A ride in Horace’s car was always exciting. He had the top down so that they seemed to be racing the wind. In almost no time they were passing the sheared-off house where Mr. Sammis bought and sold antiques.
“Some of the furniture in his shop had been left out in the rain,” Judy remembered. “Anyway, he claimed it had, but I’m beginning to wonder. He had a green car in his driveway, but he said it had been parked there all day and, Horace, he accused me of breaking a table that he knocked over himself.”
“Pleasant sort, wasn’t he? Naturally, you didn’t find Holly’s typewriter?”
“No, but that doesn’t prove it wasn’t hidden away somewhere. The shop was so crowded he wouldn’t accept anything more. We left him quarreling with a man named John Beer. Anyway, that was the name lettered on his truck,” Judy finished.
The conversation turned to rivers as they crossed the watershed. Judy was convinced, by now, that the lady table couldn’t have been carried this far north by the flood. She shivered when she thought of that patient face in the water. Would it still be there, or had she only imagined she saw a face?
“Well, here we are,” Horace announced.
Judy had been so absorbed in her own thoughts that she hadn’t noticed the orphanage as they passed it. They had come to the end of the road.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, looking about her in surprise. There was the house with the boarded-up windows, just as Meta Hanley had described it.
Horace fell headlong into the pond!