I prefered Marcus Whitby’s simple staircase with its poster of Kylie Ballantine’s “Ballet Noir,” but I backed up to get a better look at a stern woman in mauve silk, wondering if she was the Mrs. Edwards Bayard who had gone to the opening of Larchmont Hall in 1903; I could see a resemblance to young Catherine and to Calvin Bayard in the narrow planes of her face. Not the great beauty Geraldine Graham’s mother had been.

I heard Ruth’s voice above me and slid around behind the stairwell where the balustrade formed an alcove. “All you have to tell her is that he was asleep and in bed. But you know if this happens again, I will have to talk to Mrs. Renee about it.”

A second woman mumbled something inaudible. I hurried back down the hall to the anteroom, the thick carpeting muffling my steps. I managed to be standing at the window, gazing outside with supreme indifference, when Ruth reappeared. The mumbler was a woman in her thirties, with a bony, anxious face. Like Ruth, she wore jeans, not a uniform, and had on a heavy gray cardigan over a faded T-shirt.

“This is Theresa Jakes.” Ruth fished my card out of her blazer pocket and did a creditable job in pronouncing my name. “Mr. Bayard has been ill and Theresa is helping Mrs. Bayard nurse him.”

Theresa’s hands were red from much scrubbing. She tucked them nunlike into the sleeves of her cardigan and looked at me nervously.

I repeated my little speech. “Did you take a phone call from Marcus Whitby? Did you try to arrange for Mr. Bayard to see him?”

Theresa shook her head. “I know better than to let journalists come here. It’s Mrs. Bayard’s strictest order. Anyone who wants an interview has to talk to her in town. No one can bother Mr. Bayard here at home.” “Could he have taken the call himself?” I asked.

Theresa looked helplessly at Ruth Lantner. “There is a phone in his room, but we’ve turned off the ringer so it won’t bother him. Unless heI guess I could check it.”

“But he did go out Sunday and Monday night, right?” I said, plowing forward despite my growing uncertainty. “Was it you who brought him home?”

“He wasn’t out,” Theresa said. “He was sleeping, sleeping heavily.” “You were with him all night?” I asked.

“He doesn’t need someone in the room with him,” Theresa said. “He doesn’t have that kind of illness. But if he leaves, an alarm goes off over my bed so that I can make sure he’s all right.”

“And that alarm never sounded?” I persisted, hoping to get some inkling about what she’d done that Ruth was going to report the next time it happened-since whatever it was explained why I’d been admitted to the house. “It’s funny, because young Catherine emphasized that she’d used his key to get into Larchmont Hall.”

Theresa made a little dismayed face at Ruth, who shook her head at the other woman and said, “Catherine wasn’t here Monday night. Mr. Bayard did not leave the house on Monday. Or on Sunday. Whatever scheme you have in mind-“