Duff couldn’t hold back the question any longer, “What about the thing Eleanor said she found? Was it another box?”
Mrs. Yates’ head shook. “The same one. That Mr. Higgins came last night. Poor Harry! He must have been a little off balance about money! He told you he’d sold his platinum, didn’t he? Well, he hadn’t. He did open a small savings account, but apparently he couldn’t bear to part with that — metal. He just moved the box.”
Duff tried to hide an enormous disappointment. “Oh.”
Her smiled was wistful. “So perhaps it was in your lily pond, Duff. Perhaps he fetched it out between the time you were taken to the hospital and the time the police and all the others searched. He’d put it up in the tree house.”
“Tree house?”
“Didn’t you ever notice it? In the woods, toward the house from that pit with water in it? Eleanor’s father built it when she was little and it’s stood all these years.”
Duff remembered the weathered platform.
“It was a very sad Christmas for us,” Mrs. Yates said. “And poor Eleanor was exhausted, anyhow.”
Duff finished his coffee and signaled to Scotty. They went out on the lawn.
“It looks,” Scotty said ruefully, “as if we’ve been hurrying ourselves and friends around without any need.”