Small Acts
The Letters in the Wall

The Dog Named Biscuit

August 25, 2026 · Part 3 of 10 · 2 min

They started with the easy ones. Corinne Aldous cried in her doorway holding a letter about a dog and a bicycle she never got, and insisted the crew stay for lemonade, and Dash found himself sitting on a porch swing for forty-five minutes listening to a seventy-four-year-old woman describe, word for word, the bicycle her father promised and never bought.

"He wasn't a bad man," she said. "Just poor. Funny, I forgot I was ever mad about it till just now."

Otto Attwater laughed so hard reading his own nine-year-old handwriting about the dog named Biscuit that he had to sit down on his own porch steps. "Biscuit got hit by the Hendersons' truck two weeks after I wrote this," he said, wiping his eyes, still laughing. "Never told anybody how broke up I was. Nine-year-old boys didn't cry about dogs where I grew up."

It went like that for five more names. Warm. Ordinary. Dash started to think maybe the S letter and the unsigned girl's letter really were outliers — two scared kids among a dozen who'd only worried about bicycles and dogs.

Then Priscilla Doyle called.

The town clerk had agreed to help them cross-reference names against old school rosters, mostly out of curiosity. Dash had given her the thirteen signed names and, almost as an afterthought, described the two unsigned letters — a boy who signed only S, a girl who mentioned a brother.

"I need you to come down to records," Priscilla said. Her voice had a flatness to it Dash hadn't heard from her before. "I found something. It's not going to make sense over the phone."

"Give me the short version."

A pause. Papers shuffling.

"There's a missing person filing from 1978. Boy, age nine. Filed by his older sister — the parents apparently refused to. Case got closed within six weeks, ruled a runaway." Another pause, longer. "There's a note clipped to the file. Handwritten, unsigned, added after the case closed. It just says: *ask Arthur Pemberton.*"

Dash gripped the phone tighter.

"The boy's name," Priscilla said. "Simeon Wexler."

Continue the story Part 4: No Record of Running Away →

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