A long moment passed with no answer or noise from inside. Tick shivered in the biting cold and rubbed his arms. His dad knocked again, then found a barely visible doorbell and pushed it, though it didn’t work. Another half-minute went by without so much as a creak from the house.

Dad moaned. “Don’t tell me we came all this way and the man we need to talk to is on vacation in sunny Florida.”

Tick craned his neck to look at a window on the second floor. “There’re lights on inside. Someone has to be home.”

“I don’t know—we always leave a light on when we go on vacation—scares the burglars away.” He knocked again, half-heartedly. “Come on, let’s go.”

With slumped shoulders, they started down the porch steps. They were halfway down the sidewalk when they heard a scraping sound from behind and above them, then a low, tired voice. “What do you folks a-want?”

Tick turned to see a disheveled, gray-haired man peeking out of an upstairs window, his eyes darting back and forth around the yard, looking for anything and everything.

“We’re trying to find Norbert Johnson,” Tick shouted up to the window. “We have some questions about a letter mailed from here.”

The man muttered something unintelligible before letting out a little shriek. “Do . . . do you work for Master George or Mistress Jane?”

Tick and his dad exchanged a baffled look. “Master George . . .” Dad said under his breath, then looked back up toward the man at the window. “Never heard of either one of them, but my son got a letter from someone named M.G. Could be the same person, I guess.”

The man paused, his squinty eyes scrutinizing the man and boy below him for signs of trouble. “Do you swear you’ve a-never heard of a woman named Mistress Jane in your life?”

“Never,” Tick and his dad said in unison.

“You’ve a-never seen or worked for a lady dressed all in yellow who’s as bald as Bigfoot is hairy?”

Tick couldn’t believe how weird this whole conversation had become. “Never.”

The man slammed his window shut without saying another word, leaving Tick to wonder if this Norbert guy really had gone bonkers like the old postal worker had suggested.

The front door popped open and Norbert stuck his head out, smoothing his thin gray hair. “Come on in,” he said in a quick, tight voice, looking around the yard again. “I’ve got something for you.”

~

Frazier had pulled to the side of the road two houses down from the one at the end of the street, curious as to what Tick and his dad would learn from the man who lived there. It seemed they merely wanted to discover if the postal workers knew who had mailed the letter they had received, but something about the whole thing seemed fishy.