Album (45 page)

“What she could have done, if conditions were right, was obvious enough. She could have slipped down the front stairs, unlocked the front door, gone back up to where she had left the basket and taken it down to the kitchen porch. She had two witnesses there to prove that she had left the house. Then, under cover of all that shrubbery, all she had to do was to circle the house, going by the empty laundry wing, and enter it again by the front door, locking it behind her.”

It was only a possibility at first. He knew nothing of the Crescent, or of its interrelationships. There seemed no object in her killing her sister-in-law. They might have quarreled, of course. There was Emily on the stand saying she had left Lydia with her mother while she cleaned her bird’s cage. But the presence of the axe was the rock on which he almost foundered.

“Grant a quarrel or anything you like, she had carried no axe in a ten-inch basket, although we know now that she carried some other things besides food! A ball of cord, for instance, and a knife or a pair of scissors. And that axe had to be taken into the house somehow.”

By the Sunday morning after the first murder, however, he had veered to the idea that it was an inside job after all. He had got us all straightened out in his mind by that time, and he had had my story of the glove. He was still working on his own, and I have already told how I got him into the Lancaster house.

What he wanted was the second glove, or some proof that it had been destroyed. But he also wanted to examine the house itself. Already he had a fair idea—through Holmes and his experiment with the book—as to how the money had been carried out. He knew too that the Crescent was not as arrogantly at peace as the front it presented to the world, and he was turning over in his mind Mrs. Talbot and her locked house.

“Either she was crazy,” he says, “or she was afraid of someone inside the place. She didn’t lock only her windows and her outer doors. She had the inner doors locked too. And I’d watched her on the stand. She was scared almost to death. That voice of hers was—well, a shout of defiance. She knew something, or she suspected someone.”

That Sunday morning, however, he was still suspicious of Margaret Lancaster. He had not missed the significance of her shower, and he had been practically certain that the man he had seen on the roof was her stepfather. He came pretty close to knowing what he was looking for, also.

Still, back in his mind was that idea that somebody could have entered the house, locked as it was, and hidden away until the moment came; that moment which to anyone who knew the family habits was the one time in the day when the thing could be done.

“There were a number of such places,” he says. “Any room in the guest wing would have answered. But I happened to find something in the housemaid’s closet on the second floor which made me fairly jump. The key was on the inside of the door! That was absurd on the face of it. Why lock such a place at all? And especially why lock one’s self in it?”

He had spent all the rest of his time there. It had two smallish windows; one opening onto the roof of the kitchen porch, and a larger one which overlooked No Man’s Land and a flower border beneath. He opened the first one, and found the opening to the drain pipe just below it. Then he examined the closet itself.

It was clean, with no bloodstains whatever. The walls and floor were of white tile, and he switched on the light and went over them carefully. Also he examined the sponge and cleaning cloths, as well as Mr. Lancaster’s boot-box, but they suggested nothing. However, he slipped the sponge into his pocket before he left, and analysis of it later on showed faint traces of human blood.

Just before he left he looked up, and he saw tied to a water pipe a short length of heavy cord. It had been cut, as if time had been too short to untie its knots, and when he left the Lancaster house that morning he was certain, not only that Lydia Talbot had committed the crime, but that he knew how she had brought the axe into the house.

W
HAT I FIGURED WAS
that she had previously—the night before, perhaps—hidden the axe in that flower border. If it was found it might be mysterious, but nothing more. The rest was easy too. Here was Margaret in her room and Emily and Mrs. Talbot with the old lady. She had the run of the house for some time, and even if she were discovered in it nobody would have questioned it.

“But she wasn’t discovered. What she did before she went down and out the kitchen door was to drop that string of hers down the outside wall, beside the drain pipe. Then after she was outside—in case anyone was looking—she could tie the end of it to the axe, and seem only to be looking at the flowers. That’s what she did anyhow. Maybe she picked one or two as an excuse, for she had to pass the kitchen porch again to get around the other end of the house. Eben was at the end next to you. She did pass that porch again, for both the girls there saw here. They thought nothing of it, naturally.”

When, that Sunday morning, I had found the second glove, he felt that he had everything against her save actual proof. He was confident that she had locked herself in that closet, knowing the housemaid was out that day; that she had there taken off her hat and dress; that she had with infinite caution drawn up the axe, assisted by the chatter and noise below; that at the last moment she had seen Mr. Lancaster’s gloves in his shoe-box and had put them on; and that having committed her furious crime she had returned there, locked herself in and safely and systematically washed, cleaned the closet, redressed and finally escaped by way of the back stairs and the deserted porch after Bryan Dalton had gone.

Unfortunately, other things had happened, or began to happen. There was Emily’s wild flight to the Talbots, and her cry that “they” were after her. There was the undoubted fact that someone had climbed a porch pillar and tried to enter Emily’s room, and as Herbert says:

“Not by the wildest flight of my imagination could I see Lydia Talbot doing that—unless she had wings.”

And then on that Sunday night there came the shooting of Emily, and following that the mix-up about two identical makes of automatics. His theory did not fit any of all that, nor did the death of Holmes. It was a Chinese puzzle, and he began all over again, this time on Margaret. By that time he was openly working with the police, and he had seen Annie’s anonymous letter.

He could not fit either Margaret or Dalton into the picture, however. It is true that he began to suspect some outside assistance, and he knew before long that Bryan Dalton had stood by the woodshed that afternoon, and had burned his overalls that night and something else as well. But why should Margaret have used the closet when her own room offered a safer refuge? Or why should she have brought the axe in by that method when she could have carried it in at night, any night?

What deceived him too for a time was Lydia Talbot’s own demeanor. She was moving much as usual around her narrow orbit; neither overacting nor underacting her part.

The reason for Emily being out that Sunday night also worried him. Every inch of No Man’s Land had been gone over, but neither the police nor he had missed the possible significance of that spade. It had been his theory that Emily had secreted the money elsewhere, possibly in a rented room not far away. But no keys to such a room had been found, nor was there any trace in the house of the book which she had almost certainly used as a receptacle for it.

It was my own story of the lost bird cage which gave him his first clue to the whereabouts of the keys, and as we know the police themselves prevented his finding them in time. “If I’d got Talbot that night I’d have had the story,” he adds.

Then came the attack on me, apparently purposeless, and shortly after that the MacMullen woman’s story and the death of Holmes. Also Herbert had made that night examination of Mrs. Lancaster’s room, and was convinced that she had been out of bed when at least the first blow was struck. In that case she might well have known that the money was gone and been killed to gain time until it could be placed somewhere in safety.

The discovery of Emily’s hidden room did only one thing to help solve the murder. A photographic enlargement of the blotter found there enabled Herbert to read on it the address of the house behind the library, and to enable him to examine the family history for a possible connection with the man Daniels.

“The only real brain-storm I had was right there,” he says. “There could be no logical connection between the two of them, on the facts. But she had written to him, and more than once. It was then that this story Jim had told about John Talbot popped into my mind. I got the details from Jim, but it was your Aunt Caroline, my darling, who remembered the date and the name under which he had been convicted. Which was
not
Daniels, by the way. After that I sent for old files of the newspapers where it had happened, and—”

“Aunt Caroline! Whatever made you go to her?”

“Because, O light of my life, your mother would not talk! Aunt Caroline, thank God, did not live on the Crescent.”

It was then that, being fairly sure of his ground, he went to see Daniels, or Talbot rather. But in the interval Lydia had disappeared, and Talbot’s room was empty. And Talbot was Lydia’s brother. Herbert found himself back once more to Lydia as the killer; although there was a chance that Talbot himself was guilty. If she could admit herself to the Lancaster house, she could have admitted him also.

Then came Lydia’s disappearance. Herbert had never for a moment believed that Lydia had been killed. To him it was a plain case of escape, and escape with sufficient money to last her the rest of her life. But how had she escaped? He says:

“There was that old bead bag of hers, found over on Euclid Street; and there was that damned butterfly from her hatpin. Why a hatpin if she wore no hat? I didn’t believe she left without a hat. She would be too conspicuous. I suspected that she had a flat hat of some sort in that box along with the veil, and maybe a transformation too. And on Saturday morning I asked Lizzie Cromwell to see if all of Mrs. Talbot’s transformations were in the house. They were not. One was missing, and Lizzie knew as well as I did what that meant.

“She told Mrs. Talbot and wanted the police notified. But you know your Crescent! She absolutely refused, and so that afternoon Lizzie simply packed her valise, put George’s automatic into it, and went after Lydia herself.”

No one will ever know, I dare say, how Lizzie knew about that house at Hollytree. But know she did, poor creature; just as she knew from Amanda on the Monday morning before that someone had washed clothing in the laundry the night before.

And she found Lydia in the house when she got there. She knew her danger, and she followed Lydia’s flight to that upper bathroom with George’s automatic in her hand. When the bathroom door would not lock things must have looked quite simple to her. She walked in, and Lydia probably hit her at once with a chair.

However that may be, the one thing we do know is that in some such manner Lydia got the automatic from her and shot her dead. And that when her brother came back from burying the money that is what he found.

“What could he do,” Herbert says, “except to give her a chance to escape? He helped her with the undressing, and to put her own clothing on the body. And it was he who took the drawers out of the trunk. Right there, however, I got my clue.

“For you see, my dear, that trunk, once the drawers were out, was large enough to hold the body. There was no real necessity for—well, for amputating that head. The only real reason I could see for such an act was to conceal the identity of the dead woman. The trunk was certain to be found, but with Lydia Talbot apparently inside of it she was safe. I tried to tell Briggs that, but he wouldn’t even listen.

“The rest is easy. While they were looking for a black-haired Lizzie, I was looking for Lydia Talbot, gray-headed and flat-voiced. But I couldn’t find her, and so I sat down and tried to think what I would do if I were Lydia Talbot, waiting to make my escape when the time came and with leisure now to worry about any clues lying around.

“It seemed to me that the album was still the danger point, if as Lydia believed my fingerprints were smeared all over it. Suppose on her disappearance her prints had been found in her room at the Talbot house, and then some day—long after she had made her escape—someone opened that album? Can’t you see it? And not only that, but let them be found and identified, and that desperate expedient of the body in the trunk would fail of its object. Let her once be identified as the killer, and she saw the body exhumed and a world-wide search made for her.”

So he believed that she would, sooner or later, make her third attempt to get at the album. But not even Herbert until the last few hours suspected her of the audacious method she had used, both to get it and to hide herself from the police. For what she had done on that Sunday night was to slip back inside the Crescent itself, enter by a basement door to which she had hidden the key, confront her sister-in-law and tell her the truth.

She knew the Crescent. Best of all, she knew her sister-in-law: her horror of scandal, and the fact that she had already learned from Lizzie Cromwell that Lydia was guilty. She went to Mrs. Talbot, and demanded sanctuary!

From that night until the night of her capture she had been hidden in the Talbot house, in that bedroom of hers which had been locked after her departure. Not even George suspected, or the servants. What her thoughts were during those long hours no one can know. She must have seen again and again the horror on her brother’s face when, looking up from that awful bathtub, she had said:

“I had to do it, John. She knew.”

“Knew what, for God’s sake?”

Some things, however, we do know about her; for Mrs. Talbot’s statement to the police says that during all the time she was hidden in the house she was obsessed by only one thing.

“She neither ate nor slept,” she said. “When I went with food at night she would be sitting by a window in the dark, and all she would talk about was the album.