He eyed me steadily.
“That’s very nice of you. Rather handsome, considering everything! But it was probably the police. I’m expecting them, I suppose that you, being the honest person you are, have told them you saw me there?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, nobody asked me, Jim, and so—”
He dropped his light manner, and coming to me, put a hand on my shoulder.
“You’re a good girl, Lou,” he said, “and we were a pair of young fools once. Well—I suppose Emily will bring it out before long, if she hasn’t done it already. She was coming out of her faint when you called me. Maybe not right away, but sooner or later she’ll remember. You see,” he smiled down at me, “you can’t save a fool from his folly. Or a man from his stomach,” he added cryptically.
When I merely stared at him in bewilderment he put me into a chair and sat down himself.
“Here’s the story,” he said. “You can believe it or not; if you do you’ll be the only one who will. I had a key to the front door, so I let myself in. There was nobody about, and I went upstairs and found her—like that! I went up to her room and opened the door, and—God! I couldn’t believe it. The house was quiet. Old Emily was talking to her canary across the hall, and the door into the old lady’s room was partly open. Luckily I didn’t touch the knob. At least I don’t think I did.” He laughed shortly. “But I didn’t stop at the door. I went in and looked down at her to see if she was—She was dead, of course.”
“Why on earth didn’t you raise the alarm?”
“You’re asking me that? Because I am God’s worst fool. We’d had a quarrel; she’d been hoarding gold for months under that bed of hers, and I got sick and tired of facing the bank people every week and getting it for her. I was her messenger boy. The girls wouldn’t do it, nor Uncle James. Too decent. So we’d had a row, and she—well, she threatened to cut me out of her will. And,” he added with a return to the light tone I hated, “this is no time to be cut out of wills, my dear Lou.”
“So you went back to make peace, and found her?”
“So I went back because I was sent for, like the good boy I am.”
“Oh, stop it, Jim,” I cried. “I can’t bear it.”
“Well, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. If my cousin Margaret, who hates me like sin, will only acknowledge that she telephoned me this morning to come out at four o’clock to see her beloved stepfather, maybe I’ll have a chance. Otherwise I’ll get what the police so practically refer to as the ‘hot squat.’ Meaning the chair, my dear.”
I got up, rather wearily.
“I’m sorry, Jim. I came here to help if I could. Even to get you some dinner—” He made a gesture at that. “But you don’t want any help. I’d better go.”
Then he became the old Jim again, kindly and considerate.
“I’m just shouting to keep my courage up, Lou. And I haven’t told you the whole story. Maybe you don’t remember, but the sight of blood always makes me sick. It does something to me, always has. But it’s too damned ridiculous to tell the police. I think I’d have raised the alarm. God knows it was the first instinct I had! But I was going to be sick. Can you imagine it?” he demanded savagely. “Can you imagine a full-grown man in an emergency like that rushing off to be sick somewhere? Well, that’s what I did. And when Emily raised the alarm I was in the lavatory off the downstairs hall, throwing up my boots! That’s a laugh for the police, isn’t it?”
“They might believe it, Jim.”
“They might. It’s too irrational for a good killer to invent, I suppose. And it happens to be true. You see, I couldn’t show myself after it was all over. I had blood on my clothes. Not much, but some.”
“You could get rid of your clothes.”
“How? Burn them, and let the police find whatever’s left over. Nails, buttons or what have you? No, my child. I know exactly what a real killer is up against. I’ve been down twice to start that damned furnace; in August, mind you! But what’s the use?”
“I could take them with me. They’ll never search our house.”
“And have them take them from you as you leave here? Use your head, Lou! Now run home and forget me and this mess.”
“Maybe later on tonight you could bury them, Jim? Out in No Man’s Land.”
He refused that idea, too, and I remember standing there and trying to think of some place where the inevitable police search would not discover them. It is strange how little the average house offers against that sort of hunt, especially for bulky objects.
“You haven’t a concealed closet for your liquor?” I asked at last.
“I have a closet; but if you think at least fifty people don’t know about it, then you don’t know Helen.”
“Still it would give you time, Jim,” I pleaded.
Without a word he turned, and going to the bookshelves beside the fire, took hold of the frame and swung it out. Books and shelves, it proved to be a small door, and behind it was a neat liquor closet.
“Of course, once I hide the things I am committed by my own act,” he said. “Still—”
“Did anyone see you?”
“In this house? No, I have my own key to the front door. Of course the police know that now.”
“Or outside, on the way back here?”
“How do I know? We’ll have to take a chance on that. Luckily I left my car here and walked there. That may help some.”
We made it without a minute to spare. I had drawn the front shades while he was upstairs, and he was on his way down when the doorbell rang. Luckily the hall was dark, and the front door solid. He slipped the things to me through the stair-rail, and fumbled long enough at the door to give me a minute or two. But I was trembling all over by the time I had hidden the trousers and the shoes, and had swung the shelves back in place.
He gave me a bit more leeway by stopping to turn on the hall lights after he had opened the door. Then I heard him bringing in some men, and although I dread to think of what the Crescent would have said had it known, I was lighting one of Jim’s cigarettes when they entered.
There were two of them, an Inspector Briggs from Headquarters and the detective, Sullivan, whom I had seen in the hall upstairs at the Lancaster house.
They eyed me curiously when Jim presented them.
“Miss Hall, eh? Then you are the young lady who found Miss Emily Lancaster in the garden?” This was from the Inspector.
“I didn’t exactly find her. I heard her screaming, and ran out. It was Eben who got to her first.”
“I see.”
I was bracing myself for the next question, but to my surprise it did not come. Instead he suggested that Mr. Sullivan see me home, and then come back. Evidently he had no idea of letting Jim overhear what I had to say. I had a horrified moment as I rose when I realized that in my anxiety to hide the clothing I had overlooked that with Jim. What would he tell them? Or deny?
But Jim settled that for me in surprising fashion.
“Don’t worry, Lou,” he said. “We’ll tell the truth and shame the devil! And you can throw away that cigarette. I don’t think it’s fooled anybody.”
Inspector Briggs smiled slightly, but his face altered as Jim walked deliberately to the shelves and swung them open. “There’s the evidence,” he said.
Sullivan took me out, and I came as near to fainting then as I ever have, right there on the Wellington front porch.
Chapter VI
MOTHER HAD NOTIFIED HOLMES that he was to sleep in the house that night, on the general principle I suppose that having had one murder we might expect any number of them; which was not so absurd after all as it seemed that night.
But Holmes as a protection did seem absurd; a scared little rabbit of a man, he trailed at our heels as we locked up that night, careful not to get too far away from one or the other of us. It was from Holmes that I first heard the theory of a homicidal maniac.
“I don’t mind saying, miss
,” he confided to me, “that I’m just as glad to be in here tonight. Somebody around here’s gone crazy, and that’s the truth.”
“It would have to be a lunatic who knows all about us, Holmes.”
“Well, that’s not so hard to do, miss, with everybody living by the clock, as you may say.”
“Except you, Holmes!”
He grinned at that. Mother still insists that the servants be in at ten o’clock at night; but still Holmes has an easy and unobserved exit by the path across No Man’s Land, and I knew perfectly well that there were times when he not only disobeyed the rule, but did not come back at all.
But I think now that Holmes tried to tell me something that night, that his following me was not without reason. Later on he must have changed his mind, but I often wonder what would have happened had he followed that impulse. We would not in all probability have had our second murder, for one thing. Also it might have brought into the open the fact that all our servants knew or guessed a great deal more than any of us.
As I have indicated, however, the Crescent keeps its domestics in their places, the result being a sort of tacit cabal among them; the backs of our houses, so to speak, against the fronts. And Holmes had no chance that night to speak. Mother returned before he had decided, and having had the best linen sheets ceremoniously removed from the guest room next to hers, installed Holmes there with instructions not to snore, and to rap on her door if he heard anything suspicious during the night.
Poor Holmes! Unscrupulous he might have been, and was, but I always had a sneaking fondness for the little man
Incredible as it seems, it was only half past ten when I finally got to my room, leaving Mother locked and bolted inside hers. It had been only six and a half hours since I had seen Miss Emily run shrieking out of that door and collapse on the grass, but it had been innumerable years emotionally for me.
Not only the murder. Not only fear for Jim Wellington, possibly even then under arrest. Alarmed as I was for him, even I knew that a man could not be sent to the electric chair because he had stumbled on an old woman dead in her bed. What also worried me was a sort of terror that I still cared for him. Perhaps it was only sheer pity for his danger, and because I had seen him alone in that empty disordered house, with his servants gone because Helen had spent their money on the exotic clothes, the perfumes and whatnot which seemed more important to her than he ever was.
I knew as well as if I had seen her that she was out that night at some club or roadhouse or hotel roof, dancing, and I felt that I hated her for it.
This is not a love story, however, and perhaps here I should attempt to tell what the police had discovered up to half past ten o’clock that night, and to outline the Lancaster house itself for better understanding. The first I learned a bit at a time over the next two weeks, but the house I knew as well as I knew our own.
Indeed, for all practical purposes the two houses were the same. The same builder had constructed them fifty-odd years ago, at the time when elaborate scroll and fret-saw work decorated most pretentious country houses; and later on the same architect had added what we called our guest wings, removed his predecessor’s adornments and given the dignity of both white paint and plain pillared porches.
The Lancaster house, then, is broad and comparatively shallow, presenting its long dimension to the Crescent. On the lower floor a wide hallway runs from front to back of the main body of the house; from this hall the front door opens onto the porch, shaded with vines, while the rear door opens on what was the old carriage sweep in front of the long-gone stables, and is now a vegetable garden with the woodshed beyond and shielded from the house by heavy shrubbery. As the Lancasters kept no car, there was no garage.
The four main living rooms of the family open from this hall on the first floor, while a narrower hall runs the length of the floor, one end opening by a door onto the lawn toward our house, and the other connecting by a door with the service wing. The staircase rises, not from the main hall but from this transverse one. Under this staircase is the lavatory of which Jim had spoken.
Thus, entering by the porch and the front door, there is the wide hall from front to back, bisected by the narrower transverse one. The parlor—a word we still use—lies on the right, while Mr. Lancaster’s library is on the left. Then comes the transverse hall, with the staircase going up on the left, and an extension, rather narrower, leading to the side entrance to the right. Behind this is the morning room, done in chintz, where Margaret keeps her accounts and writes her letters, and across the main hall the dining room, the latter to the left and connecting through the pantry and underneath the back staircase with the kitchen beyond.
A servants’ dining room and closets to the front of the house, the kitchen, pantry, kitchen porch and laundry comprise the service wing and connect through a door with the body of the house; while a rear staircase, rather awkwardly placed to open onto the kitchen porch, and thus separating the pantry from the kitchen, leads to what we call the guest wing on the second floor, and then continues to the servants’ bedrooms on the third.
This rear staircase, playing a certain strategic part in our first crime, opens on the second floor not far beyond the first landing of the main staircase; for the second floor wing is on a lower level than the body of the house. One who ascends the front stairs may thus look through an archway along the guest wing passage, and then turn and go on up the short flight of six steps to the hall and four large bedrooms which are—or were—occupied by the family.
All these rooms and passages are large, with high corniced ceilings, and the effect is one of great dignity and space.
Practically the same arrangement holds upstairs; that is, the four main sleeping rooms open on the broad hall, while the guest wing, with its lower ceilings, contains two guest rooms to the front—almost never used—with a connecting bath between them, and to the rear a sewing room, a linen closet, a housemaid’s closet, and reached by a narrow hallway, the entrance to the back staircase.
The servants sleep on the third floor.
Of the four main sleeping rooms, Mrs. Lancaster occupied the large corner one in the front of the house; this being somewhat noisier and more exposed to the sun than the others, but being by all tradition of the Crescent the room belonging to the mistress of the house. Through a bathroom it connected with her husband’s room behind, this space with certain closets corresponding to the side hall below.
Emily’s room lay directly across the hall from it; also a front room, she occupied it because with both doors open she could hear her mother if—or when—she needed her at night. Behind this room, with the upper part of the staircase-well between them, lay Margaret’s room, which was over the dining room and at the rear of the house.
There was no staircase to the top floor in the main part of the house, the only access to it being by the one in the guest wing.
What puzzled the police from the start was not the layout of the house, but the seeming impossibility of any access to it. Always carefully locked, with the hoarding by Mrs. Lancaster extra precautions had been taken. Extra locks and in some cases bolts also had been placed on all outside doors, and the screen doors and windows were provided with locks. During Mr. Lancaster’s afternoon walks the screen on the front door was left unlatched so he could admit himself with his key to the main door, but the inside wooden door was carefully locked.
All these doors were found fastened when they arrived, with the single exception of’ the side door which Emily herself had opened when she ran outside. These included the front and back hall doors, the side entrance, the one on the kitchen porch and another from the laundry into a drying yard. The door to the basement was padlocked, and had remained so since the furnace had been discontinued in the spring.
When the police arrived that afternoon, therefore, certain things became obvious, outside of the bedroom itself. One was that while there were innumerable doors and windows giving access to the house, none of them had apparently been used.
Another was that the kitchen porch, the most vulnerable spot since the women servants were constantly using it, had been occupied ever since the luncheon hour: Ellen resting and later bearing up a cake, and Jennie the waitress polishing her silver at the table there.
With the family shut in the library and the servants huddled in their own dining room, the detective named Sullivan had at once made an intensive survey of the lower floor, including doors and windows. He found nothing, and at last went back to the death chamber itself.
“House is like a fortress,” he reported. “One thing’s sure; nobody got in or out of it unless someone inside here helped him to do it.”
But he found the Inspector at a front window, gazing curiously at the porch roof outside.
“Looks like he got in here,” he said. “Something’s overturned that flower pot. And look at this screen!”
Sullivan looked and grunted. Margaret Lancaster always kept a row of flower pots on her mother’s window sill. Now one of them had slid off and overturned on the porch roof, and the screen itself was raised about four inches.
“Might ask one of the daughters if this screen was like this earlier in the day,” the Inspector said.
Sullivan went down to the library, and came back to say that the screen had not been opened, and that Mrs. Lancaster had had a horror of house-flies; that she would have noticed it at once.
The medical examiner had finished at the bed by that time, and the fingerprint men were at work; and not finding anything, at that. The medical examiner went to the window and, still wearing his rubber gloves, tried to raise the screen from the top. But it would not move an inch and he gave it up.
“Nobody got out there,” he said. “Might have tried it, however, and then gave it up.”
They tried the other screen onto the porch roof, but it too stuck tight in its frame. It was not until Sullivan had crawled out the front hall window that they reached the roof at all, and that window he had found closed and locked. The three men were puzzled. Then Sullivan stooped suddenly and pointed to a small smear on the wooden base of the first screen.
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