lamp was the butterfly head of Lydia Talbot’s hatpin. I can still remember George’s dazed expression.

“It’s hers, all right,” he said. “But listen, Lou. She went out without a hat!”

The general alarm was raised at midnight, and for once in many years the Talbot house was unlocked and unbolted, and blazing with lights. Inspector Briggs, Mr. Sullivan and two plain-clothes men had inspected it inch by inch, but they had found nothing. Lizzie and Mrs. Talbot, examining Miss Lydia’s room, while the police looked on, were certain that nothing was missing except what she had worn that night; a rusty black silk dress, a black mohair petticoat, and undergarments, and her usual black shoes and stockings.

On a stand near the window sill stood the electric iron with which she had pressed Margaret Lancaster’s veil.

Lizzie was as calm as usual; a tall thin figure of a woman, not unlike Miss Lydia herself. Mrs. Talbot, however, was profoundly shaken. She could hold nothing, not even the glass of wine George got her, and her voice was a mere echo of its usual boom.

“Her habits?” she said. “She had none, except going to the movies. As to being kidnapped for a ransom, who’s to pay it? She hadn’t a penny, and I haven’t much more. Not since this depression set in.”

“You don’t think it might be a case of loss of memory?”

“She hadn’t any memory to lose.”

“Now,” said the Inspector, “you have no reason to believe that she had any enemies, I suppose?”

“Neither enemies nor friends. She lived a life of her own, and she was as nearly negative as any human being I ever knew.”

That was as far as they got with Mrs. Talbot. They tried to tell her that such disappearances were either compulsory or voluntary, and they asked her if she knew of any reason why Miss Lydia would have run away. Her only answer was that she had taken nothing to run away with, and that she had had a good home. Why leave it?

By two o’clock that morning the search was in full cry. Both the Common and No Man’s Land had been searched without result, including all outbuildings facing on the latter, and the one or two policemen who had been on duty reported nothing suspicious. It was not until three
A.M.
that the first clue was picked up, and that proved to be the missing woman’s bag, found on Euclid Street with its beaded strap broken, and looking as though it had either broken of itself or been jerked from her arm.

It contained only a clean handkerchief, a dollar or two in money, and an old hunting case watch with which everyone on the Crescent was familiar. It made a terrific noise, and all of us could remember Miss Lydia’s bag on a table or a chair, ticking away like a grandfather’s clock.

Scarcely any of us went to bed that night. We gathered in small groups in each other’s houses; Margaret and her nurse in the Talbots’, where Ms. Talbot sat like a woman stunned and Lizzie moved inscrutably about with coffee for everybody, and Jim Wellington and the Daltons with us.

Something possessed me then to tell about the dumbwaiter incident, and I remember Bryan Dalton examining the outlets, and at four in the morning insisting on nailing them all shut again. Laura Dalton had little to say. She seemed puzzled, but she looked happier than I had seen her look for a long time. She found an opportunity to tell me that she was sorry for what she had said the other day.

“I was hysterical,” she said. “Of course it wasn’t true. And he hasn’t been out of the house tonight, Louisa. Besides, why on earth should anyone kill Lydia Talbot?”

For that was what it had come to. Not one of us but believed that Lydia Talbot was already dead, the third and possibly the fourth in our list of murders.

T
HE POLICE IN THE
meantime were working hard. One motive after another was examined and rejected. She had neither money nor enemies, and the two remaining possibilities were either loss of memory or a killing without reason. Subjected to this new test even Margaret Lancaster’s conviction, as shown in her statement, lost much of its value; and was before many hours had passed to be proved entirely mistaken as to her sister Emily’s death at least.

In the meantime the Bureau of Missing Persons had sent out its usual messages by teletype, with a careful description of Miss Lydia. It was not only local. It extended to other cities, and to the state police of nearby states. Her name was placed upon the general alarm, and men were visiting the morgue, our hospitals and even our hotels and jails. Already too by daylight that next morning, Saturday, circulars were being printed, using an old snapshot of Miss Lydia which someone happened to have.

I have one of these before me now. It reads: “Missing since nine-thirty Friday night August the twenty-sixth, Miss Lydia Spencer Talbot. Born in the United States. Age fifty-two. Height five feet eight. Weight about one hundred and thirty pounds. Gray hair, parted and worn in hard knot. Flat curls on forehead. Complexion medium fair. Gray eyes. Denture with four teeth (molars) lower jaw. No identifying marks on body. Wore black silk dress, not new, black mohair underskirt, black shoes and hose. No rings or other jewelry. No laundry or other marks on clothing.”

In addition to all this radio broadcasts had already been sent out, police boats on the river were on the lookout for a body, and the night police reporters assigned to the various station houses had abandoned their usual poker games for what promised to be another sensation. With one result that none of them had anticipated, which was the return of Helen Wellington.

It must have been ten o’clock in the morning when she telephoned to me from the same hotel downtown where I had found her before, and her voice was strained with excitement.

“Can you come down right away?” she asked. “I can’t locate Jim or Herbert Dean, and I’m blithering all over the place. I suppose it’s true?”

“Lydia Talbot has disappeared, yes.”

“Good heavens! Lydia! Listen, Lou; I called Jim early last night, and he said Margaret Lancaster thinks her father killed Emily. Is that right?”

“Margaret thinks that? You don’t mean it, Helen. You can’t.”

“No, I don’t and can’t,” she said, with something of her old manner. “She may think that, but it isn’t true. I
know
.”

I was in her room by half past ten, and found her still in traveling clothes and pacing the floor. She was lighting one cigarette after another, and under her make-up she was very white. She hardly greeted me at all.

“Don’t blame poor old Jim for this,” she said. “I swore him to secrecy, but if he had any guts—but that’s neither here nor there. We split on the thing anyhow, and now with old Lydia gone he’ll never forgive me.”

“Just what is it all about, Helen?”

She made a gesture.

“It’s just that I’m a plain damned fool,” she said. “Things looked black for Jim, and if they found
I’d
been out that night—!”

“What night?”

“Last Sunday night,” she said. And finally she told her story.

She and Jim had had a difference of some sort, and she had not gone to bed. She was nervous and angry. However that might be, at one o’clock or thereabouts—she was not sure of the time—she had gone out to the refrigerator for some soda, and from there to the rear porch. It was a hot night, and for some time she had sat there on a chair staring out over the tennis court and No Man’s Land beyond it. Everything was quiet there, but suddenly she thought she saw a match lighted near the Daltons’ garage to her left; a match or a flashlight.

It went out in a second or two, but it had interested her, and so she had left the porch and gone along the kitchen path which connects all the houses. She had just reached the end of their own shrubbery when she saw a woman coming from beside the Dalton garage. At first this woman was only a shadowy figure and she remained so until she emerged into the open. Then, by the walk and the heavy outline, Helen decided that it must be either one of our servants or—improbable as it seemed—Emily Lancaster.

Whoever it was, she was carrying something. And whatever it was she carried, it seemed to be long and awkward to manage.

Helen had followed her quietly. She was quite certain now that it was Emily, and her first horrified idea was that she was carrying an axe. But—and this was something not known before—as she rounded the curve of the walk near the Lancaster house itself she saw that the light was on on the kitchen porch, and that although it was Miss Emily, what she carried was a spade.