Cole Burkhardt

Beefsteak even went so far as to flop down on the ground and make himself dead weight.

They weren't going to budge, and I didn't want to force them into going somewhere that made them nervous, anyhow.

So I just inched as close as I could without dropping their leashes, about thirty feet away.

I turned on my flashlight and pointed it at the mural.

was messy, in an impressionist way.

It had the feel of a project done by a high school art class, rather than a professional painter.

I noticed that some of the colors seemed to fade in areas, as though they had experienced a few years of weathering.

I could imagine a painting getting sunbleached within a few months of being subjected to the summer here, but in less than a day?

There had to be some other explanation.

The paint was chipped in a few places, and I wondered whether the mural had been there for years and was just hidden behind a wall that was torn down recently.

but that kind of construction is something I should have noticed too, even if it had only taken a day.

They would have come out early in the morning, due to the hot weather, and Nugget would have woken me up by barking at it.

Even if they did it while I was away from the house, there should have been some debris and a clear line along the ground where the bricks used to stand.

Neither forms of evidence were present.

My only other idea at that moment was to find the name of the artist who painted it,

But when I stand it with the flashlight, I didn't see a signature anywhere.

As best I could tell, the mural had appeared on its own.

I had never been the kind to buy into spiritual or paranormal stuff.

As a lifelong desert dweller, I knew that haunted hotels and Old West ghost stories were just tall tales meant to bring in tourists.

For some of the smaller towns, gimmicky ghost tours made up most of their income.