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“From the servants,” she said, triumphant over her sensation. “While Mr. Dalton was ringing the front doorbell tonight I went around to the back of the house. I found Ellen in tears, and the others in a fine state. The police have not only searched the entire house from roof to cellar, including the furnace and the soiled clothes hampers and the coal pile—there’s a man still moving the coal—but they actually got a woman there and made the women take off their clothes! Or at least show what they had on. To see if there was blood on them.”

The Crescent, as represented there, sat in a stupefied silence; not so much because an inside job was suspected, but at the power of a police force which could thus violate its privacy and offend its dignity.

It was only George Talbot who grinned.

“I’d better be getting home,” he said. “I had a nose-bleed yesterday, and I have a little washing to do!”

But no one laughed. The picture Mrs. Dalton had drawn was too graphic. For the first time in its existence the Crescent was threatened with the awful majesty of the law, and it did not like it. It covered its fear with talk, much of it rather pointless. Nevertheless, out of that welter of talk and surmise, certain things finally emerged.

The afternoon at the Lancasters’ up to or about four o’clock had apparently been quiet enough. The family had lunched at one, and at one-thirty Jennie had carried up the invalid’s tray. Miss Emily had fed her, and the tray had gone down at two.

At a quarter before two Lydia had brought her basket, too late for lunch, and had been admitted by Jennie, who cautioned her with a gesture that Mr. Lancaster was asleep in the library. As she had gone out by the kitchen door shortly after her sister-in-law arrived, she had not seen the old gentleman again.

At two-thirty Mrs. Talbot had gone in, remaining until half past three, which was when Mrs. Lancaster took her afternoon nap. When she went downstairs she found Mr. Lancaster awake and in the hall, and about to take the brief half-hour saunter which was his daily exercise. Emily had gone downstairs with her; and she had not only seen them out, she had for Mrs. Talbot’s benefit shown her that the spring lock was on the front door, and in order.

“I’m not afraid of the door,” Emily had said. “But I don’t like the porch roof off mother’s room; especially just now.”

“It’s a fool idea anyhow,” Mr. Lancaster had said. “If a good bank isn’t safe, then nothing and nobody is.”

He and Mrs. Talbot had then gone down the walk to the street together, separating at the pavement; he going left toward Liberty Avenue and Mrs. Talbot going back home. The last thing Emily had said was that she was going to put on a fresh dress, since Margaret intended to go out. This fresh dress we all understood perfectly, since most of us dress before four in the afternoon to receive the callers who are more of a tradition of past social importance than present fact.

From that time, three-thirty or so, until Miss Emily came in that awful fashion through the side door, no one knew anything of what had happened. Emily had dressed, Miss Margaret had taken or prepared to take her shower, Eben had cut the grass, Ellen had beaten up her cake, Jennie had polished her silver, and up in the hot third floor Peggy had prepared to go out.

Not once in all this, however, had anyone mentioned Jim Wellington’s name. It was George Talbot who came nearest to it.

“It looks like a premeditated thing, all right,” he said. “Somebody who knew that Mrs. Lancaster always slept at three-thirty and that the girls dressed then.” They are, of course, still the girls to us. “Also that the old boy always took his walk at that time.” He looked around the room mischievously. “Might be any of us!” he said, and grinned. “Anyone along the Crescent, from Jim Wellington at one end to me at the other. Of course he’d have to know the axe was kept in the woodshed, too. That’s another point.”

“That isn’t funny,” said Bryan Dalton.

“Well, even you knew it was there, didn’t you, sir?” said George, still grinning. “Matter of fact, I saw you near there early this morning.”

“And what were you doing there yourself?” said Mr. Dalton, red with anger.

“Looking for a golf ball I lost yesterday,” said George, smiling and unruffled. “And you, sir?”

“That’s none of your damned business,” Mr. Dalton shouted, and would have continued in the same vein had not his wife hastily risen.

“Will someone tell my husband,” she said sweetly, “that it is time to go home?
And
that I do not like his language?”

Almost he spoke to her! We all waited breathlessly, for it was common opinion among us that, the ice once broken, they would get along at least amicably. But he remembered in time, gave George an angry glare and stalked out. Mrs. Dalton followed him, tripping on her high heels, and at the foot of the front steps he waited for her. I watched them going side by side down the walk, in their usual silence; but it seemed to me that night that it was less companionable than usual, if a silence can be companionable, or if people can be further separated who are already entirely apart.

M
RS. 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.