“Oh yes, yes it is. Quite large. We’re backed up against the sea wall, sort of. You only see the very front from the street. Come this way—the kitchen is over here.”

The kitchen was enormous. Its ceiling must have cleared twelve feet, and the interior appeared to have been cut from one single block of rough, light stone. A large, half-oval niche in the wall staked out a fireplace so expansive that it could have cooked my car, and the floors were flat stones held together with a brownish grout. Elderly appliances, not one of which could have digitally displayed the time, sat against the walls and on the counters. The most advanced piece of equipment I saw was an avocado green coffeemaker next to a chipped porcelain sink filled with empty white mugs.

In short, it looked exactly like it had been built four hundred years ago and was remodeled in the 1930s.

Marcus lit a burner on the gas stove and filled a teapot, setting it atop the flame. “Hold on a moment,” he said, setting two mugs down before us on the table beside the old fireplace. “Let me go get the papers. It’s very exciting. I think we might have a lead!”

With that, he skipped from the room, returning just in time to pull the kettle. While we waited for our tea to steep and fiddled with the sugar, Marcus removed the contents of a manila envelope and carefully laid them out before us.

“Here we are,” he squeaked. “You’re not going to believe this. We wouldn’t have found it at all, except for the courthouse in Sebring has put all its records into a computer. We sent out feelers as far south as the Everglades, and a lucky thing we did. Look here.” He withdrew a black-and-white photocopy and set it between me and Harry. “I think we found them, I really think we did.”

The copy was not a very good or clear one, but it was sufficient. What we saw before us was a deed made out to Avery Dufresne. The exact location of the property was listed as a set of numbers I didn’t understand.

Marcus was more than happy to clarify. “It’s out there near Sebring, in the middle of the swamp where they’ve put the state park. Whoever is trying to raise John Gray may be there yet. This is just one acre in the middle of nowhere, on what’s technically government land. But it’s mostly dense cypress swamp that’s virtually unnavigable. I’ll bet they could safely hide several people there—maybe even a small coven.”

I fiddled with the photocopy, staring down at the formal scrawl of Avery’s name which had surely been put there by a bored public official. No, it was not Avery’s hand. Down below, on the line marked for a signature, there was a large solid X.