I cannot claim that the fact at the time had any significance for me, or that I saw in it anything more than another verification of Martin Sprague’s solution.  But it enabled me to reconstruct the Benton household at the date that had grown so significant.  The 30th would have probably been the day after the funeral.  Perhaps the nurse was still there.  He had had a nurse for months, according to Mrs. Graves.  And there would have been the airing that follows long illness and death, the opened windows, the packing up or giving away of clothing, the pauses and silences, the sense of strangeness and quiet, the lowered voices.  And there would have been, too, that remorseless packing for destruction of the dead atheist’s books.

And some time, during that day or the night that followed, little Miss Emily claimed to have committed her crime.

I went home thoughtfully.  At the gate I turned and looked back.  The Benton Mausoleum was warm in the sunset, and the rose sprays lay, like outstretched arms, across the tiny grave.

Maggie is amazingly efficient.  I am efficient myself, I trust, but I modify it with intelligence.  It is not to me a vital matter, for instance, if three dozen glasses of jelly sit on a kitchen table a day or two after they are prepared for retirement to the fruit cellar.  I rather like to see them, marshaled in their neat rows, capped with sealing wax and paper, and armed with labels.  But Maggie has neither sentiment nor imagination.  Jelly to her is an institution, not an inspiration.  It is subject to certain rules and rites, of which not the least is the formal interment in the fruit closet.

Therefore, after much protesting that night, I agreed to visit the fruit cellar, and select a spot for the temporary entombing of thirty-six jelly tumblers, which would have been thirty-seven had Delia known the efficacy of a silver spoon.  I can recall vividly the mental shift from the confession to that domestic excursion, my own impatience, Maggie’s grim determination, and the curious denouement of that visit.

III

I had the very slightest acquaintance with the basement of the Benton house.  I knew it was dry and orderly, and with that my interest in it ceased.  It was not cemented, but its hard clay floor was almost as solid as macadam.  In one end was built a high potato-bin.  In another corner two or three old pews from the church, evidently long discarded and showing weather-stains, as though they had once served as garden benches, were up-ended against the whitewashed wall.  The fruit-closet, built in of lumber, occupied one entire end, and was virtually a room, with a door and no windows.

Maggie had, she said, found it locked and had had an itinerant locksmith fit a key to it.

“It’s all scrubbed and ready,” she said.  “I found that preserved melon-rind you had for lunch in a corner.  ’Twouldn’t of kept much longer, so I took it up and opened it.  She’s probably got all sorts of stuff spoiling in the locked part.  Some folks’re like that.”