“No.” Puck’s voice was a whisper. “The next day everything in the house was gone.”
“You mean the mask and the recorder?” Kate asked, and Puck nodded.
“Did you see him with the men again?” Sara asked. “Maybe somewhere else?”
“No.” When Puck stood up, she swayed on her feet. “I...” The reliving of the past had exhausted her.
Sara stood. “We need to go. Bella will be wondering what happened to us.”
Jack picked up Sara’s camera. “We’ll say we went exploring to take photos.” He was reminding Sara that she wasn’t to tell Bella anything about what they’d heard.
Sara opened her camera bag and took out two clean SD c
ards. She put the ones with the photos of the skeleton on them into her pocket. “Let’s go take some pictures. I’d like to have something to show for our hours out.” She looked at Puck. “Is it all right to say that you invited us to breakfast?”
“I doubt if anyone will believe that.”
Sara frowned. As a writer, she knew all about isolation and being an introvert and how people criticized. “You should get out more. You should meet people. You should—” Fill in the blank. Everyone knew what she should do.
“Okay,” Jack said over Sara’s silence. “Let’s give Puck time to recover.”
Puck looked at Jack with smiling eyes.
They went downstairs to the ground floor, then outside, and stood for a moment in the cool air.
“Is it still morning?” Jack asked. “It feels like we left the house days ago.”
“Discovering a murder does that to you,” Kate said.
“Could have been an accident and a cover-up,” Sara said. “We have no proof of murder.”
Jack and Kate gave her skeptical looks.
“I agree,” Sara said. She didn’t take her camera when Jack held it out to her. “Why don’t you photograph Puck’s garden? Your love will show in the photos.”
“Love? What does that mean? Love for the plants? The flowers are nice, but...”
Kate and Sara were looking at him. They knew that he had taken on Puck as his latest cause. In the past, they’d seen him risk himself for what he believed in.
“Yeah, okay, so I like her,” he said. “That story of hers! She practically kept this place going. And they all used her.”
“Except Sean,” Sara said. “Anybody have any ideas about what he was doing in the cemetery? And no drugs. I am sick of drugs being given as the cause of everything bad. They’re used in movies, TV, books. In life! Drugs were great as shock value back in the sixties, but now they’re all anyone can think of. Parents dealing with drugs, masses of money being made, gangs. Drugs, drugs, drugs. We need to look for something else that could be the reason for Sean’s secrecy. Just no drugs!”
Jack and Kate were waiting patiently for her to get over her tirade.
“Sorry,” Sara whispered, and looked off into the distance.
Kate spoke up. “I saw that the attics are full. Bet an Antiques Road Show person would love to go through them. Maybe Sean was selling something of value he found.”
“You think the stable guy was allowed to wander through the house?” Jack asked.
“Didn’t Puck say that Sean knew Bertram sat in his office every night and got drunk?” Kate said. “How’d he know that if he wasn’t upstairs sometimes? At night?”
“Maybe he was having an affair with a pretty maid,” Sara began.
“Or Diana,” Kate said. “They both loved horses.”
“Yet again, you two are plotting a romance novel,” Jack said. “How about we take photos and figure out what we actually know?”