Or paint one.  Amanda’s brain stopped dead and her eyes opened wide.  Could he have painted them?  She went back over every detail she could remember since she met the friendly little man.  He came over twice a week to tend the garden and putter around.  She accepted the help gladly and never questioned why he did it, or on such a routine schedule.  It just seemed neighborly, never strange.   She thought of words like secretive, sly, anger, hatred – and tried to apply them to a look, a gesture, an action.  She couldn’t.  They just didn’t fit.  She sighed and wrote ‘Moisey’ on her list of things to research.  A possible answer, but one that created even more questions.  Great.  Well, she had a ‘to-do’ list now, and it was past lunchtime.  She needed to get to it.

The assessor’s office was next to the grandiose courthouse on the town square.  The bespectacled man at the front desk pulled all the records on her house and showed her an alcove where she could study them, and she went to work.  It was an interesting history, all about the original cranberry farm where the house had been built as a laborer’s home, and the subsequent splitting and sale of the holdings in the 1930’s.  But that would wait for another day. 

There were only two previous owners in the last thirty years.  Before she and Thomas bought it, the recorded owner was Harvey Blackwell.  According to the records, he owned it for two years and never paid any taxes.  She remembered the realtor saying there was a tax lien on the property.  What did the librarian call him?  An outlander who never lived there.  Why would someone buy a house and never live in it, or pay taxes on it?  Had it stood empty?  Yes, the realtor said it had, come to think of it.  But it was clean and tidy.  She had assumed the realtor took care of that, but Moisey raking leaves popped back in her mind.  Had he worked outside and inside?

Prior to Blackwell, it was owned jointly by Stewart Benz and Katherine Moises Benz.  Amanda read that name again; Moises must be her maiden name, she assumed.  It was an odd name, and she thought again of Moisey.   What were the chances that Moisey was a nickname, she wondered, and that she had just found his sister that the librarian had talked about?  And the husband – was he the man that was killed years ago?  She finished her notes, and closed the books with a sigh and returned them.  Ties to Moisey just kept popping up, and he was beginning to feel decidedly sinister after all.

(To begin the story, go to The Artist, Chapter 1.)

To continue, go to The Artist, Chapter 4.)