Repair to Her Grave by Sarah Graves Page A

heck's it doing here?”
    “Raines must have had it,” Ellie concluded. “No one else in the house would have one, would they? Sam wouldn’t, for diving?”
    “I don’t think so. He’d have been showing it to us at dinner last night if he had.” Perhaps due to his father's influence, Sam adored fancy gadgetry, could fix just about any of it, and vastly enjoyed demonstrating it for other people.
    Ellie frowned. “But what would Raines want with … Oh.”
    Her face intent, she approached what was left of the wall: a two-foot-high section of intact plaster extending upward from the floor trim. Carefully she placed the stalk's long end behind the plaster, twisted the device to make the light go on, and …
    “There's something down there.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “Nope. It's a …”
    My mind was racing. “I’ll bet Raines meant to take that wall down all along.”
    Or take some wall down, anyway, to peek behind it, in case a Stradivarius happened to be hidden there. I’d inadvertently focused his attention on this wall by removing the wallpaper, so he saw the old plaster patch centered behind my new one.
    Then he’d done just what we’d been hoping he would do: he’d seen with fresh eyes. The old patch was square, with clean, straight edges; it hadn’t been put in to fix something broken. It had been done to fill a hole that was deliberately cut.
    And he had realized this. “Oof,” Ellie said, craning her arm down. “I think there's something … What have you got in the house with a hook on the end? Maybe we can fish it out.”
    “Nuts.” I’d had enough. “Take that gadget out and stand back.” With the claw hammer I gave the remaining plaster a smack.
    Naturally, however, when you are trying to break plaster it becomes durable. So it was ten minutes and a lot of claw hammering before we got at it: a thick packet of papers bound in leather.
    An old manuscript: eagerly, we opened the cover.
    The pages were blank.
    “Well, darn,” Ellie said indignantly as Monday nosed in to find out what we were excited about: hidden dog biscuits?
    “No, Monday, there's nothing here.” I flipped through the empty pages in disgust. “Well, that's par for the course lately. Raines tore down the wall for nothing.”
    But Ellie looked dubious. “Why would anyone hide a book of blank pages?”
    I snapped the book shut, dust clouds from it billowing into the air. The soft antique-leather binding seemed to mock me with its aged look of importance, its sense of having been hidden away for some secret reason.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “And I don’t care. What I do know is that the Reading Circle meeting is getting closer by the minute, and if I don’t want those little sandwiches with the crusts cut off to be full of plaster dust, I need to get busy.”
    Because it was obvious now that there was no percentage in further effort. Raines was a stranger, he’d showed up here, and now he was gone: end of story.
    Blank pages, indeed; I yanked sharply at the last scraps of wallpaper. “And Charmian?” Ellie asked.
    “Waiting for the body to be found, that's all. And talking to Bob Arnold this afternoon. I hope he convinces her that she shouldn’t wait around forever.”
    I picked up the hammer and pulled out the rest of the broken plaster. Plaster mix, I said stubbornly to myself. Lath pieces, nails, wallpaper paste. Tools and materials for reconstructing what was broken. Doggedly, I swept up the plaster bits.
    But Ellie wasn’t ready to quit. “Fake glasses. A high-tech snooping device. And a book without words,” she said. “There's something connected about those ideas. But what's the link?”
    “They’re all part of an annoying and ultimately meaningless puzzle,” I said. “One that at the moment resembles my life.”
    I emptied the dustpan into the trash bag with an impatient shake. “Why couldn’t Jonathan Raines have picked some other house to demolish? Darn it, I wish I’d never heard of