“Tony mostly has his parties in the playhouse,” she said. “The young people like it.”

But I did not see the playhouse that day. I was to know it well later, to know it and hate the very sight of it. It was twilight before I left, and Maud Wainwright stood on the terrace, watched me get into my ancient car and start it with a clash of worn-out gears, and waved a smiling good night to me. She looked a lonely figure standing there, under the high white pillars, and I find that I always think of her like that; lonely against the panoply of wealth, kind and totally unarmed against the world. Perhaps that was why she made her great mistake. For make it she did, with terrible results.

Someone has said that murder is the great mistake, the one irrevocable error any individual can make. We were to have murder, of course. But behind our crimes there lay that curious helplessness of Maud Wainwright and her inability to see evil in any individual, man or woman.

A day or two before I started this record I went in to see Jim Conway. He had just been re-elected chief of police, and he grinned at me over a desk covered with flowers, including an enormous horseshoe of white carnations from one of the local organizations.

“Sorry if I look like a gangster’s funeral,” he said. “Is this a visit of congratulation, or is it merely that I’ve become a habit?”

“I need some help, Jim.”

He groaned.

“Not again, Pat!” he said. “Listen, sister, I’m through. I’ve had plenty. I’ve had enough to last a lifetime. All I want now is to sit here in peace and maybe look for a stolen chicken or a missing car now and then. And don’t look at me like that. I’m adamant, if you know the word.”

However, he was mollified as well as highly interested when I told him what I meant to do. He lit a cigarette and sat back in his chair.

“Going to write it, are you?” he said. “Well, it ought to be some story at that. Better start it off with something that will keep them reading, like Evans’s trousers. Or how about Haines dodging around mother-naked that night? It isn’t often you see a cop without his clothes.”

But I could not be lighthearted about it. I got some papers from him that day and made notes as to dates from his records. Then I went out to my car, the same one Maud gave me on my birthday the year before, determined to tell the story as it happened day by day; and to begin it with my first introduction to Maud Wainwright and the Cloisters. And Tony.

Chapter Two

I CANNOT SAY THAT my new position was received with any great enthusiasm by the two people I saw that night. For the past six years I had lived with Miss Mattie, whose neat toes were now pointed toward making a handful of boarders comfortable. She was an aristocrat in the old sense of the word, and when I told her she looked horrified.