“Audrey,” I said sharply, “don’t talk like that. It’s wrong and it’s dangerous. What are you trying to do? Make trouble? You know she would never hurt anybody, or even think about it.”

“No?” she said. “Then why was she burying a revolver in the garden?” Her voice rose. “I saw her, I tell you. I’d always believed in her. She was all I had for years on end. And she never had a gun. Never.”

I stopped the car. I did not know why Bill Sterling had been arrested, but I did know of the search for Evans’s missing gun. Certainly it would not do for a hysterical girl to go about accusing Lydia of hiding such a weapon. I suppose there was fear as well as anger in my voice, for she drew away from me like a scared puppy.

“When was all this?”

“The night before last.”

I turned on her furiously. “Are you deliberately trying to involve your mother in a murder?” I demanded. “She’s been damned good to you for years. You were a spoiled little brat, but she tried to make you into something. I thought maybe she had. But first you spread a story that Tony Wainwright and your father had quarreled, and now it’s this. How many people have you told? It’s too much to hope you’ve kept your mouth shut.”

“I haven’t talked about it,” she said sulkily. “I haven’t seen anybody but Larry, and he was having a fit about something. But Mother knows I saw her. I told her.”

I sat still, trying to think. The gun was important, I knew. Whoever had knocked Evans out had taken one; and knowing my valley as I do, I did not believe there were many such weapons knocking around loose. I tried to think, with Audrey sniffling beside me. Lydia had not mentioned a gun to me, although she had been frank enough about everything else. Now Audrey had found her burying one. I never doubted that for once she was telling the truth.

She stopped sniffling and wiped her eyes. “I’m all right now, Pat,” she said, in a little-girl voice. “I’m sorry. I don’t think Mother killed him. I never did, really. She was just hiding it for Bill Sterling.”

I had my hand on the starter, but I took it off. “Now what do you mean by that?”

She looked startled. “I wish you wouldn’t jump at me,” she said fretfully. “I just thought, with the police watching Bill, maybe he wanted to get rid of it.”

“See here, Audrey, I want to hear this whole story. Where is it now? Is it still buried?”

She looked at me defiantly. “No,” she said. “I dug it up yesterday and I took it back to Bill Sterling’s office and left it in his desk.”

Chapter Nineteen

I PUT HER OUT of the car then and there, and ten minutes later I was at the station house. The desk sergeant was eating an apple, and Cracker Brown had left his radio and was looking important over a ham sandwich. I had known them both all my life, but I must have looked pretty wild just then.