His dark round face looked strained and upset, and he responded to our various exclamations with a wave of his hand. He collapsed into a chair by Eileen with obvious relief, automatically adjusting his tie and running a hand over his very short hair.

“Mackie, I thought I was going to have to send a lawyer down to the station to get you out!”

“Thanks, Mrs. Queensland. You were going to be my one phone call,” he said. “But they seem to believe, at least for the moment, that I didn’t do it.”

“What did happen yesterday?” Eileen asked.

We all leaned forward to listen.

“Well,” Mackie began wearily, telling a story he’d obviously told several times already, “the phone rang here five minutes after Patty went home for the day, and I was standing out in the reception room talking to Roe, so I answered it.”

Patty looked chagrined that she hadn’t worked late the day before.

“It was Mrs. Greenhouse, and she said she had an appointment to meet a client to show him the Anderton house. She had forgotten to come by earlier to get the key-if anyone happened to be leaving our office soon, could they bring it by? She was worried she’d miss her client if she left to come to our office.”

“She didn’t name the client?” Mother asked.

“No name,” Mackie said firmly. “She did say ‘he,’ I’m almost positive.”

Idella Yates, beside me, shuddered and clutched her arms as if she were feeling a chill. I think we all did; Tonia Lee, making arrangements to meet her own death.

“Anyway, this is the part the police have the most trouble with,” Mackie continued. “What I did, instead of driving up and leaving the key and going on home… I went home first, put on my jogging clothes, and went out for my run. I stuck the key in the pocket of my shorts and stopped on my run to hand it to Mrs. Greenhouse. That only made maybe seven to ten minutes’ difference in the time I actually got there, and it suited me better. To tell you the honest truth, I wasn’t so excited about doing her work for her. No one here would be that sloppy. When I got there, she was at the house by herself. If anyone else was there, I didn’t see him. Hers was the only car. It was parked in the back, outside the kitchen, so that was the door I went to.”