Dear Mr. Blathe,

I took a photo of the apparent wedding picture that I mentioned was in the dead drop. The dress bothered me for reasons I could not place. I cropped the photo so as to remove J. Durham from the image and make Lola McGuire unrecognizable. I took the new photo to a dressmaker in town to see what he thought of it. I stated that it was a copy of an old photo of my family's and I wanted to find out where the dress came from. The dressmaker stated that it was an unusual style. He noted that the hands were completely obscured by the sleeves, and he pointed to the bodice which was extremely constrictive and concealed her body up to the neck. He saw a detail that I had not noticed, at least not consciously. A wide line of delicately embroidered squiggles extends from the dress's neck to its waist. In the center of the torso, the line bifurcates into two thinner lines then returns to a single line, forming a circle. The details are of the same white fabric as the rest of the dress, rendering it nearly invisible to the untrained eye when looking at the photo. The dressmaker stated that he could tell that the quality of the dressmaking was possibly unmatched in his experience. All this from a mere photo of a photo.

I believe that the squiggles are text of some kind.

Take care of yourself,

H. McNutt