“Where did she have the thing?”

“Anywhere. Under the bed, probably. There’s a baseboard outlet there. She let it play until Carlton went in and turned off his mother’s radio. If he hadn’t she would have stopped it herself. She didn’t even have to get out of bed to do it. But of course things went wrong. I was there, in the hall. She hadn’t counted on my staying there every minute. And Ida was busy with Marian. I suppose that’s why she fainted when she did. She hadn’t got rid of the machine, and I’d found the body. She had thought she had until morning.”

“So it was there under the bed when you searched her room!”

“It was nothing of the sort,” she said indignantly.

“All right, I’ll bite. Where was it?”

“Hanging outside her window on a rope.”

He looked at her with admiration, not unmixed with something else.

“As I may have said before, Hilda, you’re a smart woman,” he said, smiling. “My safe looks like a rummage sale. I’ll present you with some of the stuff if you like. But I’d give a good bit to know why you interfered with the law and telephoned her.”

“Because she hadn’t killed Jan,” Hilda said. “She could have, but she didn’t.”

“What did you say over the phone? That all was discovered?”

She went a little pale, but her voice was steady.

“I really didn’t tell her anything,” she said. “I merely asked her if she still had her remote-control radio-phonograph. She didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said no, she’d given it away.”

There were tears in her eyes. He got up and going over to her, put his hand on her shoulder. “Oh, subtle little Miss Pinkerton,” he said. “Lovable and clever and entirely terrible Miss Pinkerton! What am I to do about you? I’m afraid to take you, and I can’t even leave you alone.”

He looked down at her, her soft skin, her prematurely graying hair, her steady blue eyes.

“See here,” he said awkwardly, “Jan and young Brooke are going to be married. Susie and Carlton Fairbanks are going on a second honeymoon, looking for a farm. And unless I miss my guess Frank Garrison and Marian will remarry eventually. I’d hate like hell to join that crew of lovebirds, but—you won’t object if I come around now and then? Unprofessionally, of course, little Miss Pinkerton.”

She smiled up at him.

“I’d prefer even that to being left alone,” she said.

After he had gone she sat still for a long time. Then she determinedly took a long hot bath, using plenty of bath salts, and shampooed her short, slightly graying hair. Once more she looked rather a rosy thirty-eight-year-old cherub, and she was carefully rubbing lotion into her small but capable hands when the telephone rang. She looked desperately about her, at the books she wanted to read, at her soft bed, and through the door to her small cheerful sitting-room with the bird sleeping in its cage. Then she picked up the receiver.