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Perhaps I was hysterical that night, for I found myself looking at the fat pincushion on my bureau and laughing. I had done that only once before. That was when I came home from boarding school for the last time, and tried to throw it out. I had done it, too; but the next day it was firmly in its place again. I had laughed then, and then burst into a storm of tears.

After that the pincushion was always symbolic to me. It stood for everything: for no children to play with when I was small; for long hair when I had wanted to cut mine; for fried chicken and ice cream at hot Sunday midday dinners; for the loss of romance and the general emptiness of life. And that night it squatted there as if to remind me that life was short, but that it was still there; that it would always be there.

I did not undress at once. Instead I stood by a window, in the room which corresponded with Margaret Lancaster’s, and thought over all that I had learned. Out of the chaos in my mind certain things were emerging. For one thing, everyone at the house that night had, either tacitly or openly, suspected that the crime was essentially a crime of the Crescent itself. Apparently George Talbot suspected Bryan Dalton, and Mr. Dalton suspected George! Both Lydia Talbot and Mrs. Dalton, not to mention Mother, seemed convinced that the answer lay in the Lancaster house itself; and only Mrs. Talbot openly believed that it was a plain case of robbery.

But that last theory seemed to me to be absurd. Even I knew that gold was heavy. One did not pick it up and simply run away with it. Again, none of us actually knew that the gold and currency were missing. And if they were, I wondered vaguely if there had been time between Mrs. Talbot’s departure and Jim’s entrance for the old lady to be killed, the chest dragged out and opened, bags of gold or bundles of notes placed on the porch roof, and the chest replaced under the bed.

For that at least we did know that night, although I do not remember how we knew it, unless it was from Lydia Talbot, who had an uncanny way of securing information. The chest was under the bed when the police got there.

I wondered about Eben, only to dismiss him. It had been half past three when I sat down at my window, and the sound of the mower had not ceased once until that time at four o’clock when he stopped to mop his hot face, and Emily had screamed in the house across.

No, not Eben. Not even any of our servants, so far as we could tell. All of them save Peggy at the Lancasters’ had been with us for years on end. All save Helen Wellington’s, that is, and they had packed and gone long before the crime. I thought of Peggy and dismissed her; a slim soft little creature, whom I had once seen walking with Holmes on the path through No Man’s Land, but whose face showed only a sort of weak amiability.

Then who else? Not a delivery driver for one of our shops. The Crescent rigidly insists on delivery at the rear, and the Lancaster rear porch had been occupied all the afternoon. Not Holmes, more recent than most of the others, but driving Mother that afternoon until half past four; nor the Daltons’ butler, Joseph, identified in the general canvass that night by Laura Dalton as having brought her iced tea at a quarter to four.

Who else but Jim, then? I began again that sort of desperate roll call of the Crescent: Helen Wellington in town, and with no possible motive: Mrs. Dalton drinking iced tea and Bryan Dalton in a pair of dirty overalls working over his car in their garage, Mother out, Eben mowing, Lydia gone shopping at two-thirty and sitting the rest of the afternoon in an air-cooled moving picture theater, George downtown at his bank, and Mrs. Talbot carefully locked in her bedroom and taking a nap.

It was Lydia Talbot that afternoon who had come nearest to making plain statement. “I suppose they stood it as long as they could,” she had said, and then became uneasy and spoke of what devoted daughters they had always been.

One thing was clear even to me, however. That was that the secret of the Lancasters’ gold was not a secret at all. Probably from the moment Jim Wellington had brought out his first canvas sack, with its neck neatly wired and sealed with lead, our grapevine telegraph had sent the news from one end of the Crescent to the other. There would be even no secret as to where it was kept, with Peggy wiping the chest daily with an oiled cloth—as we wipe all our furniture—and brushing the floor under that tragic bed.

A dozen people knew, a hundred might have learned. And as I did not then know of those screens which would not move, it seemed to me that some one of those hundred could have scaled the porch roof, slid into the room, opened the chest with the key after his deadly work was done, and escaped with his treasure.

But how? In a car? No car had passed our house from three-thirty to four. That I knew. Then who else? The street cleaner? I had hardly ever noticed him. No one seems to notice the street cleaner, for some reason. But now I recalled him, a tall thin gangling man in dirty white clothes and helmet, who was a constant source of irritation to the Crescent, which regarded him as especially employed by the city to brush its leaves into heaps and then let the wind blow them about again.

Perhaps I was not entirely rational that night, but the picture of this individual pushing his waste can on wheels persisted in my mind. After all, if the Crescent knew of the gold and the key to the chest around the old lady’s neck, then its servants knew it. And what the servants knew he might know.

In a way, too, he had access to all our properties; for whenever his cart was filled he had a way of trundling it back to No Man’s Land and there, against a city ordinance, dumping and burning it.

He could have known not only about the gold. He could easily have known about the axe in the woodshed. Moreover, so regular are our habits, it might have been possible for him to know that Emily dressed while Mrs. Lancaster slept between three-thirty and four, that the old gentleman walked at that time, leaving the screen door open, that it was Margaret’s afternoon off, as well as Peggy’s; and he could have seen that the other two maids were in the rear of the house.

Moreover, the times coincided. While I had not noticed him that day, he generally reached us by mid-afternoon. And again, it seemed to me that his cart answered the question as to how the gold had been taken, if it had.

I have told all this circumstantially, not because it made any real contribution to the solving of our crimes, but because it explains how I myself in a small way became involved in them. For shortly before midnight, and while the Inspector and Sullivan were still gazing at that chest as it was being dragged from under the bed, I was on my way to the Lancaster house with my theory!

I got out of the front door without rousing anyone, but no sooner had I set foot on the street pavement than a shadowy figure in a rubber coat looked up and flashed a light in my face.

“Not allowed to go this way, miss,” a voice said.

“Don’t be absurd. I want to see Inspector Briggs.”

“I don’t think he’ll see you. He’s busy.”

“Nevertheless I intend to try,” I said firmly; and with that he fell back, although he followed me all the way. At the Lancaster walk he stopped.

“I’ll be here when you come out,” he told me. “It isn’t a healthy neighborhood just now for young ladies alone.”

With which cheerful remark he lighted a cigarette and lounged away.

The Lancaster house was more fully lighted than I had realized until I stood before it. Saving of lights is one of the Crescent’s pet economies, although most of us are safely beyond want, and it is an actual fact that the house in front of me, blazing from attic to cellar, was more indicative to me of the sharp break in our lives than anything else I had so far seen.

For a time, however, it looked as though I might not be admitted.

There was an officer on the porch, and he asked me sharply what I wanted.

“To see Inspector Briggs,” I told him. “Or Mr. Sullivan. He’s a detective, I believe.”

“The Inspector’s upstairs, miss,” he said doubtfully. “But I don’t think he’ll see you.”

“Tell him I have something to say that may be important. I am Miss Hall. I live next door.”

He went in then, and I stood on the porch waiting. The expected storm was closer now, and I remember distant thunder and a thin spatter of rain on the roof overhead. Then the front door opened again, but it was not the policeman. It was Margaret Lancaster.

“Louisa?” she said, in a whisper.

“I’m here, Miss Margaret.”

“Quick, take this,” she said. “Have you a pocket? If you haven’t, slip it into your stocking. And for God’s sake don’t tell anybody I gave it to you.”

She had thrust a small package into my hand; an envelope rather. I took it, but I must have seemed uncertain, for she urged me in a desperate voice to hide it.

“He’ll be down any minute!” she implored me. “Hurry!”

I slid it into my stocking, and then slowly straightened.

“I don’t like it, Miss Margaret,” I told her. “If it has anything to do with—”

“Listen to me, Lou! All I’m trying to do is to save somebody who is innocent. I swear that, Lou.”

The next second I was alone on the porch, and soon after that the officer returned.

I
WAS IN A
poor state of nerves when I was finally shown into the library. Only Mr. Lancaster was still there, and he looked as though he had not moved since the afternoon. He was lying back in the same chair, with his delicate immaculately kept hands on the arms, and his face a waxy yellow. He did not rise as usual on my entrance. At first he seemed not to know that I was there; then he opened his eyes and looked at me, a strange and unfriendly look.

“What brings you here?” he asked, still without moving.

“I want to talk to the Inspector.”

“About what?” He still lay back, but I got an impression of sudden tension.

I took my courage in my hands.

“About the money, Mr. Lancaster,” I said. “I may be wrong, but I have thought of a way by which it could have been taken out of the house.”

“Taken out of the house! How do you know it has been taken out of the house?”

Luckily for me Inspector Briggs came in just then, looking rather annoyed, and took me to the morning room behind the parlor. He put me into a chair, and then drawing one close in front of me, sat down himself. At that moment I thanked heaven for long skirts. Whatever it was Margaret had given me, it felt bulky and uncomfortable in my stocking.

“Now, Miss Hall,” he said, “let’s have it. I presume it’s about this murder.”

“The murder and the gold,” I told him.

“Gold? What do you know about any gold?”

That was the first time I realized that the family had not told the police about it, and I was pretty well confused. But I managed to say that there was a story that Mrs. Lancaster had been hoarding it and that, trying to think how it could be taken away—if it was—I had thought of the street-cleaner.

“After all,” I said, “somebody did this killing, Inspector. And it wasn’t Jim Wellington, no matter what you think.”

He smiled rather grimly.

“Somebody did it, that’s sure,” he agreed. “Well, we’ll look up your friend with the cart; but I wouldn’t be too hopeful. You live next door, eh? Then I suppose you know this family fairly well.”

“I’ve lived next door to them all my life. But as to knowing them well, if you knew the Crescent you wouldn’t say that.”

“Why?” He eyed me, absently pinching his upper lip; a habit I was to learn well as time went on.

“I don’t know. We are rather a repressed lot, I imagine. We see a good bit of each other, but no one is particularly intimate with anyone else. We still leave cards when we call after four o’clock,” I added; and he seemed to find that amusing, for he smiled.

“But you have certain powers of observation,” he pointed out. “Take this family here, in this house. Did they get along together? Just shut your eyes and tell me what you can think, or remember, about them; their relationships, their prejudices, their differences if they had any.” And seeing me hesitate, he added: “Nobody is under suspicion, of course. As a matter of fact, it is practically impossible for any of them to have done it; for reasons I won’t go into now. This is routine, but it has to be done.”

“I don’t really know much,” I told him. “They seemed to get along very well. The two girls were devoted to Mrs. Lancaster, although she was a fretful invalid. In a way Miss Emily bore most of that burden; but Emily was her favorite.”

“And Mr. Lancaster? Was he fond of his wife?”

“He was most loyal and careful of her. But she was not easy to get along with. You see,” I explained, “our servants talk back and forth, and so we learn things we wouldn’t otherwise.”

“And—since you seem to know about this money—how did Mr. Lancaster regard the hoarding?”

“He disliked it. All of them did.”

He leaned back and pinched his lip again. “Now that’s interesting,” he commented. “Very interesting. It doesn’t look—well, let’s get on. What about Miss Margaret? Rather more worldly, isn’t she? Doesn’t like being a spinster and doesn’t like getting old. Isn’t that it?”

I colored uncomfortably.

“No woman likes either, Inspector.”

But he grinned at me cheerfully.

“Tut, tut!” he said. “You’re still a young woman, and a good-looking one at that. Well, what about her?”

“I don’t know very much. She’s a good housekeeper, and she helps with her mother. She goes out more than Miss Emily, almost every other afternoon; and she dresses more carefully. That is, Miss Emily is frightfully neat, of course, but Miss Margaret is more—well, I dare say more fashionable.”

“Hasn’t give up hope yet, in other words!” he said, and laughed a little. “All right, that will do for the family. Now tell me about this afternoon. Close your eyes again. But first; have you any idea just how this gold was put into the chest? The old lady was helpless, wasn’t she? Then who did it, or was there when it was done?”

“I haven’t any idea. I never heard of it until tonight.”

“And then Wellington told you?”

“I heard before that. All the Crescent seems to have known about it, except myself.”