THEY WERE STILL ARGUING over that, I believe, the Inspector truculent and rather flushed, when Sullivan quietly came in from an examination of the garage and reported that Holmes’s uniform was in it, and a small light truck.
“Haven’t gone over it,” he said, “but it looks like the one we’re after.”
It was, they discovered. There was the nail in the tire, and the unmistakable evidence that it had been driven through a freshly tarred road. Careful examination of seat and body revealed nothing else, however, although some fresh scratches in the rear looked as though it had recently carried something heavy and unwieldy.
There was no sign of the trunk.
It was almost six o’clock by that time but still broad daylight, and so they set out to cover the dozen acres or so as well as they could. For now of course it was at least possible that Holmes had reached his garage safely, and had been killed on his way back into town. In that case he might have emptied the trunk, buried or hidden its contents and been on his way back with it to dispose of it in any one of a dozen ways. Even to return it to the MacMullen house.
They divided, the Inspector going back into the cottage and the three men searching the ground outside. It was the plain-clothes man who found the hole, and called the others to look at it.
The spot was well chosen. A bush had been lifted and carefully wheeled in, about three hundred feet from the house; and beside it lay the top sod, cut from an area about two feet by two. This space had then been dug out to a depth of about thirty inches, and an empty box with a wooden lid placed inside it.
The work was recent; about twenty-four hours old. The bush showed no signs of wilting, and under the surface the pile of soil was still moist. In the Inspector’s words:
“It was all ready, you see. All he had to do was to fill the box out of the trunk, replant his bush, replace his sod, water the lot, and then sit tight until the excitement died down. Only it didn’t work that way.”
For that hole in the earth told its own story to the men who stood around it. Holmes had been killed on his way out with the gold. He had never reached his little place in the country with it, and somewhere safely hidden away or perhaps traveling respectably tagged on a train going nobody knew where, was Miss Emily Lancaster’s trunk with its valuable contents.
I have written in detail of this expedition and its result; for it was the search for that trunk and its ultimate discovery which revealed the last and most shocking of our murders. But there was another discovery made late that afternoon which helped to prove Mrs. MacMullen innocent of any connivance as to the trunk itself.
Herbert Dean, going through the pockets of Holmes’s uniform, found a letter in it addressed to that lady. It was in a fair imitation of Miss Emily Lancaster’s hand, and it read:
“Dear Mrs. MacMullen: I am sorry not to see you again, but we are leaving in a hurry. This is my authority to give my trunk to the bearer, who will also have the key to my room.” Signed. “Lucy Merriam.”
“All set” as the Inspector says. “Note ready in case the landlady refused without it. And of course he had a pretty good general idea of the lock on that door, or maybe he had made an impression of it. He had plenty of chances.”
It was too late when at last they got back to the city to do more than teletype a general description of the trunk, and to send operatives to the various railroad stations. Mrs. MacMullen, again closely questioned, could give no details by which it could be identified, and had not even noticed from what store it had been delivered. Peggy was in danger of losing her child and a woman from the neighborhood and a doctor were with her, so that she could not be questioned; Mr. Lancaster had died that afternoon and any information from Margaret as to where her sister might have gone for a trunk was not obtainable, for she was shut in her room and reported to be in collapse.
The four men ate some dinner and decided to call it a day. And that night I had a brief but rather comforting talk with Herbert Dean. Comforting in spite of the fact that he started it with a warning. Mother was over at the Lancasters’, for although Lydia Talbot always presided over our funerary ceremonies, it was and is one of our traditions that in cases of grief the family must on no account be left alone with it; and I understood from Mary that all the available Crescent, including Jim Wellington, was also there. I had begged off with a headache myself, which was real enough, and I was sitting on the porch in the dark when I heard his light active footsteps on the street and recognized them.
At first I thought he mean to go on by, and I ran out along the walk and called to him. It was then that he read me my lecture, right there on the path.
“I’ve been criminally remiss with you, Lou,” he said severely. “I’ve warned you not to wander around alone, but apparently that isn’t enough. Among the numbers of things I don’t know about this case is why you were attacked the other night; or why anybody wanted to get into this house at all. Nevertheless, you were attacked and you might have been killed. If it were not for the fact that you have a lot of hair—very lovely hair, Lou!—well, it doesn’t stand thinking about. Anyhow, we’ve got to keep you safe.”
He laughed a little, as he led me back to the porch. “I seem to be increasingly interested in keeping you safe, Lou. Odd, isn’t it? That you should walk into my life at the instant I was being blown out of the Wellington kitchen! Still, I dare say many a romance has started less romantically.”
He did not pursue that, however, although I dare say I colored.
“I’ve had a wretched afternoon,” I told him. “You’ve left me feeling that I can’t trust anybody; not even Jim Wellington.”
“Well, that’s something gained,” he said rather drily. “And you are quite right. Don’t trust anybody around here for a while anyhow. Don’t trust them until you can see the whites of their eyes, and then run like hell!”
“Herbert,” I said, “you must tell me about Miss Emily. Somehow I can’t bear it.”
And then he became grave, almost tender.
“Who are we to judge her?” he asked. “She took it; we can take that for granted. What we don’t yet know is why. She may simply have wanted it for herself. After all, she had given up her life to that old woman. She may have been in inner rebellion for years; then suddenly she saw her chance to escape. Almost fifty and liable to the emotional upsets of that age in women, Lou my dear. She might have been in an abnormal state of mind. Such things happen.
“Or there’s another possible explanation. She may have felt that too many people knew about that gold, and so she had to protect it. That is simply another guess. There’s a third one, but less likely; that she and another member of the family, say, Mr. Lancaster, developed the plan together to protect the money. I don’t believe it, myself. And I don’t think that this third person was Margaret, for I have an idea that Margaret all along has suspected Emily of just what she did; and maybe more than she did.”
“You mean that Margaret thinks Emily killed their mother? Oh, no!” I wailed. “She never did. How could she think such a thing?”
He reached over in the darkness and took my hand.
“Listen, Lou,” he said. “I agree with you, but try to get Margaret’s point of view. You see, there are degrees even in crime. There’s cold-blooded calculated murder; and there’s the picture of Emily Lancaster, not allowed to marry, getting on in years and heavy and tired, and that old woman nagging her until she’ll do anything, even kill, to escape her. Margaret has had her share of it, too, so she’s afraid it was Emily. That’s all. And in twenty years or so, if you stay where you are, you’ll possibly understand that fear of Margaret’s yourself.”
And he added:
“The terrible domination of the old and helpless, Lou. Think of it!”
I did think, to my own shame. I realized that along with the rest of us I had watched Emily Lancaster for years without ever thinking about her at all; had taken it for granted that she asked no more of life than her three meals a day, her broken sleep at night, and the servitude from which her only escape was into the books she read so avidly.
But he was entirely convinced, for more reasons than he gave me that night, that Emily Lancaster had never murdered her mother. It was more to reassure me than anything else that he explained that afternoon as he saw it.
“Just take the question of time, for instance,” he said. “The killing didn’t take long, but remember that she was fully dressed at three-thirty, and differently but fully dressed again at four. And she was a slow-moving woman. Even if she had stripped off her clothing and entered that room entirely naked—and that’s been considered—she would have had to go back and bathe and clean the tub. And the police examined every tub in the house, including the outlets. The soap, too. Then there’s that story of Jim’s, that when he went up she was talking to her canary. If that was acting, for whose benefit was it? She may have known he was in the house. She could hardly have known he was upstairs in the hall.”
My mind was too confused to work properly, but I was trying to think as best I could.
“Still, if she knew Jim was coming that afternoon to get out the gold, wouldn’t she be pretty desperate?”
“But did she know? It was Margaret who did the telephoning. Emily was out at the library at the time, getting some books. But wasn’t she prepared even for discovery, if it came before she could get away? I think she was. I’m not so sure about the window screen, but that flower pot was overturned; and they’re not easy to overturn. I’ve tried it. How about those stories of someone on the porch roof at night, before the murder? Weren’t they pure camouflage for her theft?—if it is theft to take what will be yours some day anyhow, and what you may feel you have earned a dozen times.”
“Still, Herbert,” I objected, “there was no reason for her running out of the house last Saturday night, unless there really was someone there. Or she thought so.”
“That’s different,” he said almost roughly, and released my hand. “There was someone there that night, and if I knew who it was I’d have this case settled and out of the way.”
After that he told me some of the steps by which he and the police had reached certain conclusions. He held out much I have already told here, but as a résumé it is not without interest. He had recaptured my hand, and I felt that he was amused at my feeble effort to free it.
“I’m holding it out of sheer gratitude, Lou darling. Nothing sentimental about it, so let it alone. You see, you set me on the track of that money.”
“I did?”
“Certainly you did. You told me about Holmes and his book. Do you remember? It was like an answer to prayer. You see, my dear, that money wasn’t taken all at once. It wasn’t taken even in three or four packages, or whatever they might be. What had been going on was evidently what has been going in some of our banks, a sort of slow seepage, or so it looked. That meant somebody who had pretty steady access to the chest, so the first thing the police went after was the servants, particularly the upstairs maid, Peggy. But it was obvious from the beginning that in the twenty or so afternoons and ten Sundays that they were out of the house, none of these women could have carried off the gold. Add an evening out each week for good measure, and you’ll see that, all other things being equal—chances at the chest and so on—any one of them would have had to carry each time several pounds of gold coins. It simply couldn’t be done, for there was plenty of evidence that these women carried out only small hand-bags. That is, unless some one of them had an outside accomplice.
“We considered that, but the two older women seemed to have no outside life at all, and Peggy’s mother we found to be a widow named MacMullen who kept a highly respectable lodging house on Liberty Avenue. Yes, we knew about Mrs. MacMullen before she came to you. Then you came along with your story of Holmes and his book, and suddenly I saw a light.”
“I wish I did,” I said despondently.
“Well, you see, from the first it was clear that Holmes occupied a highly strategic position in that room and bath of his. Also that he had plenty of time to use it. And Holmes wasn’t tearing leaves out of a book. He was cutting them, one or two at a time. In other words, Holmes was making an experiment with a book, some glue and a spool of adhesive tape.”
“I see,” I said slowly. “He was making a box out of a book.”
“Precisely. His experiment proved that, given a fair-sized book, it could be made to hold a good bit of flat gold money or currency. And Holmes was no angel. He was on the track of something, and that something was a fortune to him. Here was Miss Emily, making her almost daily trips to the library, and carrying two or more books each time, probably tied together.
“He had access to the MacMullen house, too, through Peggy; he almost certainly knew that Miss Merriam was Emily and the papers had told him that the gold had not been found. Then he saw a great light, and I’m sadly afraid, Lou, that he followed it to his death.”
He told me then about the cottage, and about the conclusion he had come to as to how Holmes had met his end.
“There were one or two odd things about the way he was found,” he added thoughtfully. “They’re rather hard to explain. In the first place, he was neatly laid out on that road, and his white handkerchief was placed on his chest and anchored there with a stone; as if to insure that the body would be seen. Then again, the autopsy showed nothing that would indicate that he had been struck down and then deliberately run over. If it didn’t rather strain my imagination, I’d say he’d been run over by accident, and that by his own truck!”
But he added, after a pause:
“We have to remember this, of course, little Lady Lou; and maybe it will make you more careful. Holmes, tragic and puzzling as he is, only enters the picture after that first murder. In a sense, he was only an interruption. He interfered with a carefully laid plan; much as did Margaret Lancaster the other morning.”
“Margaret interfered?” I asked. “How did she interfere?”
“She sent away the bird cage,” he said, rising and smiling down at me. “And the cage had Emily’s keys in it. Do you see? Holmes didn’t need those keys; not enough at least to kill her to get them. But somebody else did. When we know who that is—!”
Across at the Lancasters’ the front door had opened, and a broad beam of light gleamed out on the trees and the walk. He got up quickly.
“Just one question, Lou,” he said, “and we’ll have to be quick. After Mrs. Lancaster’s murder somebody burned what might have been a photograph, on very heavy board; one of the old types of mountings. Or it might have been something else, pasteboard anyhow with a beveled edge and gilded. Does that mean anything to you? I think, but I’m not sure, that it came out of the Lancaster house.”
There were no voices on the porch across by that time, and I had to think quickly.
They had quantities of old pictures,” I said. “Some were framed, but I haven’t missed any. Of course I haven’t been there much since. And there’s the old photograph album, of course. Margaret gave it to Mother.”
“Margaret gave it to her,” he said slowly. “When? Since her mother’s death?”
“Yes. It’s upstairs now somewhere. I think it has never been unwrapped.”
“Unwrapped? You mean it was tied up when it came? Lou, I’ve got to have that album, and I’ve got to have it soon. It’ll be back here at twelve o’clock, and don’t open the door until you’ve turned on the porch light and seen who it is. Is that a promise?”
I agreed, and to my stunned amazement he bent down and kissed me lightly on the lips.
“That’s for being a good girl,” he said, and a moment later he had disappeared down the street.
It was not until he had gone that I remembered that I had not asked about the poison ivy.