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“Why would I keep it, if I’d killed poor old Emily?” he demanded. “Don’t you suppose I know that every gun puts its mark on a bullet? I’m not a fool.”

“Then you ought to know that these marks are identical.”

They showed him the enlargements of photographs, but he only shook his head.

“That’s your business,” he said. “Mine’s to get out of here with a whole skin. But don’t fool yourselves that anybody else has had that gun of mine. If you think that you don’t know our house. We’re not only locked up against the world. We’re locked up against each other!”

That was the best they could do. They held him all day and well into the night, and then they had to let him go home. They let him go because there were some things they could not understand about the automatic; especially about that empty shell of Amanda’s. I am no expert in ballistics, but I believe it had to do with a firing pin. There was some microscopic deviation there, but small as it was it released George.

He was not free, of course. Thereafter, and until our third mystery was solved, I was more than once to meet George walking briskly along with a detective following at a discreet distance; and to have George say:

“Just taking him around the block before I turn in. I’ve offered to put him on a leash, but he doesn’t fancy the idea.”

It must have been about the time in our reign of terror that the Commissioner of Police sent for Inspector Briggs and asked him ironically if he would like to take over the public library on Liberty Avenue as headquarters for the men on the case.

It was after luncheon on that same Tuesday that Mrs. Talbot and Lydia heard the news of George’s arrest, and they reacted in characteristic fashion. Mrs. Talbot at once called a taxi and fairly took Police Headquarters by assault.

“Where is my son?” she boomed. “Get out of my way, young man. My son is being illegally detained, and I’ll get him out of here if I have to engage every lawyer in this town.”

Lydia, indignant and frightened as well as agonized at being left behind, came in to see me.

“Of course he didn’t do it,” she said sitting as usual bolt upright on the edge of her chair. “Why should he? Anyhow I heard him getting out onto that shed roof, and there was no shot fired after that.”

“You should tell them that, Miss Lydia,” I said.

“I’ll tell them when they ask me.”

If she was alarmed for George, she was also highly curious about my own adventure. I had to sit and wait while she went back to look over the scene of it, and I can still see her after she came back, prim and late-Victorian on the edge of her chair, opening that bead bag of hers and taking out the clippings from the morning papers and giving them to me to read.

“I have kept them all,” she said. “I’m pasting them into a book, but I haven’t told Hester. It’s surprising, Louisa, how many there are.”

Strange, that casual little speech of hers, when I am writing this story largely from that very book, so neat and yet so lurid.

She did not stay long. She wandered into Mother’s room to see if a camera man who had been hidden in the bushes all morning was still there, and on discovering that he had gone she went away.

“I sent Lizzie out to drive him off,” she said, preparing to go. “But he only offered her ten dollars if she could get you to the front porch with a bandage on your head. Or he said a towel would do!”

I rather affronted her by laughing at this, and finally she went away. I remember watching her go out the door, and smiling at the butterfly hatpin in her hat. It was set on a bit of coiled wire so that the insect took on a curious activity as she walked, jerking and glittering uncannily. There was certainly nothing that morning to tell me that the time was near at hand when I was to see that same butterfly trampled into the ground; or that Lydia Talbot herself was soon to be added to our list of tragic mysteries.

I was much stronger that afternoon, and after she left Annie helped me into a dressing gown and put me into a chair. Mother, who had escaped the moment she saw Lydia, was still at the Lancaster house; for Margaret had had to go to the inquest over poor Emily, and somebody had to stay in the house.

It was still, incredible as it seems to me now, only Tuesday. The smell of hot irons on wet linen penetrated to my room, and now and then far off I could hear the thud of one as our own black Lily thumped it on the stove. All along the Crescent, though death and trouble seemed everywhere, the same process was going on. Dark hands were taking dampened rolls of this or that from our baskets, spreading them on tables and boards and ironing them. On clothes horses the finished products were hung to dry, and then folded down into their various hampers, Ruffles were fluted with fluting irons, and old damask carefully polished until it shone.

Yet the situation that Tuesday afternoon was strange enough, what with suspicion suddenly shifting from Jim to George Talbot; with reporters ringing our doorbell; with Mr. Lancaster slowly sinking in the white house across from my windows; with poor Emily still lying on a slab in the morgue, and nothing so far discovered as to the hiding place of the stolen gold.

Of actual physical clues, in the sense of something material, there were still only a half dozen. The police, so far as I can recall now, had only the series of photographs taken after each of the crimes; a number of fingerprints on cards, each card carefully marked; an automatic pistol, an empty shell and a bullet; the chest under the bed, and George Talbot! Somewhere put away they probably had those stained clothes of Jim Wellington’s, but I do not know. Also I dare say they still had those ridiculous and now withered blades of grass from the porch roof, but the sliver of wood from the screen I know had been mounted on a card and carefully kept.

I know that because after the whole thing was over the Inspector presented it to me!

They did not have the bit of stem which had been found in our hall, however. That the Commissioner of Police had gravely handed to Herbert Dean.

“Briggs here seems to think I need a salad!” he said. “He’ll be bringing me a rose geranium leaf next and asking me to smell it! Maybe you can find out what that stuff is, Dean. Not that I think it matters, but—well, take it along if you like.”

However, the police added another clue that Tuesday, and then sat around a desk at Headquarters and wondered just where it left them. That was the magnified photograph of a fingerprint from the bell which hung over Mrs. Lancaster’s bed, presumably hers, and beside it another one, of the thumbprint from the chest which had contained the money. There was no question but that they were the prints of the same thumb, and I believe the District Attorney sent for the Inspector on the strength of his discovery and told him he was the only man on the job worth a hill of beans.

“Good work, Briggs,” he said. “Now I suppose we have to guess whether the money was taken out of the chest by the old lady and hidden somewhere; or whether she found out it had been taken and was killed before she could make a fuss. No chance it’s still in the house, I suppose?”

“Not a chance, unless someone there is smarter than I think.”

Nevertheless, I believe they made another intensive search of the house that day, rapping walls and even examining the chimneys and the roof. But they found nothing whatever.

“And of course, Miss Lou,” the Inspector told me later, “it was still only a presumption that those prints were the old lady’s anyhow. The whole thing was guesswork, and how could we prove it? We didn’t like to ask for an exhumation order; the family would never have given it. And under the circumstances we hadn’t printed her before she was buried.”

Herbert Dean had one or two bits of evidence which he had not given to the police, however. Among these were the gloves, a short piece of hemp cord, and the buttons and charred paper from the fire in No Man’s Land. Also he now had the stem of the unidentified plant, over which that same day the botanical department of our local university was working. But he also had, carefully stowed away, the end of a rather expensive cigar, flattened as though it had been trampled into the ground.

These—“and an idea”—he says, were his total equipment up to four o’clock that day when, Mother still at the Lancaster house, Laura Dalton rang our doorbell, pushed Annie aside, walked deliberately up the stairs and into my bedroom, and locked the door behind her.

I
HAVE THOUGHT A
great deal about Laura Dalton since that day. In the Crescent her position was somewhat isolated; not because she did not belong, for she had been born there. But as Herbert says, she was suspended like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth. She was too young for that close triumvirate which had consisted of Mother, Mrs. Lancaster and Hester Talbot, and her marriage had placed an unbridgeable gulf between the local spinsters and herself.

Doctor Armstrong, calling that morning to look me over, had expressed some anxiety about her.

“It’s the wrong time of life for her to go through all this,” he said. “Head looks all right to me, Lou; you can go down to dinner if you feel up to it. But I’d be glad if you could talk to her a little. She’s got something on her mind. She’s still pretty much in love with Bryan, you know, and I imagine she’s got some sort of bee in her bonnet about him.” He went into the bathroom, washed his hands carefully and came back still holding the towel.

“I suppose people make their own hell in this world,” he went on. “They’re fond of each other, you know; probably a good bit more than that. But they’re both stubborn. It’s twenty years since she locked her door against him for some peccadillo or other, and I haven’t a doubt myself that there have been a good many times since when she’s unlocked it; and others when he had brought himself to try it, and had to go away. Pitiful, isn’t it, with life so short!”

All that was in my mind that afternoon when Laura Dalton walked into my room and locked the door behind her. I can see her now, in her pale lavender summer silk, her too-youthful hat sitting high on her head, and under it a pair of devastated eyes and a mouth that twitched with nerves.

She did not even explain that locking of the door. She moved directly across the room and stood over me, and for a moment I was startled. She did not look quite sane. She wasted no time in preliminaries.

“Is it true,” she demanded, “that they have arrested George Talbot?”

“I don’t know about an arrest. They have taken him to Headquarters.”

“The fools. The fools!” she broke out. “Listen, Louisa, George never killed Emily Lancaster, or her mother either. I know that. But I can’t tell the police. I can’t. I
can
’
t
.”

It was some time before I could quiet her, and at first I did not realize what she was trying to tell me. It was only after a full half hour, while I listened to the bottled-up miseries of a jealous and suspicious woman, still passionately in love with her husband and now terrified beyond all control, that I knew that Mrs. Dalton believed that her husband, with the assistance of Margaret Lancaster, had killed both Margaret’s mother and her sister!

Stripped of inessentials, her narrative ran something like this:

Years ago, Margaret Lancaster had been engaged to Bryan Dalton. He did not live on the Crescent then; but he used to come in his high trap and take Margaret for drives. Mrs. Lancaster had opposed the match, however.

“She didn’t like Bryan,” was what she said. “And when Margaret insisted on marrying him anyhow she simply went to bed for six months. I was very young then,” she added quickly, “but my father had built here where we are now, and I can remember my own mother saying that Mrs. Lancaster had gone to bed because it was the one way she could keep Margaret at home.”

Then one day Bryan asked
her
to drive with him, and after that they became engaged and were married. “And I had the house by that time,” she said, “so he came to live on the Crescent, although it wasn’t the Crescent then. It was just country, and he never really liked it.”

It was to that, his boredom and his revolt against the Crescent, that she laid his unfaithfulness. There had been somebody else, as she put it, every now and then since. And for the past few months it had been Margaret Lancaster again.

She was, I thought, trying to explain something to herself rather than to me, for all this came out only by degrees. She would stop, stretch the fingers of the gloves on her lap and start again, as though by going over the whole business and trying to coordinate it for me, she was trying to follow the steps by which she had come to her tragic conviction.

“I thought it was all over,” she said. “I still can’t see—I think she led him on, Louisa; for her own purposes. He hadn’t been faithful. We separated years ago over a maid in my own house. But after all a man of fifty—well, I thought all that was over. I suppose,” she added doubtfully, “that I shouldn’t be telling you all this, Louisa. You’re still a young woman.”

“I’m twenty-eight,” I said briefly. “I don’t think you’re telling me much I don’t know. I can’t believe what you are telling me about Margaret Lancaster. That’s all.”

I was, however, uneasily remembering that anonymous letter sent to the police, and I felt that my voice lacked conviction. If it did she did not notice.

“It’s true,” she asserted. “I don’t know how far it’s gone, but she’s smart and not bad-looking; and after all the time comes when any man has to learn that young women aren’t interested in him.”

There was apparently no mistake about the situation. He had even taken Margaret out driving, meeting her some place downtown; that was early in August, and once she had found Margaret’s bag in the car. It had slipped down beside a seat cushion, and she had given it to her husband without speaking. He had simply shrugged his shoulders and taken it. But she had no other proof. She had set herself to watch, but so far as she could tell no letters passed between them. She believed now that they had; that they had used the woodshed on the Lancaster place as a sort of post office.

The affair, so far as she knew, had commenced late in June or early in July.