Total pages in book: 133
Estimated words: 122440 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 612(@200wpm)___ 490(@250wpm)___ 408(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122440 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 612(@200wpm)___ 490(@250wpm)___ 408(@300wpm)
What exactly was she looking for? If the owner had bulldozed the area, overturning the ground repeatedly and removing the smaller boulders and larger rocks, there had to have been a reason. Had the inquiry into purchasing the property triggered the owner to do such a thing? If so, it meant he was hiding something. There wasn’t any other explanation.
Harlow laid the photos out carefully on her table and turned her brightest lights on them. She spent the next hour and a half scrutinizing the photos she’d taken. Spiderwebs and rattlesnakes. What else was in the boulders that she wasn’t seeing? Something had to be there that maybe she hadn’t noticed. Something important. She set her large freestanding magnifying glass over the first photo and then carefully went down the long line, taking her time, noting the slightest differences. The angles. It took her several passes to see the shiny webs tucked into the rocks. The same thick, sticky webs were attached to the outside of the rocks near the base. Her heart stuttered, giving her that reaction that told her she was on the right track.
She had never thought much about the webs on the ground. She’d been very focused on the building and snakes. Also, the way the sun hit the frost had been the biggest interest for her in the photograph. She’d gone to the barn for the express purpose of photographing the way the frost was caught in the orb spiderwebs and along the barn walls. The ground webs hadn’t been as much a part of her ideas until she’d seen the results in her photographs, then she’d included them.
Now, she spent time focusing on them. The more she studied them, the more she realized the sticks and debris on the ground weren’t necessarily from the collapsing barn. In fact, the more she looked at it, the more it appeared as if what she had first considered sticks were boards and parts of trees, old small logs strewn on the ground.
Had they been deliberately placed there? What was the point? If the thick sticks and tree limbs had been placed by a human, they would have been there awhile. She could tell from the amount of weathering and buildup of dirt and leaves over and around them.
The silk webbing was thick, attaching to the sticks or small tree limbs just as it did the boulders. Again, she began to inspect the series of photographs. She went inch by inch. Was that an actual spider she’d captured? She turned up the magnification and centered the glass directly over the web. The silk ran out from the small tree limb lying on the ground in the midst of dead and dying leaves. The web had heavy trip lines extending all around it. The long silk threads funneled into a burrow to create a hole where the spider seemed to reside.
Harlow had seen many types of trap and funnel-web spiderwebs. This looked a little different from what she remembered. She wasn’t certain exactly why. The funnel-web spiders she had encountered in her travels across California had different webs according to the type of spider it was. Some appeared to look like orbs. Others gave the appearance of cotton candy.
The spiders themselves often took on different looks. She’d seen one that looked like a bug to entice its prey. Another actually appeared to look like a tree. She had taken several pictures of that one. She had photos of various spiders taking on the appearance of a snake, a bird, a wasp, even a butterfly. They had always fascinated her.
She went back to study the spider she had inadvertently captured in a photograph of the rocks near the barn. It didn’t look like any of the funnel-web spiders she was familiar with. It was shiny and black, much larger than the ones she had run across in her adventures. She bent closer to the magnifying glass, once more turning up the power in order to better see the spider. It was definitely larger and shinier, more like a widow than the funnel-web spiders she had come across.
She straightened and paced away to walk the length of the room to help herself think. She had always had a fascination with spiders and their webs. Somewhere, in the past, she had seen that particular spider before. She had definitely read about the various types of webs the funnel-web spiders across the United States made. She’d photographed many in her travels. She’d seen that spider and possibly the web in the rocks. That was unusual. The same web was attached to the small tree limbs, the silk leading down to a burrow where the spider waited for its prey. She just had to recall the exact spider.
Many funnel-web spiders were venomous, but few killed in the United States. It was different in Australia. The Sydney funnel-web spider was considered one of the deadliest spiders in the world, if not the deadliest, but it was found only in Australia.