THAT NIGHT STANDS OUT in my mind as one of gradually accumulating horror.
It started with confusion, for at a dinner that evening served by a neat but sullen house-parlor maid Mother suddenly determined to go to Aunt Caroline’s.
“You and Mary,” she told Annie, “can stay for the night or go. As you are deserting me after all these years, I feel that I am quite right in abandoning you.”
Annie then retired in tears, and then followed a period of hectic packing. When Mother travels, even if it be only the equivalent of thirty city blocks, she travels; and I spent a wild hour or two collecting the small pillows, the slumber robes and bed jackets and even the framed photograph of my father which always accompanied her.
Both maids were ready before we were, and I remember the bumping noise of their trunks as they were taken downstairs, and my own sense of loss as I paid them off and saw them go.
To all this was added the hottest night of the summer, with a heavy storm threatening and the incessant roll of distant thunder; and when at nine o’clock the doorbell rang, I was distinctly nervous as I went downstairs. I turned on the porch light before I opened the door, but it proved to be Herbert Dean and I let him in.
“Getting out?” he said when I told him. “Well, that’s sensible, darling. I’ll be a lot easier in my mind.”
“But if you’ve got the killer, as the papers say—”
“We’re not entirely through yet,” he said evasively. “The main thing just now is to keep you safe at least until—well, until somewhere around the end of September.”
“What is to happen the end of September?” I asked him in an unguarded moment.
“Haven’t I told you?” he asked, in surprise. “Our wedding, of course. Naturally I have been pretty busy; but it does seem odd that I should have told Helen and forgotten to tell you!”
“I hope Helen declined, for me!”
“Declined? Great Scott, no. She leaped at it. She says she will never be happy until you are out of Jim’s way.”
Incredible, all of that, in view of what happened later that night; and as I have said, this is not a love story. Nor is it. But in that fashion was I wooed and won that same evening, although Herbert today maintains that he proposed to me in an entirely conventional fashion, and that I lowered my eyes modestly and whispered a “yes.”
That, as I happen to know, occurred the next day, and of all places in the world in the hospital on Liberty Avenue where a half-conscious John Talbot in another room was talking garrulously to a police dictograph, and a stenographer behind a screen was also taking notes.
The first step in the sequence of that night was when I told Herbert that two people had wanted the album. It had almost an electrical effect on him, and he made me recite the conversations as completely as I could remember them. He was almost boyishly excited when I had finished.
“We’re close to the end, Lou!” he said triumphantly. “And thank heaven for a girl like you who doesn’t talk. You’re going to talk now, however.” He looked at his watch. “See here,” he said, “give me thirty minutes, will you? I’ll be back by that time, and then I’ll want you to do some telephoning. Can you hold Mother half an hour?”
I thought I could, and he left, driving off at his usual rocketlike speed. Fortunately the storm was close by that time, and Mother is afraid of lightning. I found her upstairs, ready to go but apprehensive, and I managed to delay my own packing for another thirty minutes before I carried my overnight bag down the stairs.
The house was empty and queer that night. I could never remember it without at least one or the other of the maids in it, and the wind which preceded the rain made strange sounds as I waited in the lower hall for Herbert. I was shivering for some reason when I heard his car again and admitted him.
“All here,” he said cautiously, and produced the album neatly tied up in paper. “Now I’ll get out again, but first you’re to do a little work on the telephone. And while you’re doing it I’ll unlock the kitchen door. Right? I want to get back into the house after you’ve gone.”
I agreed, although I was puzzled. I was, it appeared, to call up George Talbot and Margaret Lancaster, and to tell them that the album had been found in the schoolroom after all. But I was also to say that we were leaving at once, and that I would give it to each of them the next day.
“Better not do it until the taxicab is at the door,” he said, and after a quick and excited kiss he had gone again, driving away more sedately than usual.
I obeyed his orders to the letter. I took the album up to the schoolroom, not without some nervous qualms, and while Mother was gathering up her last possessions for the taxi, I was at the telephone. She caught something of what I said, however, and was rather peevish about it.
“Really, Louisa,” she said, “why didn’t you tell me? I shall take it to Margaret myself. The taxi can stop there.”
It took some argument, including the approach of the storm, to get her into the cab without the album, but at last I managed it and we drove away. She was still offended as well as highly nervous, I remember; and she was continually opening bags on the way downtown to be certain that she had brought everything.
All in all it was a wild ride, for the rain was coming down in torrents by that time and Mother insisted because of the lightning on taking a roundabout route to avoid all trolley tracks. To add to the general discomfort the wiper on the windshield refused to work and for the last mile or two we went at a snail’s pace.
And then, within four blocks of Aunt Caroline’s, Mother remembered that she had taken my father’s picture out of a suitcase and forgotten to put it back again!
She insisted on returning at once, and it was only with difficulty that I persuaded her to go while I took the taxi back for it. She agreed finally and gave me her key to the front door; I had never had a key of my own.
“It is on my bed,” she said. “You would better take the taxi man in with you, just to be safe.”
One look at the driver convinced me that I would do nothing of the sort, although here and now I apologize. He was to be a valuable ally that night. But I knew that Herbert was in the house, which Mother did not, and I may as well confess that I was rather pleased than otherwise to go back.
Nevertheless, the sight of the darkened building in the midst of that storm daunted me. The taxi man sat in his seat, stolid and immovable. Beyond reaching a hand back to open the door he took little or no cognizance of me. Rain poured from the roof of the cab and fell in sheets from the porch, and I had no sooner gained its shelter than following a terrific flash of lightning every light on the street went out.
I let myself into the hall and felt for the light switch there. To my horror the house lights were off also, and there was neither movement nor sound to tell me whether Herbert was inside or not.
I groped my way into the library and found a box of matches. With the bit of illumination my courage came back, and in the dining room I found a candle and lighted it. There was still no sign of Herbert, and at last I called him cautiously. There was no answer, and I was beginning to be alarmed. Then suddenly the wind blew open the kitchen door behind me, my candle went out, and I had not groped my way five feet before a man had caught me in his arms and held me with a grip like a vise.
“You devil!” he said.
It was George Talbot.
I believe he would have killed me then and there, but at that moment the light in the hall came on, and he released me and stood staring at me.
“Sorry Lou!” he said thickly. “I thought—look here, there’s all hell loose in this house tonight. Beat it; I’m telling you! O God, there go the lights again!”
I had time to see that he held a golf club in his hand, however; and with that my shaken courage returned.
“Listen, George,” I said. “I can’t go. Herbert Dean’s here somewhere, and we’ll have to find him. If there is somebody here who is dangerous—I’d better bring in the taxi driver. He’ll help us to look, anyhow.”
And at that moment four shots in rapid succession were fired somewhere in the upper part of the house. I heard George groan in the darkness, and the next moment he had dashed out of the room and up the front stairs. Some sheer automatism took me into the front hall, and as I reached the foot of the stairs a flash of lightning showed the taxi driver in the doorway. Then everything was dark again, and out of that blackness something rushed at me from the rear of the house and knocked me flat on the floor.
Someone ran over me as I lay there, going with incredible silence and speed. Then there was a shocking scream, and by another lightning flash I saw that the taxi driver was struggling to hold a black and amorphous figure. Then there was another shot, the hall mirror fell in a crash of glass, and I fainted.
I never heard George Talbot come rushing down the stairs nor his frantic call over the telephone for the police. I never saw the inside of the library, where a grim-faced taxi driver had tied up a figure with a blackened face with the cords from the window curtains, and was now standing with a pistol pointed at it.
But the arrival of a police car finally roused me, and I was sitting dazedly in the hall when a few minutes later they carried down Herbert Dean, with a leg broken by a bullet and evidently in pain, but with a faint smile for me on a practically bloodless face.
It was midnight before I reached Aunt Caroline’s again. I had been left to recover in the hands of a strange policeman, who seemed to know as little of what had happened as I did. But I did not go until the hospital had assured me that Herbert was in pain but not gravely hurt.
I must have presented a queer sight to Aunt Caroline’s butler when at last, delivered like a warrant by the officer, he admitted me to the house and showed me up to my usual room. My hat was at a strange angle and my face dead white, save for a small cut where I had hit the edge of the hall table. I felt that I would never sleep again, but I fell into what was almost a stupor the moment I got into bed, and it was bright daylight on Wednesday morning before I wakened again.
Aunt Caroline had sent up the morning paper with my tray, and the first thing I saw was an enormous headline. “Crescent Place Murders Solved. Social Registerite Held Deranged.”