Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “Come in, Lou,” she said. “Wasn’t it just my luck to leave the Crescent when it was about to provide some real excitement? I wouldn’t have missed it on a bet.”

  “Well,” I said, “it isn’t too late. Helen, Jim’s there alone, and he certainly needs you.”

  “Did he send you?” she asked sharply.

  “No. But the servants have gone, and the way things are—”

  She laughed a little, not too pleasantly.

  “Gone, have they? Well, they were a poor lot anyhow,” she said. “Always wanting money, the wretches! So Jim’s there alone, and you think I ought to go back to make his bed and cook for him!”

  “I think he needs moral support, Helen.”

  “Ask Jim if he would expect moral support from me! I’d like to see his face.”

  “There’s another reason, too,” I said soberly. “It doesn’t look well just now.”

  “Yes, the Crescent would think of that!”

  “Not to the Crescent. To the police.”

  But she waved that off with a gesture.

  “They’ve been here already. They know I don’t believe Jim did it. He had too much common sense. It was his common sense that separated us, by the way; always asking me to be sensible and taking the fun out of life. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m not going back just to save Jim’s face, and that’s flat.”

  “You mean never?”

  “Well, never’s a long time. Don’t be too hopeful! But I’m very comfortable here.”

  “Listen, Helen,” I said. “Probably Jim would want to kill me if he knew I’d been here, but I must tell you how things are. Then maybe you’ll reconsider.”

  I did tell her, from the stains on his clothes to the money in the chest. It was not until I reached the money, however, that she really sat up and became intent.

  “And to think he never told me! How much was there?”

  “I don’t know. Between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars, they say.”

  Her reaction to that was typical. She simply lay back on her hotel sofa and groaned.

  “What I could do with all that money,” she wailed. “I owe everybody, and I’m completely out of clothes. Now some fool has got it and buried it, and will turn it into government bonds and live on the interest! I simply can’t bear it.”

  After that I went away. Thinking it over since, I believe she staged a good bit of that for my benefit, and that she deliberately overplayed her attitude of indifference. That had always been her reaction to the Crescent, and it still remains so; a carefully thought-out defiance.

  I still remember her last words as she stood in that untidy room, with the scent she affected almost overwhelming and her eyes shrewd and keen.

  “Sorry Lou,” she said. “I’m not a very satisfactory person, am I? But your Crescent scares me to death. Too much steam in the boiler and no whistle to use it up.”

  Chapter XIII

  I FOUND ANNIE CARRYING a tea tray in to Mother, and a copy of the extra on Mother’s bed. That newspaper alone, if nothing else, would have marked the change in our habits since the murder. But I was astonished to find Mother looking relieved and almost cheerful.

  She looked up as I went in.

  “Get that tray fixed and get out, Annie,” she said, “and close that door behind you.”

  Annie went in a hurry, and Mother turned to me.

  “I suppose you’ve seen this?”

  “No. But I dare say I should have suspected it. I was there when they opened the chest.”

  “Oh, you were, were you? Really, Louisa, sometimes I wonder how I ever bore a child so—so undutiful. To think—!”

  “You’ve been sick all day, mother. Anyhow, I wasn’t certain. I was there when they opened the chest, but not the bags in it. I simply remember now that one of the detectives looked skeptical when he touched the bags. That’s all.”

  She eyed me.

  “I suppose you realize that this will probably be very damaging to Jim Wellington, to say the least.”

  “I don’t see it,” I said stubbornly. “Anyone who knows him—”

  “Stuff and nonsense. Do use your head, Louisa. Who else could have done it? It would have been easy for him. All he had to do was to show her one bag, and have another ready to put into the chest.”

  “You can’t believe that, mother! You can’t.”

  “Never mind what I believe,” she said sharply. “What I want you to do is to get Hester Talbot here. I’ve got an apology to make to her.”

  That must have been at five, or perhaps later. At six o’clock Mrs. Talbot came, carrying her bag of keys as usual, and from then until almost seven she and Mother were shut away in Mother’s room. When she came out I thought she had been crying, a fact so astonishing that I should have been less startled if I had seen a hippopotamus weep. But her voice was as loud and resonant as ever when she met me in the upper hall.

  “Well, I understand they’ve taken Jim Wellington in again for interrogation. It’s about time they took him and kept him!”

  “If all the Crescent is determined to think him guilty it is time, Mrs. Talbot.”

  I let her out myself. It was dark and windy and growing much colder. But I was too utterly miserable to notice it then. I was thinking as hard and as fast as I have ever done in my life. If the police found that money buried in No Man’s Land, I knew what it would mean, especially if it was buried among the trees where George had found the gold piece. That bit of wood was not far from the Wellington house, and began perhaps two hundred feet from the end of the tennis court.

  I went back to the kitchen and told Mary I should want no dinner. Then I put on a heavy coat and started out. On the back path I met Holmes coming in, and it seemed to me that he stopped and looked after me; but I was beyond caring. Nevertheless, I did not strike for the wood land at once. Instead I took the grapevine path which connects the rear of each house with the other; and I remember wondering to see the Dalton place as quiet and orderly as ever, with Joseph in the dining room and a faint aroma of something spicy coming from an open kitchen window. It was hard to believe that I had actually seen what had occurred the night before.

  It was beyond the Dalton garage that the Wellington house, as it came into view, surprised me by showing a light in the kitchen. My first feeling was one of relief, that Jim had been released once more and was at home again. That changed to surprise, however, as I kept on until I was close under the kitchen porch.

  There was a man inside, a tall man in an apron, who was smoking a cigarette and eyeing rather dubiously a can of something or other which he held in his hand. He might easily have seen me, but he did not, and as I watched him I felt certain that I had seen him before. I had no time to think about that, however, for the next moment he commenced a curious performance which kept me rooted to the spot in amazement.

  That is, he first did something or other to the gas range and then backing off from it, began to toss lighted matches at it from a distance. On what I think was the third try the effect was simply astounding. There was a roar of exploding gas, and the door to the stove oven came hurtling through the screen and landed on the rear porch, followed almost instantly by the strange man himself, who proceeded to fall over it.

  There was a second or two of silence. Then the man sat up and commenced a soft and monotonous swearing which I interrupted.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “Hurt! I’ve damned near broken my leg.”

  He was getting up by that time, and now he looked out and saw me.

  “Sorry, miss. I must have turned on the oven and forgotten about it. I’m not used to a gas range.”

  “So I imagine,” I said drily. “Has Mr. Wellington come back?”

  “No, miss.”

  “Then you’d better let me come in and show you about that stove.”

  He did not want me; I saw that. But he put as good a face on it as he could, and I went in and lighted the stove properly. He watched me carefully.<
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  “It’s really quite tame, isn’t it, when you get the hang of it?” he said, and then added “miss” as an afterthought. I noticed then that he had lost his eyebrows and some of his front hair, but he was distinctly amiable in spite of it. “You see, miss, I’m not a cook; but I told Mr. Wellington I’d try to carry on until—well, until things got settled.”

  “If you carry on the way you’ve started, they’ll never be settled. And you can tell him, when he comes back, that Miss Hall called. Louisa Hall.”

  He gave me a quick look, seemed to hesitate and then opened the screen door, or what was left of it, for me.

  “Very well, miss,” he said. “I’ll tell him.”

  I started out from there for the wood land toward Euclid Street, but once I turned to look back, and he was at the window watching me. Take it all in all, I was puzzled and not too easy. Had the police taken over Jim’s house in his absence, and was this man an officer of some sort, trying to get himself a bit of a meal? Or was he a friend of Jim’s, there for some purpose I could not know? He was no servant. That was certain.

  But I could not take a chance on him. I looked regretfully toward the wood land and then turned back home, to see when I turned the corner of the Dalton house something which set me running as fast as I ever ran in my life. That something was a thick column of smoke from one of the chimneys of our house, and I knew that Mother had ordered the furnace to be lighted.

  That, with all the Crescent, meant that immediately the water pans on all the radiators would be filled.

  I ran like a crazy woman. Luckily it was now dusk and the dinner hour, so that the kitchen windows which are like so many eyes peering out were untenanted. I shot into our own kitchen, collided with Annie in a passage carrying down Mother’s tea tray, and took the stairs two at a time. But I was too late. Mother in her dressing gown was standing by the radiator in the wing, and gazing down at that awful glove.

  “Is that you, Louisa?” she called. “Come here a moment. What do you think this is?”

  “It looks like an old glove,” I said as calmly as I could.

  “Then what is it doing there?”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” I picked it up and looked at it. “It has stove polish on it or something. I’ll throw it away.”

  But Mother reached out and taking it from me, delicately held it to her nose and sniffed at it.

  “It’s boot polish,” she said.

  I knew at once that she was right. It was boot polish. That was the scent that had escaped me; a scent which took me back to my childhood days, with my father standing with one foot on an old-fashioned boot-box and fastidiously rubbing at his shoes.

  “But who in the world polishes boots in this house?” Mother said. “Not Holmes. He never polishes anything unless he’s forced to do so. I must ask Annie.”

  But the one thing I did not want was that Mother should ask Annie, or show her that glove. Luckily the collision and the resulting damage had delayed her somewhat, but I could now hear her slowly plodding up the stairs, ready to see the significance of that glove, or of the stains on it that Mother’s older eyes had overlooked. Ready to run downstairs with it, examine it, talk it over.

  I thought desperately of some way to divert Mother’s attention. She was still holding the glove, and Annie was on her way down the hall with a pitcher with which to fill the pans.

  “There’s a new butler at Jim Wellington’s, mother,” I said breathlessly. “And he blew up the kitchen range.”

  “He what?” said Mother.

  “Blew up the range. I was walking by, and the explosion blew him and the oven door out onto the back porch.”

  “And serves him right,” said Mother, outraged at this crime against domestic order. “I never heard of such a thing. It was a new range, too. They only bought it last year.”

  But this expedient had had the proper effect. Glove in hand and still indignant, Mother watched Annie fill the radiator pan and then sailed back to her room. Inside it she looked absently at the glove, seemed surprised to find she still held it, and finally dropped it into her wastebasket.

  This did not mean necessarily that the glove was safe. Rather the contrary indeed, the Crescent expecting that its wastebaskets be emptied at night when the beds are turned down, just as it demands fresh towels in its bathrooms. And this waste goes into cans provided for the purpose at the extreme rear end of each property. Rain or shine, bright morning or late evening, our servants make these excursions. And I knew enough about police methods by that time to realize that examination of waste cans might well be a part of their routine.

  Even if the glove escaped Annie’s sharp eyes, there was the question whether I could safely make a night trip for its recovery. Lightning did not strike twice, and I could hardly hope to repeat the Dalton’s foolhardy and reckless excursion. I managed to drop the advertising portion of the paper into Mother’s basket so that it covered the glove, and when Annie came up to turn down the beds I waylaid her in the hall.

  “Annie,” I said, “I don’t think I’d go out by the rear door at night for a while. We don’t know what all this is about, but it might not be safe.”

  “I haven’t any intention of doing that, Miss Louisa. Not with a murdering lunatic about.”

  “You might suggest to Holmes that he bring the waste cans onto the kitchen porch.”

  “They’re there now, miss,” she said primly. “Although what your mother will say I don’t know.”

  “I’ll take the responsibility for that, Annie.”

  She gave me a small and cynical smile. Both of us would get it, it implied, when the time came. But there was appreciation in it too. Annie and I understood each other.

  “Very well, Miss Louisa,” she said. “And it’s Mary’s evening out, and she says she’s going out by the front door. I suppose you haven’t a key for it?”

  “You know very well that I have no key for it, Annie.”

  She was standing beside me with the coffee tray in her hands, and I was surprised a look of sympathy on her face. She knew that I had no key, had never had a key of my own.

  “I’ve told her I’d wait up, so she needn’t ring the bell, miss. She’ll be back at eleven.”

  I agreed, of course. It meant that I, too, must wait until eleven or later before I could retrieve the glove, but there was nothing else to do. And I have reported this conversation in detail because it led to what was to be the most exciting night of my life up to that time.

  Chapter XIV

  I GOT MOTHER TO bed by ten o’clock, putting her book and her glasses on the table beside her, along with her folded clean handkerchief and her glass of water. Her prayer book, of course, always lay there. And as I did it I wondered about Miss Emily next door. What was she feeling that night, after all her years of service? Was she utterly lost? Or was there some sense of relief from the demands of that petulant and querulous old woman, with the stick by her bed with which to summon Emily remorselessly, day or night?

  She had built herself no life at all, had Emily, save for her incessant reading, her trips to the library for books. Margaret was different. She had a life of her own, slightly mysterious but very real. She dressed carefully, went out—to concerts, to the theater now and then. It was even rumored that she had a small group where she played bridge for infinitesimal sums of money; something of which the Crescent disapproved on principle, although it bought lottery tickets at hospital fairs without compunction.

  When at last I went back to my room I was still wondering. Not only about Emily and Margaret; about all our women. Save Helen Wellington, none of us lived interesting or even active lives. It was as though our very gates closed us away. The men went out, to business, to clubs, to golf. They came back to well-ordered houses and excellent dinners. Even old Mr. Lancaster had a club, although he rarely went there. But the women! I remembered a call I had made on Helen Wellington shortly after she married Jim.

  “What do you do, all of you?” she asked. �
�You’ll got twenty-four hours a day to fill in.”

  “We have our homes, of course. You’ll find that we consider them very important.”

  “And that’s living? To know how many napkins go into the wash every week?”

  “We manage. It isn’t very exciting, of course. It was harder when I first came back from boarding school, but I’m used to it now.”

  “Used to it! At twenty! That’s ridiculous.”

  And because she too was young I had told her about having to let down my skirts before I came back for each vacation—that was when skirts were very short—and turning them up laboriously as soon as I reached the school again. She had thought it so funny that she had screamed with laughter. But I wondered that night if it was really funny at all.

  “Twenty,” she had said, “and they’ve got you. Well, they’ve never get me.”

  And perhaps it was as a result of those reflections that I took a book that night and went down to the library.

  By years of custom, on nights when Mother has gone to bed early I have sat in my room with the door open, in case she might need something. Now I went down and turned on all the lamps. Not the few we ordinarily use, but all of them. And it was into this blaze of light that, at ten-thirty, Annie showed Inspector Briggs.

  He came in, pinching his lip thoughtfully, and with a faintly deprecatory smile.

  “Sorry to bother you again, Miss Hall.”

  “That’s all right. I’m interested, naturally, if that word is strong enough. That’s a good chair, Inspector.”

  He sat down, remarking that the night was cold and the room warm; and then said rather abruptly that he had dropped Jim Wellington at his house on his way in.

  “I thought you’d like to know,” he said, rather too casually.

  “I can’t see why you took him in the first place,” I said.

  “Well,” he replied, smiling again, “the police aren’t miracle workers. They are only a hard-working plodding lot at the best, and the fact that we’ve released Wellington doesn’t mean so much at that. The plain fact is that we’ve got a fair case against him now, but nothing to take before a jury. There’s a difference, Miss Hall!”