"But why would they have sent Christmas over? And of course Christmas was not acting in any kind of apparently well-thought-out way."
    "No, rather the opposite."
    "Unless it was just a distraction of some kind."
    "Perhaps the goal was the creature all along?"
    "Conceivably, but how would they get it out of the house?"
    "We're hypothesizing at random, here," Horus shrugged.
    "Yes, yes we are. Hard to do more with the available evidence. This is frustrating," he admitted.
    
    "Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven...." Stevie had the radio on and a cigarette lit, his mask pulled up to his forehead for the moment.
    They reached the location marked on the map, a "development" where each parcel ran to about thirty acres. They pulled off the main road onto a drive that led to a cabin; the place looked long-abandoned. Stevie put his mask back into place.
    "You want I should follow you boss? Or should I keep the engine running? Um?" He looked around nervously. "I've never been out in the woods." It was awfully dark.
    "Come along."
    He shut off the engine and rummaged in the trunk for a tire iron.
    Gravedigger headed for the house, ignoring the way the kid jumped at every bird call and creaking branch. Inside, he began a methodical search of the house, moving slowly enough for Stevie to observe in case he wanted to ask questions.
    The place looked like a part-year vacation home, unused for at least a decade now. Some of the windows were broken, the roof had leaked in a couple of places. One room in the back held only a very solid chair and had plywood nailed over its single window. Marks on the chair legs suggested someone had been tied there. At a sudden pounding sound he looked over his should and saw a sheet-white Stevie turning a venturesome rat into paste and swearing a blue streak.
    "Just a rat," he announced somewhat breathlessly, recovering from his startlement.
    If there had been any paper in the place, it had been meticulously cleared out.
    "Some slobs live here, eh?" Stevie looked around.
    "No one's been here in about ten years."
    "How can you tell?" he ventured.
    Gravedigger showed him. Then he led the way to the basement. Stevie followed, breathless and nervous and practically treading on the boss's coat. There was a poured concrete foundation, nothing much there. Behind the stairs were a couple of shovels. He was not particularly surprised.
    "Let's go find her," he announced quietly.
    "Find who? What? What're you talking about?"
    "Elsie Turnbull."
    "All right.... What're we doing?"
    "We're looking for a grave."
    "Where? I didn't see any graveyards, or nothing...." He did that nervous squaring of his shoulders, getting a sneaking suspicion.
    "No, there's no graveyards up here."
    "Okay...."
    "They wouldn't have gone too far from the house, they've already got themselves way the heck out here. Sane people wouldn't have done this anyways, and extraordinarily thorough people would have just burned her, which wouldn't have needed shovels."
    The search was short; there was a garden out back of the cabin, very badly overgrown, but it would have been the easiest place to dig without being noticed. Stevie tucked a small shovel into his toolbelt and grabbed one of the shovels from the basement. Gravedigger went to work, carefully.
    Light shone on them suddenly, from a good distance away.
    "Who the hell are you?" someone called, adding "Stop the squirrely one from moving around so much," as Stevie went into defensive mode.
    "Who is asking?" Gravedigger replied.
    "I'm the neighbor. What're you kids doing out here? Damn," he said as he came within sight of the two.
    "Kids?" Gravedigger repeated dryly.
    "I read the pulps, I know who you are." The light bobbed as its bearer came down the hill. The man was in his fifties, flashlight in one hand, shotgun under his arm, the barrel dropping toward the ground as he recognized the intrudor. "Saw the car come in, figured, y'know, someone was here messing around. Place might not be in the best of shape, but...."
    "Who owns it?"
    "Well, no one owns it now. Widow Farcus owned it up to about nine years ago, but she went down to the home in the city two years before that."
    Stevie adjusted his mask, easing out from behind Gravedigger a little.
    "When'd you get the sidekick?" the old man asked.
    "Mind holding the light for me?" Gravedigger asked instead of answering.
    "W-what're you doing?"
    "If I'm right, I'm digging up a body."
    "A body!" He looked at the hole, at the man. "What... what're you talking about? Why would there be a body out here?"
    "About ten years ago, a girl was grabbed down in the city, held for ransom, never came home. I think she was held here."
    "Ten years ago summer?"
    "Yeah."
    "Aw, shit," the man whispered. "Miss Farcus, the widow Farcus, when she went down to the home, they tried to rent the place out, tried to find a buyer for it. And then she died, and the whole thing got screwed up. Her only son's off in Australia, the little bastard. They were renting the place out, there were people here, for about a month...." He pressed his hand to his face.
    "Give me a couple of minutes, we'll see if I'm right."
    He was. The shovel's gentle work revealed a skull to the unsteady light, then the remainder of the skeleton, largely intact. There was a neat hole above one ear, looked like a .22 maybe, a less neat exit. Stevie looked on in horrified fascination, the old man in simple horror.
    "What can you tell me about the people who rented this place?" Gravedigger asked the latter.
    "Couple of them came over. There were three, four of 'em. One guy was only there the first day, I don't know much about him. But the others... man and a woman, they came over and chatted, and then they had some guy with them, big dumb-looking fellow they said was gonna help them fix the house up. But all he did was cut down some of the brush and the dug a big... hole in the garden to burn the... brush in.... I am sick."
    "I assume you'll talk to the police when they arrive?"
    "Yeah." He nodded vigorously, then looked up. "I have a diary. I would have wrote down their names."
    "Shall we go back to your house, then?"
    He glanced at the open grave with a shudder. "Yeah."
    It was a bit of a walk; to Stevie's mind this was all a vast wilderness, and he continued jumping at shadows.
    "I could put some coffee on. Give me a second to go find that." He rummaged through a pile of books. "Here it is." Pages turned. "Widow Farcus must be renting her cottage out, people came.... Yeah, there's a—two of them, the two that came over, I only saw one of them that first day. There was the big guy who I don't have a name for, but it was Raymond and Belle. Belle, she gave her full name... Belle Barry. She was supposed to be overseeing the remodeling of the house. Very, very proud of herself. Yeah." He glanced up. "You know those people who just come across like they know everything? She'd just flounce that blond hair of hers and that was it, she had to know it all. And I got that in five minutes of talking to her. After five minutes I realized that I really didn't want to talk to her any more." Pause. "They had that big guy cutting down stuff in back and digging the pit and putting the brush in, and burning stuff in it, and then they just filled in the pit and left." He shook his head, shaken. "You want to call the cops from here, you want me to call them cops?"
    

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