Two hours later, we were dirty, tired, and discouraged. “I’m willing to call it a day,” I said, flopping down on the floor beside Ulysses who was lying down by the door.
“Same here,” Pat said. “I need a bath.”
Jackie looked around at the ruins of the living room. “There’s too much of a jumble now that Jud has torn things apart. It would be next to impossible to find anything at all in this mess except more mess.” She gave me a hand up, and we headed for my car.
Turning my SUV around in the driveway, I drove back toward town. “We can’t just give up. Maybe we need to look elsewhere,” I muttered.
Pat shrugged. “Where else is there to look?”
“There’s that old hand-dug well”, I said, “and the barn. The barn looks to be in better shape than the house.”
Pat shook her head. “I’m not going near that barn. If there’re snakes in the house, there certainly are snakes out there, probably a den of them. Why don’t you just tell Tom you tried, but there’s nothing to find?”
That would have been the smart thing to do. Hunting for I knew not what was worse than hunting for a needle in a haystack. But, somehow, I couldn’t just back off. My curiosity was whetted. We finished the drive back to town in silence, too tired to talk.
“Ulysses, you need a bath as much as I do,” I said, as my faithful protector and I went up the steps to my front porch.
Before doing anything else, I took time to put on the coffee pot, then Ulysses and I climbed the stairs for much-needed baths. I glanced around at the upstairs landing and bedrooms leading off from it. Yes, that space at the end of the hall should be big enough for a second small bathroom. Hopefully, Dink could get started on it soon.
I unfastened Ulysses’ collar. Although baths were not his favorite thing, he showed no objection today. He must have felt as filthy as I did.
Enjoying the freedom of being collarless, he briskly shook the dust out of his fur, showering me with more grime.
“Oh, yuk, Ulysses,” I said, looking at the dirt on the floor. “Couldn’t you have waited until you were in the tub?”
A scrap of paper lay in the dust. I picked it up. It must have been a remnant from the Saunders’ house, stuck under Ulysses’ collar. The ragged piece had roses on one side. This was a torn piece of wallpaper. It felt unusually thick and stiff. I turned it over.
“Why, it’s two pieces of wallpaper,” I whispered. “Someone must have papered over the old wallpaper.” As I was fingering this, another slip of plain paper fell to the floor. I picked it up and carried it to the window, so I could see better.
The letters were faded and shaky on this scrap, some of them had disappeared. I squinted at the writing and felt a chill run down my spine.
Murder By Moonlight
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