“Sure it wasn’t Stoddard who tried to finish you off?” he asked.

“He would never do that to me.”

“A man will do a good bit to escape the chair,” he said dryly. “You knew about Margery. Nobody else did. Even the Connor woman, according to you, didn’t know she had married Stoddard.”

“He didn’t know I was there.”

“How can you tell? There’s a lot of evergreen stuff around the pool. He could have followed his wife and heard everything you said. It looks bad, Pat. They know what happened to you. That’s why they grabbed him.”

“I don’t know myself what happened to me.”

He told me then. Gus had been worried about me, and when I did not come back he had started out in the station wagon to find me. He went down first to the village, but by twelve o’clock he was back on the Hill. My car was still gone, so he called Reynolds at the main house and asked if he knew where I had gone. “To the Stoddards’,” said Reynolds. “I heard her make the appointment.”

Gus began to feel foolish. He thought of putting up the station wagon and letting things ride. But there was Tony’s order not to let me out alone at night. In the end he drove over to the Farm, to find my car parked inside the drive and the Stoddard house dark.

“It didn’t look right to him,” Jim said. “He got out and looked around the place. It was pretty dark, and if you hadn’t had that white coat on he’d have missed you. But there you were, thrown into the empty pool, and he thought you were dead.”

I gathered that there had been considerable excitement when I was brought back. Bill Sterling was afraid of a skull fracture, and Tony had roused a surgeon in town and made him come down. He had wanted to take me to the hospital for an X-ray, but Tony opposed it. “If there’s anything to be done,” he said, “it will be done here. I want her where she can be watched. She isn’t going to follow Evans.”

I had no fracture. It was a concussion, although I groaned when I learned that they had shaved a small place on the back of my head and put in four stitches. They had given me hypodermics to keep me quiet, and part of the time I’d been asleep.

“You were a pretty tired girl,” said Jim, getting up. “You might as well take a rest now. There is nothing any of us can do for Stoddard. They think they’ve got him cold.”

It looked as though they had. It was the little inconspicuous man, of course, who had done it. When I left Miss Connor, he had simply walked in and showed his badge to the landlady. “Woman here named Connor,” he said. “Like to see her.”

“Good gracious, she’ll drop dead. The police!”

“Just want to talk to her. Nothing wrong.”