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She came then to the events of the last few days. On the Thursday morning of Mrs. Lancaster’s death, at somewhere around eleven o’clock, “Miss Merriam” had come in in a worse state of nerves than usual. She had been there the morning before, but only for a few minutes. This time she stayed an hour, and Mrs. MacMullen said she could hear her walking the floor again.

“Back and forth she went, and me wondering what it was all about. Then she came out, and I asked her if there was anything wrong, or if her old lady was worse. She just acted as though she didn’t hear me, and went past me and on out like a crazy woman. Then she came right in again, and said she’d have to give up the room in a day or two; that they were going somewhere, she didn’t know where. But that she’d send for the trunk later. And she paid me up to the end of the month. That’s the last I ever saw of her, until I recognized this picture this morning.”

It was that afternoon that Mrs. Lancaster was murdered, and the whole neighborhood thrown in a state of frenzy. Mrs. MacMullen was interested, not only because of the crime, but because Miss Merriam had given Miss Emily as a reference. The general belief was that a homicidal maniac was loose, and along with a good many others the landlady inspected her window locks, and in addition she had put a chain across her front door the next morning.

“Some of my people didn’t like it,” she explained. “I put it on at nine every night and after that they had to ring the bell. Their keys were no good to them. But I did it to protect them as well as myself, and when that killer got Miss Emily herself on Sunday night, they stopped fussing.”

She still, she said, had no idea that Miss Emily and Miss Merriam were the same woman. She was shocked nevertheless: “because only last spring I’d talked to her over the telephone. It was as if I knew her, if you see what I mean.”

But on Sunday night she had had real reason to be thankful for the chain. It was about three o’clock in the morning and she was in the lower hall.

“Miss Anderson on the second floor had a toothache, and I’d offered to go down and heat some water for a hot-water bottle. I know my house pretty well so I didn’t turn on a light—and I was in my slippers, and they don’t make any noise.

“Well, I was down at the foot of the stairs when I heard somebody at the front door fumbling with the lock. All my people were in, and they knew about the chair anyhow. I was scared, but I stood still and watched, and that door opened! It opened as far as the chain would let it. Then—I couldn’t help it, I guess—I yelled, and it slammed shut again.”

“You didn’t see anybody?”

“No, miss, and I’d be glad if you kept it to yourself. I don’t want my roomers leaving.”

I nodded absently, I’m afraid, for I was busy thinking. On Sunday night Holmes was locked in our guest room, and he was still there when I unlocked his door the next morning. Then it could hardly have been Holmes at that door and thwarted by that chain. Then who? Mrs. MacMullen was in no doubt, apparently.

“I guess I’d have yelled louder if I’d known Miss Merriam was Emily Lancaster and that he’d killed her that very night,” she said trying to smile. “It’s easy to see what happened, Miss Hall, isn’t it? Whoever it was, he killed her to get that key, and I can only thank God that my chain held.”

But of course she still did not know Miss Merriam’s real identity, and she only wondered why she had not come to her room since the Thursday before.

“I thought maybe she’d gone away as she said,” she explained. “But that seemed queer with her trunk still locked in that room of hers.”

And then, after this long preamble, she reached the trunk itself. It had been taken away the night before, and the word had been brought at noon by a liveried chauffeur with a limousine at the curb. Naturally she had suspected nothing out of the way.

“Up the steps he came, as bold as brass, and he said to me that Miss Merriam’s old lady was going out of town in a hurry, and that she’d send for her trunk that night.

“‘And what about getting into the room for it?’ I said ‘She’ll have to send her key.’

“He said he would get the key, and that was all.” She had not been surprised when he himself came for the trunk with a light truck. He had a negro helper, and the two went up the stairs. He had the key right enough, as she said; but the trunk was heavy and he himself was a small man. It had stuck too at the turn of the stairs, and finally she herself had gone out on the street, found a white man loitering on the pavement, and brought him in.

“The three of them got the trunk out and into the truck,” she said, “and that’s all I know, except that he paid the helpers off and drove away by himself.”

She took a handkerchief out of her bag and wiped her face with it. I could see that she was trembling.

“Well, that’s all, Miss Hall,” she said, getting slowly to her feet. “I let him take the trunk. How was I to know that this Merriam woman was Miss Lancaster, or that she was dead? I gave it to him, and the police can believe it or not. I don’t know what was in it and I don’t care. Let them get him and they’ll get it.”

“They’ll never get him, Mrs. MacMullen,” I said gravely. “I’m afraid he is dead.”

And I was astounded to see her crumple up in a dead faint, on the floor at my feet.

She came around before very long, after Mary over my protests had dashed a tea cup of ice water in her face. She was dazed at first, gazing at us all with blank eyes, but soon she oriented herself and tried to sit up.

“I’m sorry, miss,” she began. “I don’t know when I’ve done such a thing.” Then memory came back and she closed her eyes and leaned back heavily against my arm as I held her.

“Dead!” she said. “O my God! What will we do!”

T
HE REMAINDER OF THAT
day, Thursday August the twenty-fifth, is a sort of nightmare to remember.

I had notified the police of Mrs. MacMullen’s visit, and then followed the usual long hours when nothing seemed to happen. Indeed when everything was over and we knew that our killer would kill no more, I was to hear Herbert Dean say that a big crime case was like a war: a few dramatic moments and then hours and days of surface quiet and patient underground digging.

So far the Crescent as a whole knew nothing of Holmes’s death. No boy selling extras ever intruded on our sacred privacy, and both Mother and I had been asked to let the police make the announcement when they were ready. The result was an extremely peaceful if hot August afternoon, with Eben once again systematically cutting the grass, and our housemaids or parlormaids or butlers, as the case might be, quite cheerfully doing the usual Thursday silver cleaning.

To them I dare say the crimes were over and the excitement ended. Whatever they knew or suspected, the curtain was down and they were ready to go about their business again. It had been exciting, but it was not their play. They had been interested and terrified spectators, but no more than that. The result was that for all our bars and locks, for all our guards at night and the incessant clamor of the press for action on the part of the police as to the Crescent Place murderer, there was a definite relaxation of tension.

Mary and Annie might, and actually did, barricade themselves on the third floor each night by putting a row of chairs on the staircase. But I know now that in most of the Crescent houses the attack on me was laid, either to a burglar after my grandmother’s silver in the cedar room or to my having run head-on into an open door!

That was due to Mrs. Talbot who, coming in early on the morning after it happened, had gone ponderously back to the guest wing and carefully inspected it.

“That’s what happened,” she boomed. “This door was open and she ran into it in the dark. My George did that once and had to have three stitches. Who on earth would want to hurt Louisa?”

“Louisa didn’t carry the kitchen poker up with her,” Mother said.

“How d’you know? Whose fingerprints were on it? I don’t know anything to hold a mark like a brass-handled poker.”

But the poker had borne no prints, it seemed; not even mine. Nor could she account for the fact that even if I had run into a door, the bump was on the top and toward the back of my head!

It was then to a Crescent still ignorant of this third tragedy and quietly going about its business, that Mother returned rather late that afternoon. Her mourning veil looked rather the worse for wear, but she herself looked better than I had seen her look for a long time. She had, it appeared, not only gone to the morgue. She had lunched alone downtown for the first time in twenty years; a break in her routine so incredible that I almost gasped.

“It was quite pleasant,” she said. “The chicken salad was much better than Mary’s; I must speak to her about it.”

“It was Holmes, wasn’t it, mother?”

She nodded, taking off her hat.

“Yes, it was Holmes. Of course his uniform is missing. I shall have to buy a new one. But he looked very natural, considering everything. Quite natural. A hit-and-run driver, they say. But I cannot help thinking, Louisa that he was taken by a definite act of Providence; and Mr. Sullivan quite agrees with me. You see—I suppose I can say this now—I had suspected something quite different. If Holmes killed Emily Lancaster—”

“We don’t know that it was Holmes, mother,” I said. “You may have been right, you know. At least you ought to tell somebody what you suspected, or whom. It can’t do any harm.”

But she refused with a gesture, and I could not induce her to tell me. In her mind the case was settled, the mystery solved. She was certain that he had killed Mrs. Lancaster before he took her on Thursday for her drive, and that all the family had been wrong about the time; and she was even more certain that on Sunday night he had escaped from a locked room and shot Miss Emily.

This belief of hers was strengthened rather than weakened by the fact that the Department had no record of Holmes’s fingerprints.

“You know, Louisa,” she said, “the police have said all along that the murderer was a non-habitual criminal, and I dare say they’ll find that he has that money out in that country place of his he used to talk about. It is all perfectly obvious.”

Outside of that one matter, of the suspicion which was now definitely and comfortably allayed, Mother was more garrulous that afternoon than I had ever seen her. Mr. Sullivan had taken her to see the Police Commissioner after they left the morgue, and she had been surprised to find that he was what she called a gentleman.

“Quite good-looking,” she said. “That is, he would have been, but he was suffering quite dreadfully from poison ivy. It seems he had got some on his hands and then rubbed his face. He was severely swollen. And he has very handsome offices. I suppose that is where our tax money goes. Then the District Attorney dropped in and we had a very nice talk.”

From which I gathered that Mother, rather pleased and certainly without suspecting it, had been that morning tactfully interrogated by the police!

Considering Mother since, in the light of that secret she so carefully preserved, I believe that she was as much a victim to the Crescent as its defender. It had done to her what it had done to most of us: it had definitely contracted our lives until it was a vital matter that in hot weather our candles be placed on ice before using so they would burn evenly on our dinner tables; or that our doilies be rolled over cones of old papers, and not folded.

Congresses might come and go, but it was still essential that our table napkins be ironed on the wrong side and then polished on the right side; that on certain dates our furs be brushed, sunned and put into domestic storage, and that on certain other days the process be repeated in reverse order.

Out in the world women were taking their places and living their own lives, but our small rules of living and conduct ignored all that. Our women servants still had to be in at ten and up at seven. Dependent women relatives were still cared for, if somewhat grudgingly; as witness Lydia Talbot. Mrs. Dalton, cutting flowers in her garden with her hands and complexion protected against the sun, was simply following the tradition; as was Mother when she served a glass of wine and a biscuit to one of our rare callers. And Mrs. Talbot might lock herself in to her heart’s content; it was her house and her affair.

Was it from this slavery of the unimportant that Emily Lancaster had tried to escape? That was the problem I carried into my room that afternoon, for if Emily had taken that money, it opened up something so dreadful that I was afraid to face it.

Suppose that Mrs. Lancaster had roused some night or other to find Emily drawing out that chest, or fumbling with its locks as it lay underneath the bed? And suppose then that the invalid had asked for Jim, the next day perhaps, to come and examine her hoard, to count it for her bag by bag and coin for coin as it lay on the bed? Then what? Was it so hard to suppose the rest? Hadn’t Lizzie Borden been accused of having killed her stepmother with an axe? And hadn’t our own grocer’s daughter turned on him a year ago and stabbed him in the neck with a knife, so that only the proximity of the hospital and assistance had saved his life?

I do not know when I have put in as utterly wretched an hour. All that I knew of Emily came back: the sacrifice of her life and of any real chance for marriage, and the possibility of some furious inner rebellion that had suddenly flared into desperate action. That was what Doctor Armstrong had said: “—to extreme violence. Even to murder.”

For she could have done it. I saw that clearly. She had had that half hour between three-thirty and four, for we had only her word that at three-forty-five she had opened her mother’s door and found her still asleep.

All of it, the plotting about the room on Liberty Avenue, the direct and indirect purchasing of the weights, the conning of various steamship folders, pointed to long and careful planning and the expectation of escape. Then, with everything ready, she could not escape. The police watched her. The house was under guard. Even her own nerves betrayed her, for I had seen her myself in a state of utter collapse.

But I brought myself up with a jerk, for on Sunday night she herself had been killed.