Chapter Three: The Other Door
Lila came home from the pharmacy just after noon and found Evan crouched beside the shattered mailbox.
He told her what happened, and Iris showed her the recording.
Lila watched Nolan walk back to the van, then asked to see the beginning again.
“Look at his left hand,” she said.
Nolan had been holding a narrow cardboard sleeve beneath his arm.
The sleeve was empty when he returned to the van.
Evan checked the roadside grass, the ditch, and the weeds behind the post.
He found nothing except torn paper and a rusty bolt.
Lila walked around the side of the house and stopped near the basement steps.
The outer basement door stood open by two inches.
Evan had locked it that morning.
Inside, a smell of fresh paint hung in the air, though nobody had painted anything for weeks.
A line of pale dust crossed the concrete floor toward a storage closet.
The closet contained Christmas decorations, old camping equipment, and a wooden model of the neighborhood that Iris had built for a school assignment.
The model was still there, but one of its cardboard houses had been crushed.
Evan picked it up and saw that the damage had been made by a heavy boot.
The intruder had stepped directly on Iris’s project while reaching for the shelf above it.
The shelf held nothing valuable.
It did, however, contain six folded canvas banners from the neighborhood’s abandoned street festival.
One banner was missing.
Chapter Four: The Banner
Evan remembered the festival because it had ended in an argument three summers earlier.
The neighborhood association had promised a weekend arts fair, but the event collapsed when dozens of vendors arrived to discover that their reserved spaces had already been sold to other businesses.
The president at the time, Nolan Price, blamed a clerical mistake and resigned from the committee.
Several vendors never received refunds.
Lila had kept the unused banners because she planned to turn the canvas into garden covers.
“Why steal an old banner?” Iris asked.
Evan spread the remaining banners across the basement floor.
Each carried the same painted street scene, with a row of colorful storefronts and a bright blue trolley.
Iris knelt beside the canvas and traced a seam with her finger.
“These were printed in sections,” she said.
“The picture doesn’t line up.”
Evan checked the labels stitched into the corners.
Five banners bore the numbers two through six.
The missing banner was number one.
Lila went still.
“Number one had the sponsor names,” she said.
“And the vendor schedule,” Evan replied.
He remembered standing beside the banner on the morning the fair was canceled, arguing with Nolan about a baker who had paid for the same booth as a furniture dealer.
Nolan had insisted the overlapping reservations were the result of an online error.
But the banners had been printed before the online system went live.
Evan looked at Iris.
“Somebody may have kept a picture of the original plan,” he said.
Iris shook her head.
“Or somebody wants to stop us from seeing who was supposed to be there.”
