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Then abruptly she went on to the day of Mrs. Lancaster’s murder.

“Bryan was in the garage,” she said. “He had put on a pair of old overalls, and I was at a window at the back of the house upstairs. I wasn’t watching him,” she added. “I was measuring a window for new curtains. And at half past three I saw him, in his overalls, go toward the Lancaster woodshed. I could not see him all the way, of course. The path curves, and you know how the shrubbery has grown. But I was curious and I waited. And he didn’t come back
until a quarter after four
.”

She began to cry again, and I saw that she was trembling violently.

“Look here,” I said, “haven’t you just worked yourself into a state of nerves over all this? Suppose he was near the Lancaster house at that time? How could he get in? And why in heaven’s name would he want to get in? It all sounds rather silly to me.”

“It won’t sound so silly when I’ve finished, Louisa,” she said with a return of her dignity. “I’m not an utter fool. Perhaps I would be a happier woman if I were!”

I was inclined to agree with her as she went on; for she did go on. What she believed was that for a long time Margaret had been taking gold from the chest under the bed, either with a duplicate key or by securing at night the one from her mother’s neck. That she had carried it out of the house, a little at a time, and hidden it; and that all of this was known to Bryan Dalton. That it was in effect a part of their plan to run away and live together somewhere, probably in Europe or South America.

“You see,” she said, as though the entire Crescent did not know it, “I have the money. Bryan has very little of his own.”

Then, on the day Margaret had telephoned Jim Wellington that her father wanted an audit and to examine the chest, they had both known the game was up.

“He might have found a note in the woodshed, telling him,” she said. “And of course there was the axe, right there in plain sight. I know it sounds crazy, but wait, Louisa. How do we know he didn’t slip around the house, and Margaret admit him by the front door?”

I am afraid I shivered, for she said then that she should not have come to me after my own dreadful adventure; but that she was simply desperate.

“I can’t let them hold George Talbot,” she wailed.

“Listen, Mrs. Dalton. Do you think Bryan Dalton shot Emily Lancaster, or did this to me last night? Because I don’t.”

“God forgive me, Lou! I don’t know.”

“Well, I do know,” I told her. “He never left the house last night. They had two men watching it.”

I remember that she got up then, her face colorless and still twitching.

“Then they suspect him! What am I to do, Lou? What am I to do? For he’s guilty, Lou. He must be, or why did she give him that note last night to burn his overalls? He did burn them, last Thursday night. There was a fire still going out there and they disappeared. What else could he have done with them?”

I was too stunned to speak.

“And why, when he heard Emily run out screaming, didn’t he go to her? He must have been near enough to hear her. Who could help it? And why did he come into the house from the garage after he took off his overalls and tell Joseph to get him some whisky? In thirty years I’ve never known him to take a drink before dinner. I tell you, Louisa, Bryan Dalton knew that afternoon that Mrs. Lancaster had been murdered; for all his asking Joseph to tell me that night, as though he had just read it in the newspaper.”

When he came back into the house that afternoon she had been quietly drinking her iced tea, and he never knew she had seen him. But of course she still knew nothing of the murder. She was still without suspicion that evening, in the library after dinner. He had looked very strange when he called Joseph, however. She remembered that later on when they had reached the Lancaster house. They did not enter it together. Bryan rang the front doorbell. She herself had gone around and in by the kitchen, fully aware that the servants would be more talkative than the family. It was still only a crime to her, bad as it was.

But on emerging from the service wing into the side hall, she had seen her husband and Margaret together for a second near the foot of the front stairs. The Talbots were there also, but she had seen Margaret slip a note into Bryan’s hand, and he had slid it into his pocket. She was fishing in her hand-bag while she was telling me this, and I do not even now know how or when she had got it from him later on. She passed it to me, and I must say my flesh crept when I read it. It was in Margaret’s clear strong hand.

“Please burn all letters at once, and destroy what I gave you this afternoon. M.”

Just how she got possession of that note I do not know, nor did she say. He had no idea that she knew he had it, and certainly she got it. But after that, I imagine, all hell must have broken loose in the house when she read it. To her, then, and since, it had meant only one thing: that Margaret and Bryan Dalton had killed Mrs. Lancaster as a preliminary to a flight together, and that the crime was the result of a plot long concocted and carefully carried out.

For she had never found the overalls.

That night, Thursday, she had searched for them, and for any letters from Margaret. He had discovered what she was doing and had tried to stop her, but she was like a crazy woman. There was no sign that he had burned anything in any of the fireplaces, or in the furnace either. But of course that idiot Daniels had had his usual fire in No Man’s Land, and during that three or four hours in the afternoon after the murder he could easily have walked out and dropped something there. Nobody would have been likely to notice. Or maybe he did it at night. She did not know.

That was the story Laura Dalton told me the Tuesday afternoon after our two murders; stripping away for once the hypocrisies and traditional reticences of the Crescent and revealing a naked and suffering soul. She had done it with a certain amount of dignity at that, save for one or two outbursts; stretching and pulling at her gloves, keeping her voice down, and even—heaven help us!—once settling her skirt so that it hung at the correct length about her ankles.

All I could do was to make her promise that she would not go to the police for a day or so at least; and at last she drew on her gloves, straightened her hat, and went away with that odd self-possession which seems to characterize all the older women of the Crescent. Time takes its toll of them, death and tragedy come inevitably, but they face the world with quiet faces and unbroken dignity.

I even heard her thanking Annie as she let her out the front door.

I
HAD ANOTHER VISITOR
that afternoon; Helen Wellington looking, I thought, rather edgy, but determinedly cheerful. She came in, demanding Herbert Dean, and seemed to think I might have him somewhere in a closet.

“I thought he’d be here,” she said. “He seems to spend a lot of time hanging about this place! Either he’s fallen for you or he suspects you; you never can tell with him. Love or business, he’s equally secretive about both.”

She inspected me carefully, including my rising color.

“I hope it’s love, of course,” she went on. “I’d just as soon see you out of my way, Lou! Every time Jim and I have a fuss he spends hours secretly convinced that I’m the Big Mistake and lamenting that he missed out with you.”

“Don’t be so foolish, Helen.”

“Oh, I’m not foolish. After he has been noble and taken me back I spend hours too, telling him how interesting I make life and how you would have bored him. But it’s a fixed idea. However, don’t bother about that. I want to wash my hands, and after that I want to choke Bertie Dean with them. Do you know that I’ve spent the afternoon in the public library? Believe it or not!”

She did not explain at once. From the bathroom she kept up a running fire of talk; my own injury, the bombshell she had thrown the night before “if anyone is going to abuse Jim I’ll do it myself”—and George Talbot’s detention.

“They’ve been all around the mulberry bush,” was her comment, “and I dare say they’ll be back to us now. I haven’t a doubt myself but that your mother did it. They’ve suspected everybody else.”

It was characteristic of her to return from the bathroom carrying both a bottle of hand lotion and a towel; and that she immediately spilled the one on the carpet and mopped it up with the other. But it is also characteristic that just then Annie came up with an enormous bunch of expensive roses which Helen had brought in with her.

“Don’t thank me,” she said. They’re simply an expression of relief. Failing with my little poker last night, I now hope that Bertie Dean may carry you off out of sheer anxiety for your safety! Lou, why do you suppose he sent me to the library today? I’ll give you three guesses, and don’t guess a book. He knows me better than that.”

When she finally dropped her bantering air, it was to reveal that her errand had been to look over old files of the local newspapers; not so old, really, but from the first of March to the first of August, and to look in the proper section for someone either advertising for a room in our vicinity, the reply to be sent in care of general delivery; or for a room advertised to let, furnished.

“Although just why anybody would come voluntarily into this vicinity is a mystery to me,” she finished. “There you are. That’s what he wanted, and I never suspected that anywhere in the world there were so many bright, attractive rooms, ‘nicely furnished, run. water, use parlor, rent reasonable.’”

She had eight in all, copied out in her square modern script, and she laid them on my lap. Only one of them concerned a room in our immediate vicinity, and I could not see how it could possibly have any bearing on our situation. I read it over twice:

“Wanted: By trained nurse, furnished room near General Hospital. Must have telephone in house.”

“I can’t see how that could mean anything,” I said.

“No? Then you don’t know our Bertie. If you did you would realize that our murderer, masquerading as a lady, has probably been living in that room and stroking fevered brows between crimes, so to speak. The telephone, of course, is pure camouflage! Well, I’ve done my job. I have to save my man; he’s a poor thing but mine own. And now I’m going home to take a bath.”

Writing this record and piecing together from this and that the whole story of our crimes, I have often thought of that visit of Helen’s and wondered exactly what would have happened had those angular notes of hers reached Herbert Dean and the police in time. But they did not. She was cheerful enough when she left me, apparently even gay. I heard her whistling as she went down the street, a gesture of bravado with which she often shocked the Crescent. She was fighting Jim’s fight for him with a certain gallantry, as witness the night before.

Yet she and Jim quarreled again that afternoon, and I think there is no question but that the two deaths which followed were due entirely to that. Possibly she knows it; it is a different Helen who now lives in the house nearest to the Crescent gate. She still swaggers, but the old casual careless ways are gone.

Even John, that suave and impassive police agent who was in the Wellington house as a butler, did not know what it was about. Although he was certainly suspicious; and I have never held Jim guiltless. He was in a bad state of nerves, irascible and impatient, and Helen was not a person to stand for either.

However that may be, at seven o’clock when Annie brought up my supper tray she was pop-eyed with information.

“Mrs. Wellington’s gone again, miss.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“That I can’t say, miss. I believe they had a few words, and she just called a taxicab and went away in it. I must say it’s a poor time to leave Mr. Jim, with him needing all the comfort he can get.”

All of which, as I have said, is not important. What was vitally important was that she carried away with her in her hand-bag those notes made at the library, and that she did not go to her usual hotel. When she was finally located—she really located herself—she still had the notes in her bag, having forgotten them completely; but they were useless then.

I have wondered since what would have happened, or not happened, had Helen gone to the police that day with what she knew. The notes in her bag and her story of that Sunday night. But she did not. She was frightened, like all the rest of us.

Would we have seen it all? Perhaps it was not possible even then, although Herbert Dean came closer than any of us to guessing the truth. But as Doctor Armstrong said afterwards:

“Upon my word, Lou, if everyone on the Crescent had had a dose of some drug like hyoscine, and been so released from all his normal repressions that he’d had to tell the truth, we’d have saved some of these people. Not hyoscine perhaps; it causes fantasy; but something to put the brain censors to sleep. All we needed was a little openness, but everybody was afraid.”

Which was true enough, for it was not until that evening, Tuesday, that I learned that Peggy from the Lancasters’ had had her purse snatched from her in No Man’s Land on Sunday night; and had been so terrified to report it for fear of some reprisal that even our servants did not know it for a day or two. Here too Annie was my source of information. She came up to turn down my bed that night, and her mouth was set hard and tight. She had just heard the news, from Peggy herself.

“She’s a little fool, and I’ve told her so,” she said. “Because, Miss Lou, whatever these police may think—and so far as I can see their thinking isn’t getting them anywhere anyhow—the whole thing ain’t what you’d call natural. Why did he bring the purse back? If that isn’t the act of a lunatic, what is?”

And Peggy’s story as related by Annie had indeed an unusual element.

She had been at home that evening; she lived somewhere in the neighborhood. And as she had been late, which is a grave offense with us, she had taken the short cut across No Man’s Land. In the woodland behind the Wellingtons’, where the path is shady for two hundred feet or so, she had suddenly seen a man emerge from the shadows and come toward her.

She was startled and stopped dead, but the man said: “Don’t be afraid, please. I have no idea of hurting you. But I want that bag.”