MOTHER HAD NOTIFIED HOLMES that he was to sleep in the house that night, on the general principle I suppose that having had one murder we might expect any number of them; which was not so absurd after all as it seemed that night.
But Holmes as a protection did seem absurd; a scared little rabbit of a man, he trailed at our heels as we locked up that night, careful not to get too far away from one or the other of us. It was from Holmes that I first heard the theory of a homicidal maniac.
“I don’t mind saying, miss,” he confided to me, “that I’m just as glad to be in here tonight. Somebody around here’s gone crazy, and that’s the truth.”
“It would have to be a lunatic who knows all about us, Holmes.”
“Well, that’s not so hard to do, miss, with everybody living by the clock, as you may say.”
“Except you, Holmes!”
He grinned at that. Mother still insists that the servants be in at ten o’clock at night; but still Holmes has an easy and unobserved exit by the path across No Man’s Land, and I knew perfectly well that there were times when he not only disobeyed the rule, but did not come back at all.
But I think now that Holmes tried to tell me something that night, that his following me was not without reason. Later on he must have changed his mind, but I often wonder what would have happened had he followed that impulse. We would not in all probability have had our second murder, for one thing. Also it might have brought into the open the fact that all our servants knew or guessed a great deal more than any of us.
As I have indicated, however, the Crescent keeps its domestics in their places, the result being a sort of tacit cabal among them; the backs of our houses, so to speak, against the fronts. And Holmes had no chance that night to speak. Mother returned before he had decided, and having had the best linen sheets ceremoniously removed from the guest room next to hers, installed Holmes there with instructions not to snore, and to rap on her door if he heard anything suspicious during the night.
Poor Holmes! Unscrupulous he might have been, and was, but I always had a sneaking fondness for the little man
Incredible as it seems, it was only half past ten when I finally got to my room, leaving Mother locked and bolted inside hers. It had been only six and a half hours since I had seen Miss Emily run shrieking out of that door and collapse on the grass, but it had been innumerable years emotionally for me.
Not only the murder. Not only fear for Jim Wellington, possibly even then under arrest. Alarmed as I was for him, even I knew that a man could not be sent to the electric chair because he had stumbled on an old woman dead in her bed. What also worried me was a sort of terror that I still cared for him. Perhaps it was only sheer pity for his danger, and because I had seen him alone in that empty disordered house, with his servants gone because Helen had spent their money on the exotic clothes, the perfumes and whatnot which seemed more important to her than he ever was.
I knew as well as if I had seen her that she was out that night at some club or roadhouse or hotel roof, dancing, and I felt that I hated her for it.
This is not a love story, however, and perhaps here I should attempt to tell what the police had discovered up to half past ten o’clock that night, and to outline the Lancaster house itself for better understanding. The first I learned a bit at a time over the next two weeks, but the house I knew as well as I knew our own.
Indeed, for all practical purposes the two houses were the same. The same builder had constructed them fifty-odd years ago, at the time when elaborate scroll and fret-saw work decorated most pretentious country houses; and later on the same architect had added what we called our guest wings, removed his predecessor’s adornments and given the dignity of both white paint and plain pillared porches.
The Lancaster house, then, is broad and comparatively shallow, presenting its long dimension to the Crescent. On the lower floor a wide hallway runs from front to back of the main body of the house; from this hall the front door opens onto the porch, shaded with vines, while the rear door opens on what was the old carriage sweep in front of the long-gone stables, and is now a vegetable garden with the woodshed beyond and shielded from the house by heavy shrubbery. As the Lancasters kept no car, there was no garage.
The four main living rooms of the family open from this hall on the first floor, while a narrower hall runs the length of the floor, one end opening by a door onto the lawn toward our house, and the other connecting by a door with the service wing. The staircase rises, not from the main hall but from this transverse one. Under this staircase is the lavatory of which Jim had spoken.
Thus, entering by the porch and the front door, there is the wide hall from front to back, bisected by the narrower transverse one. The parlor—a word we still use—lies on the right, while Mr. Lancaster’s library is on the left. Then comes the transverse hall, with the staircase going up on the left, and an extension, rather narrower, leading to the side entrance to the right. Behind this is the morning room, done in chintz, where Margaret keeps her accounts and writes her letters, and across the main hall the dining room, the latter to the left and connecting through the pantry and underneath the back staircase with the kitchen beyond.
A servants’ dining room and closets to the front of the house, the kitchen, pantry, kitchen porch and laundry comprise the service wing and connect through a door with the body of the house; while a rear staircase, rather awkwardly placed to open onto the kitchen porch, and thus separating the pantry from the kitchen, leads to what we call the guest wing on the second floor, and then continues to the servants’ bedrooms on the third.
This rear staircase, playing a certain strategic part in our first crime, opens on the second floor not far beyond the first landing of the main staircase; for the second floor wing is on a lower level than the body of the house. One who ascends the front stairs may thus look through an archway along the guest wing passage, and then turn and go on up the short flight of six steps to the hall and four large bedrooms which are—or were—occupied by the family.
All these rooms and passages are large, with high corniced ceilings, and the effect is one of great dignity and space.
Practically the same arrangement holds upstairs; that is, the four main sleeping rooms open on the broad hall, while the guest wing, with its lower ceilings, contains two guest rooms to the front—almost never used—with a connecting bath between them, and to the rear a sewing room, a linen closet, a housemaid’s closet, and reached by a narrow hallway, the entrance to the back staircase.
The servants sleep on the third floor.
Of the four main sleeping rooms, Mrs. Lancaster occupied the large corner one in the front of the house; this being somewhat noisier and more exposed to the sun than the others, but being by all tradition of the Crescent the room belonging to the mistress of the house. Through a bathroom it connected with her husband’s room behind, this space with certain closets corresponding to the side hall below.
Emily’s room lay directly across the hall from it; also a front room, she occupied it because with both doors open she could hear her mother if—or when—she needed her at night. Behind this room, with the upper part of the staircase-well between them, lay Margaret’s room, which was over the dining room and at the rear of the house.
There was no staircase to the top floor in the main part of the house, the only access to it being by the one in the guest wing.
What puzzled the police from the start was not the layout of the house, but the seeming impossibility of any access to it. Always carefully locked, with the hoarding by Mrs. Lancaster extra precautions had been taken. Extra locks and in some cases bolts also had been placed on all outside doors, and the screen doors and windows were provided with locks. During Mr. Lancaster’s afternoon walks the screen on the front door was left unlatched so he could admit himself with his key to the main door, but the inside wooden door was carefully locked.
All these doors were found fastened when they arrived, with the single exception of’ the side door which Emily herself had opened when she ran outside. These included the front and back hall doors, the side entrance, the one on the kitchen porch and another from the laundry into a drying yard. The door to the basement was padlocked, and had remained so since the furnace had been discontinued in the spring.
When the police arrived that afternoon, therefore, certain things became obvious, outside of the bedroom itself. One was that while there were innumerable doors and windows giving access to the house, none of them had apparently been used. Another was that the kitchen porch, the most vulnerable spot since the women servants were constantly using it, had been occupied ever since the luncheon hour: Ellen resting and later bearing up a cake, and Jennie the waitress polishing her silver at the table there.
With the family shut in the library and the servants huddled in their own dining room, the detective named Sullivan had at once made an intensive survey of the lower floor, including doors and windows. He found nothing, and at last went back to the death chamber itself.
“House is like a fortress,” he reported. “One thing’s sure; nobody got in or out of it unless someone inside here helped him to do it.”
But he found the Inspector at a front window, gazing curiously at the porch roof outside.
“Looks like he got in here,” he said. “Something’s overturned that flower pot. And look at this screen!”
Sullivan looked and grunted. Margaret Lancaster always kept a row of flower pots on her mother’s window sill. Now one of them had slid off and overturned on the porch roof, and the screen itself was raised about four inches.
“Might ask one of the daughters if this screen was like this earlier in the day,” the Inspector said.
Sullivan went down to the library, and came back to say that the screen had not been opened, and that Mrs. Lancaster had had a horror of house-flies; that she would have noticed it at once.
The medical examiner had finished at the bed by that time, and the fingerprint men were at work; and not finding anything, at that. The medical examiner went to the window and, still wearing his rubber gloves, tried to raise the screen from the top. But it would not move an inch and he gave it up.
“Nobody got out there,” he said. “Might have tried it, however, and then gave it up.”
They tried the other screen onto the porch roof, but it too stuck tight in its frame. It was not until Sullivan had crawled out the front hall window that they reached the roof at all, and that window he had found closed and locked. The three men were puzzled. Then Sullivan stooped suddenly and pointed to a small smear on the wooden base of the first screen.
“Looks like blood here,” he said.
He straightened up and looked about him, then he creaked his way across the tin roof. There, lying wilted but fairly fresh in the hot sun he picked up two or three bits of newly cut grass. Just such grass indeed as I had watched cascading from the blades of Eben’s lawn mower.
“What’s that?” said the Inspector.
“Grass. How’d it get here? There’s no wind.”
“Birds, maybe.”
None of them were satisfied, however. They went across into Emily’s room, where her bird was still singing in the sunlight by a front window, and tried her screens. They too were locked, but they opened fairly easily.
“Anyhow that’s out,” said the Inspector. “She was in here herself, dressing, when it happened.”
“So she says,” said Sullivan drily, and the two men exchanged glances and went back across the hall.
Up to that time, oddly enough, they had not found the weapon. The medical examiner had suggested a hatchet, but there was none in sight. Then one of the fingerprint men happened to glance up, and he saw a stain on the tester top of the bed. Somebody got a chair, and being tall he was able to reach up with a clean towel and bring down the axe.
“It made me kind of sick,” said the Inspector later. “I’m used to blood and all that, but an axe! And that little old woman not weighing a hundred pounds! It—well, it just about got me.”
The discovery of the axe, while gratifying, was not particularly productive, however. It was a moderately heavy wood axe, with the usual long handle, but it bore only what looked like old and badly smeared fingerprints. At the extreme end there were no prints whatever,
“Either wore gloves or wiped it pretty carefully,” was the comment of the fingerprint man, after a look at it.
None of them knew then, of course, that it belonged in the Lancaster woodshed, and practically all of them except Sullivan had veered to the idea of a homicidal maniac. The brutality of the crime, its apparent lack of motive, and as the Inspector said later, the utter recklessness of the entire business looked like that.
“You’ve got to get your lunatic into the house,” was Sullivan’s comment. “He hadn’t wings, that’s sure.”
They began to study the room once more. The chest under the bed had at that time no significance for them, and the room was not particularly disturbed. Mrs. Lancaster’s bed stood with its head against the wall toward her husband’s room, and she had been found lying on the side toward the door into the hall. On one side of the bed was the entrance to the bathroom, which the police had found shut, and on the other a closet door, also closed. Beyond the closet door in the corner was a small chest of drawers, and one of these drawers was partly open, although its contents, mainly the dead woman’s nightdress and bed jackets, were undisturbed.
There had apparently been no struggle, but that part of the room was a shambles. Not content with the first blow, probably fatal, five or six had been struck. In other words, as the Inspector said later, either some furious anger or pure mania lay behind the attack; or possibly fear, he added as an afterthought.
And, to quote him again:
“Well, there we were,” he said. “We had some clues, as you might call them. We’d sliced that sliver with the blood off the window screen, and Sullivan was taking care of those bits of grass. But there was nothing on the axe or anywhere else. Also the house was shut, and shut tight. We didn’t know about the hoarding then, but those lower floor windows and screens had new catches on them, and everybody in the house swore—and they were right at that—that every door had been locked and kept locked!
“Take the outside of the house, too. Here was the gardener. Nobody got past him, as we know, and I had my doubts about anybody except a professional strong man being able to climb one of those porch pillars with that axe, as you may say, in his teeth. Even the ground outside didn’t help us any. Of course the earth was baked hard, but take a house like that with grass right up to the building itself, and there’s mighty little chance of a print anyhow.
“Then there’s another thing. I can understand that nobody heard anything. It’s likely they couldn’t, with that canary wound up tight and going hard. But it’s not credible that whoever did that thing wasn’t covered with blood from head to foot, and yet beyond a mark or two we spotted on that red hall carpet, probably from the gardener’s shoes, there wasn’t a sign of blood outside that room.
“For those wounds had bled! Especially the one in the neck. They bled and bled fast. Our medical examiner said that it would be practically impossible to strike those five blows and then cover the poor woman as she was covered, without the killer showing something. And maybe a good bit. You see she’d been arranged. In a way, that is; the body was straight in the bed and a sheet drawn up part way. And the mere matter of getting that key meant stains, and plenty of them.”
The key had puzzled them, and Miss Emily’s frantic search for it. No one explained it to them, and still of course they knew nothing of the gold.
“We were pretty much at sea about that time,” he acknowledged. “Either it was an inside or an outside job, and there were arguments against either or both! It looked like one of those motiveless crazy crimes which drive the Department wild,” he added. “The least to go on and the most showy from the press point of view! You could guess a crazy man with a pair of wings, and you could say that a bird went crazy with the heat and carried three blades of grass up onto that tin roof. But short of that where were we? And nobody, axe or no axe, had climbed those porch pillars. We caught a camera man shinning up a porch column that night to get a picture, and the marks he left were nobody’s business!
“That’s the outside end of it. Then take the inside. Take the matter of time as we figured it out that day,” he said. “It was four o’clock when Miss Emily Lancaster ran out that side door and fainted on the grass. It was three-thirty when Mrs. Talbot left and the old lady turned over to take her nap. How much time had anybody in that house had to clean up a mess and get rid of a lot of bloody clothes? Whoever it was hadn’t burned them and they couldn’t hide them. We didn’t merely examine that furnace; one of our operatives crawled inside it, and we had the devil of a time getting him out!”
And this, so far as the police were concerned, was the situation up to six o’clock that night when, Margaret being the calmest of the lot, they showed her the axe. She went white and sick, but she identified it at once as belonging to the household.
Normally it hung, from May until November, on two nails in the woodshed at the back of the lot; a woodshed which was purely a shed, having a door which usually stood wide open from one year’s end to the other, but which Eben had noticed that day was closed. Investigation inside the shed, however, revealed nothing to show when it had been entered. The nails were there, the axe gone. Nothing else had been disturbed. The narrow shelf where Miss Margaret potted her plants for the porch roof and for the house in winter showed nothing save the usual crocks and a heap of loose leaf mold.
There was no sign of blood, nor of any stained clothing, anywhere in the shed.
It was the discovery of the ownership of the axe that finally convinced the police that the crime had been an inside one. But nobody mentioned the gold, or intimated that it was in the house until approximately ten o’clock that night. Then Emily Lancaster suddenly broke down under their questions and admitted that Jim Wellington had been near her when she recovered from her fainting attack in the garden.
With that Peggy was recalled and broke down, and, as the Inspector would have said, the fat was in the fire.