I REMEMBER THAT I spent the time until Mother slept again in undressing and in trying to think of a safe spot in which to hide that sickening glove.
Perhaps that seems a simple matter in a house as large as ours, but it does not take into account the Crescent type of housekeeping. For thirty-odd years, in four of our five houses, the week has been divided into certain household “days.” Thus, although we have imported certain labor-saving devices, we still wash on Monday and iron on Tuesday. We bake—we still bake our own bread—on Wednesday and Saturday, we clean our silver on Thursday, we do our marketing three times a week and do it ourselves, and on Friday we have a general cleaning, upstairs and down. Saturday is a sort of preparation day, being devoted to the preparing of elaborate food for Sunday, and to the changing of beds, the listing of Monday’s wash and a complete tidying up of house, porches and grounds.
Nothing is sacred from this system, and I myself have rather less privacy than the elephant in our city zoo. It is nothing unusual for me to find Mother seated before my bureau and putting into order the contents of its drawers, and it was in the course of such an investigation that she once found hidden there a letter from Jim Wellington, and thus ended my first and only romance.
So it was that, there waiting for Mother to go to sleep, I was wildly canvassing the house for some safe hiding place for the glove. I considered the library and dropping it behind the books there; but although we use the room the books are my father’s and so are held virtually sacred. No hand but Mother’s ever dusts them, and only that week I had heard her say that she meant to get at them again. On the third floor the storeroom was always locked, and Mother carried the key. And it was now Friday by the clock, a day which meant the lifting of all liftables and the moving of all movables in the entire house.
Never before had I realized what must be the mental condition of a criminal faced with the problem of hiding the clue to his guilt; and never before had I considered that it might be practically impossible in a house of eighteen rooms, baths, pantries and innumerable closets, to conceal an object as small as a glove. Certainly I did not believe that, having at last found a spot which seemingly answered all requirements, it would be discovered in less than twenty-four hours by anything so ironic as a mere turn in the weather!
But that is precisely what happened, for the place I finally located was over the radiator at the end of the guest wing hall.
Some years ago the Crescent had decided that our hot-water heat was hard on its furniture, and almost all of us had installed new patented radiator covers in our upper and lower halls. These covers were of metal and resembled all other covers of the sort, with one exception. The top of each one was hinged, and underneath lay a flat zinc water pan. One might examine them for days, and unless one knew the secret he would not discover that shallow pan, which was filled only when cold weather stared our furnaces.
In our house there were two in the upper hall, one underneath the front window and outside of Mother’s door; the other near the end of the guest wing, where a window faced the Daltons’. It was this one I decided to use, and it was there, at something after one o’clock in the morning, that I placed the glove.
My spirits rose at once, I remember. The storm had passed, and a cooler air was coming through the open window near at hand. To add to my relief I heard a car drive in at the gate, stop at the Wellington house and men go round the Crescent and out the gate again. That could only mean that they had brought Jim back, and I drew my first full breath of the evening when far away I heard his front door slam.
It was then that I went to the window, to discover that the Dalton house, like the Lancasters’, was lighted from top floor to basement.
It startled me, that blaze of light. The Dalton house is rather closer to ours than the Lancasters’, and as Mother has her cutting garden there, it is not obscured by trees. Ordinarily it is a dark house. The strange silent life which goes on there is not conducive to the gaiety of many lights, and never before had I seen it fully lighted.
Mrs. Dalton’s room at the front was brilliant, and also her dressing room behind it. Downstairs both drawing room and dining room were alight, and even the windows in the cellar. Nor was that all. Beyond the shrubbery at the rear there was a faint gleam as though the garage itself was lighted, although I could not see it.
At first all I saw was this blaze of light. Then I realized that someone was moving about in it, and at last that this moving figure was that of Mrs. Dalton. She appeared to be still fully dressed, and she was doing a peculiar thing. So far as I could make out, she was systematically searching her house!
She would enter a room, appear and reappear as though moving about it, end by examining the windows and the sills beyond them, and then turn out the light and go through the same process in the next room. Even from that distance that silent search of hers had something remorseless and determined about it.
She was in the dining room when I first saw her, and in Bryan Dalton’s den next. Then came a few minutes when I lost her, only to have her reappear in the basement. She was there for so long that I wondered if she had gone up again, when I saw her again at one of the windows, carefully peering out into the areaway beyond it.
To say that I was puzzled is rather to understate the situation. On a night when, shattered as to nerves and profoundly shaken as to its sense of security, the Crescent was presumably locked and bolted into its bedchambers, the most timid woman among us all was carefully and systematically making a search of her house. For what?
Odd memories wandered through my mind: Miss Lydia Talbot’s statement a year or so before that Laura Dalton was still madly in love with Bryan. Helen Wellington’s conviction that he, Bryan, had a wandering foot as well as a wandering eye, and that he was too good-looking to be let alone and too dangerous to trifle with.
“But he’s so old,” I had said to that.
“Old? At fifty-something? Don’t be the eternal ingénue, Lou. That’s not what I meant anyhow. When I say he’s dangerous I mean that she is. She’s insanely jealous of him.”
Up to that time when at last she put out the basement lights, then, I had not connected any of all this with our murder. If I had any coherent thoughts at all, they were that she was searching for something which might show that he was involved with another woman. For it was no casual search; even I could see that. She was carrying it on with too desperate an energy for that.
It was not until the light went up on the rear porch that I began to wonder, for Bryan suddenly appeared in the picture, towering over her—she barely reached to his shoulder—and to my utter amazement seemed to be protesting not by gestures but by words. Not only that, but she seemed to be making brief staccato replies. This complete reversal of all that I could remember was more than human nature could bear, and I started running back to my room for my dressing gown and slippers. I must have made some noise, for the next minute I had run full tilt into Holmes and scared him nearly to death.
“Oh, my God!” he gasped, and darting back into his room, closed and bolted the door.
Luckily Mother had not wakened, and I dragged on some things and went downstairs without further interruption.
Perhaps one should have been born and have lived along the Crescent to realize what any break in our routine means to us, or the avid curiosity which hides behind our calm assumption that each house is its family castle. Perhaps, too, I should invent here some excuse for what I meant to do, which was nothing less than to get as near to the Daltons’ as possible, and to see if the old deadlock actually had been broken; and if it had, why?
But there was more to it than that. I was remembering that neighborhood meeting downstairs only a few hours before, with Laura Dalton’s loquacity and her husband’s comparative silence. More than that, for I had happened to be looking at Mrs. Dalton when George Talbot said he had seen Bryan near the woodshed that morning, and I remembered that her eyes had narrowed and her lips tightened.
A dozen ideas were surging in my mind as I went down: reports that Mr. Dalton had been caught in the market and badly squeezed, stories that he had found consolation for the separation from his wife, pictures of him working over his car, his hands protected by old kid gloves and swearing sometimes at the top of his voice. A quick-tempered man he was, but I had thought him rather kindly. The feminine part of the Crescent had always blamed him rather less than his wife for their troubles.
And now something, something crucial, had driven him to speak to her, and to her to reply. What was it? Was she merely jealous, or was it in some way connected with the crime?
But I had no time for surmises. I had barely reached the kitchen door and let myself out onto the porch when I realized that the two of them, she in the lead and he following, had left the house and were coming quickly but quietly toward where I stood. They came through the darkness by the grapevine path, moving swiftly because of long familiarity, and so far as I know neither one spoke until they were immediately beneath me. Then he said, cautiously:
“It’s sheer madness, Laura. With all these policemen about!”
“What do I care about the police? The more the better!”
“I suppose you know what you are doing?”
“Didn’t you know what you were doing, all these months? And today?”
“For God’s sake, Laura! What do you mean?”
But she did not reply to that, and the next moment they had passed by our porch, going as nearly as I could determine toward the Lancaster house itself, and leaving me there on the porch with the solid foundations of the Crescent fairly rocking under my feet. What had driven them into speech together I had no idea, but from the cold fury in her voice and the fear in his I knew that it was something terrific, something beyond any knowledge of mine.
I had never doubted that they were on the way to the Lancaster house, now only dimly lighted. To my amazement, however, the next thing I saw was that the flash was being used in the woodshed. Mrs. Dalton was apparently examining it from roof to floor, and by going down to the end of our garden I saw that this was so.
It gave me a strange and eerie feeling, for now again they were not talking. He was standing in the open doorway, and she seemed to be moving about rapidly. Luckily for them, for she seemed beyond caution, the doorway opened in our direction and there were no windows. Also the rain had apparently driven the outside searchers within doors somewhere.
It had stopped raining by that time, but the grass and shrubbery were dripping, and I began to feel cold and uneasy. In the Lancaster house Margaret’s windows at the back, which had been dark, were suddenly lighted. Evidently she, too, could not sleep. And in the shed I heard Mr. Dalton’s voice, now cold and angry.
“Well, what have you found?”
“I know what I’m after. That’s something.”
“I think you’ve gone crazy.”
“Then what about you? Ask yourself that. And I’ll find them, don’t worry. You’re clever, Bryan, but I’m clever too. Wherever you put them I’ll find them.”
That broke his icy calm, for he went in suddenly and caught her by the shoulder.
“No, you won’t,” he said. “I’ll tell you that right now.” Then he released her and his voice softened somewhat.
“You’re a little thing to have so much hate in you,” he said. “If you’d been any sort of wife to me, Laura—”
“And whose fault was that?”
Sheer recklessness had carried them safely through all this. I know now that there was a policeman on the Lancaster back porch at the time, but as I have said the woodshed is at some distance, and is screened by shrubbery as well. Not that Mrs. Dalton cared, at that. She was in one of those cold rages where she cared nothing for consequences. This was evident when she started back with the flash still going.
I had beat a hasty retreat, but I could hear him protesting.
“For God’s sake, Laura! Do you want us both arrested?”
“They couldn’t hold me. Not for a minute.”
But she put out the light, and as they passed our porch again they were only two shadowy figures once more, silent and unhappy. I had a feeling of tragedy about them that night, for their frustrated lives and their wasted years.
It was not until I was back in my room and in my bed that the full significance of that visit and that conversation began to dawn on me. Surely Laura Dalton could not suspect her husband of that ghastly murder. What possible motive could he have had? The money? But according to the Inspector, the money was still in the chest.