Wayland paused for a moment. “This door,” he said, “is to be replaced.” He made no sign of entering, but Miss Withers sailed blithely past him. The room, however, showed no clues. It was completely bare, stripped down to the baseboards. The one window, opening above the sloping roof of the kitchen, had a heavy iron grille built into the original stone—nothing larger than a cat could have entered or left that way.

Miss Withers thought that she had never seen a less productive scene-of-the-crime. She followed Wayland to the third floor, where there was nothing much of interest, and then back down again. “Now we’ll have a look at the cellar,” the man said. And he opened a little door which led down out of the butler’s pantry.

The air which rose from the cellar’s depths was dank and musty and cold, yet with a trace of perfume. For the first time Miss Hildegarde Withers felt an unpleasant chill of apprehension. Upstairs was one thing, but going down into the semi-darkness of a basement with a man supposed to have killed one woman in this house already—

Her agile mind devised all sorts of excuses. She could say that she had to run along, that her friends were waiting, that the house was too large. . . .

“‘One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward!’” she quoted. After all, Wayland was no more dangerous in one place than another. She started, a little gingerly, down the stairs.

Down below there was a great pile of paper cartons, some neatly tied with string and some open and overflowing. Miss Withers saw women’s dresses, shoes, underwear, and all the rest of it—a pitiful exhibit.

“I’ve asked the Goodwill people to pick that stuff up,” Wayland was saying. “Just some old clothes that I have no use for now.” Miss Withers followed him obediently onward, gathering from her quick glimpse of the debris that the late Mrs. Wayland had been addicted to very high heels and to the scent of gardenia. She had also, from the look of her girdles, been very fat around the middle. Wayland was at this moment delivering a lecture about construction and termites and water-heaters, but the schoolteacher only nodded from time to time. She peered into the shadows underneath the stair, noticing a rough shelf on which had been neatly arranged a row of old magazines dating, she noted, as far back as 1934. Most of them seemed to deal with women’s fashions, a few with travel, and there was a long row of pulps, in the adventure and outdoor category.

Wayland saw what had caught her eyes, and came back to lift one of the periodicals from the rack, blow the dust from it, and shake his head. “I was always going to re-read some of these. But I guess there’s nothing deader than old magazines. . . .”