Novel - Half Moon Investigations Read Online Free PDF Page B

page. I suspect that our Stevie made more than one attempt to write this letter. Perhaps he was even going to tell the truth before he lost his nerve.”
    I laid the page flat on my desk, shaking graphite filings over its surface. After a slow count of ten, I tipped the filings into the wastepaper basket. Not all the filings ran off, some caught in the indents.
    “This is what was written on the page before this one in the pad. Only two lines are legible. I think you will find that the handwriting is the same.”
    Hazel took the sheet, reading the faint black writing aloud. “Dear Hazel, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I have met some . . .” My sister ripped the note into shreds, tossing it into the air like confetti.
    “He’s met someone else, has he?” she said, pulling a cell phone out of her pocket. “Someone who wears Happy. It should take me about five minutes to find out who.” She handed me a Mars bar. “Thanks, little brother. For that I won’t tease you for an entire day.”
    “I’d prefer actual money,” I said.
    “I can’t pay you,” said Hazel, skipping across the hall to her own room. “It would be exploitation of child labor.”
    The door closed behind her.
    Mom sighed. “We won’t see her for days. Hazel will get at least a one-act play out of this.”
    I knelt to gather the shreds of paper. “Do you see how complicated things become when people get involved in relationships, Mom? My business is just taking off and I want to concentrate on that, so I think I’ll give the relationships a pass for a few years, if you don’t mind. April Devereux is a client, that’s all.”
    “Okay,” said Mom. “But wear something with color. Think ahead. You never know.”
    How do you know if you’re a detective? What sets us apart from the everyday people? My theory is that most people like to dwell on the brighter side of life. They want to concentrate on the rug, and not on the dirt swept underneath. Not detectives. We want to pull back the rug and put the dirt in a forensics bag. Then we want to run over the floorboards with a sticky roller just in case some of the dirt got away. We are social scientists. We like to take people apart to see what makes them tick. You don’t have to be particularly smart to be a detective, you just have to want to do it.
    April lived on Rhododendron Road. A name that must have started out as a joke and then stuck. It took twenty-five minutes to walk along Lock’s historic wooden works and across the town bridge, and with every step I thought about my badge.
    April’s house was a large manor-style building, complete with manicured lawns and a tree-lined avenue. The drive was covered with raked white gravel, and flower beds swirled along both sides drawing the visitor toward the front porch.
    I crunched down the drive only to be told by the gardener that April was next door at her cousin’s, but had left a note for me. The note was on scented pink paper with a unicorn watermark. April Devereux was printed in dark-pink flowing script across the top.
    Dear Half Moon,
    Follow the yellow brick road.
    A (April)
    It was not very encouraging, I decided, if your employer thought you were too thick to figure out that A stood for April. Especially at the bottom of a note from April, on April’s personally monogrammed paper.
    The yellow brick road was a sandstone path that wound through the white gravel, leading to a gate in the wall between April’s and May’s houses. The gate was unlocked and I pushed through to a house pretty much identical to the first one.
    April’s cousin May ran down her side of the yellow brick road, just as I closed the gate.
    “Fletcher,” she said. “You came. I was just coming to check.”
    It was generally acknowledged that May Devereux was the nice one of the pair. She was dressed in full Irish dance costume, including hard shoes. Gold and green were the prominent colors. This, I have to admit, was a