“See here, Pat,” he said. “About Bessie. Will you try to find out how much she got from Margery? I can’t have my wife collecting blackmail; and she’s still my wife.”

I asked him then if he knew where she was, but he seemed utterly indifferent. “She’ll turn up,” he said. “She always has. I suppose she always will. But not always, Pat. I’ve learned some things. Bessie is out. I want you to know that.”

It was on Tuesday, the eleventh day after I had been hurt, that little Audrey—as Jim always called her—stepped into the picture again.

I had not seen Lydia alone since the time Audrey and her young crowd had made a sort of perpetual picnic out of the search for Evans’s body. There had been Maud’s death, and after that the days in town tracking Miss Connor. But one day Bill Sterling, examining the scar on my head, opened up about her.

“There’s something wrong with her,” he said, looking worried. “Of course, none of us are normal just now. But she stays in her room a lot. As soon as you’re able I wish you’d see her. She’s been a tower of strength for years. Now she’s changed. She’s not the same even with me.”

Amy, cleaning up after him, was out of the room for a few minutes, so we had time to talk. He said it was not Don’s murder. She had been shocked, of course, but she was not grieving for him. If he didn’t know better, he would say it was something to do with Maud’s death.

“She’s been different ever since it happened,” he said, his pleasant unhandsome face looking anxious. “But she barely knew her. Why would that change her?”

“No,” I said, “she didn’t know Maud well enough really to grieve for her, Bill. But then that’s true of the whole business, isn’t it? Don Morgan comes back after fifteen years and is killed. People hardly remembered him. Evans was a solitary who lived at night and slept all day, so he disappears. Bessie comes to make a visit and goes away without notice. And poor Maud Wainwright, who hadn’t an enemy in the world, is murdered.”

He looked at me. “So you think that too, do you?”

“I’m sure of it. So is Tony. So is Jim Conway. So are the servants in the house. If you want to know anything in a place like this, talk to the staff.”

“What do they say?”

“They’re divided between Bessie and Evans, with the odds on Bessie,” I said bitterly. “They don’t like her.”

“If that’s all they have—”

“They have a little more,” I admitted. “They think she put that letter of Maud’s to Tony where it was found, for one thing.”

“I don’t get it, Pat.”

“Listen,” I said. “Any letter meant to be read after a death can sound like a suicide letter. Suppose she wanted to kill herself. Why steal Tony’s gun? Why go to the playhouse to do it? Why turn on the water in the pool? I don’t even think she knew how. And why hide a suicide note, if it was one, unless somebody needed to gain some time?”