“It pretty nearly finished her.

“She must have lain in bed for weeks wondering what to do. Then one day she had an idea. She could sell her jewels and give Audrey the money. They were hers. Wife or no wife to J.C., he had given them to her. The Cloisters too.

“What else could she do? Make a big gesture, tell the truth, and ruin Audrey? I think she meant to lay her cards on the table that night at the playhouse, tell Lydia the facts, and let her decide. She never had a chance, of course. Somebody else was taking mighty good care of that.

“Who was it? Who knew she was going to be there? Or that she had taken that brown manila envelope with her? Because that’s what she did. I imagine it contained her wedding certificate to Anthony Donaldson Morgan, maybe Tony’s birth certificate, and perhaps some old photographs of Morgan himself. But she did one thing before she left that night that fooled nobody. She’d meant Tony to have those certificates after she died, and she’d put a sort of explanatory letter to him in with them.

“Only she wasn’t going to die that night, or so she thought. So she took that letter to Tony out and hid it temporarily under her mattress. It fooled everybody for a while.

“Now let’s look at our killer for a minute. When he met Don at the playhouse the night he threw him in the pool he found a bonanza. Don had Evans’s keys! After that, by going down to the basement and slipping the chain he could get into the house any time he wanted. And he wanted to, all right. You never know about women. What had Maud kept, out of that past of hers? If anything, where was it?

“Finally he thinks of the trunk room, but you scare him off that night. He damned well had to get into it just the same, and the way we got him was to indicate it was there and we intended to look it over.

“Well, that’s the story, sister,” he said. “Maybe I was pretty slow, but even after I’d gotten the papers out of the trunk room I still didn’t know that Don Morgan had divorced Maud. But if he hadn’t, the one person to benefit by his death and Maud’s was Bessie.

“She didn’t want that story known any more than she wanted to lose a leg.

“Then she herself was killed.

“I’m not going over that again. You know all the answers. She was murdered because she knew too much, and because her price for keeping her mouth shut was too high. But there was one thing she didn’t know, or you can bet she’d have had them. That was about those letters in the trunk room. As I say, they were the cheese with which we baited the trap that last night.”

He got up and picked up his hat. Then he looked down at me and grinned.