“Who brought you? The police?”

She smiled that cool amused smile of hers. “If it interests you, I came of my own free will.”

She looked different that day. Her long bob was gone, and her hair was pinned in curls on top of her head. But the difference was deeper than that. She was not so tense. She lit a cigarette and smiled again.

“So it was Julian Stoddard all the time!” she said, those hard blue eyes of hers on Tony. “The great Julian, with his airs and his pride. Well, at least that settles it.”

“Nothing is settled,” he said grimly. “Except that some things you won’t like are going to be aired in court.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But she did know. Her smile died, her easy assurance left her. When Tony gave me over to an Amy who obviously wanted to shake me, she was still standing poised in the hall, as if on the edge of flight again.

She did not get away. Jim Conway, coming up that night, warned her against it. “You’re a witness, and a pretty important one,” he told her. “No matter what you did or how you did it, you told Margery Stoddard you knew who she was. The State’s case is that to avoid exposure after that Stoddard killed Don Morgan.”

“Why didn’t he kill me?” she asked shrewdly. “Why poor old Don, who never hurt anybody?”

“I’m giving you the State’s case, not mine,” he told her. “They’ll want you, so don’t try any tricks. Those fellows in town don’t play games.”

There was a meeting at the Cloisters that night, after Bessie had gone sullenly to her room. Dwight Elliott motored out and soon after Amy saw lights in the playhouse. We were on speaking terms again, after a bad hour or two, and she was almost bursting with curiosity.

“What are they doing?” she said, peering out the window. “That’s Jim Conway. It looks like your Tony too. Say, listen, Pat. Unless I’ve gone crazy, that’s Lydia Morgan’s car. It is. It’s Lydia. Now what on earth is she doing there?”

I could not tell her. I did not know myself, although I thought they were probably reconstructing the night Lydia had found Maud. They were, of course. They had her make her entrance, walk to the living room, turn back and find the body. Then, to test whether or not Maud herself had turned on the water, they asked her to try it. She is a strong woman, but she could not do it. The control was a small wheel in a closet, and Dwight Elliott pointed out that only someone well acquainted with the place could find it.

“I suppose Stoddard wouldn’t have known where it was?” he asked.

“Not a chance,” Tony said.

They did find something that night. Jim had marked with chalk the location of the gun on the floor of the empty pool, and now he got down and examined it with a glass. The pool was painted blue, and inside the chalk mark the paint was broken. “I don’t know about such things,” he said, “but on a guess I’d say the gun went in while the pool was dry.” He looked up at Lydia. “How much water was in it when you saw it?”