“Exactly right,” he replies. “Which brings me to your buffalo fiber. I’d sure like to know the source of it because you can bet it’s old and interesting.”

“Did you say buffalo?”

“As in ‘Home on the Range’ and nickels from my grandfather’s day.”

“Buffalo have fibers?”

“The same way sheep do. For the sake of simplicity I’ll call what I found a hair. But technically it’s a fiber and a first-time match in my animal reference library,” he says proudly, almost lovingly. “Which is why I’ve been building it all these years. You’re always waiting for that one oddball something to show up …”

“Buffalo aren’t exactly indigenous to this area.” I stare straight ahead at a black SUV backing toward me on the flooded driveway.

Not SWAT, I think. It looks like a limo.

“I think if we consider the context, Kay, this hair goes back a long time,” Ernie says. “Possibly from a buffalo skin, a rug, a robe that’s inside someplace or possibly was in an earlier era. The Cambridge house where your truck was parked when you found the dust bunny, the arrow? It’s really old.”

“Yes. More than three hundred years.” My attention is riveted to the SUV, a Cadillac Escalade with dark tinted windows and a livery license tag.

It’s slowly backing toward me, starting and stopping, taillights flaring red as Ernie tells me he’s been doing some poking around. He’s been excavating as he puts it, and he reminds me for the hundredth time at least that he should have been an archaeologist.

“What have you dug up?” My eyes are on the black SUV getting closer.

“That the Gilbert house was built by some rich Englishman who owned a shipping company,” he says. “According to what I’ve come across the place started out as a sizable estate in Cambridge’s rural days when there was nothing much there but a small college called Harvard. The original property included a smokehouse, a guesthouse and servants’ quarters, a kitchen, and one article said cows were kept in the basement out of the harsh winter weather. They’d take them outside to graze then return them to built-in stalls.”

“I can only imagine the trace evidence in such a place.” I see where he’s going with this.

“Trace evidence like the broken piece of Venetian glass that could be from a trade bead,” he says, “which could be related to the shipping company. As could furs.”