“Somebody got in! With O’Brien there, and the place locked up like a bank! I don’t believe it.”

He believed me when I told him, however, although he snorted with disgust when I spoke about the box of keys.

“So you handled it, and O’Brien and Reynolds pawed it too! I ought to fire O’Brien for that. The only chance for fingerprints in the whole goddam case, and you gum the works!”

He quieted down after that. He sat for a time, looking through me rather than at me. “Tell me this,” he said. “I’m no woman, thank God. But don’t women save things? Sentimental things, I mean. Baby clothes and old love letters, stuff like that?”

I grinned at him. “I still have a note you wrote me in school years ago, Jim.”

“Holding it for blackmail, eh?”

“You told me my slip was showing.”

“Always was a soft kid,” he said. “Look, Pat, Mrs. Wainwright have any such things among what you found? Tony’s first diaper or old J.C.’s love letters. They’d be something, wouldn’t they!”

“There was nothing, Jim.”

“You didn’t try the trunk room?”

“No. Hilda said there was nothing there.”

There was something there. Bessie was in town shopping when Jim came up to the Cloisters that afternoon. I admitted him by the west wing door, and to evade the servants we took the elevator to the third floor. The room was as we had left it the night before, keys and all, and our first experiments were pretty hopeless. Then at last Jim located in a corner a small, shabby trunk, and finally managed to find a key to open it.

I shall never forget that trunk. It was heartbreaking, in a way. There was Maud’s white satin wedding dress and veil. She must have been very young and slender when it was made, for there were small lace ruffles to pad out the bust. Even Jim handled it gently, and I myself could have wept over it. There were Tony’s baby clothes, and a quaint book with a record of his weight at birth, and later on an imprint of his foot drawn in ink. There was a lock of his hair too, fine and blond, with a slight curl to it.

I took it to a window to look at it and when I came back Jim was closing and locking the trunk. He looked up at me.

“Sorry, Pat,” he said. “A policeman has to do a lot of snooping, and I’m damned if I like it. Don’t tell Tony I’ve been in that trunk, will you?”

“I don’t think he knows it’s here.”

He was more sober that day than I had ever seen him, and I know now that he went down to his office, closed his door, and did a number of things. He took out and studied some letters he had taken from the trunk while my back was turned. He went back over the list of clues he had made a few days before, and he got out some old borough documents and looked them over. After that he made one telephone call and wrote out a cable and some telegrams, telephoning them to the city to avoid a local leak. Then he sat back and went over what he had learned.