OUT OF THAT INTERROGATION, of family and servants, certain statements were finally collected by the police and put into shape. Copies of these I now have, and as they illuminate the events of that day far better than I can repeat them here. I have stripped them, of course, of inessentials and repetitions, but they are correct in every other respect.
That of Emily Lancaster, as being the one who found the body, I give first.
“Mother had been restless all day. She felt the heat terribly, but an electric fan gave her neuritis, so I fanned her a good bit of the time. Except that I slipped over to the library in the morning to change that book I was reading aloud to her, I hardly left her at all. Indeed, I had not even a chance to clean my bird until Lydia Talbot arrived after lunch.
“Mrs. Talbot came in at half past two, and she relieved me of the fanning for a while. We sat and talked, but I thought that something Mrs. Talbot had said had annoyed Mother, and I was relieved when she went away. I went downstairs with her, and we met Father in the hall and they left the house together.
“I closed and locked the front door, and then went back to the kitchen porch for a glass of ice water. Jennie was there, cleaning the silver, and Ellen was beating up a cake.
“As I went up the back stairs I thought I heard the housemaid in one of the guest rooms. It was a sound of some sort. I called ‘Peggy, is that you?’ No one answered, so I looked into the guest rooms, but they were empty.
“All that took about five minutes. I then went to Margaret’s door. I knew she meant to go out and was afraid she had fallen asleep. I asked her if she would listen for Mother while I changed for the afternoon, but she said she was going to take a long shower to get cool before she dressed, and that she had just seen Mother, and she was asleep.
“I went on forward to my room and took off my dress, but just then I thought I heard Mother pounding on the floor with her stick, which is the way she often calls if she thinks I am downstairs. There is a bell over her bed, but it rings in the kitchen. I put on a dressing gown and went across, but she seemed to be asleep. I know that she—that nothing had happened then. I left the door partially open, and went back to my room.
“I know the exact time, for I looked at my clock. I like to be dressed for the afternoon by four, and it was not quite fifteen minutes before four.
“I dressed as fast as possible. My bird is a great singer, and he was making so much noise that once I opened my door and listened, for fear Mother was awake. She did not like birds much. I heard nothing, and so I finished dressing. It was almost four when I was ready.
“I went across to Mother’s room, but I did not go all the way in. I saw her and I think I screamed. Then I ran back to Margaret’s room, but I had to go all the way into the bathroom, for the water was running and she did not hear me. After that I ran down the stairs and out into the yard. I don’t know why, except that I had to get away somewhere.”
That was Emily’s story, told in fragments between attacks of hysteria, and in some ways the most fully detailed of the lot. Neither in it nor in the others, until the situation was forced, did any of the family mention the dead woman’s hoard. Partly I dare say it was pride, the fear that the newspapers would exploit the fact; partly it must have been because of their unwillingness to involve Jim Wellington. And it must be remembered that at that time the police still attached no significance whatever to the wooden chest under the bed.
Margaret’s statement, which followed Emily’s, is less exact as to time.
“This was my afternoon off. By that I mean that my sister and I take—took—alternate afternoons with Mother. Usually I go out on my free days, but today was very hot.
“I rested and read in my room until I heard Mrs. Talbot and Father leaving at half-past three. Then I remembered that Peggy, the housemaid, was having her afternoon off and that Mother had scolded her severely that morning. She was a good maid, and I did not want her leave.
“I went upstairs and spoke to her. She was crying, but at last she agreed to stay. I was there only a few minutes, but as I used the back staircase my sister may have heard me as she came up from the kitchen porch. I did not hear her call, however.
“I was running the water when she—Emily—came into my room with the news. She could hardly speak, and at first I did not hear her. Then I threw on something, took a glance into Mother’s room and after calling to the servants I ran downstairs. In the lower hall I met Eben, and the two of us ran upstairs the front way while the servants hurried up the back.
“Eben then closed the door into Mother’s room and started out to get a policeman. He was running. I have no real idea how long all this took, but at last I remembered Emily and went out to look for her. She was lying on the ground, and Lou Hall was stooping over her.
“Lou and I brought her in. Father had met Eben on the street and been told. We found him collapsed in the library, and soon after that the police came.
“The axe is one belonging to us. It was never brought into the house, and I have no idea how it got there. I know of no reason why my mother was attacked, and I trust our servants absolutely. Two of the women and Eben have been with us for many years. Peggy has been with us only a short time, but she had neither reason nor opportunity to do this thing.”
All of which sounds rather like Margaret, clear and unemotional and—even in the police notes—told without Emily’s hesitation and indirection.
Mr. Lancaster’s story to the police was much more vague. He was still profoundly shocked, but in his account he was quite clear as to the essential facts.
He had not been well for several days, and had not slept at night. He and Mrs. Lancaster had for several weeks disagreed on what he called a matter of policy, by which undoubtedly he referred to her hoarding of gold currency; but which he didn’t explain that night. In her condition he did not like to argue with her, but he had been considerably upset.
That day he had read all morning in the library. Before going in to lunch he had made his usual noon visit to his wife. Emily was out, and he found Mrs. Lancaster silent and rather fretful, and had laid it to the heat. But here he added, after a certain hesitation, that he had been under the impression when he entered the bedroom that she had hidden something from him.
Asked what it might have been, he said that he had no idea, and might even have been mistaken. He was merely trying to remember all that he could. She had not said anything to suggest that it might be true, nor had he questioned her.
At noon he had eaten a light meal, largely fruit and tea, and had then slept for some time. He had not gone upstairs at all, but being roused by Mrs. Talbot’s voice as she started down, had got his hat and left the house when she did. He had taken his usual walk, and had heard the news on the street as he returned from Eben, who was running for a policeman.
Asked as to his usual walk, he stated what we all knew, that it was his habit to go out through the Crescent gates, and to go past the hospital and toward the shopping district a half mile away. For the city had grown and apartments had appeared on our horizon, so had sprung up six or eight blocks of small shops to supply their needs. Even the Crescent, which for a long time ignored them and did its buying downtown, had at last recognized and patronized them.
His walk that day, he said, had merely taken him to the tobacconist’s shop on Liberty Avenue and back to the gates, where Eben met him. Unfortunately, and this is when the police determined to make a second and intensive search of the house, there were two things about Mr. Lancaster’s statement which set Inspector Briggs to thinking, and thinking hard.
One was that he had stopped at a small and unimportant drug store, and had there had a glass of coca-cola.
“As we happened to know,” the Inspector said later, “the drug store he mentioned had been padlocked that day for an infringement of the Volstead Act on the premises. Wherever he’d been, the old gentleman hadn’t been there. And then came this girl Peggy with her story and—well, we began to wonder. That’s all!”
For Peggy, seated uneasily on the edge of a chair in the dining room, her eyes swollen with crying, had finally admitted that she had been standing at her window overlooking the front street, had seen Mr. Lancaster go out with Mrs. Talbot; and return five minutes later.
“I don’t want them to know I said so,” she had whispered, “but that’s the truth.”
“You may be wrong about the time.”
“No, sir. I didn’t stand there more than five minutes at the most. Miss Margaret will tell you that she came up to speak to me, and that I was standing at my window then. Maybe she’ll know the time.”
“Did you tell Miss Margaret that Mr. Lancaster had come back?”
“I didn’t think of it. You see the old—Mrs. Lancaster had acted very mean to me that morning, and I was thinking about leaving. I couldn’t make up my mind. Miss Margaret came up to ask me to stay on, and I said I would.”
The Inspector had heard Emily’s story by that time, and so he asked her if she couldn’t be mistaken.
“Looking down from a third story window,” he said, “people look different, you know, Peggy.”
“I’d know that old panama of his anywhere,” she said stubbornly.
“Lots of men wear old panamas. Was there nothing else?”
“He was getting out his keys. I saw him as plain as I see you. Besides,” she added triumphantly, “anybody else but Mr. Wellington would have had to ring the doorbell, and it didn’t ring. It rings on the third floor as well as in the kitchen.”
But there is to Peggy’s credit the fact that she then set her small and pretty chin, and that she said nothing more about Jim until she was recalled later that night. That was after Emily had remembered that Jim had spoken to me in the garden; and they brought the girl in, anxious and with reddened eyes, and inquired if the man she had seen on the walk could not have been Jim Wellington.
She shook her head obstinately, but they kept at her, and at last she admitted that she had seen Jim that afternoon.
“Where? On the walk?”
“No. In the house. On the second floor.” And then seeing the Inspector’s expression, she burst into a flood of tears.
But of course she had to go on, and at last they had a fairly coherent story from her.
Shortly before four, feeling comforted by Margaret’s visit, she decided to go out after all. She did not know the precise time. She put on her hat and went down to the second floor, where in one of the guest rooms there was a better mirror. She fixed her hat there, and then went out into the hall. On her way to the back stairs, however, she heard someone coming up the front staircase and saw that it was Jim Wellington.
He was bareheaded, and he was coming up quietly, but without any particular stealth. Of one thing she was certain. He was empty-handed.
He did not see her, but passed the landing and went on up toward the main part of the house. Certainly his presence there did not surprise her.
“He always had the run of the house,” she said, rather naively.
She had not seen or heard him go out. She herself had gone on down the back stairs, and she was there with Ellen and Jennie when the alarm was raised. Not in a thousand years would she believe Mr. Wellington committed the crime. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, and she didn’t care what anybody thought.
“So there we are!” said the Inspector, summarizing the case later on. “Wellington had been in the house and slipped away, and old Mr. Lancaster had pulled a fake alibi on us! But if this girl was right, the old gentleman came back at twenty-five minutes to four, and at a quarter to four or about that Miss Emily finds her mother all right and goes to dress. At four she discovers what has happened, and not more than ten minutes after four Eben meets the old gentleman on his way in at the gates, immaculate and not in a hurry, apparently on his way home, and not more than five or ten minutes past his usual schedule!
“I don’t mind telling you that when I got home at three o’clock that morning I took a triple bromide.”