“She didn’t have to go to the playhouse to sit by a fire. It looked to me as though she had expected to meet somebody there. Somebody she didn’t want in the house, but somebody she wanted to make comfortable.”

He had only a minute or two. He sent Thomas to turn on the floodlight on the fountain so the others could find the way. Then he went outside and examined the ground. He could see a vague outline of Maud’s footprints and mine in the thin snow, although the men running from the house had almost obliterated them. But there was another set, leading from the direction of the entrance to the grounds and back again. They were little more than vague depressions, but they looked small to him. He had no tape measure with him, but he found one print still fairly clear and marked its length with a pencil on his handkerchief.

“Looked like a woman’s to me,” he said. “Here and there I found what looked like the mark of a high heel. I wasn’t sure, of course. All I was sure of was that somebody had come in the gate that night and gone away again. It didn’t look right, somehow. I thought of Bessie Wainwright, but the direction was wrong. Anyhow, she could see Bessie any day. Why the playhouse?”

He said nothing to anybody. When the patrolmen came he shut off the water, but left the gun where it lay in the pool, He had gotten rid of Tony and me soon after, and Bill Sterling was there. Of course, all Bill could say was that she was gone, which he knew already. Bill got up from his examination and looked down at her. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would she do it, Jim? She had everything.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” said Jim. “That is, if she did do it.”

The coroner arrived at daylight, with Hopper not far behind him. But the coroner considered it suicide.

“Not all the autopsies in the world can change the picture,” he said with a thin smile.

Hopper was inclined to agree with him, even when the automatic, retrieved from the pool, showed only smudged fingerprints. “Water would take care of that,” he said, “especially if it was running.”

“Who the hell turned on the water?” Jim demanded.

“How do you know one of the gardeners didn’t do it? To keep the pipe from freezing?”

“Why would she kill herself?”

“Maybe she knew Tony was mixed up in Morgan’s death, and couldn’t take it.”

“Listen,” said Jim stubbornly. “You didn’t know her. She could take anything.”

It was after Jim showed him the living room that Hopper sent for the homicide squad from town. He was still unconvinced. Only, as Jim said, it looked queer even to him that anybody would light a fire and smoke a cigarette in comfort, and then walk to a cold swimming pool to shoot herself.

It was a little late by that time. Men had been tramping in and out, even Maud herself had been taken to the house. But at that the result was unexpected. The prints on the gun were of no use to them. Maud’s own prints were on the chair and table by the fire. But the door to the outside was still standing open, as it had been, and there were no prints on it whatever.