Darkmoon(50)

Everything was neat and clean, everything in its place. Well, almost everything. As we moved from the entryway into the combined living room/dining room space, I noticed a cream-colored envelope, the kind that you might put a birthday card in, leaning up against the Navajo basket filled with dried gourds that sat in the center of the dining table. One word was written on that envelope, in handwriting so elegant that it looked almost like calligraphy.

Connor.

Mystified, the two of us exchanged a glance before he stepped forward and lifted the envelope, turning it over in his hand. Nothing else had been written on it.

Connor stood there for so long, staring down at the envelope, that I felt compelled to ask, “Aren’t you going to open it?”

“I guess so. Yes. It’s just…I don’t know. I can’t imagine she would’ve left a note unless it was bad news.”

A weird prickling sense of unease told me the same thing, but I shook it off, saying, “Even if it’s bad news, we need to know what it is.”

“I know…you’re right.” A final hesitation, and then he ran his thumb under the flap of the envelope, tearing it open. Inside was a single piece of paper, also cream, thick and heavy. That surprised me; Marie seemed like the last person in the world to care about nice stationery, although I knew I should probably stop trying to understand all the quirks of the individual Wilcoxes.

As Connor unfolded the paper, I saw that it contained only a few words written in that same flowing handwriting. Peering over his shoulder, I could just make out what they said.

I thought I could do this, but I can’t. You’ll need to discover your own path to the solution.

“What the hell?” Connor exclaimed, turning the paper over, almost as if he expected more words to magically appear on the reverse of the note. Well, it had been written by a witch, so I supposed that expectation wasn’t entirely unwarranted, but even so, the paper’s surface remained smooth and blank.

“So…she’s gone?” I asked.

“Sure looks that way.”

And even though the house was clearly empty, he still went from room to room, with me trailing in his wake, as if Marie might be discovered hiding in a broom closet or something. Like the main rooms downstairs, the bedrooms and bathroom on the second story were clean and neat, nothing out of place. One bedroom was clearly a guest room, with a daybed and small dresser and not much else, and the other seemed to be her office, although the desk that must have once held her computer was now empty. There was a table opposite it that she seemed to have used for some kind of mosaic work; the surface was covered with a plastic sheet, and there were still jars of glass tiles sitting there, and a half-finished piece showing a jagged mountain range and a stylized sunburst behind it.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “I didn’t know Marie was an artist, too.”

He gave a shrug, clearly not interested in Marie’s artistic pursuits at the moment. “Yeah, she’s been doing that stuff for as long as I can remember. Sells it to the local shops, has an online business, too, I think.”

My knowledge of Marie had just doubled in the last five minutes. “It looks as if she didn’t care much about taking it with her.”

“Well, it’s not quite as portable as knitting, I guess.”

Moving out of the office, he went down the hall to the master bedroom. The door stood ajar, so it wasn’t as if she’d locked it behind her, but I still felt strange going in there. My aunt’s bedroom, which was about my only frame of reference for an adult woman’s private space, was a cheerful jumble of antiques and knickknacks and decorative frames filled with various photos of family members. This chamber was almost the exact opposite, spare Shaker-style furniture and a queen-size bed with a white-on-white quilt laid across it. No pictures, no decorations at all except a couple of Navajo rugs hanging on the walls, just as in the living room downstairs.

Well, there was one thing out of place.

Lying in the middle of the bed, glaringly obvious against all that white, was a small 4x6 photo. Connor went to it at once and lifted it up, again turning it over to see if anything was written on the back. But the reverse of the photo was blank, except for the faint watermark of the photographic paper.

As he flipped it back over, I saw it was a picture of a young couple, the woman clearly Native American, the man also dark-haired, but his skin was lighter, and his eyes hazel. They were standing in front of what looked like the gate to a corral; in the background I could just make out the dark brown shape of what was probably a horse.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“I think that’s Marie.”