needed lunch,
parked his car in the driveway of one of the most splendid houses
overlooking Mirror Lake--a home whose master and mistress were now
attending an inquest into two murders....

Half an hour later he climbed into his roadster again, his head
spinning. "Did I say _ingenious_?" he marvelled....

He drove directly to the Selim house, for he had much to do before the
arrival of Sanderson's compulsory guests at 5:15.

His first visit there was to a small room in the basement--a dark
cubbyhole next to the coal room. He had locked it carefully after
exploring it the day before, for he had taken no chance on leaving
unguarded--as he had found it--treasure worth more to him than its
weight in gold.

And queer treasure it was that he extracted now--a coiled length of
electric wire, which he and Ralph Hammond had measured the day before,
with triumphant excitement; a box of thumb tacks, many of them
surprisingly bent at the point; an augur with a set of bits of varying
sizes, a step-ladder, and a hammer. If Dexter Sprague had not
overestimated the amount of electric wire needed for the job of
installing an alarm bell between Nita's bedroom and Lydia's.... Dundee
was about to close the tool chest when his eyes fell upon a piece of
hardware he had not expected ever to find, although he had known of its
existence for more than an hour.

At 5:15 he was entirely ready for D. A. Sanderson, Captain Strawn and
their party of indignant and unwilling guests....

"Oh, Mr. Dundee!" Carolyn Drake squealed. "You're not going to make us
play that awful 'death hand' again, are you?"

They were all crowding about him--the men and women who had been Nita
Selim's guests at her last bridge and cocktail party....

"Not only are the bridge tables exactly where they were at this time on
the evening of May 24," Dundee answered _so_ significantly that all
stopped chattering to listen, "_but everything else in the house is
precisely as it was then_. Fortunately, not even the _electricity_ has
been cut off! But to make sure I have forgotten nothing, I wish you
would all follow me into Mrs. Selim's bedroom and look for yourselves."

Like sheep, they crowded into the little foyer and on into the bedroom.
There stood the big bronze lamp, set squarely in front of the window
frame and in a direct line with the musical powder box on dead Nita's
dressing table.

At 5:25, Penny Crain, Karen Marshall, Carolyn Drake, and Flora Miles,
who had