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All of which sounds rather like Margaret, clear and unemotional and—even in the police notes—told without Emily’s hesitation and indirection.

Mr. Lancaster’s story to the police was much more vague. He was still profoundly shocked, but in his account he was quite clear as to the essential facts.

He had not been well for several days, and had not slept at night. He and Mrs. Lancaster had for several weeks disagreed on what he called a matter of policy, by which undoubtedly he referred to her hoarding of gold currency; but which he didn’t explain that night. In her condition he did not like to argue with her, but he had been considerably upset.

That day he had read all morning in the library. Before going in to lunch he had made his usual noon visit to his wife. Emily was out, and he found Mrs. Lancaster silent and rather fretful, and had laid it to the heat. But here he added, after a certain hesitation, that he had been under the impression when he entered the bedroom that she had hidden something from him.

Asked what it might have been, he said that he had no idea, and might even have been mistaken. He was merely trying to remember all that he could. She had not said anything to suggest that it might be true, nor had he questioned her.

At noon he had eaten a light meal, largely fruit and tea, and had then slept for some time. He had not gone upstairs at all, but being roused by Mrs. Talbot’s voice as she started down, had got his hat and left the house when she did. He had taken his usual walk, and had heard the news on the street as he returned from Eben, who was running for a policeman.

Asked as to his usual walk, he stated what we all knew, that it was his habit to go out through the Crescent gates, and to go past the hospital and toward the shopping district a half mile away. For the city had grown and apartments had appeared on our horizon, so had sprung up six or eight blocks of small shops to supply their needs. Even the Crescent, which for a long time ignored them and did its buying downtown, had at last recognized and patronized them.

His walk that day, he said, had merely taken him to the tobacconist’s shop on Liberty Avenue and back to the gates, where Eben met him. Unfortunately, and this is when the police determined to make a second and intensive search of the house, there were two things about Mr. Lancaster’s statement which set Inspector Briggs to thinking, and thinking hard.

One was that he had stopped at a small and unimportant drug store, and had there had a glass of coca-cola.

“As we happened to know,” the Inspector said later, “the drug store he mentioned had been padlocked that day for an infringement of the Volstead Act on the premises. Wherever he’d been, the old gentleman hadn’t been there. And then came this girl Peggy with her story and—well, we began to wonder. That’s all!”

For Peggy, seated uneasily on the edge of a chair in the dining room, her eyes swollen with crying, had finally admitted that she had been standing at her window overlooking the front street, had seen Mr. Lancaster go out with Mrs. Talbot; and return five minutes later.

“I don’t want them to know I said so,” she had whispered, “but that’s the truth.”

“You may be wrong about the time.”

“No, sir. I didn’t stand there more than five minutes at the most. Miss Margaret will tell you that she came up to speak to me, and that I was standing at my window then. Maybe she’ll know the time.”

“Did you tell Miss Margaret that Mr. Lancaster had come back?”

“I didn’t think of it. You see the old—Mrs. Lancaster had acted very mean to me that morning, and I was thinking about leaving. I couldn’t make up my mind. Miss Margaret came up to ask me to stay on, and I said I would.”

The Inspector had heard Emily’s story by that time, and so he asked her if she couldn’t be mistaken.

“Looking down from a third story window,” he said, “people look different, you know, Peggy.”

“I’d know that old panama of his anywhere,” she said stubbornly.

“Lots of men wear old panamas. Was there nothing else?”

“He was getting out his keys. I saw him as plain as I see you. Besides,” she added triumphantly, “anybody else but Mr. Wellington would have had to ring the doorbell, and it didn’t ring. It rings on the third floor as well as in the kitchen.”

But there is to Peggy’s credit the fact that she then set her small and pretty chin, and that she said nothing more about Jim until she was recalled later that night. That was after Emily had remembered that Jim had spoken to me in the garden; and they brought the girl in, anxious and with reddened eyes, and inquired if the man she had seen on the walk could not have been Jim Wellington.

She shook her head obstinately, but they kept at her, and at last she admitted that she had seen Jim that afternoon.

“Where? On the walk?”

“No. In the house. On the second floor.” And then seeing the Inspector’s expression, she burst into a flood of tears.

But of course she had to go on, and at last they had a fairly coherent story from her.

Shortly before four, feeling comforted by Margaret’s visit, she decided to go out after all. She did not know the precise time. She put on her hat and went down to the second floor, where in one of the guest rooms there was a better mirror. She fixed her hat there, and then went out into the hall. On her way to the back stairs, however, she heard someone coming up the front staircase and saw that it was Jim Wellington.

He was bareheaded, and he was coming up quietly, but without any particular stealth. Of one thing she was certain. He was empty-handed.

He did not see her, but passed the landing and went on up toward the main part of the house. Certainly his presence there did not surprise her.

“He always had the run of the house,” she said, rather naively.

She had not seen or heard him go out. She herself had gone on down the back stairs, and she was there with Ellen and Jennie when the alarm was raised. Not in a thousand years would she believe Mr. Wellington committed the crime. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, and she didn’t care what anybody thought.

“So there we are!” said the Inspector, summarizing the case later on. “Wellington had been in the house and slipped away, and old Mr. Lancaster had pulled a fake alibi on us! But if this girl was right, the old gentleman came back at twenty-five minutes to four, and at a quarter to four or about that Miss Emily finds her mother all right and goes to dress. At four she discovers what has happened, and not more than ten minutes after four Eben meets the old gentleman on his way in at the gates, immaculate and not in a hurry, apparently on his way home, and not more than five or ten minutes past his usual schedule!

“I don’t mind telling you that when I got home at three o’clock that morning I took a triple bromide.”

I
SUPPOSE SOME OF
the Crescent people went to bed that night. That some of the women stood before their old-fashioned bureaus, stuck their brooches into their fat pincushions, unhooked dresses and hung them up, slid off petticoats, unpinned false curls and braids and put them neatly into their boxes, unhooked their tight laced stays and unbuttoned their tight shoes; and having got so far, modestly slipped their nightgowns over their heads and then removed the remainder of their clothing.

Or that some of the men also retired, after taking a final nightcap or two, the material for which rumor reported that our chauffeur, Holmes, surreptitiously supplied at a profit.

They had had the first real thrill of many years, and now behind them, visible in the mirrors before which they brushed their hair or took off their collars, were their wide beds with their bolsters, opened and waiting for them, the starched linen pillow-shams of the day laid aside, the day spreads neatly folded and the night spreads as neatly in place. The single bed had no place on the Crescent.

Looking back, I can see them all with an understanding I lacked at the time. I can see Mrs. Talbot, attended by her faithful Lizzie, removing one of the black transformations which she wore rather as other women wear a hat, and of which she claimed to have a half dozen or so. I can see Lydia taking off her pads and hanging them up in a window to dry after the hot day. I have seen them there myself, early in the morning. I can see Emily Lancaster, filled with who knows what horrors, asleep at last after the Crescent physician, Doctor Armstrong, had given her an opiate; and Margaret walking the floor of the morning room downstairs while police overran the house, listening for any approach to the library and the old couch there, where far down under the upholstery she had hidden something which she must somehow get out of the house.

And downtown, in an office in the City Hall, I can see Jim Wellington sitting in a hard chair and being questioned, his key to the Lancaster house on the desk, the Commissioner behind the desk, and the District Attorney walking the floor and smoking one cigarette after another.

“What time was it when Miss Margaret Lancaster telephoned you?”

“Between eleven and twelve. Perhaps a little later.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said her father wanted me to go over the chest and see what was in it.”

“A chest? What chest?”

Jim was astonished.

“Then they haven’t told you? The chest under my aunt’s bed. She had developed a nervous terror of banks, and she’d been turning her fortune into gold and currency for some months. Mostly gold.”

After that he had to explain the entire procedure, and they listened spellbound. Here at last, they felt was the motive for the crime. But they were not satisfied with his explanation of why he had gone to the house that afternoon.

“You carried no money today?”

“No. None whatever.”

“Then why did they send for you?”

“I’ve told you that Mr. Lancaster wanted the chest opened and investigated. A sort of audit, I suppose.”

“Why an audit? Did Margaret Lancaster explain?”

“No, I haven’t an idea. None of them had liked the hoarding. I hoped it meant the stuff was to go back to the bank. It was a fool idea from the start.”

“This key the family was searching for, was that the key to this chest?”

“I don’t know what they were searching for,” he said rather sulkily. “My aunt wore the key to the chest on a chain around her neck.”

“You know how much gold was in this chest. Is it your idea that robbery was the motive for the crime?”

“I have no ideas about it at all. More than half the stuff was in gold, the rest in currency. I’d say nobody could carry the gold away in a hurry. It’s pretty heavy. As to the currency—” He looked at them. “Why in God’s name don’t you look and see?”

But this, as it happened, was not possible that night. On the first information from Jim that the chest had held a fortune in gold and currency Inspector Briggs had been notified and the chest examined. Not only did it show no signs of having been tampered with, but it was still so heavy that the mere act of getting it out from under the bed was a difficult one.

No key had been found, and the officers stood about the chest, eyeing it. It was almost midnight by that time, but Sullivan went downstairs and after getting an ice pick from the back porch, the only tool he could find, was on his way back when he met Mr. Lancaster in the lower hall.

“I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Lancaster,” he said. “We want to take a look into that chest under your—under the bed upstairs. I suppose you have no other key to it?”

The old man eyed him stonily.

“The chest is not to be opened,” he said.

“But if there has been a robbery—”

“There has been no robbery. The chest contains a large part of my wife’s estate, and will not be opened unless her attorney is present; perhaps not until her will has been probated. I know very little about such matters.”

Sullivan, I believe, went up the stairs, swearing softly. There was apparently nothing to be done, since the chest itself showed no signs of having been disturbed. He and the Inspector agreed to let it ride until morning, and it was only the discovery of fingerprints on it that changed their minds. These checked with none belonging to the household, all of whom had been printed that evening, and were quite distinct; that is, two hands had been laid on the lid, on either side of the lock, as if to raise it.

They made no further attempt to open the box that night, but they put a policeman in the room on guard over it; and at last after a rather acid exchange with that office in the City Hall they went home, the Inspector to take his bromide and Sullivan to ponder over those prints on the box. For they were the prints of a small hand, and Jim Wellington was built on large and fairly substantial lines.

That, as nearly as I can describe it, was the situation that night of Thursday August the eighteenth, following the murder. The police had gone over every inch of the house and were still examining the grounds outside, but what they had as a result of seven hours or more intensive labor was the body of an aged and bedridden woman, almost decapitated by the blows of an axe; the picture of a family, stunned but still bearing with dignity its terrible catastrophe; and for clues a blood-stained axe, two or three blades of grass, a smear outside a window screen, a locked chest with some unidentified prints on it, and the knowledge for what it was worth that both Mr. Lancaster and Jim Wellington had been in the house at or about the time the murder was committed.

I myself was faint and confused when I got back from Jim’s that night. Mother was asleep, locked in and probably with a vase set on each of her window sills so it would fall if anyone tried to enter by the porch roof. Holmes was snoring lustily in the guest room, and the night air was heavy and close, as though rain were in prospect.

I remember standing in the center of my room and looking about me. My sense of security was badly shaken that night, and suddenly I realized that I had given up everything else for it, had sacrificed to it my chance to live and even my chance to love. And for what? That my bed should be neatly turned down at night and the house run smoothly, with fresh flowers in the proper season and the table napkins ironed first on the wrong side and then polished on the right?