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all done this before. Let’s go, let’s go.”
     
    Arthur stood at the back, leaning on his cane. As the searchers started for the corner of the property line, Clayton walked over to Arthur.
     
    “You sure you’re up to this?” Clayton asked.
     
    Lately, Arthur’s old eyes watered constantly. In a high-pitched grandfatherly voice, Arthur said, “You’re damned right I am. No house will spook me.” He turned and started after the group, leaning into his cane more today than on other days.
     
    The ensemble of volunteers started by ten in the morning and finished the left side of the property by the lunch hour. Everyone went back to their cars for food, where they sat on hoods and trunks to eat.
     
    Mike Lewis gestured toward Clayton, the remnants of a tuna sandwich in his mouth. “You really think that couple came here?”
     
    Clayton shrugged. “I have no idea. Everything points to the negative.”
     
    “I heard everything that comes around here goes missing eventually,” Barbara added from a few feet over.
     
    “We don’t want to encourage fairy tales,” Clayton said.
     
    “What happened to that hunter last year?” Mike asked.
     
    “Who knows?” Clayton bit into a gala apple. “People go missing all the time in the mountains.”
     
    “Yeah, but I heard his rifle was found on the porch of this house.”
     
    “Ghost stories,” Clayton said. “That’s all it is.”
     
    “I don’t think so,” Arthur chimed in. “There’s something wrong with this house. I can feel it in my bones. Can smell it in the air.”
     
    Clayton swallowed the chunk of apple and took a deep breath. “That’s just somebody nearby with a campfire. Probably roasting marshmallows or hotdogs.”
     
    “I smell something burning,” Arthur said. “And it ain’t marshmallows.”
     
    “Okay, folks. Let’s finish this up and get the rest of the search done. I want to be home in time for dinner.”
     
    They gathered their garbage, tossed it into a bag Clayton had brought and assembled at the opposite corner of the property.
     
    After two more search lines were covered, they came upon the old well near the back of the property line. In order to walk around the raised stones that marked the well, Clayton would have to move away from one of the volunteer’s on either side of him.
     
    “Everyone, slow up. I want to scan the base of the well so we don’t have to revisit this spot.”
     
    The line stopped. Clayton got down and circled the well, seeing nothing but overgrown grass and stone. He rose to his full height and looked down into the open hole of the well. Darkness covered the bottom. As far as he remembered, the old wells in these parts had dried up years ago.
     
    He grabbed the flashlight off his belt, flicked it on and shined the beam down the hole. Something reflected off it near the bottom.
     
    “What was that?” he asked out loud.
     
    A moment later Mike stood beside him, leaned down and scanned the bottom of the well.
     
    “I can’t make it out, but from here it looks like a woman’s purse.”
     
    “What would a purse be doing at the bottom of a well?” Clayton asked no one in particular.
     
    “No idea,” Mike answered.
     
    “Okay everyone, continue the search without me. I’m going to get my fishing rod out of my trunk to see if I can hook that purse and bring it up.”
     
    The group of volunteers formed their line again and moved away as Clayton walked out to his car.
     
    Minutes later he stood at the lip of the old well, a large lure with a double hook at its base affixed to the ten-pound line.
     
    He let the line go until the lure touched bottom and then began the monotonous work of trying to hook the purse in the little to no light at the bottom of the well.
     
    The volunteers finished scanning the property and came up empty. There was no indication anyone had spent time at the house in the last few years.
     
    Just as it was beginning to seem a fruitless effort, the hook