MRS. TALBOT REMAINED THAT night after the others left. Lydia had pleaded fatigue, and so George took her home. Probably the line-up of cars on the street had changed since afternoon, but there were still several there, and the Lancaster house seemed to be lighted from attic to cellar.
I knew Mother and Mrs. Talbot were settled for at least an hour, so I slipped on a dark cape in the back hall, and letting myself out the kitchen door, took an inconspicuous route toward Jim Wellington’s.
This was not the grapevine path the servants use, but one even more remote. Behind all our houses lies a considerable acreage of still unoccupied land, which since the war we have called No Man’s Land. Children used to play in it, but the Crescent frowned on that after some one of us got a baseball through a pantry window. Now it is purely a waste, where George Talbot and sometimes Mr. Dalton practice short golf shots; a waste bordered on one curved side by our properties, on a rather narrow end by the bustle and noise of Liberty Avenue, and directly behind us, but some distance away, the rear yards of the modest houses on Euclid Street. The Talbot’s old stable, now a garage for George’s dilapidated car, bordered on it; as did the Lancasters’ woodshed, our garage and the Daltons’, and what was once the Wellington tennis court but was now the weed-grown spot where Helen—to our horror—took sunbaths in a steamer chair and a very scanty bathing suit. She and Jim had no garage. Their car was kept in a garage on Liberty Avenue.
This area did not belong to us, of course, but during the process of years we had adopted it as our own. Thus a path led across it and through some trees and an empty lot to Euclid Street, and was used by our servants and sometimes ourselves as a short cut. Also Eben burned there our dead leaves in the fall; and even the street cleaners, finding their little carts overfull, had been known to slip back and surreptitiously empty them there, sometimes setting a match to their contents.
It was through this waste land that I made my way that night. Not too comfortably, for there is something about a murder—any murder—that disturbs one’s sense of security. However, I had a little light at first. Holmes, our chauffeur, was evidently in his room over the garage, for his windows were fully illuminated, and out in No Man’s Land itself there was still the flicker of a small fire.
But beyond the Dalton place I found myself plunged into thick darkness and a silence closed about me which the distant noise on Liberty Avenue did nothing to dispel. Then something caught at my cape and held it, and I stopped dead in my tracks and went cold all over. It was only a briar, but that unexpected stop had done something startling and rather terrible. It had enabled me to hear that someone was close behind me, someone who had stopped just too late to save himself from discovery.
I never even turned to look. Pell-mell I ran on, blind with terror, until I fetched up with a crash against the wire netting of the tennis court and there collapsed onto the ground. When I dared to look back it seemed to me that between me and the fire someone was standing and watching; but he made no move and so at last I pulled myself to my feet.
It was a picture of demoralization I must have presented to Jim Wellington when, a few minutes later, he himself answered my ring at the door.
“Good heavens, Lou!” he said. “Come in and sit down. You look all in.”
I obeyed him in silence. To tell the truth, I was almost unable to speak. He led the way, himself silent, back to his den and pulled out a chair for me.
“It’s not very tidy,” he explained. “Helen’s gone again, as you know. And as I find she hadn’t paid the servants for two months—” he shrugged his shoulders—“they’ve gone too.”
Well, not very tidy was a mild way of putting it. But that night I was not interested in Helen’s slovenly housekeeping. I was looking at Jim, neat enough but tired and pale. I saw that he had changed his clothes.
“Aren’t you going to sit down?”
I shook my head.
“Jim, I was followed here.”
“By the police? Well, does that surprise you?”
“I hadn’t thought of the police. I thought it might be whoever killed Mrs. Lancaster, Jim.”
He eyed me steadily.
“That’s very nice of you. Rather handsome, considering everything! But it was probably the police. I’m expecting them, I suppose that you, being the honest person you are, have told them you saw me there?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, nobody asked me, Jim, and so—”
He dropped his light manner, and coming to me, put a hand on my shoulder.
“You’re a good girl, Lou,” he said, “and we were a pair of young fools once. Well—I suppose Emily will bring it out before long, if she hasn’t done it already. She was coming out of her faint when you called me. Maybe not right away, but sooner or later she’ll remember. You see,” he smiled down at me, “you can’t save a fool from his folly. Or a man from his stomach,” he added cryptically.
When I merely stared at him in bewilderment he put me into a chair and sat down himself.
“Here’s the story,” he said. “You can believe it or not; if you do you’ll be the only one who will. I had a key to the front door, so I let myself in. There was nobody about, and I went upstairs and found her—like that! I went up to her room and opened the door, and—God! I couldn’t believe it. The house was quiet. Old Emily was talking to her canary across the hall, and the door into the old lady’s room was partly open. Luckily I didn’t touch the knob. At least I don’t think I did.” He laughed shortly. “But I didn’t stop at the door. I went in and looked down at her to see if she was—She was dead, of course.”
“Why on earth didn’t you raise the alarm?”
“You’re asking me that? Because I am God’s worst fool. We’d had a quarrel; she’d been hoarding gold for months under that bed of hers, and I got sick and tired of facing the bank people every week and getting it for her. I was her messenger boy. The girls wouldn’t do it, nor Uncle James. Too decent. So we’d had a row, and she—well, she threatened to cut me out of her will. And,” he added with a return to the light tone I hated, “this is no time to be cut out of wills, my dear Lou.”
“So you went back to make peace, and found her?”
“So I went back because I was sent for, like the good boy I am.”
“Oh, stop it, Jim,” I cried. “I can’t bear it.”
“Well, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. If my cousin Margaret, who hates me like sin, will only acknowledge that she telephoned me this morning to come out at four o’clock to see her beloved stepfather, maybe I’ll have a chance. Otherwise I’ll get what the police so practically refer to as the ‘hot squat.’ Meaning the chair, my dear.”
I got up, rather wearily.
“I’m sorry, Jim. I came here to help if I could. Even to get you some dinner—” He made a gesture at that. “But you don’t want any help. I’d better go.”
Then he became the old Jim again, kindly and considerate.
“I’m just shouting to keep my courage up, Lou. And I haven’t told you the whole story. Maybe you don’t remember, but the sight of blood always makes me sick. It does something to me, always has. But it’s too damned ridiculous to tell the police. I think I’d have raised the alarm. God knows it was the first instinct I had! But I was going to be sick. Can you imagine it?” he demanded savagely. “Can you imagine a full-grown man in an emergency like that rushing off to be sick somewhere? Well, that’s what I did. And when Emily raised the alarm I was in the lavatory off the downstairs hall, throwing up my boots! That’s a laugh for the police, isn’t it?”
“They might believe it, Jim.”
“They might. It’s too irrational for a good killer to invent, I suppose. And it happens to be true. You see, I couldn’t show myself after it was all over. I had blood on my clothes. Not much, but some.”
“You could get rid of your clothes.”
“How? Burn them, and let the police find whatever’s left over. Nails, buttons or what have you? No, my child. I know exactly what a real killer is up against. I’ve been down twice to start that damned furnace; in August, mind you! But what’s the use?”
“I could take them with me. They’ll never search our house.”
“And have them take them from you as you leave here? Use your head, Lou! Now run home and forget me and this mess.”
“Maybe later on tonight you could bury them, Jim? Out in No Man’s Land.”
He refused that idea, too, and I remember standing there and trying to think of some place where the inevitable police search would not discover them. It is strange how little the average house offers against that sort of hunt, especially for bulky objects.
“You haven’t a concealed closet for your liquor?” I asked at last.
“I have a closet; but if you think at least fifty people don’t know about it, then you don’t know Helen.”
“Still it would give you time, Jim,” I pleaded.
Without a word he turned, and going to the bookshelves beside the fire, took hold of the frame and swung it out. Books and shelves, it proved to be a small door, and behind it was a neat liquor closet.
“Of course, once I hide the things I am committed by my own act,” he said. “Still—”
“Did anyone see you?”
“In this house? No, I have my own key to the front door. Of course the police know that now.”
“Or outside, on the way back here?”
“How do I know? We’ll have to take a chance on that. Luckily I left my car here and walked there. That may help some.”
We made it without a minute to spare. I had drawn the front shades while he was upstairs, and he was on his way down when the doorbell rang. Luckily the hall was dark, and the front door solid. He slipped the things to me through the stair-rail, and fumbled long enough at the door to give me a minute or two. But I was trembling all over by the time I had hidden the trousers and the shoes, and had swung the shelves back in place.
He gave me a bit more leeway by stopping to turn on the hall lights after he had opened the door. Then I heard him bringing in some men, and although I dread to think of what the Crescent would have said had it known, I was lighting one of Jim’s cigarettes when they entered.
There were two of them, an Inspector Briggs from Headquarters and the detective, Sullivan, whom I had seen in the hall upstairs at the Lancaster house.
They eyed me curiously when Jim presented them.
“Miss Hall, eh? Then you are the young lady who found Miss Emily Lancaster in the garden?” This was from the Inspector.
“I didn’t exactly find her. I heard her screaming, and ran out. It was Eben who got to her first.”
“I see.”
I was bracing myself for the next question, but to my surprise it did not come. Instead he suggested that Mr. Sullivan see me home, and then come back. Evidently he had no idea of letting Jim overhear what I had to say. I had a horrified moment as I rose when I realized that in my anxiety to hide the clothing I had overlooked that with Jim. What would he tell them? Or deny?
But Jim settled that for me in surprising fashion.
“Don’t worry, Lou,” he said. “We’ll tell the truth and shame the devil! And you can throw away that cigarette. I don’t think it’s fooled anybody.”
Inspector Briggs smiled slightly, but his face altered as Jim walked deliberately to the shelves and swung them open. “There’s the evidence,” he said.
Sullivan took me out, and I came as near to fainting then as I ever have, right there on the Wellington front porch.