BEFORE I LEFT I inquired about Emily, and she gave me a quick hard glance.
“She’s all right,” she said. “Doctor Armstrong gave her a hypodermic last night, but I don’t think she slept much. It only dazed her.”
Emily was not asleep. As I went out I heard her voice in the upper hall querulously demanding some paste, and Peggy replying that there was none in the house.
“I’ll get you some, Miss Emily,” I called. She did not hear me, however, and so I started up the stairs. The men were still in the library at that time, and I recognized the voice of Mr. Lewis, who has been the attorney for most of the Crescent ever since I can remember. As I mounted I could hear Emily’s canary, singing gaily, and in the upper hall Peggy was using a carpet sweeper. It might have been any house in the Crescent on a sunny August morning, had it not been for a policeman in uniform, eyeing Peggy with admiration from his position outside Mrs. Lancaster’s bedroom door.
“Where is Miss Emily, Peggy?” I asked.
She glanced at the other.
“She’s in there, miss. There was a leak in the night, and they let her go in.”
I saw then that the door into the death chamber was open, and I went to it and glanced in.
The big bed had been stripped of its sheets and mattress, but apparently nothing else had been touched, except that the chest had been drawn out from under the bed and now rested on two chairs in the center of the room.
The leak was at once evident. The rain had seemingly come in from the third floor by the way of the roof, for the heavy paper was soaked and loose from ceiling to floor just beside the big bed. There was a pan on the floor to catch the water, and stretching over this Emily Lancaster was carefully patting the paper back into place. She had not heard me, for she did not turn until I spoke to the policeman.
“May I go in?”
“No, miss. Sorry, but it’s orders.”
Then Emily turned, and I was horrified by the change in her. Her face was simply raddled. Not only that; usually the perfection of neatness, she looked as though she had slept in her clothes. She still wore yesterday afternoon’s white dress, but it was incredibly wrinkled. When she came toward me she moved with the tottering gait of a very old woman.
“I’m afraid the paper is spoiled,” she said, as though that was the most vital matter in the world. “I’ve spoken to Father ever since Ellen reported the leak upstairs, and now it has come all the way through.”
She held out her hand to me, seemed to forget why, and turned back to look again at the paper.
“Even when it dries it will leave a stain,” she said. “It did it once before, but not so much. I fastened it back with thumb tacks, but now I’d like to glue it.”
It was rather dreadful, that escape of hers from reality to anything so unimportant. And she would not stop. She sent me down to Margaret to see if she had any paste, and Margaret gave it to me grimly.
“Still at it, is she? She’s been carrying on about it since seven this morning.”
“I suppose it gives her something to do.”
“There’s plenty to do, if she’d pull herself together. Tell her not to use that paste while the paper’s wet, and get her to bed if you can, Louisa.”
I did not manage all that, but I did coax her to bathe and lie down. She kept up an incessant rattle of empty talk all the time I was with her, and what with that and the singing of the bird I felt as though I were on the edge of hysteria myself. It was fortunate for my nerves that Doctor Armstrong came in just then, and seemed to grasp the situation without words from me.
“Now see here, Emily,” he said sternly. “You stop talking and take this medicine. I told you to take it last night. After that Louisa here will draw your shades and settle you. And get rid of that damned bird, Lou.”
“I’m used to him,” Emily protested.
“I could get used to a riveting machine,” the doctor retorted, “but I don’t intend to. Out he goes.”
He handed the cage to me and I carried it into the back wing of the house and left it in one of the guest rooms. It seemed the obvious thing to do at the time, but I still have moments when I waken and think of the cheerful little creature, and that by not looking at its seed and water cup I signed its death warrant that day. Perhaps another death warrant too, but that does not bear thinking about.
When I came back the doctor met me in the hall and asked me to stay for a while.
“Margaret is arranging for the funeral,” he said, “and all of them have got the inquest to go through tomorrow morning. If you’ll be about in case the old gentleman needs anything it will help.”
I was astonished, when I went back into Emily’s room, to find that she was already asleep. Evidently Margaret had been right, and she had not. slept much during the night.
That left the upper hall to the policeman and myself. Peggy having disappeared, he had taken a morning paper from his pocket, and sitting on the front window sill, was doing a crossword puzzle. I was about to get a chair from Margaret’s room to place outside Mr. Lancaster’s door when I heard the men below leave the library and start up the stairs. The Inspector came first, followed by Sullivan, the detective; then Mr. Lewis, who nodded to me, and a strange dark man carrying a shabby valise.
They were very quiet. They filed along and into Mrs. Lancaster’s room, and it was Inspector Briggs who spoke: “That’s the box, Johnny.”
When I tiptoed forward they were gathered about it, and no one noticed me at all. The dark man, Johnny, produced a bunch of keys, tried them in turn, selected one and filed at it, and then in a businesslike manner stepped back and said:
“That does it. All right, chief.”
I could not see into the box, but I could see the Inspector’s face, and I am certain he was disappointed.
“All here, apparently,” he said. “Is there anybody about to show this to?”
“I represent the family,” Mr. Lewis said rather pompously.
“Ever see this before? Know how much is in it?”
“No, but—”
“Get somebody, Sullivan.”
I moved away from the door just in time, and a few minutes later the detective returned with Margaret. She gave a look into the chest, and her expression changed from one of apprehension to relief.
“It’s there, then,” she said. “Well, all I can say is, thank God.”
The Inspector eyed her quickly.
“Why?”
“Because now we know,” she said. “There was no motive. Someone got into the house, that’s all.”
But Sullivan had bent slightly and was prodding something with a finger.
“Any objection to opening one of these bags, chief?” he asked.
Margaret answered, instead.
“Not unless my father is present,” she said, “and I don’t want to disturb him just now.”
I saw Sullivan and the Inspector exchange a glance, but nothing more was said about opening anything. Instead the Inspector asked her about the method used when the money was put into the chest.
“It was very simple,” she said. “We all disapproved, of course, but sometimes one or the other of us would be in the room. Jim Wellington got the gold for Mother, and currency when gold was scarce. She had accounts in different banks, and most of them would give only a little gold at a time. He brought it out in these bags, and Mother would count it out on the bed.
“After that she would put the gold back into the sack, and twist the wire around the neck of the sack. Or—when it was bank notes—into one of those brown envelopes. After that, whichever it was, Jim would put it into chest.”
“How did he do that?”
“Well, at first he would put the box on two chairs, as it is now. But it got pretty hard. After that he simply dragged it out from under the bed. Mother would give him the key, and he would raise the lid and place the money inside.”
“You don’t know how much there is, I suppose?”
“Not exactly. Jim said once that five thousand dollars weighed over eighteen pounds, and that he didn’t like carrying so much at once anyhow. Something might happen to it. Then the banks objected, too. He hated the whole business. He brought less at a time after that. He’s the only one who would know exactly, if he kept a record; as I’m sure he did. I imagine she had between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars, but that is only a guess.”
Sullivan had been doing some figuring on an old envelope. Now he picked up one of the handles of the chest and lifted it. Inspector Briggs watched him, but said nothing.
“Sure is heavy,” was Sullivan’s only comment.
“Just one thing more,” Margaret said. “I’m sure Mr. Lewis will agree with me, and I know the family will. I’d be glad if that money went back to the banks, and now; today. Under police protection. It can all go to the First National and be counted there.”
Then she went out, followed very shortly by Johnny with his bag. The others remained for some time, having closed the door on me, and so again it was not until the afternoon papers came out that the Crescent as a whole learned that there was no gold to go back to any bank; that practically all the currency was gone, that most of the brown envelopes with their tapes contained merely scraps of the local newspapers, and that the canvas bags had been looted of their gold and carefully filled with lead weights.
Just such lead weights, indeed, as Miss Mamie uses to hold down the none too modern dresses she makes for most of us, and which all of us buy to weight the bottoms of flower vases, and plant crocks, so that they will not upset in a wind.
But I knew nothing of that that morning. I went back home convinced that everything was all right, and that there was no need of the search George Talbot had suggested in No Man’s Land. Which was as well, for Mother with a sick headache is rather difficult and I spent the remainder of the morning putting iced cloths on her head—we do not approve of rubber ice caps—and in raising and lowering the window shades.
At two o’clock Doctor Armstrong, who is the Crescent doctor as Mr. Lewis is its attorney, came in and I sent him up to see her. Before he went he followed me into the library, and I saw that he looked anxious and as though he too had not slept much.
“It’s a bad business, Lou,” he said. “Any way you look at it. Matter of fact, this whole Crescent is bad business.”
“I don’t understand, I’m afraid.”
“It’s not hard to understand,” he said testily “It’s neurotic; it’s almost psychopathic. That’s what the matter is. Outside of yourself and the Wellingtons—and even then Helen Wellington is not all she might be—there is hardly a normal individual in the lot of you. By circumstance or birth or exclusion of the world or God knows what, this Crescent has become a fine neuro-psychiatric institute!”
“We are a little cut off,” I agreed.
“Cut off! Look at the Talbot woman, with her mania, no less, for locking doors! Look at Lydia, suppressed within an inch of her life! Look at Laura Dalton! Look at your own mother. Is it normal for a woman to wear deep mourning and shut out the world because of the death twenty years ago of a man—of her husband? Unless there’s remorse in it? About fifty per cent of these crêpe-draped women are filled either with remorse or self-dramatization!”
Then he realized what he had said and apologized rather lamely.
“Your mother is different,” he added. “With her it is escape. People and the world generally rather bore her, so she escapes. But take the Lancasters. Margaret has apparently managed, with the aid of an outside life, to keep fairly normal. Emily has been on the verge of a nervous breakdown for a year or two. Even Mr. Lancaster has felt the strain of the last two years. Now on top of all that this comes, and—well, I’m uneasy, Lou. Something or somebody over there is going to blow up. I’ve been in and out of this Crescent for ten years, and it’s—well, I’ve said what it is!”
He was a youngish man, with a thin tired face and a habit of drumming nervously on his professional satchel while he talked.
“What do you mean by blow up, doctor?” I asked.
“How do I know? Yell, scream, go crazy, escape! Take your choice, Lou, but keep normal yourself.”
He got up then, and prepared to see Mother. But he turned back at the door.
“You found Mr. Lancaster in the library, didn’t you? Well, what was your idea of the old gentleman’s reception of the news? How did he take it?”
“He was shocked, of course. He said very little, but he looked faint. He asked Emily if it was she who had found the body, and later on he asked if anyone had looked under the bed.”
“Who was there when he asked that?”
“Both the sisters.”
“Not too shocked, then, to think of the money! Well, what about the two women? How did they react?”
“Emily was hysterical. Margaret was calm. I think she was angry with Emily for acting as she did. That’s really all I noticed.”
“In other words, they each conformed to the pattern you’d have expected.”
“I suppose so. I was pretty well excited myself.”
When some time later I let him out he said rather whimsically that he had given Mother a sedative, and that so far he had doped practically the entire Crescent, beginning with Lydia Talbot; and that the only reason he had omitted Helen Wellington was because she was not there.
“Although I’ve got an idea that she ought to be,” he said. “This is no time for the police to know that Jim’s wife has deserted him. They may not understand that little habit of hers!”
Which explains in part what I did later that afternoon, with Mother safely asleep in her bed and the usual Friday turning out and cleaning being done in a sort of domestic whisper.
What I did was nothing less than to call on Helen Wellington, and to beg her to come home.
I had meant to go in, calm and collected, and merely tell her the situation, but circumstances changed all that. On my way downtown in a taxi I heard the newsboys calling an extra and bought one. That was how I learned that the money was gone, and I remember leaning back in that dirty cab, strewn with cigarette butts and ashes, and feeling suddenly faint again and as though I needed air.
I had pulled myself together somewhat when I reached Helen’s hotel, but I must have looked rather queer when I went in. And I knew there was no use appealing to either her pity or her pride the moment I had entered that untidy little suite strewn with her belongings, and where she met me in a gaudy pair of backless and sleeveless pajamas, a cigarette in her hand and a cool smile on her face.
“Come in, Lou,” she said. “Wasn’t it just my luck to leave the Crescent when it was about to provide some real excitement? I wouldn’t have missed it on a bet.”
“Well,” I said, “it isn’t too late. Helen, Jim’s there alone, and he certainly needs you.”
“Did he send you?” she asked sharply.
“No. But the servants have gone, and the way things are—”
She laughed a little, not too pleasantly.
“Gone, have they? Well, they were a poor lot anyhow,” she said. “Always wanting money, the wretches! So Jim’s there alone, and you think I ought to go back to make his bed and cook for him!”
“I think he needs moral support, Helen.”
“Ask Jim if he would expect moral support from me! I’d like to see his face.”
“There’s another reason, too,” I said soberly. “It doesn’t look well just now.”
“Yes, the Crescent would think of that!”
“Not to the Crescent. To the police.”
But she waved that off with a gesture.
“They’ve been here already. They know I don’t believe Jim did it. He had too much common sense. It was his common sense that separated us, by the way; always asking me to be sensible and taking the fun out of life. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m not going back just to save Jim’s face, and that’s flat.”
“You mean never?”
“Well, never’s a long time. Don’t be too hopeful! But I’m very comfortable here.”
“Listen, Helen,” I said. “Probably Jim would want to kill me if he knew I’d been here, but I must tell you how things are. Then maybe you’ll reconsider.”
I did tell her, from the stains on his clothes to the money in the chest. It was not until I reached the money, however, that she really sat up and became intent.
“And to think he never told me! How much was there?”
“I don’t know. Between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars, they say.”
Her reaction to that was typical. She simply lay back on her hotel sofa and groaned.
“What I could do with all that money,” she wailed. “I owe everybody, and I’m completely out of clothes. Now some fool has got it and buried it, and will turn it into government bonds and live on the interest! I simply can’t bear it.”
After that I went away. Thinking it over since, I believe she staged a good bit of that for my benefit, and that she deliberately overplayed her attitude of indifference. That had always been her reaction to the Crescent, and it still remains so; a carefully thought-out defiance.
I still remember her last words as she stood in that untidy room, with the scent she affected almost overwhelming and her eyes shrewd and keen.
“Sorry Lou,” she said. “I’m not a very satisfactory person, am I? But your Crescent scares me to death. Too much steam in the boiler and no whistle to use it up.”