Page 78 of Welcome to Murder Week

Wyatt brings his hands to his cheeks.

“Amity, you’re brilliant!” He picks up his notebook and flips the pages back and forth, reviewing his notes. “Oh my god, why didn’t we see it?”

He starts ripping pages from his notebook and tacking them to the board. The names of Lady Blanders’s sons, Charles and Benedict. Some scribbles about Lord Blanders and his awful snobbery. And then he takes the photograph of the magazine article with the picture of Tracy at the horse stable with little Ambrosia in the saddle. He stares at it for a moment and then tacks it to the center of the bulletin board.

“Look at her hair,” he says.

“Must we?” Amity says. “The perm is so unfortunate.”

“Not Tracy’s hair. Ambrosia’s hair.”

“What about it?” I say.

“It’s red,” he says.

“Oh my god, that face,” Amity says. “Do you think? Are you saying?”

I’m not following. “What is he saying? What does he think?”

Wyatt is frantically thumbing through his notebook.

“But if that’s the why, what’s the how?” he mumbles.

“Is he talking to himself?” I ask Amity.

“Seems like it.”

“Can you fill us in, Wyatt?” I ask.

“Do we have a map of Willowthrop?” He’s like a man possessed.

Amity takes her map from her purse. Wyatt unfolds it, puts it on the table. He runs his finger from the King George Inn to Hair’s Looking at You salon and back again.

“Bear with me here. If I’m right, I know where we’ll find the murder weapon.” He’s by the door, slipping on his sneakers and grabbing his blazer. “Get your shoes. We don’t have much time. Follow me!”

And he’s out the door.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Amity and I have to run to keep up. We follow Wyatt to the King George Inn, where, instead of going inside, he goes around to the back, to the footpath that runs behind the shops.

“Look carefully in the bushes on both sides of the path,” he says. “We have to follow this all the way back to the salon.”

I pick up a stick and use it to swat at and poke the branches, which are lush with flowers and leaves. “This would be much easier in the winter.”

“Make sure you look deep,” Wyatt says. “The weapon could have been flung quite a distance.”

Trying not to get scratched, I wade into the shrubbery. I hope they don’t have ticks here. I think I see something, but it turns out to be an empty can of Jaipur IPA. If only England weren’t a horticultural paradise. These bushes grow like they’ve been watered with steroids.

We’re about halfway to Tracy’s salon when Wyatt tells us to slow down.

“It has to be here.” He’s sounding a little desperate.

We come to the public footpath sign where the trail branches off and goes down to Tracy’s parking lot. The windows are open in Tracy’s flat, and I can hear the television from inside. I hope she’scelebrating being undead by watching something good on Netflix and polishing off her double-chocolate ice cream.

I’m almost ready to give up when Amity shouts, “Bingo!”

And there it is, on the ground beneath a scraggly bush. How had we missed it before? We stand over the flatter, which looks just as Roland described it in his book.

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