MRS. LANCASTER WAS BURIED that same afternoon from a downtown mortuary chapel. Owing to the enormous curiosity aroused by the case, admission to the services was by card only, and for these Margaret had herself made out the list.
It was the brief but beautiful service of the Episcopal church, and we were back home again by four o’clock. The funeral had tired Mother, so she went to her room, and thus at last I found time to follow George Talbot’s suggestion of a visit to the woodland where he had found the gold piece. For now at last I realized the vital importance of that money, gold or whatever it had been, from the chest.
I was too late, however. To my astonishment the woodland was already occupied by four strange men, and their procedure was so curious that I stood fascinated, watching them. They had eight wooden stakes, a spade, a hammer, several long pieces of twine and a can of water which I recognized as Miss Emily’s watering can with the sprinkler removed; and what they were doing was to drive the four stakes to form a large square, outline it with cord and then divide it in the same manner into four smaller squares.
Each man then took one square and on his hands and knees examined it carefully. Every now and then one of them got up, took the can and poured water onto the ground, while the others watched intently. How long they had been doing this I did not know, nor did I know the purpose of the water until that night, when Herbert Dean enlightened me.
“Looking to see if the ground had been disturbed,” he explained. “If it soaks in quickly and there are air-bubbles, then they can know that the earth has been dug up recently. And the woodland is obvious; it’s sheltered, while the rest is open. But of course they’ll not find the gold there.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because, my dear young lady, the person who committed that murder and got away with that money is too smart to have buried it there.”
That conversation took place in Jim Wellington’s house late that night. Mother, as if to make up for her inaction the day before, had stayed down until eleven, insisting on game after game of cribbage until I had gone nearly wild. Whatever she had feared after the murder, whatever had made her bring Holmes into the house and speak so mysteriously to me, she had been much more calm since she discovered that the gold was gone. But my attempt to sound her out that night met with failure.
“Mother,” I said, summoning all my courage when at last she prepared to go upstairs, “don’t you think that now you can explain what you said to me on the night of the murder?”
“What in the world are you talking about, Louisa?”
I was chilled, but I had to go on.
“You know perfectly well, mother. I was not to go out of the house, day or night. You said there was a reason.”
“Why should I explain that? It’s self-evident. And you did go out. I happen to know that! You deliberately disobeyed me. If anyone had told me that a daughter of mine—”
“Listen, mother,” I said earnestly. “It’s frightfully important. It may be vital. What was it about spoiling two lives? That’s certainly not self-evident.”
She was putting away the cribbage set, and I thought she stood for a minute with her back to me as though she were undecided, if one can imagine Mother being undecided about anything. Then very deliberately she put away the set and closed the drawer. When she turned to me her face was quite blank.
“I dare say I was merely sharing in the general hysteria,” she said blandly. “I am not certain precisely what I said, but I was certainly anxious about those two poor women next door.”
With that she admonished me as usual about locking the windows, and in her long heavy black swept out of the room and up the stairs. Mother must be well over sixty, for I was the child of her middle age, but she still sits erect in a chair and moves with the dignity which is a part of her tradition. I felt rather helpless as I watched her go, for I was as certain then as I am now that she could have helped if she had wanted to. I still marvel at her silence, at the pride or whatever it might have been that kept her suspicions to herself, or to herself and Mrs. Talbot. But here again I am up against the Crescent itself, its loathing of publicity, its distrust of the police, and its firm belief that every man’s house is his castle.
That was of course on Saturday night, and I had no intention of doing anything but follow Mother up to bed.
But I did not get to bed until hours later.
Due to that false sense of security of Mother’s, that the thing was over and done with, Holmes was no longer sleeping in the house; and as I went upstairs myself I stopped at the rear window which overlooks the garage and saw him in his room. Probably he had forgotten to draw the shade, or was indifferent, for he was still fully dressed. Mother had gone into her room. I stood by the window and gazed in surprise at what he was doing.
What he was doing, so far as I could see, was cutting the pages out of a book. He would take a knife, bend over a table, cut carefully and then take out the page and drop it, either onto the floor or into a basket. I could not see which. And he was working carefully and deliberately, so far as I could tell, doing only one page at a time. It seemed to be slow work, or perhaps he was clumsy; for he managed to take out only two or three while I watched, and the whole performance was so mysterious that when at last Mother called me I could scarcely tear myself away.
When finally I was free I was still curious. Holmes’s window was dark by that time, but it occurred to me that in all this dreadful business perhaps I had considered Holmes far too little. Certainly he knew a great deal about us. If the Lancaster servants had known about the money, for instance, he could easily have known also. I remembered that time I had seen him with Peggy on the path.
Then too he could easily have known of the axe in the woodshed, and the habits of the Lancaster house. True, he had had an alibi for the hour of the murder; Mary had said he was having a cup of tea in the kitchen at the time. But our kitchen clock is notoriously unreliable; that is Mary has a habit of turning it ahead, so that the other servants will get down in good time to breakfast.
Therefore Holmes, having his tea before taking Mother out, might actually have had it some fifteen minutes or so before four. And Holmes, like Bryan Dalton, had an eye for a pretty girl. If the Lancasters’ Peggy was involved, it seemed to me that she was far more likely to have been his tool in securing the gold than anyone else. The only stumbling block seemed to be that, having already secured the money, the murder in that case was utterly unreasonable. Unless of course he had needed more time in which to dispose of it, or unless Mrs. Lancaster herself had been suspicious.
But apparently she had not been suspicious at all. It was Mr. Lancaster who, for some reason still unknown, had insisted on the audit on that previous Thursday.
It was all too much for me, and so I determined to carry my new theory to Jim and the Dean person. I had to wait for Mother to settle down, of course, and she took a maddening time about it that night, making her usual Saturday preparation by putting her hair in kid rollers and laying out her church clothes for the morning. At last she slept, however, and once again for the third successive night I crept out of the house.
I had expected to have to rouse the Wellington house when I got there, and even to defy any officer detailed to watch the place. But neither was necessary; there was a light in the library windows, and my tap on one brought Jim himself to it.
“It’s Lou, Jim,” I said. “Can you let me in?”
“Go to the kitchen porch. I’ll open the door there.”
There was something conspiratorial in our movements; in the silence with which the door opened and I slid in. But there was nothing conspiratorial in the library, now miraculously restored to order, where Mr. Herbert Ranchester Dean was hastily putting on a coat and lamps were cheerfully burning.
“Well!” he said, “it’s the young lady of the cellar! Are you like your fellow creatures who live in the basement, and only emerge at night?”
“I was at the inquest today.”
“Were you indeed? And what did you think of our little performance?”
“I’m more interesting in one I saw an hour ago,” I told him, and took the chair he offered me.
Suddenly his light manner left him and I saw him as he was, shrewd, keen and observant. But he finished lightning his pipe before he asked me about it.
“What was that?”
“It’s about our chauffeur, Holmes, Mr. Dean,” I said. “Why do you suppose he would be cutting the leaves out of a book tonight and then throwing them away? What is he trying to get rid of?”
He sat up suddenly and put down his pipe.
“He was doing that?”
“I watched him in his room, about an hour ago.”
“What sort of book? Could you tell? Was it large or small? And what did he do with the pages?”
“He threw them down, either onto the floor or into his wastebasket. I know there is one there. And it seemed an ordinary sized book. It might be a detective story. He reads a lot of them.”
“Has he an open fire in his room?”
“No. It is heated by a radiator, from the house.”
I thought even Jim was puzzled by his intensity and the speed of his questions. He got up, as though he were about to start out after Holmes at once. Then he reconsidered and sat down again.
“That will keep,” he said. “Either he’s burned them already, or he’ll dispose of them early tomorrow morning. If they’re gone they’re gone. If not—”
He did not finish this, but sat drawing at his pipe and thinking.
“Just what do you know about this man?” he asked at last.
“Well, very little really. What does one know of people like that. I believe he bootlegs for George Talbot and Bryan Dalton now and then, although Mother doesn’t suspect it. And he speaks sometimes of a place in the country; just a small place, but I imagine he either stores liquor there or makes it.”
“You don’t know where it is?”
“No.”
He seemed to consider that too, but the next moment he startled me.
“By the way,” he said suddenly. “Did you by any chance ring up the Lancasters last night, about two hours after I left you?”
“Yes, I did. Good heavens, don’t tell me you were the man on the roof!”
He smiled and shook his head.
“No, but I was the man on the ground if you happened to see me. You scared him away, you know. That telephone bell did it. What did Margaret Lancaster say when she came down to the front porch?”
I told him; that the cedar room trap was closed and the ladder in its place, and he nodded thoughtfully.
“I see,” he said. “Of course it took some time to get there. Emily isn’t a fast mover. Well, it’s all rather curious.”
He lapsed into silence, and Jim spoke for the first time. He had remained standing since I entered, leaning against the mantelpiece with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, and I thought he looked tired and harassed.
“Thanks a lot about the glove, Lou,” he said rather awkwardly. “It’s mine, of course, or was, although I don’t know how it got into that house, or when I saw it last. I don’t wear gloves in the summer, scarcely ever carry them. I’d put the date at somewhere last spring; early in June, maybe.”
“You didn’t leave it at the Lancasters’?”
“I might at that. I simply don’t know.”
Mr. Dean looked up.
“You know this Crescent pretty well, Miss Lou. Who would you say uses boot polish around here? I suppose the butler, Joseph, at the Daltons’? And old Mr. Lancaster does his own, I imagine. Who else?”
“I don’t know. Possibly Holmes, although Mother says he hates to polish anything.”
He thought that over before he spoke again. “Well,” he said, “of course we need the other glove, but I’d say the chances are two to one against our finding it. You see, Miss Lou, a man may and usually does polish his boots with one hand; but he uses two hands on an axe. He’s got to. And that’s why we want the second glove.”
It was after that that he asked me about the Crescent itself.
“Funny place, this Crescent,” he said. “What about the Talbot woman, for instance? And why does she lock herself away? What was Mrs. Dalton hunting for, the night of the murder? And why does he look like a whipped dog? Then whose prints are those on the chest? I’ve got an idea I know, but it’s probably too late to prove it. Certainly they don’t check with those of the Lancaster family or the servants.
“Then again, does anyone in the Crescent suspect anyone else? You might know that. They’re a secretive lot, but they know each other well and some of them are interrelated. Take Jim here, and I believe the Talbots are connected, aren’t they?”
“Mrs. Lancaster’s first husband was a brother of Miss Lydia’s, and of Mrs. Talbot’s husband. I think—” I added hesitantly—“I think Miss Lydia suspects that either Miss Emily or Miss Margaret did it.”
“Did she say so?”
“Not exactly. She said she supposed they’d stood it as long as they could.”
“Now that’s interesting! Stood what? The old lady was hard to get along with, I gather.”
“Probably, but I don’t think Lydia meant it really. She was dreadfully upset.”
“Well, nerves with women are often like wine with men; they bring out indiscreet facts. However—! I suppose there’s a Mr. Talbot?”
And Jim gave me a real surprise when he said that there was.
“Although he may be dead now. He ran off when George was a baby, and has never been heard from since. It was pretty well hushed up at the time, and of course I don’t remember it; but there was a miserable story connected with it. That was years ago.”
It was so utterly incredible to me that I laughed. To learn all at once that that crayon portrait had had more than a head and shoulders; had had legs to run away with and emotions to feel and resentments to drive it off! But nobody noticed me.
“Is that why she locks up everything and everybody?”
“By George, it never occurred to me!” Jim said slowly. “It may be. Still, it’s absurd on the face of it. It must be twenty-five years ago. Maybe thirty.”
But Mr. Dean was apparently tired of ancient history. He asked me if Holmes was a hard sleeper and an early riser, to which I replied yes and no; and a little later on he explained to me, as I have said, the intensive method of search I had witnessed that afternoon.
“But they’ll not find it there,” he said. And added: “Whoever got away with that money was too intelligent for that.”
I left him standing by the fire, and Jim took me back to the kitchen door again. He was silent until we reached it, then with his hand on the doorknob he said:
“What on earth made you go to see Helen, Lou?”
“I suppose—I didn’t know about Mr. Dean, and I thought you needed looking after,” I told him.
“Well, she’s coming back. Not because it’s her duty, she says, but because she doesn’t want to miss anything!”
And with the memory of the utter bitterness of his voice in my ears I got myself home somehow and into bed. As I went back I could see that across toward Euclid Street the men were still at work with lanterns and electric lamps. They had moved considerably since the afternoon, and there was something sinister and ominous about that painstaking inch-by-inch search, and about the shadowy figures as they crept along close to the ground.