“Evans? How could he? He was in the hospital.”

She was not convinced. Old men got queer sometimes. There were the long winter months when for years he had been alone in the house, with her in the South and Tony at his club. It must have been pretty dreary, she thought.

But the subject seemed to distress her. She had definitely changed since her illness. What suspicions she had, sitting there alone in her chair, I do not know. Physically she was better. Two of the nurses had gone and only Amy remained. But she had lost her old decision. I would see Mrs. Partridge, the day’s menus in her hand, stand there for a long time before Maud so much as realized she was there. But she was always gay with Tony. He would push her wheel chair out to her upstairs garden when it was warm enough, and sit there with her.

“You look like a debutante, with that new figure of yours,” he would say, smiling at her.

She would laugh, showing her strong white teeth.

“Debutante!” she would scoff. “Just because after thirty years I can see my ribs again. Get along with you.”

But with Amy and me she did not bother to act. She would sit for hours, gazing out over the dying autumn garden, her big hands folded in her lap, her expression remote. Amy’s chatter passed over her head entirely.

“What did you say, Miss Richards?”

“I was just talking to myself,” Amy would say. “Time for your eggnog. I’ll go and get it.”

It was on one such occasion that Maud gave me the combination to her safe. We had been talking about Don’s murder. She could not understand why our playhouse had been used, although she said she could perhaps understand the murder itself.

“If he had behaved badly to some woman,” she said. “But this girl he ran away with—He married her, didn’t he? And it seems strange, his being dressed as he was. Or not dressed. If he had meant to meet somebody—”

“He had no other clothes,” I told her. And then and there I gave her a picture of poor old Don in that house in the valley; the two women, Audrey and Lydia, exercising their constant espionage over him, the one through suspicion and the other through belated affection. Even the telephone in an open hall downstairs, and on the night he was killed the fact that his clothing had been sent away by Lydia.

She listened intently, as though she were attempting to reconcile what I said with some secret inner knowledge of her own. Once she asked me if Tony was still seeing Audrey. She seemed relieved when I said I thought not. Of course, she knew the revolver story by that time, as indeed did everybody.

“I’m glad,” she said. “The girl sounds neurotic.” And Amy coming in just then, she dutifully drank her eggnog and changed the subject.

That is how matters stood with us during those early days in last October. Don had been dead for two weeks. Evans was still missing. Bill Sterling was at liberty but going about, as he said, like a large comet with a tail, the tail being the detective. And as the leaves fell the playhouse, locked and deserted, became more and more visible from the house. There was no escaping it, from the west wing at least.