came to a corner. There was no opening. I had gone the wrong way. I turned and went back, touching the fence with my hands. It was six feet high, with steel posts. The oleanders were on the inside, a solid wall of them nearly fifteen feet high.

I found the gate. It rattled a little when I put my hand on it. I felt along one side for the latch and located it. Apparently there was no chain or padlock. I eased it open. A dry hinge squeaked in the silence. I stopped, then pulled it open very slowly.

I could see the dark bulk of the house looming ahead of me now across the expanse of rear lawn. It was enormous, two stories and an attic, probably, with high gables running off into the big overhanging trees at each end. Off to the right was a smaller pile of blackness, which I took to be the garage.

I stepped inside, through the break in the hedge, and studied the blank windows carefully for any sliver of light at all. There was none. The whole place was as dark and deserted and silent as if it had been vacant for twenty years.

I eased across the grass toward the back porch. Then, suddenly, I thought of something we had overlooked. We hadn’t thought of the grounds themselves. There were probably two acres of trees, flower beds, shrubs, and lawns around the place. If the money—or even Butler’s body—had been buried out here somewhere, it would take a gang of men with a bulldozer a week to search it all. We’d been stupid.

But what could we do about it, if we had thought of it? Our only hope was that the stuff was in the house. If I didn’t find it there, we were whipped. The only thing to do was go on.

I came to the corner of the porch and went around it to the rear of the house itself. In the darkness I could just make out the forms of two windows set close to the ground and partially screened by shrubs. They were just what I had been hoping to find—basement windows.

I slipped up to the first and took out the small flashlight. Standing close to shield it with my body, I shot the tiny beam inside. The screen and the window were both dirty, but I could see the latch where the top and bottom sashes met. It was closed. I moved to the other window. It was latched too.

Probably they all are, I thought. I stood back a little and sized them up. This one was better screened behind the shrubs. Getting down on my knees, I turned the light on again and shot it in on the hook at the bottom of the screen. I took out the screwdriver, pushed the blade in through the wire, and pried at the hook. It slid out, and the screen was free. I swung the bottom of it outward against the shrub and got in behind it.

Taking the Scotch tape out of my pocket, I began peeling it off and plastering strips of it across the glass of the upper sash, crisscrossing it in all directions. Then I reversed the screwdriver and rapped smartly with the handle right in front of the latch. The glass cracked, but the tape kept it from falling. I slid the screwdriver blade through against the latch, and pushed. It slid open.

I raised the bottom sash, swung the beam of light down inside, and dropped in. Pulling the screen back in place, I hooked it and closed the window. I took a quick look around the basement. This must be only part of it. It was a big room with a furnace in the center. Against the opposite wall was a coal bin, and beside it were some old trunks and a pile of magazines and newspapers. I saw a door, and went through it. This room held a washing machine and a lot of clotheslines.

There was no use trying to search this now. What I had to do first was take a quick look at the whole house and size up the job—and make certain that maid wasn’t here. Diana James had said she’d be gone, but it wasn’t Diana James that was going to wind up behind the eight ball if she happened to be wrong.

I went back in the first room and started swinging the light around, looking for the stairway. I’d just