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was home in twenty minutes at exactly twenty past three. Connie was waiting for me in the hall. There was no longer any indication of lack of control. She looked even handsomer and more capable than usual. Ala wasn’t there. With incredible frivolity, so it seemed to me, she was having lunch and spending the afternoon with Rosemary Clark. My wife hustled me into the library. She hurried to her desk, picked up a neatly folded newspaper and brought it to me, making me read the paragraph.
    “Don’t you see?” Her gray level gaze was fixed on my face with her overbearing “committee” look. “The police are bound to know he was an—an acquaintance of ours. But that’s not all. What about those people in Massachusetts? The Greens? What’s to stop them calling the police and letting them know Ala and Don were there for Friday night?”
    There was, of course, nothing to stop the Greens. It seemed inconceivable that I hadn’t prepared myself for that.
    “So,” said Connie, “there’s only one thing to do. He’s dead. It doesn’t matter who killed him. Anyone might want to kill a man like that. It’s nothing to do with us. But we’ve got to think out a story and stick to it—you, me and Ala. We’ve absolutely got to. If it all came out about Ala, it could ruin her whole life.”
    As I looked at my wife, I thought how invariably I got her wrong. Connie wasn’t going to be civic-minded at all. All that civic-mindedness was reserved for juvenile delinquents, museum directors and slum-property owners. To her this was a family affair. All her clashes and tensions with Ala were forgotten because Ala was a Corliss, even though a pseudo one, and for the Corlisses Connie would fight as relentlessly and unscrupulously as old Charlie Corliss himself.
    “Listen,” she said, “I’ve thought it out and I’m sure it’ll be all right. Thank heavens we don’t have to worry about the time he was killed. Sunday, I mean. We both know Ala was here in the house all day. Of course, she was locked in her room most of the time, but we don’t have to tell the police that. We can just say she was here for the whole day, and you and I and Milly Taylor can prove it.”
    “Milly Taylor?” I said. “Was she here?”
    Connie gave a little impatient shrug. “Didn’t I tell you? After you’d gone to Idlewild, I called her. I knew she probably had nothing to do. I invited her for lunch and we did the crossword together. She left only a few minutes before you came back. So that’s settled. There’s just the other tiling—the trip to the Greens’.”
    Just the trip to the Greens’! Nothing more than that! I thought: If only she knew. She went on, making it into a neat little pattern like one of her agenda.
    “Now, this is what I’ve decided. We’ll have to rehearse Ala, of course, when she gets back. But listen, George. We have to admit she and Don went to the Greens’ on Friday. We can’t get out of that. But we can say that she just knew Don slightly, that she met the Greens at some party and the Greens invited them both to Massachusetts. They went but Ala got bored. She asked Don to bring her home. We’ll say Don brought her home Saturday evening and that was the end of everything.” She paused, watching me rather severely. “Why should the police have to know there was this—this crazy infatuation? Or that ridiculous motel episode? What possible need is there? Can’t we do it that way? Isn’t that all right?”
    Although it was taking a terrible chance of being found out later in a lie, it was, I supposed, as all right as anything could be. At least, it would have been except for one thing.
    I said, “What about Chuck? Where was he yesterday? I didn’t tell you, but when Vivien called last night, she said he hadn’t been home at all.”
    “He… Chuck…” Suddenly Connie looked completely different. The skin of her cheeks had gone a grayish-white. “George, are you sure?”
    “I’m sure.”
    “Then where…