said Kit.
“I’d have to be hallucinating to mistake your old friend for a man,” I said flatly. “Look at it, Kit. The branches are bunched too closely together to be mistaken for arms, and I don’t see anything remotely resembling legs or a head. If you leave out the arms, legs, and head, there’s not much left to look manlike, is there?”
“Your sons have very active imaginations,” Kit reminded me.
“They also have very good eyesight,” I countered.
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“We can argue about the tree for as long as you like,” said Kit, sounding slightly offended, “but you can’t argue with the fact that I didn’t fi nd any footprints up here.”
“I most certainly can,” I retorted. “Watch this.”
I walked deliberately across the thick carpet of dead leaves that covered the floor of the small clearing, then turned to peer intently at the ground. The indentations made by my hiking boots were barely visible.
“So much for your tracking skills,” I said. “The leaves are so wet and spongy that a guy would have to weigh three hundred pounds before he’d make a lasting impression in them. In Will’s drawing, Rendor is as thin as a rail. He would have had to hop up and down to leave footprints here.”
“Let me try,” said Kit, stepping forward.
When his experiment produced the same results, I planted my hands on my hips and tut-tutted at him like a disapproving schoolmarm.
“Shame on you, Kit,” I said. “You assumed that the twins were making up a story, so you didn’t bother to check it out properly.
No wonder you didn’t fi nd any clues.”
“I may have overlooked one or two details,” Kit acknowledged grumpily.
“Only one or two?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “I just hope the rain hasn’t already washed away the clues you must have missed.”
Kit leaned against the apple tree, looking faintly bored, while I prowled the edge of the clearing, searching the surrounding undergrowth for a piece of hard evidence that would support the boys’
story. When I saw the crushed toadstool, my heart skipped a beat, and when I dropped to my knees for a closer look, a tingle of excitement mixed with dread curled up my spine. For there, in a small patch of mud just beyond the crushed toadstool, was a V-shaped mark that might have been left by the pointed toe of a grown man’s boot.
52 Nancy Atherton
“Kit?” I called unsteadily. “I think I found some clues.”
I sat back on my heels while Kit bent low to examine my discoveries. When he straightened, I expected him to shout “Eureka!” and apologize profusely for ever doubting my sons, but he did nothing of the sort.
“Interesting,” he said, with a noncommittal shrug. “But I wouldn’t call them clues. Toadstools collapse for any number of natural reasons, and the mark isn’t distinct enough to count as a footprint.”
I stared at him in prickly silence, then got to my feet.
“It’s distinct enough for me,” I said coldly. “And I’m going to see where it leads.”
I brushed past him imperiously and followed the point of the V-shaped mark into the woods. I should have crept along at a snail’s pace, scanning the wet ground for more footprints, but I was too busy fuming to think clearly. How dare Kit cast aspersions on my splendid clues? Why couldn’t he just admit that he’d made a mistake? It wasn’t like him to be defensive, self-righteous, or grouchy, yet he’d been all three in quick succession under the apple tree. Perhaps, I thought, the sight of Nell’s many suitors was getting to him.
Whatever the case, I wasn’t about to let his doubts deter me from discovering the truth. When I heard him coming after me, I didn’t slow down to wait for him but quickened my pace, crashing recklessly through the undergrowth until a wild rosebush caught me by the ankle and sent me tumbling headlong into another, much larger clearing.
I landed with a damp splat on a small mound of earth covered with long, rain-speckled grasses. I lay there for a moment, feeling foolish as well as vexed, but when I finally lifted my head clear of the grasses, I felt nothing but skin-crawling horror. The tip of my nose was less than a foot away from the decaying face of a weathered tombstone. The small mound upon which I’d fallen was a grave.
I let out a shriek that should have awakened the dead and scrambled to my feet, backpedaling so fast that I ran straight into a Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
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