“It’s malicious and horrible.”

“It’s irrational anyhow. What good did it do? You can figure that someone with a grouch against the cemetery people might have done it, but these fellows have been here for years. Old Hodge, the superintendent, has had to be put to bed.”

I could not talk about it. The cemetery had always been our pride. It lay on a ridge halfway up the hill, and my earliest memories of it were of a handful of Civil War veterans being taken there in cars on the Fourth of July, and escorted by the local post of the American Legion. There would be speeches, and a brass band would drown out the efforts of Mrs. Dawes, our local soprano, to reach the high notes of the national anthem.

It was distinctly a valley affair, the cemetery, and as such the village cherished it. It was beautifully kept, and naturally sacred to me since both my father and mother lay there.

No one had told Maud, of course, but Bessie had already heard the news when I got back. She seemed to find it highly diverting. “Somebody sure had himself a time,” she said. “I’m going down to look at it.”

Which I believe she did at once.

Maud was slightly better the next day. The gloom perceptibly lifted in the house, the servants were more cheerful, even my ankle was improved. So in the evening I had Gus bring around my car and drove down to see Lydia. I took Roger with me. He loved to ride, looking huge and important on the seat beside me, and also there are long empty stretches of road on the way down to the valley; and I remembered Jim Conway’s final words the day before in the cemetery.

“Just be careful, Pat,” he said. “No roaming around the house and grounds at night, and no driving after dark. We only have two guesses on this thing. One is that we have a pretty shrewd killer at large. The other is a lunatic. Maybe we have both.”

“You’re serious about a lunatic, are you?”

“Look around you,” he reminded me grimly. “And if you can make sense out of Don Morgan’s being drowned up there in your pool, with the river at his back door, you’re smarter than I am.”

I found Lydia alone on the bench by the river. The sun had set a long time before, but there was still some light. She was sitting without moving, her hands in her lap and her eyes on the water. I thought she was disappointed when she saw who it was.

“Oh, it’s you, Pat,” she said. “Come and sit down. Audrey’s in bed and I’m alone. She’s taken this thing hard, poor child.”

I sat down and lit a cigarette. There was a boat going by, its searchlight swinging from side to side of the stream, and it struck us both for a minute. She looked, I saw, pale and exhausted. She tried to be casual, however. She asked for Maud and told me to thank her for the flowers. There had been a good many. She would write the notes later. Just now she couldn’t.