Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  I knew then that there was something terribly wrong, and I tried to rouse Emily.

  “Miss Emily!” I said. “Listen, Miss Emily, can’t you sit up?”

  But she did not move, and I stared around helplessly for someone to assist me. It was then that I saw Jim Wellington. It looked as though he had come out of the Lancasters’ side door, although I had not heard the screen slam; and I have not lived all my life beside that door without knowing that it can slam.

  At first I thought he had not noticed us. He was moving rapidly toward the back of the property, where a path connected the rears of all the houses. Our grapevine telegraph line, Bryan Dalton called it, because the servants used it to go from one house to another and to carry all the news. Then I felt that he must have seen us, for I in my pale dress and Miss Emily in white must have stood out like two sore thumbs.

  “Jim!” I called. “Jim Wellington! Come here.”

  He turned then and came toward us. Like the screen door, I have known him all my life and been fond of him; too fond once, for that matter. But never have I seen him look as he looked then. His face was gray, and he seemed slightly dazed.

  “I need help, Jim. She’s fainted.”

  “Who is it? Emily?”

  “Yes.”

  He hesitated, then came closer and leaned over her.

  “You’re sure she’s not hurt?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t seem to fall very hard. She just slid down. What on earth has happened, Jim?”

  But as Miss Emily moved then and groaned, he straightened up and shook his head for silence.

  “She’s coming to,” he said. “Better tell them where she is. I have to get on home.” He turned to go and then swung back. “See here, Lou,” he said roughly, “you needn’t say you’ve seen me. There’s trouble in there, and I don’t want to be mixed up in it.”

  “What sort of trouble?” I asked. But he went on as though he had not heard me, toward the back path and his house.

  Still no help came. Apparently not even our own servants had heard the excitement, for our service wing is away from the Lancasters’ and toward the Dalton house. Five minutes had passed, or maybe more; long enough at least for Eben to have reached Liberty Avenue and to return, for now he reappeared on the run, followed by our local police officer. They had disappeared into the house when Miss Emily groaned again.

  I bent over her.

  “Can you get up, Miss Emily?” I inquired.

  She shook her head, and then a memory of some sort sent her face down again on the grass, sobbing hysterically.

  “What is it?” I asked helplessly. “Please tell me, Miss Emily. Then I’ll know what to do.”

  At that she went off into straight hysterics, that dreadful crying which is half a scream, and I was never so glad to see anyone as I was to see Margaret, hastily clad in a kimono and standing in the side doorway. She too looked pale and distracted, but she came across to us in a hurry.

  “Stop it, Emily!” she said. “Louisa, get some water somewhere and throw it over her. Emily, for God’s sake!”

  Whether it was the threat of the water or the furious anger in Miss Margaret’s voice I do not know, but Miss Emily stopped anyhow, and sat up.

  “You’re a cold-blooded woman, Margaret. With Mother—!”

  “Who do you think you are helping by fainting and screaming?” Margaret demanded sharply. “Do you want Father to hear you?”

  “Does he know?”

  “He knows.” Miss Margaret’s voice was grim. “I told them not to let him go upstairs.”

  Naturally I knew or was certain by that time that Mrs. Lancaster was dead, and as everyone had known how faithfully Emily had cared for her mother, I could understand her hysteria well enough. She was an emotional woman, given to the reading of light romances and considered sentimental by the Crescent. Margaret had been a devoted daughter also, but she was more matter-of-fact. In a way, Emily had been the nurse and Margaret had been the housekeeper of the establishment.

  The screen door was still unfastened, and together we got Emily into the house and across the main hall to the library. Margaret was leading the way, and I remember now that she stopped and picked up something from the floor near the foot of the stairs. I did not notice it particularly at the time, for the patrolman, Lynch, was at the telephone in the lower hall, and well as I knew him he stared at me and through me as he talked.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Looks like it was done with an axe, yes. … Yeah, I got it. Okay.”

  He hung up and ran up the stairs again.

  Suddenly I felt sick and cold all over. Somebody had been hurt, or killed with an axe! But that automatically removed Mrs. Lancaster from my mind as the victim. Who would kill that helpless old woman, and with an axe! Confused as I was, I was excited but still ignorant when we reached the library door; and it was not until I saw old Mr. Lancaster that I knew.

  He was alone, lying back in a big leather chair, his face bloodless and his eyes closed. He did not even open them when we went in, or when Margaret helped me get Emily onto the leather couch there. It was after we had settled her there that Margaret went to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “You know that it was murder, don’t you, father?”

  He nodded.

  “Who told you?”

  “Eben.” His lips scarcely moved. “I met him on the street.”

  “But you haven’t been up?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll get you a glass of wine.” She patted his shoulder and disappeared, leaving the three of us to one of those appalling silences which are like thunder in the ears. It was the old man who broke it finally. He opened his eyes and looked at Emily, shuddering on the couch.

  “You found her?” he asked, still without moving.

  “Yes. Please, father, don’t let’s talk about it.”

  “You didn’t hear anything?”

  “No. I was dressing with my door closed.”

  “And Margaret?”

  “I don’t see how she could. She was taking a bath. The water was running when I called her.”

  Margaret brought in a glass of port wine, and he drank it. Always small, he seemed to have shrunk in the last few minutes. A dapper little man, looking younger than his years, he was as much a part of the Crescent as Mrs. Talbot’s dahlias, or our own elm trees; a creature of small but regular habits, so that we could have set our clocks by his afternoon walk, or our calendars by his appearance in his fall overcoat.

  But if he was stricken, I imagine that it was with horror rather than grief. After all, a man can hardly be heartbroken over the death of a wife who has been an exacting invalid for twenty years or so, and a bedridden one for ten.

  The wine apparently revived him, for he sat up and looked at the two women, middle-aged and now pallid and shaken. It was a searching look, intent and rather strange. He surveyed Emily moaning on the couch, a huddled white picture of grief. Then he looked at Margaret, horrified but calm beside the center table, and clutching her flowered kimono about her. I do not think he even knew that I was in the room.

  Apparently what he saw satisfied him, however, for he leaned back again in his chair and seemed to be thinking. I was about to slip out of the room when he spoke again, suddenly.

  “Has anyone looked under the bed?” he said.

  And as if she had been touched by an electric wire Emily sat up on the couch.

  “Under the bed? Then you think—?”

  “What else am I to think?”

  But no one answered him, for at that moment a police car drove up; a radio car with two officers in it, and a second or so later another car containing what I now know were an Inspector from Headquarters and three members of the Homicide Squad.

  Chapter III

  I WAS STILL SHOCKED and incredulous when I went into the hall and watched that small regiment of policemen as they trooped silently up the stairs. The clock on the landing showed only twenty minutes after four. Only twenty
minutes or so ago I had been peacefully sewing at my window, and the Lancaster house had gleamed white and quiet through the trees.

  Now everything was changed, and yet nothing was changed. The hall was as usual, the old-fashioned brass rods on the stairs gleamed from recent polishing, and the men had disappeared overhead. The only sound I could hear was of women softly crying somewhere above, and toward that sound I found myself moving. It came from the upper front hall, and there I found Lynch, the patrolman. He had rounded the three women servants outside Mrs. Lancaster’s door, and he was holding Eben there also.

  Two of the maids were elderly women and had been there for years; Ellen the cook and Jennie the waitress. Only Peggy the young housemaid was a comparative newcomer, but none the less shocked and stricken. All three of them were crying with the ease and facility of people who know that tears are expected of them, but as I looked Peggy pointed to the doorsill and gave a smothered cry.

  “Blood!” she cried.

  Lynch told her gruffly to keep still, and so we stood until one of the detectives came out into the hall. He surveyed the drooping group grimly.

  “And now,” he said, “let’s hear about it.”

  There was apparently nothing to hear. Ellen had been beating up a cake on the back porch, and Jennie had been cleaning silver, also on the porch for coolness. Peggy was off that afternoon, and had been about to leave by the kitchen door when they heard Miss Emily screaming. None of them had seen Mrs. Lancaster since Jennie had carried up her tray at half past one o’clock, and all of them swore that all the doors, front, rear and side, had been locked.

  The detective took Eben last.

  “Where were you?”

  “Where was I when?”

  “When this thing happened.”

  “I don’t know when it happened.”

  “Let’s see your feet.”

  “There’s blood on them most likely. When Miss Emily ran out screaming I thought most likely the old lady had passed away, so when the noise began I came on up here. But Miss Margaret was here ahead of me. She had the door open and was looking in. She told me to see if her mother was still alive, but I didn’t need to go far to know that.”

  “I can corroborate that,” I said. “Eben was cutting the grass near my window. I saw Miss Emily come out, and I sent him in to see what was wrong.”

  I had to explain myself then, and what I had seen from my window. He listened carefully.

  “That’s all you saw?” he asked. “Didn’t see anyone going in or coming out?”

  “No,” I told him; and suddenly for the first time since I had entered the house I remembered Jim Wellington. What I might have done or said then I hardly know now. I remember that my chest tightened and that I felt shaky all at once. But the need did not arise. There was a sound like a mild explosion from the death room at that moment, and one of the maids yelped and turned to run.

  In the resulting explanation, that a flashlight photograph had been made inside the closed room where the body lay, I was asked no more questions. The servants were dismissed and warned not to leave the house, and the detective, whose name I learned later was Sullivan, turned and went into the death chamber again.

  I was left alone in the upper hall, but entirely incapable of thought. I remember hearing Miss Emily’s canary singing loudly in her room and thinking that it was dreadful, that gaiety so close at hand. Then I went, slowly and rather dazedly, down the stairs and out the front door.

  I have no clear recollection of the rest of that afternoon, save that on the way back I met Lydia Talbot on the pavement staring at the police car, with her arms filled with bundles and her face white and shocked.

  “Whatever has happened?” she asked me. “Is it a fire?”

  “Mrs. Lancaster is dead. I’m afraid she’s been murdered, Miss Lydia.”

  She swayed so that I caught her by the arm, and some of her bundles dropped. She made no attempt to pick them up.

  “But I was there,” she said faintly. “I was there this afternoon. I took her some jellied chicken, just after lunch. She was all right then.”

  In the end I took her home, cutting across the Common to save time, and was glad to find that she had rallied somewhat.

  “How was it—was it done?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. I believe with an axe. Don’t think about it,” I added, as I felt her trembling again. “We can’t help it now.”

  And then she said a strange thing.

  “Well, she was my own sister-in-law, but I never liked her. And I suppose they stood it as long as they could.”

  She tried to cover that up the next moment, saying she was upset and not responsible, and that the girls had been devoted daughters. But I remembered the strange look Mr. Lancaster had given them one after the other, only a short time before, and I wondered if he had not had the same thought as Lydia.

  That is all I really saw or heard that afternoon. Now I know something of what went on in that shambles of a room upstairs in the Lancaster house: of the discovery of the axe, thrown on top of the big tester bed and discovered by the stain which had seeped through the heavy sateen; and the further discovery that it was the axe from the Lancaster woodshed, and that the only prints on it were old ones, later found to be Eben’s, and badly smudged. I know that they took measurements of this and that, and opened the windows and looked out, and that the medical examiner arrived with a black bag some time later, and went upstairs as briskly as though we had a daily axe murder in the Crescent.

  When I say that I know all this, I mean that all the Crescent knows. It knows the exact moment when Mrs. Lancaster’s body was taken away, the exact moment when the police decided to hold Eben for further interrogation, and the exact moment when Miss Emily toiled feebly up the stairs and asked if there had been a key on a fine chain around her mother’s neck.

  “A key?” one of the detectives is said to have asked. “Anybody find a key on a chain?”

  Nobody had, and our information was that Miss Emily immediately began to tear apart that dreadful bed, crying and moaning as she did so. But that no key or chain had been found, either there or elsewhere; elsewhere in this case being the morgue, a word which we avoided on general principles.

  But the Crescent still knew practically nothing at all of what had happened when I went home that late summer afternoon to break the news to Mother. Save for Mrs. Talbot, who heard the news from Lydia and rushed over at once, only to be summarily if politely ejected by the police, the rest remained in ignorance for a good two hours, and the Daltons even longer. The usual crowd which follows police cars had either been daunted by our gates or was being held outside them by a guard. Helen Wellington was away, having made one of her periodical breaks. The Lancaster servants were being held incommunicado, and even the reporters who had converged on the spot had, due to our planting and our semi-isolation, failed to rouse any suspicion.

  This is shown by the fact that I found Mother sitting on the porch when I returned. She was fanning herself, and complaining of the heat.

  “I wondered where you were,” she said rather fretfully. “Is Mr. Lancaster worse? I see a car there.”

  This was not surprising, since by that time there were at least six cars in a row before the Lancaster walk which led to the house. But I had to break the news to her, and I did it as tactfully as I could. That she was shocked and horrified I could see, but the Crescent carries its emotions, when it has any, to its bedroom and there locks the door. Never by any chance does it show them to the servants or to the casual passer-by. She got up suddenly.

  “I must go over at once,” she said. “They will need help.”

  “I’m afraid the police won’t let you in, mother.”

  “Don’t be absurd. They let you in.”

  “They wanted to ask me some questions.”

  “Precisely,” she said drily. “My only daughter is interrogated by the police, and I am not even consulted! Besides, the Lancasters are my best and oldest friends,
and when I think of that lonely old man and those two devoted daughters—”

  Well, that is as may be. Mother had hardly spoken to Mr. Lancaster for years, due to a disputed boundary line, and I had frequently heard her refer to the daughters as two spineless women who allowed themselves to be dominated by an unscrupulous and hard old woman! But the tradition of the Crescent is more or less to canonize its dead, which is not so bad after all.

  I got her into the house finally, and there she asked for such details as I knew of the crime. It seemed to me that she listened with singular intentness, and that toward the end she relaxed somewhat.

  “You say that all the doors were fastened?”

  “The maids say so. You know how particular they are.”

  “And Emily, when she ran out? She was fully dressed?”

  “In pure white, mother,” I said, and smiled a little. “With not a stain on it!”

  She looked up quickly, startled and annoyed.

  “What on earth do you mean by that, Louisa?”

  “Just what you meant, mother,” I told her, and went across to my own room.

  Chapter IV

  I DARE SAY EVERY woman retains a sentiment for an old lover, even if he is inevitably lost; retains it at least until a new one effaces him. And at one time, ten years before, when I was eighteen and Jim was twenty-five, we had been engaged. Nothing came of it, for Mother had never wanted me to marry and leave her alone, and Jim made things rather painful by accusing her of selfishness and declining to share me with her. All in all it had been an unhappy business, and two years later he had married Helen and had now been married to her on and off for eight years.

  The women of the Crescent had never much liked Helen. That was natural, for she flouted their prejudices and was openly scornful of their profoundest convictions. Besides she was young and attractive, a combination they found it hard to forgive.