THAT WAS ON SATURDAY, August the twenty-seventh. The reign of terror had extended over nine days, and there was talk about evacuating the Crescent to save further killings. Two or three timorous families on Euclid Street behind us had already moved themselves, their children and their family pets to remote spots in the country. Even the Avenue in our neighborhood was largely deserted at night, the press was screaming about the homicidal maniac who was still at large, and one tabloid having exhausted all other resources, dug up from an unknown source the old story of John Talbot and his love affair, with its tragic ending. From that moment the search for Mr. Talbot was almost as intensive as that for Lydia herself.
Mr. Lancaster was buried that afternoon, police reserves having been called out to control the crowds around the gate and elsewhere; and a half dozen motorcycle men escorting the body to and keeping the cemetery clear. I had flatly refused to go there, much to Mother’s indignation.
“I had never thought that a daughter of mine,” she said, “would be found failing in respect to the dead.”
“I am not going, mother.”
“Is that any way to speak to me, Louisa? Really, sometimes I wonder if all this trouble hasn’t done something very strange to you.”
“I’m afraid it has, mother.”
She whirled from where she was standing in front of her mirror, pinning on her hat with its long dull-beaded black pins.
“Just what do you mean by that?” she demanded.
“I suppose,” I said carefully, “it has taught me my right to live while I can. To live my own life, not yours, mother. Not anyone’s but mine. My own.”
She stared at me with incredulous eyes.
“And that to me, from my own child! All I have left, after years of sacrifice for her!”
“Just what have you sacrificed, mother?” I said, as gently as I could. “Haven’t I been the sacrifice? Isn’t this whole Crescent a monument to the sacrifice of some one or other? And to what? To security? Then where is it? To how things look? They don’t look so well just now, do they? If you believe in either one or the other you might look out the window!”
She made no answer to that. She gathered up her dull black bag, straightened the folds of her mourning veil, and went to the door. There she stopped and turned.
“I would like to know,” she said bitterly, “if Doctor Armstrong has put these—these outrageous notions into your head.”
“No,” I told her. “It was someone else, and if he ever asks me to marry him I shall do so.”
I doubt if she heard much of the funeral service that day. I know that when she returned she locked herself into her bedroom, and that she did not speak to me again for twenty-four hours. But as those twenty-four hours were filled with excitement I am afraid I felt this punishment less than I should.
There had been no sign whatever of Lydia Talbot through all of Saturday. Downtown in the District Attorney’s office Helen was being examined on her story of Emily Lancaster’s last night, with the usual group about her, and the only result the complete destruction of Margaret’s theory. And, although no one knew this at the time, Herbert Dean had spent at least a part of the day going from one hairdresser to another, carrying a photograph with him. The remainder of the time, or some portion of it, he spent in a lodging house on a narrow street behind the hospital; the address of which he had obtained, not without difficulty, from the blotter he had taken from Emily Lancaster’s desk in the MacMullen house.
There, as I know now, he got permission from a reluctant landlady to examine a small furnished room, extremely tidy, but from which all traces of its recent occupant had been taken the night before. Except for the books. The room was almost filled with books.
“Must have been quite a reader.”
“Yes, sir. He didn’t do much else. I was sorry to lose him. He’d been here ten years.”
“Is he sending for these books?”
“Well, now, that’s funny for a man as fond of them as he was. They were like his children in a way, if you know what I mean. But he said I was to give them to the library. He wouldn’t need them again.”
The net result of all this being that a puzzled and irritated Commissioner of Police was that afternoon asked for another guard, this time to watch the house behind the library; was also requested to issue a general alarm for one Robert Daniels, street cleaner to the Department of Public Works; and was left to read and study a mass of aged and not too clean clippings from a city in an adjoining state.
“What’s the big idea, Dean?” he demanded. “If you think this fellow Daniels is the killer, why don’t you say so?”
“I haven’t any idea that he is the killer,” Dean replied soberly. “What I want to do is to save his life.”
But on the Crescent we still remained in ignorance of all this. The only news I had was that Lizzie, from the Talbots’, had not returned from Mr. Lancaster’s funeral. That came to me at my lonely dinner, via Annie and the grapevine telegraph, and lost nothing in the telling.
Briefly, Lizzie had been acting in a strange manner all week. She had eaten scarcely anything, and had been so hard to get along with that she and Mrs. Talbot had had a frightful fuss early that day. The whole house had heard it, and no one had been greatly surprised when Lizzie at once went to her room and packed her old-fashioned valise. They were surprised, however, to see her come out to the servants’ car—it is our custom on such occasions to supply our domestics with transportation—and to drive quietly enough to the cemetery. The valise she placed in front, beside the driver.
It was not until the return journey that she spoke at all, and then it was only to the chauffeur. She reached through the window in front of her and touched him on the shoulder.
“I’ll get out here,” she said.
Some one of the women tried to say good-bye to her, but she paid no attention; and the last they saw of her she was standing with her valise at her feet and apparently waiting for an interurban car.
“Well, we understood well enough, miss,” Annie said. “Her sister’s got a farm out near Hollytree. But to go off like that, with all of us knowing her for years—well, I suppose she felt pretty bad, with one thing and another. I’m not one to hold a grudge against her.”
It seemed natural enough to me, knowing Lizzie’s dour manner. During all my early years she had terrified me. She had beaten George within an inch of his life when he had frightened me with the dumbwaiter, and had then taken the black and some of the skin off his nose with sapolio. And she had smacked me soundly once when she found me in the Talbot stable trying to smoke a seedpod from their Indian cigar tree. A hard dauntless woman, Lizzie, whose other name I have never even heard up to that time, and whose jet-black dyed hair was as familiar to me as the ancient cameo pin with which she pinned her high collar.
But I was less easy about her after George Talbot had been in to see me that evening. He had been following all sorts of police clues throughout the day, and he looked dirty and tired. Mother was still shut away in high dudgeon when he came into the library and put a copy of the tabloid into my hands.
“I suppose you’ve seen this dirty stuff, Lou?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew the story before?”
“I really don’t know any story, George. I overheard some talk a night or two ago, but—”
“And that’s been the Great Secret!” he said disgustedly. “All these years I’ve known there was one. I’ve known damned well too that everybody else along here knew it, except you perhaps. And now this filthy paper brings it out and just about intimates that my father’s back and at the old tricks. By God, for a plugged nickel I’d go down and beat up the lot of them!”
He quieted down after a time. He seemed indeed more annoyed that this Great Secret had turned out as it had than for any other reason.
“Look what it’s done to us!” he said. “We lived locked up and bolted away! And why? He wasn’t crazy. That was a trick to save his neck, and I’m darned glad he did. Glad he escaped from their lunatic asylum too. A man gets caught by a pretty face, runs away with it, takes another name, and then is found one day in a hotel room with a gun in his hand and the woman dead. She’s wrecked him, and he finishes her. And for almost thirty years Mother expects him to come back and shoot her too! Why? She didn’t mean anything to him. I doubt she ever did.”
With which unfilial remark he got up.
“The only decently normal person left in the house was Lizzie,” he said. “Now I suppose you know she’s left. Driven off, I suppose, like Aunt Lydia.”
“George! Do you think your Aunt Lydia simply went away?”
He made a despairing gesture.
“How do I know?” he said. “She’d wanted to go. Wanted it for years. I never blamed her much, although I didn’t like her. But Lizzie is different. She didn’t want to go. Why should she leave what’s been her home for more than thirty years? There’s something very queer there, Lou.”
He got up.
“Well, I’ll take that rotten sheet and get out,” he said. “I’ve still got to take my sleuth for his walk before I go to bed!”
He took the paper and went away. I had read it, and its implication was plain enough. But both George and I were wrong that night. The tabloid contained only a part of what he called the Great Secret, and we were to have another tragedy before we learned the rest of it.