“It must have been a jolt to Morgan when he learned that he’d been playing around with his son’s wife. Anyhow, he managed to see Bessie at least once. He got out at night and they drove around in her car. What she said then I don’t know. The chances are that she told him she knew that neither Maud nor Tony had a right to the Wainwright money, and he let her think so! Why? Well, look at it. She was a bad actor, and he knew it. Probably he wanted her to leave Tony. He could have threatened to blow the works if she didn’t and leave her flat.

“She looked like a pretty good suspect when I got that far. There was only one thing against it. She was scared of Tony himself.

“Now, that was curious. What she finally worked out in her crooked little mind—sorry again, Pat!—was that Tony knew the story and suspected that she knew it. She was sure Tony had shot at her the night she was hurt.

“Outside of that there was a pretty strong case against her. She wouldn’t have had a scruple about putting Morgan out of the way if she could get away with it. Only thing was, I didn’t believe she had done away with him by herself. Then who helped her? And again, when Maud Wainwright was killed, she’d had people to dinner that night, and Gus reported that no car had been out of the garage. She couldn’t have gotten down to the village and spiked Lydia’s tire.

“I was all for Bessie and an accomplice by that time.

“I began to wonder about Evans. After Haines was attacked with Andy’s car I knew he was around somewhere. But we couldn’t find Evans, and there was somebody else who stood to gain by Morgan’s death. Hold your horses, Pat. This was murder. Tony didn’t do it, but he was on the list all right.

“Of course, when I got that far I understood a lot of things. I could guess pretty well why Maud Wainwright had sent for Lydia to meet her at the playhouse the night she was killed. Look at it yourself. If her marriage to J.C. wasn’t legal, then Lydia’s to Don wasn’t legal either. In other words, Audrey was a—well, let’s say she was without a father.

“You get the picture, don’t you? What had Maud Wainwright of her own? If she wasn’t J.C.’s legal wife the estate wasn’t hers. Maybe she got legal advice on it. I don’t know. But she had done Audrey Morgan a deadly injury, as she saw it.

“Remember, she still didn’t know Don had divorced her. She didn’t even know that the Don Morgan who had been killed and the husband who had deserted her were the same person until a day or so after his murder. Remember the day she had the heart attack? She’d been perfectly normal. She’d eaten her breakfast and looked at her mail. She’d even read the first page of the paper about the murder. But after that, while she waited for Hilda to bring something, she turned the page and there was his photograph.