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