Album (42 page)

It was of no use to tell Inspector that I had told Herbert nothing, because I knew nothing. And Herbert Dean today says that the police still regard his entire success in the case as due to me!

Nevertheless, although they believed that they had the Crescent Place killer under guard in the hospital, the search for Lizzie Cromwell still went on. She had not visited her sister’s house; and with one exception, from late Saturday afternoon when she had left the interurban car four miles beyond Hollytree she had seemingly dropped out of existence.

She had walked back that four miles along the track, carrying her bag; for a man had seen her and so reported. He had seen her clearly in the light of another car; a tall thin woman with a valise, who had stepped aside to let the car pass. “Like one of these flashlight pictures,” he said. “But I got a good view of her. She wore black clothes with some sort of a big pin at her neck, and she had a kind of old-fashioned satchel in her hand.”

That had been about ten o’clock at night, and was only a mile beyond the house where the pool and the drawers from the trunk had been discovered. Where and how she had spent that interval while she presumably waited for darkness nobody knew; possibly, according to the police, resting somewhere in that darkening countryside and waiting to meet the man Daniels.

“One thing was sure,” said the Inspector. “This Daniels was in it up to the neck. We took that darky to the hospital and with that fake beard on Daniels he identified him as the man who helped carry down the trunk. Only thing in our minds was whether he’d done away with this Lizzie too, as well as the Talbot woman. You’ve got to remember that if he
was
Talbot—and all of us were sure of it—he’d been crazy once, and he might be again.”

For Lizzie had not been located, although the general alarm sent out for her described her as meticulously as it had described Lydia Talbot. At Headquarters everyone but Herbert believed that our murder mysteries were solved, and that the story was written large for everyone to read. Indeed, the Commissioner himself gave a statement to the press some time that day; much against Herbert’s advice.

In it he stated that the various crimes had been committed as part of a plot to secure the gold taken from the Lancaster house; and, although he rather hedged here, he intimidated guilty collusion between the street cleaner, Daniels, and one Elizabeth or Lizzie Cromwell, still missing but likely to be discovered before long. The gold had not yet been located, but here too the police expected results very soon.

Nevertheless, that statement of the Commissioner’s, coupled with a further description of Lizzie, brought some result that night. Lizzie had been seen early on Sunday morning. A woman answering her description, but without a valise, had gone into a restaurant of the cheaper sort downtown and had eaten a small breakfast. For this she had rather apologetically tendered a bill of large denomination in payment, and had waited until the cashier sent out for change.

She had seemed very tired, but she had been neat in dress and quiet of manner; “very ladylike.” And the cashier remembered a cameo brooch.

From the beginning the police had believed that this valise had held the missing head, and now to the search for Lizzie was added an intensive one for the satchel.

Late as it was, men were sent out again; not only to cover the check and baggage rooms of the railway stations and such express offices as they could reach, but outside the city line the county officials collected troopers and local constables to search beside all railway tracks and public roads leading into town. But as everyone who followed the case will remember, the bag was not recovered until much later. Then in dredging a new channel under one of our railroad bridges, it was brought up one day with a load of sand, with its gruesome contents still inside.

I knew very little myself that day of what was going on. The Crescent had sunk into a lethargy which amounted to fatalism. Our servants were packing to leave, and Aunt Caroline was demanding over the telephone that we close the house and stay with her downtown. At noon the police had asked Margaret Lancaster to identify the man in the hospital, the prints sent by mail not having yet arrived and Mrs. Talbot having refused to leave her bed. She came over first to us, a mere shadow of herself and looking incredibly old.

I remember thinking that Laura Dalton could never be jealous of her again; and as she had come without a hat, noticing with a shock that the hair I had always admired had been dyed hair, and that it was now gray at the roots.

I admitted her myself, Annie being upstairs packing a trunk.

“May I come in, Lou?” she said. “I have to go to the hospital, and I shall need that album I gave your mother. I don’t know why Hester Talbot won’t go. It’s certainly her affair, not mine. If Uncle John is so changed that he could work here for months and none of us recognize him, how on earth am I to do it now?”

She wanted the album, she said, because there was an old photograph of John Talbot in it. She could take it with her, and it might help. Anyhow it was all she could think of.

I did not know what to do. Mother came in just then and said the album was in the old schoolroom. But of course it was not, and at the end of an hour of frantic searching Margaret went away without it.

That was the first of two visits that afternoon for the same purpose. The second was George Talbot, in a savage humor and looking as though he had not slept for days on end.

“Mother wants that album Margaret Lancaster gave your mother,” he said. “I’m damned if I know why. And I’m to bring it as it is, tied up and everything! I give you my word, Lou, that house is like a madhouse. She won’t open her door until she knows who is outside, and I’ve had Doctor Armstrong there twice, but she won’t let him in. As for getting her to see that poor old chap in the hospital—! After all he’s my father. I’ve told them to give him the best there is.”

“Then you don’t believe—?”

“Believe? Don’t be a fool, Lou. As far as I can make out he was living the life he liked. He had his books, and he had work to do.” And he added: “I wish I’d known who he was, Lou. Imagine me passing him day after day, and giving him a nod when I felt like it. Well, where’s the album?”

I had to tell him then that we could not find the album, and he looked rather dismayed.

“More hell!” he said as he got up. “Let me know when it turns up, will you? There’s a picture of him in it, and she wants it. God knows why!”

I remember watching him as he cut across the Common to his house, and wondering whether I should have told him the truth; that the police had taken the album for some mysterious purpose of their own. But I am glad now that I did not.

T
HAT 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.