Album (36 page)

T
HE NEXT SOUND I
heard was Mary’s voice, spoken through a crack in her door above: “The saint’s preserve us! Who is it?”

“It’s all right, Mary,” I gasped. “I’m sorry, but it’s me again! I fell over your pan.”

“Are you hurt, miss?”

“No, I think not. Mary, there’s someone in the dumbwaiter shaft. I’ve just heard them.”

But with that I heard her give a low wail, followed instantly by the closing and bolting of her door. There was plainly no help from that direction, and I dare say with the instinct of the woman who saved the parrot and left her baby during a fire I picked up the album and flew down to the front porch and Herbert Dean.

Fortunately, Mother had not awakened.

The search which followed, while revealing no intruder in the house, clearly proved that I had been correct about the shaft, and Herbert Dean showed a capacity for sheer rage which surprised me.

“Damn them all!” he said. “I’ve told them this thing isn’t over, but they take the guards off! I’ll have that Inspector’s hide for this, and the Commissioner’s too.” Which was followed by a bit of rather stronger language than I care to repeat.

The search revealed certain facts. One of these was that as our basement is shut off from the main floor by a strong and well-locked door, it had not been considered necessary to watch the windows with any great care. One of them in fact was wide open, and had been so in all probability since Mary had raised it earlier in the week.

Curiously enough, the use of the abandoned old dumbwaiter as a means of access to the house had never occurred to any of us. It went to the basement, since before Mr. Lancaster and my father had done over the two houses the kitchen had been there. But it was years since it had been used. Once Mother had found Annie dropping soiled linen down the shaft, and had sternly forbidden it as a slovenly habit. After that the shaft door into the laundry had been closed and nailed.

It was neither nailed nor closed that night when Herbert Dean reached it, with a revolver in his hand and me at his heels. It was standing wide open, like the window, and examination showed that the old wood had rotted around the nails and must have given way easily.

He looked exasperated as he examined it.

“Why the devil didn’t you tell me this was here?” he demanded. “It’s a port of entry for anybody who wants to get into this house. Whoever hit you the other night probably came in this way, for I’d had an eye on the kitchen door; and you trapped them at the foot of the back stairs. Didn’t anyone remember it?”

“Do you imagine we deliberately concealed it?”

He laughed a little then, and getting up on a chair he examined the top of the slide itself with meticulous care.

“Does the Crescent housekeeping extend to things like this?” he inquired. “That is, is the top of this thing kept dusted? Or was it actually forgotten?”

“I imagine no one has seen it at all for five years, or dusted the top of it for fifteen.”

“Somebody has. It’s been cleaned lately. Carefully wiped. Very canny, this unknown of ours. Taking no chances. I suppose the ropes are all right? I’m going up on it anyhow; but not until I’ve taken you up myself and shut you into your room and heard you lock your door.”

A program which he would have carried out with entire success had he not on emerging from the schoolroom in the dark bumped head-on into Annie, who had finally determined to fill the pan again and was on her way to replace it.

The resulting uproar was one to waken the dead, and although in the midst of it Herbert Dean managed to escape, to this day Annie insists that an enormous creature that night rushed at her in our upper hall, made an effort to strangle her, and only fled when she doused him with a pan of cold water. This last was true enough, for Herbert spent most of the remainder of that chilly August night on guard outside the house, drenched to the skin and furiously annoyed, and clutching a large and heavy old photograph album by which he seemed to set considerable store.

Not that it was really as simple as all that, for Mother was up by that time and on hearing Annie’s story had at once called the telephone central and demanded the police. Herbert Dean’s insistence on my silence was put to a heavy premium after they arrived, but I kept my own council and let Annie tell her story. The result was a thorough searching of the house, followed by the discovery of Herbert himself, with the album neatly tucked under his arm, hidden away in the limousine and obviously not courting discovery.

It was a cruising radio car which had come, and the men did not know him. So for the second time within a few days Herbert found himself under arrest. It took a half hour at the station house to get himself identified and released, and before that happened an officer who had seen him taken into the Lancaster house only a few nights before stopped and stared into the room where he was being detained.

“Where did you get
him
again?” he asked the sergeant.

“Over on Crescent Place. Hiding in a garage.”

“And what’s that he’s got?”

“Old photograph album. Holding onto it like nobody’s business, too.”

The officer eyed Herbert with cold suspicion.

“He’s crazy as a loon,” he said. “Last time I saw him he was after an empty bird cage. Told somebody after he was grabbed that he was a dickey bird of some sort, and that he wanted the cage so he’d have a place to sit down in!”

We knew nothing of all this that night, and I did not see Herbert again until later that day. Mother was too disturbed to sleep again, however. The officers had discovered the open window in the basement and the chair we had left by the dumbwaiter shaft. One of them had even taken the trip to the schoolroom on it and had been stuck between two floors and only rescued by herculean efforts. But the whole result was that Mother’s carefully built case against Holmes seemed to have collapsed, and that when I finally went to sleep at dawn she was still up and gazing thoughtfully out of her window.

That day the intensive search for the missing truck went on. The store where it had been bought was located and a careful description and photographs obtained. Both were sent out to all precincts and detective squads, and to all state troopers, as well as to railways, hotels and even storage warehouses, with an enlargement of the special lock Emily Lancaster had ordered to supplement the regular one. By telephone, short-wave radio and teletype the search was taken up, and by afternoon the press had the photographs and ran them that night as “Mysterious Trunk Wanted by Police in Crescent Place Murders.”

One paper offered a reward for its discovery, and within a day or two the others followed suit. But nothing happened, and when in the course of time it was discovered, as everyone knows who reads the papers, it was too late. As the Inspector says:

“What threw everybody off was those foreign labels. It was a smart trick, that. Pretty well plastered with them, it was; everything from steamer tags to hotels in Europe. It made the same difference that a beard and a pair of false eyebrows would make on you, Miss Hall!”

But all they learned that first day of the search, Friday August the twenty-sixth, was the identity of the colored man who had helped to carry the trunk down to the waiting truck. He had not noticed the white helper, save that he had a short beard and was not young; and he had an alibi to bear out his statement that he had remained behind when the truck drove off. He added something to that, however. The white helper had gone along.

He had waited until Holmes was in the driving seat, and had then got onto the truck and curled up in the rear. He had supposed it was by prearrangement, but Holmes might not have realized that he was there.

“I dunno, boss,” he said. “That heah white man, he jes’ got in over the tail. Engine makin’ a mighty lot o’ noise jes’ then, so mebbe the other fellah didn’ know. This white man, las’ I saw of him he was sittin’ flat behin’ the trunk.”

But that Friday, beginning with two o’clock in the afternoon, stands out in all the history of the case as its one most significant day. Not only because it was that night that Lydia Talbot disappeared, but because at two o’clock that afternoon Margaret Lancaster got into a taxicab and, driving to the District Attorney’s office, proceeded of her own free will to make a statement so surprising that even the stenographic notes were in places almost unintelligible.

No one of us saw her go, or had any idea of her intention. She left Miss Lydia in the house, got into the taxicab and was driven downtown alone; and I have often wondered since what must have been her thoughts as, bolt upright in that cab and as carefully dressed as usual, she went determinedly to expose at last what she had fought so hard to conceal.

She looked exhausted and old, Herbert Dean says, as she went in. She threw back her heavy black veil, took a seat across the wide desk from the District Attorney, and simply said:

“I have come to tell the real story of my mother’s murder, and of my sister’s death following it. I suppose you will want a stenographer.”

The District Attorney could hardly believe what he heard. He stared at her.

“You are—you want to make a signed statement?”

“I do. It cannot hurt anybody now.”

They kept her waiting for a time. It was dangerous, for they knew she might weaken at any moment, and for all her quiet manner it was dear to everybody that she was close to actual physical collapse. But there would be points to check and questions to ask; and for this they needed the Inspector and Mr. Sullivan. The Commissioner had taken his ivy poisoning home to bed, but Herbert was already there.

Someone in that fifteen-minute interval asked her if she needed some spirits of ammonia, but she shook her head.

“I am quite all right,” she said.

That was the only time she spoke until, with everything ready, she asked if she should start. The District Attorney said “Please,” and she drew a long breath.

“As you all know,” she said, “I am Margaret Lancaster. And I am here to say that to the best of my knowledge and belief, my sister while mentally deranged killed my mother; and that last Sunday night, out of fear that she would do further harm, my stepfather shot and killed my sister.”

“I
SHALL TRY TO
be as brief as possible, and I am telling what I know because you already suspect my stepfather. I have learned from the nurse that you have his pistol; that she gave it to you. But what you cannot know is the reason he had for killing my sister. While he could not tell me, I am convinced that he considered her unbalanced mentally at times, and dangerous.

“I had noticed nothing different in my sister Emily until last spring. At that time Mother began to worry about her personal fortune, and she finally decided to have some of it turned into gold, this gold to be kept in a chest under her bed. None of us approved, and Emily least of all, but Mother was determined.

“She arranged with her nephew, James Wellington, to make this exchange for her, and this he did under protest. I need not go into that. You know all that already.

“It was in April that I began to notice a change in Emily. She came in one day very white, and went into my mother’s room. There they had an argument of some sort, and my mother was very angry after it. From that time on I felt that the relationship between them had changed. Emily was tearful at times, and once I found her in the storeroom with an old family photograph album. She was crying over it. Later I saw it in my mother’s room. She kept it in the top drawer of the chest beside her bed.

“I am telling you this because the album caused me so much anxiety later, although I do not yet understand just why. I have wondered—but I must get on with this statement.

“Emily was my mother’s nurse, and was in and out of her room at all hours. It was early in the summer that I began to wonder about the gold under Mother’s bed. Emily had been the soul of honesty, but late one night I heard her coming out of Mother’s room, and I opened the door. She heard me and she looked very much alarmed. There was a low light in the hall but I could see her plainly, and she was carrying something that looked like one of the canvas bags from the chest. When I knocked at her door she was some time in letting me in, and then she looked frightened.

“I did not know what to do. I went to Mother’s room, but she had had her usual opiate and was sleeping soundly. The chest was closed and locked.

“After that I watched Emily as well as I could. I examined her room over and over while she was out, but I could find nothing. She hardly ever carried a purse, and the only places she went were to the library and to a woman on Liberty Avenue across from the library who she said was dying of a cancer. I even followed her once or twice, but she went nowhere else.

“If she had not been in such a state of terror I would have given up then. There was no gold or money in her room, and she evidently had no box in any bank. But she was so queer that at last I went to Bryan Dalton. He laughed at me at first, but he too saw the change in her and at last we agreed to keep a watch and see if she left the house at night.

“We established a sort of post office in our woodshed, and he would drop a note there. Usually it said: ‘All quiet.’ Sometimes he said she had come downstairs at night apparently for something to eat. But she never left the house. This will explain why Mr. Dalton has been involved in the case. He had nothing whatever to do with it.

“It was about the first of this month that my father became suspicious. Emily had professed to believe that someone was trying to get into the house at night, and that they were after the money under Mother’s bed. On the night of August first Father was sleepless and anxious—he had never approved of the hoarding anyhow, considering it dangerous as well as unpatriotic. That night he heard a sound from Mother’s room, and he went in.

“Emily was on her knees beside the bed, and she screamed when Father spoke to her. That wakened Mother, but Emily said she was after a sleeping tablet herself and that it had dropped under the bed.