“Look! They’ve got something!”

“They have for a fact. Who’s got the field glasses? Well, for Pete’s sake, it’s only a log!”

Lydia saw my face. “They’re young, Pat,” she said. “Death is still only a word to them.”

She looked better. She said she and Bill hoped to be married before long, and she talked a little about her plans. But once she looked out at the river, and then at me.

“Pat, do you think Evans could be doing all this? He may still be alive. He could be hiding near by, you know. Back somewhere in the hills, perhaps.”

“Why would he shoot at Bessie?”

“I don’t know, unless—What do you know about Bessie, Pat? Really know, I mean. Who is she? Who was she? Why did Don go out at night with her? He did, you know, at least once. Larry Hamilton saw them. I’ve wondered—how old do you think she is?”

“She’s older than she says she is. I don’t know how much.”

“The girl who ran away with Don was only eighteen, Pat. She’d be about thirty-three now. I never saw her, but—it’s possible, Pat, isn’t it? Why did Don come back? Why is Bessie here now? Suppose she’d feathered her nest by marrying Tony Wainwright, and Don comes back and threatens to spill the beans. She’d do almost anything to get rid of him, wouldn’t she?”

“It would have taken a lot of nerve, Lydia. Suppose somebody recognized her?”

“She has plenty of nerve, hasn’t she?”

“You mean—”

“Somebody killed Don.”

“She couldn’t have done all of it alone, Lydia.”

“No. Not alone,” she said composedly.

I knew what she meant. If Bessie had killed Don, Tony might have helped her to get rid of the body. Not to save her. Not for her sake, but for his mother’s. I lit a cigarette, and tried to think back, as well as I could. I knew very little, really. Only of his marriage, as Maud had told it to me: that Bessie had had perfectly respectable parents at her wedding, that she had gone to a good school, and that she belonged to the Junior League. Still, a clever girl could have managed that, have borrowed parents for the occasion and invented the rest.

“You see, I wouldn’t recognize her,” Lydia said. “You know how it is in a business office. I never even knew her name until they were gone. She was just another girl to me.”

“What was her name?”

“She called herself Marguerite Weston. I imagine the Marguerite at least was a slight touch of—well, of imagination.” She stirred. “See here, Pat, we might find out about it. Or rather you might. I can’t very well, an account of Bill.”

“How can I? After fifteen years?”

“There might be something in the newspaper files. I think they have them at the library here. Maybe even a photograph, although I never saw any.”

I agreed to think about it, and that day, with Audrey’s crowd screaming on the river bank and the boats moving slowly along, she told me something of herself and Don.