“Jeez!” he said. “It’s moving!”

I was beyond fear by that time. I unbolted the door to the wine cellar and shot down the stairs. But I was just too late. There was nobody there.

But someone had been there. The door to the outside, which had been closed, locked, and with the chain up when we examined it earlier, was now standing open. O’Brien ran out through it and, hearing a car start down the drive, fired a shot after it. It got away, however. All he saw of it was the red taillight. He came back, looking sheepish. “The son of a gun,” he said. “He was inside all the time.”

It was his idea, and I believe now it was correct, that the chain to the basement door had been left off either by design or by accident, and that the intruder had been already in the house when we made our search. Perhaps hiding in the elevator.

When at last I went upstairs, having locked the basement door and put the chain on it, I found Bessie in the hall. She looked a dead-white, and was holding to the gallery rail to support herself. She could barely speak.

“The shooting!” she said. “What was it?”

She was in no condition to be told the facts. I said O’Brien thought he had seen the intruder in the grounds again, and let it go at that. She went back to bed, locking her door behind her as usual, but I do not think she believed me. She gave me a long hard look before she shut me out.

There was nothing to be seen in the trunk room, in that welter of trunks and bags. O’Brien and I searched it carefully that night. We found one thing, however, which Reynolds the next day claimed not to have seen before. This was a box of trunk keys. There must have been a hundred of them, of every conceivable size and shape.

“No, miss,” he said. “It doesn’t belong here. All keys are tagged and hung in this case on the wall. You can see for yourself.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

I TRIED TO GET Jim Conway that night, but his mother has a habit of muffling the telephone bell when she thinks he needs sleep. It was the next morning, therefore, that I told him in his office in the village. I remember he looked fresh and rested, and that I was furious at him. “I hope you slept well last night,” I said, with some bitterness.

“Sure I did. I needed it.”

“No matter what happens you have to have your sleep! Is that it?”

He sat upright. “All right,” he said resignedly, “I suppose Mother muffled the bell again. Let’s have it, Pat. What did happen? And where?”

“At the Cloisters. Somebody got in.”

“How do you know?”

“I was there.”

It was his turn to be furious. He’d warned me. He had even given me a gun to protect myself. And then in the middle of the night like a little fool I had gone back there. He was in the midst of washing his hands of me when he remembered what I had said.