The boulder that had been my chair didn’t look right.
“Look at that,” I said. I dropped down on my knees. “You can see where the rock used to sit; there’s mud beside it instead of grass. The earthquake must have moved it!”
Between the grass at the bottom of the rock and the rock itself was a muddy strip of bare ground about two inches wide which ran the length of the boulder.
My mother joined me on the grass. “You’re right. That’s a slide mark. I can’t believe it! This thing must weigh a ton.”
I put my hands against the side of the rock and shoved. It didn’t budge. “I can’t even begin to imagine the force that could scoot a monster like this,” I said.
Sunlight glinted upon a metal object at the base of the rock. I picked it up. A black and silver pocketknife lay in my hand.
“Well, well. What have we here?” I held my open palm out to Mom. She touched it with one finger.
“A knife! Was it under the rock?”
“No. It was in the grass on the edge of this bare strip that the quake uncovered.”
“Why didn’t Grant or Jim find it? It’s pretty big. I don’t see how they could have missed it.”
“Somebody could have been out here after Grant and Jim left.” I shuddered. Why would anybody trespassing on my mother’s land come to this particular spot?
“Maybe Grant came back later and looked again to see if he could find any sign of an intruder. Grant himself could have dropped the knife,” Mom nodded. “Yes, I’ll bet that’s what he did.”
I turned the knife over. On its side were a few letters. “I’d say this thing has seen some heavy use. Looks like there used to be a name here but it has been rubbed off.” Four dim letters: C, H, m, s were in faded silver against the black knife.
“It looks like something that may have been used as a promotion; a sales gimmick. Or maybe a door prize from a store that was having a sale. Those items always had the name of the store that was promoting it imprinted on the side. I remember your dad carried one for many years from Sutter’s Hardware. Joe Sutter gave them to his customers after he remodeled and had a grand opening. It had Sutter’s Hardware on the side.”
“But who dropped it? Was it Grant or Jim? It could have been a hunter who dropped it a long time ago. This is deer season; maybe someone stopped here at the rock to wait for a deer to come out of the woods.”
Mom nodded. “I’d hate to think anyone would go hunting here without asking my permission but that’s a possibility, too.”
She got to her feet. “Well, hand it over to Grant. Let him try to figure this out. I hope there’s nothing sinister about its being here. It could have been here for years, hidden in a crevice of the rock. It just took a good hard shake to jar it loose.”
If it comforted my mother to think that, so be it. I closed my hand around the knife. “If I take it to Grant, you can bet that he’s not going to be happy when I tell him we were back at Spirit Leap. He doesn’t want me to try to play detective.”
“If you are thinking about keeping this a secret, forget it. If there really was someone out here last night, maybe he dropped the knife. Maybe it’s got fingerprints on it or something. You shouldn’t keep it, Darcy.”
My mother was right, but I dreaded taking the knife to the Ventris County sheriff. If I asked around town, at Sutter’s or one of the other stores, would I get any information? It seemed unlikely that asking questions about where the knife might have come from would shed any light on whoever was here last night. I was convinced somebody had been watching me. But who? And why? Was Grant right about my not getting involved in Andrea Worth’s disappearance? Seemed to me I was pretty much in the middle of things already.
As we walked back to the house, my mother echoed my thoughts. “Darcy, I’ve been thinking. Just suppose there really was someone here last night; was his purpose only to scare you?”
“If that’s what he meant to do, Mom, he certainly succeeded.”
“Or did he mean to do more than scare you but you outran him?”
I pulled my sweater tighter around my shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“No, of course you don’t. But think, Darcy, why would anyone want to do either; why would he want to scare you or do you harm?”
“I guess there’re only two possibilities: Rusty Lang who is out for revenge or somebody who doesn’t want me to meddle in the disappearance of Andrea Worth.”
“There’s another possibility,” Mom said, as we went through the backyard gate. “What if Andrea is alive somewhere and for whatever reason, she wants to scare you off because she just doesn’t want to be found.”
“What if . . . . ” Why hadn’t I thought of that? “Why would she do that?”
“Only one reason I can think of . . . she’s happier away from Levi and has no wish to come back home or she’s afraid to come back.”
“But wouldn’t she at least have told her mother that she’s alive?”
Mom rubbed her forehead and gazed off into the distance. “Not if she feared for Sophie’s safety, too.”
I wished at that moment that Cliff Anderson had not placed Sophie’s letter in Mom’s mailbox. If only he had misplaced it or lost it along his route. But he hadn’t. Cliff was a very conscientious mail carrier. But if he had lost that letter, I could be reasonably sure that Rusty Lang was my only enemy.