The first thing to do, if she was to pursue a sensible course, was to check and make sure the money was still there. Though she had dropped hints to Karen, on her own part Mrs. Havermann had maintained a curious sense of honor; she had felt that Stolz wouldn’t want her spying on his hoard and so she had given in to her curiosity only once, some six months after he had requested permission to leave the money here; and at that time she had found over fourteen thousand dollars in one of his wardrobe drawers.

Now, composing herself in case she met Karen in the hallway, she went upstairs to her room. The key was in her bureau under a box of handkerchiefs. As she took it out, she heard Karen in the bathroom adjoining. “Karen?”

“I’m washing the tile. I didn’t get finished yesterday.”

“That’s good.” The bathroom faced the rear yard, overlooking the area between the house and the garage. Had Karen looked out of the window a few minutes before, she would have seen Mrs. Havermann below, but Mrs. Havermann had shut the frosted pane tight upon arising, as usual; there was no reason for Karen to have opened it. The girl hadn’t seen anything.

These ideas trailed through Mrs. Havermann’s mind as she stood there with the key in her fingers, and something more followed. She always kept the bathroom light burning at night. She’d read somewhere long ago that such a light was one most apt to keep off burglars, seeming to indicate that one was up out of bed either using the toilet or taking medicines—in either case relieving a condition which had made one wakeful. Now it occurred to her that the bathroom light being on during the night had been what had kept the burglar from making a forced and perhaps not entirely silent entry. He had thought that someone was awake upstairs.

She nodded to herself, pleased in spite of her worries that her small precaution had paid off. She went downstairs, unlocked the door to Stolz’s room, went in, relocked the door, and looked around. She had been here only yesterday, checking to see if she should dust; her eyes flew at once to the coat on Stolz’s bed.

She had almost convinced herself, since first finding it, that the coat had actually been on the bed all of the time since Stolz’s departure and that she had somehow overlooked it. But now a new conviction startled her. Someone had already been in the room, searching for the money.