She stopped trying to close her suitcase and looked at me. “You’re sure of that?”

“It looks like it. You see, you left a fire going in the playhouse, and she must have seen it from her window. She got the key and went down, and—”

She stared. Then she laughed horribly, hysterically. “So I left a fire in the playhouse!” she cried. “You fool, do you think I’d go near that place? I haven’t been there for weeks.”

I met Jim in the lower hall after I left her, and told him. He listened carefully.

“I see,” he said. “Well, she’s not leaving. Nobody’s leaving, Pat. Either Maud Wainwright killed herself or somebody staged a suicide for her. Keep that to yourself, will you?”

“She didn’t commit suicide, Jim.”

“Well, that’s for us to find out. Go to bed, Pat. You can’t help now.”

Weeks later he was to tell me about that early morning, when he found Reynolds on guard over Maud’s body, and Thomas and Stevens preparing to carry me to a bed. He had had a little time to himself before the patrol car came. He did not touch anything, but he took a careful survey. Maud, as I have said, was lying at the edge of the pool, a small handkerchief beside her, and her right arm over the edge of the pool itself. She was fully dressed, even to her coat, and she looked quiet peaceful.

Then Tony came, and Jim found that awful hole in her head. “I couldn’t say anything,” he said. “Not with that poor devil rubbing her hands and trying to bring her back to life. But she’d been shot, and a shot meant a gun. That’s when I found it, in the water in the pool.”

It was a suicide to him at first. But the water in the pool made him wonder. It had been running in faster than it ran out, and there was already a foot or two there when he arrived.

“Look at it yourself, Pat,” he said. “Either you fill a pool, in which case you close the outlet, or you leave it alone. Not only that. Every pool around had been drained for the winter. Then why the water? What did it mean? Did she want to be sure that if the shot didn’t kill her she would fall in there and drown? She didn’t fall in. So what? Anyhow, why dress and go to all that trouble to kill herself? She had a lot of sleeping dope in her room. That would have been a simple, easy way out. Why didn’t she take it?”

Not, he said, that he thought it all out at the time. He wasn’t doing a hell of a lot of thinking just then. He left Tony alone with his mother and went over the playhouse. He was surprised to find the fire in the living room. It was still smoldering, and he thought it had either been lit or had fresh wood put on it not many hours before. Not only that. There was a fresh package of cigarettes there. One had been smoked, and there was a chair drawn up by the fire.