by Jamie Blair
Copyright © 2019 by Jamie Blair
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover Design by Kelly York at Sleepy Fox Studios.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Also by Jamie Blair
About the Author
1
The five pound ball of white fur nestled beside me under the quilt let out a growl that would've been intimidating if not for his size.
"Shh," I said, stroking Liam's head. "It's just Spook."
The neighborhood wandering black cat liked to break into my attic whenever the mood struck him. The dogs always heard him before I did.
The dogs, our pack of five, made quite a full house of barking and shedding. Right now, all of them except little Liam the Maltese were staying with my sister and her certified K9 trainer boyfriend being transformed into well behaved beasties instead of wild ones.
Liam wasn't a fan of the big dogs being gone and had taken to sticking to me like glue to make sure I didn't disappear as well.
A bump up above the ceiling made Liam let out a shrill yip. "It's okay," I whispered, scratching his back. I glanced over at Ben, my husband, to see if he'd heard Liam, but a rumbling snore assured me he was still sound asleep.
"Spook's being loud tonight," I whispered to Liam. Spook was always silent as a ghost unless he wanted to be heard. Sometimes, like tonight, he liked to rile the dogs. He must've been out looking to stir up trouble.
It was a little after two in the morning and I was reading on my e-reader. I'd woken up with heartburn about an hour earlier. Heartburn was new to me and came when I hit forty. I used to brag about my lead-lined stomach that allowed me to eat anything I wanted. Banana peppers on spicy pizza was now a thing of the past.
Another bang and skittering feet in the attic had me and Liam on alert. He tunneled out from under the quilt and circled around my legs, growling and baring his teeth toward the light fixture.
"You're very intimidating," I assured him.
Listening to the ruckus, I knew I wasn't dealing with Spook. There were critters in my attic of an unknown variety.
I eased out of bed doing my best not to disturb Ben and followed the sound of clodhoppers making their way across my ceiling into the hall. They weren't even trying to hide their presence and sounded like a parade of elephants in combat boots.
Liam skittered along after me, quaking but putting on a fierce, brave face.
The hallway was pitch black, but I knew my way to the attic door in the dark. Taking small steps on tip-toe, I crossed diagonally toward the left. The racket was even louder out here.
As I approached the door, there was a crash and a squabble broke out, a few of them hissing and chittering. I backed up quickly and tripped over a big box. Tumbling over backward, I flailed my arms and hit the wall, but couldn't stop my fall. I landed on another box, rear end first, flattening it to oblivion and sending poor Liam scampering back into the bedroom.
The hall light blazed to life and my step-daughter, Mia, shouted, "Freeze! My dad's a cop!" She held one of her cheerleading trophies over her head ready to bludgeon me to death.
Ben burst out of the bedroom ready to take down an intruder and looked back and forth between the two of us, wide-eyed with confusion. "What on earth are you two doing out here?"
"That's what I want to know!" Mia said, her hand over her heart, trying to catch her breath.
"I'm sorry I scared you," I said. "We have--"
That's when the attic bandits decided to make a run for it, trekking across to the back of the house where there's a vent above an old, rickety window.
I pointed up to the attic. "That's what I'm doing out here."
Ben's expression shifted from me and Mia to the attic door. "Please tell me you adopted another animal and you're hiding it up there."
"Sorry, no," I said, struggling to free myself from the box and get back on my feet. "Little help?"
He grasped my hands and tugged me up out of the box. "Didn't Monica say she'd have all of this out of here by now?" he asked, looking around at the packed boxes my sister had left in the hallway outside her old bedroom door.
"I'm helping her with these last boxes in the morning," I said, trying to pry up the end of the one I'd flattened. "I hope there wasn't anything fragile in this one."
"Listen," Mia said, angling her head toward the ceiling. "I think they left."
Ben rubbed his eyes and yawned. "Good, let's go back to bed and deal with this in the morning." He turned and gave Mia a hug before returning to our bedroom.
"Are you okay?" I asked her. "Still scared?"
She shrugged. "I just hope they don't come back."
Liam padded out into the hall and stood on his back legs, placing his front paws on her shins, gazing up at her. It was true love where Liam and Mia were concerned. They were pet and person soulmates. She picked him up and nuzzled her nose in his fur.
"There you go," I said, "your protector." I put my arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. "See you in the morning."
And with that calamity over, we all went back to bed.
Monica breezed through the door around half past nine the next morning with a huge smile and a new doggie sweatshirt for Liam. As the owner of Dog Diggity pet boutique, she stocked homemade dog treats she made daily and items from local makers. "Who made this one?" I asked, holding up the light blue fleece shirt with a bone embroidered on the back along with the words snack attack. "It's adorable."
"A woman from Connorsville," she said, hanging her handbag over a kitchen chair. "She brought her dog to the kennel and we got to talking and now I have a new vendor."
Monica's boyfriend, Quinn Kelly, owned Kelly's K9s and Kennels in Connorsville. He was training my lovable but unruly mutts. Monica was a new homeowner. She moved in about a month ago, but still had some boxes at my house where she'd lived before she moved. She'd been so busy with Dog Diggity and helping Quinn get his business set up, that she'd only taken the bare bones necessities to her new house.
"Do you mind if we take a walk over to the Soapy Savant and grab some coffee before we start lugging boxes around?" I asked. "I'm all out and you know I can't function without caffeine."
"I don't mind at all," she said. "The Blueberry Hill latte they have this month is addicting."
It was April and spring had sprung in Metamora, Indiana. The Soapy Savant, our small town coffee shop-slash-cafe-slash-soap shop, had been busier than ever lately with everyone milling around in the warmer weather.
"Let me put this new shirt and a leash on Liam and we'll take him along," I said.
Upstairs, Mia was still sound asleep, but I managed to coax Liam out from under her blankets. He liked wearing clothes unless they were wool and itchy, and held his head up for me to slip his shirt on. Back downstairs, I clipped his leash to his collar and we were off.
"Is Ben working today?" Monica asked as we passed Schoolhouse Antiques located r
ight next door to Ellsworth House, Ben's ancestral home where we lived.
"He's helping Steve Longo. Steve's putting on a spring carnival at his museum and there's a bus group coming in this morning, so Ben told him he'd come around to help keep an eye on things." I pointed in the distance. "See the tent over there? Steve has all of his collections inside there, and I think he has a couple performers. Don't ask me what they're doing."
"Does Steve think he needs police to guard his weird treasures?"
"I have no idea why he wanted Ben to be there, but he does place a lot of value on his collection."
Steve owned Odd and Strange Metamora which claimed to house treasures and curiosities from Metamora's past linking the town to everything from Genghis Khan to the printing press. Personally, I thought it was a bunch of baloney.
We strolled along the canal that ran through town. Daffodils and tulips bloomed along the bank. Metamora Mike, the town's feathered mascot, quaked and splashed in the water with his retinue of lady ducks.
The sun shone off the canal, and the grist mill's wheel was churning. The big farm horses that pulled the canal boat, The Ben Franklin III, grazed on hay as they waited for passengers.
Along both sides of the canal, the old houses and buildings from the 1800's had been turned into shops of all kinds that sold used books, cookies, candy, coffee, antiques, and a few had become bed and breakfasts. Right in the center was the park, a nice open green space along the water with a gazebo and a small playground for the little kids.
We were passing by the gazebo when Liam started growling and barking. He tugged his leash toward a trash can. "No, Liam," I said, gently pulling him back. "We're going this way."
But Liam refused to head in the direction of the foot bridge to cross to the opposite side of the canal where the Soapy Savant was, so I decided I'd pick him up and carry him.
He wiggled and squirmed and had fits, turning his head to watch that trash can. Still yipping his shrill yip, he succeeded in wriggling out of my arms and jumping to the ground. Not holding the leash, I was caught off guard and ran after him.
"Hey, you little runt! Get back here!"
Liam jumped at the side of the trash can, barking and batting it with his front paws. A furry head popped out of the can--a bandit-eyed raccoon! It chittered and chattered, cursing at Liam, before hopping onto the side of the can and tipping it over.
Liam sprinted back to me, eyes the size of dinner plates, hair blowing back from his tiny face, terrified. I scooped him up and stomped my feet to get the raccoon to run off.
The brazen pest gave me one short glance then ignored me and sorted through the trash.
Metamora Mike rushed up onto the grass, squawking and flapping his wings, hissing at the raccoon. The raccoon wanted no part of a psychotic duck and took off up a nearby tree.
"What a mess," Monica said, heading toward the tipped over trash can.
"I guess I know what was in our attic last night." I started to tell her about our late night visitors when she grasped me by the arm.
"What is that?" she asked, pointing to something long and thin lying in the pile of refuse.
I blinked a few times thinking it couldn't be what I thought it was. "It looks like a bone."
She cross-stepped to the other side of the trash pile. "There's another one over here."
I got closer and saw what she was staring at. "That's definitely a bone."
"Holy crow a skull!" She pointed inside the can and sitting there in the shadows as nice as you please was a human skull.
"Please tell me this is left over from Halloween." I felt myself grow a bit faint and dizzy. I'd had the misfortune of stumbling upon dead bodies in this town more than once, but never a skeleton. Somehow, this was worse.
"We need to get Ben," she said.
"I'll call him. He's used to this from me."
And with that, I made another call to my husband to report that I'd found a body.
With only bones stuffed in a trash can to go on, how would anyone be able to figure out who this poor person was and what had happened to him?
2
There was almost an entire human skeleton in that trash can. Some bones were in trash bags, the larger ones were simply tossed in alongside. And they were real, not a Halloween prop as I'd hoped. The Franklin County Coroner came and took the bones to the morgue for testing.
As with every mysterious murder in town, the Metamora Action Agency met at my house after the news spread, which typically traveled at the speed of light. The Action Agency was originally put together to plan and market the town's events, but necessity made us much more. We'd solved a handful of murders and considered ourselves seasoned sleuths at this point.
I liked to say my Action Agency members were two seniors by age and two seniors by high school class. Roy Lancaster, veteran and the town drunk, and Johnna Fitzgerald, kleptomaniac and obsessive knitter, were my seniors by age. Fiery, feminist, Anna Carmichael, and my robot-boy genius, Logan Faust were my seniors by grade. We typically worked out of the church basement, but on weekends when something came up they made their way to my kitchen table on auto-pilot, ready for coffee, cookies, and conferring. This time they'd have to settle for herbal tea.
Roy looked across the table at me and shook his head. "I've said it once, and I'll say it again. Cameron Cripps Hayman, you're a murder magnet."
"There's no such thing as a murder magnet," Johnna said, looping yellow yarn around her needles. "You know it's all about her bad luck."
"Bad luck?" I asked. "Since when do you think I have bad luck?"
"Would you say you had good luck finding all these dead people?" Roy asked. "None of the rest of us have ever found one."
Johnna nodded. "It's bad luck."
I slumped in my chair considering the possibility that they were right. Roy took out his flask and held it open over my tea. "Maybe a nip to take the edge off?" he asked.
I nodded. It had been a startling morning, and it was after twelve noon, so a hot toddy was acceptable. He dumped it in and I stirred it around. When I took a sip, it was strong enough to strip tar off a roof. "Whoa." I winced and coughed. Something told me there was moonshine in his flask and not whiskey like I thought.
"That'll do ya," Roy said, taking a swig himself before dumping twice as much in his own tea.
Johnna tapped the side of her cup getting his attention. "Since it's a party."
He poured a shot in hers and shook his head. "Just don't get your yarn in a tangle over there. I won't be held responsible for you turning out a three-legged dog sweater."
"Where do we start?" Anna asked, pulling her auburn hair back into a ponytail ready to get to business. "We have a skeleton in a trash can in the middle of town. We don't know the gender, age, or how the person died. It might not be foul play. What we can find out is when it was put there, and who put it there."
"Starting with when would be easier to pin down," Logan said. "Trash day was Thursday, so it had to have been between the time the trash truck came Thursday morning and early this morning when the bones were found. Roughly forty-eight hours.
"That don't sound easier to pin down to me," Roy said. "Isn't forty-eight hours some kind of maximum time for things like this?"
"That's a missing person," Anna said. "The likelihood of finding someone alive goes down drastically after forty-eight hours."
"Well, this 'un ain't coming back to life, so I suppose we're okay with the timeframe."
I couldn't conceive the ability for someone to physically pull this off. "How would someone get trash bags of bones and bones not even in bags to the middle of town and dumped in the trash without anyone seeing?"
"It would have to be someone that nobody would suspect of doing something dubious," Logan said, leaning back and stretching out his long, lanky limbs.
"And right in plain sight," Roy added.
Johnna snorted. "Lots of people do things I plain sight and nobody takes one-second to notice. Most people have their faces
planted in their phones all the time nowadays."
Anna tapped her fingernail on the table. "It would be more conspicuous if it were the middle of the night. If anyone saw someone dumping a bunch of bags at three in the morning, it would seem strange, but not in the middle of the day."
"But in the middle of the park?" Logan asked. "I see where you're going with your train of thought, and I agree, but now we have to ask ourselves who would be filling the trash can in the park without anyone thinking it was odd?"
Mia bounded down the stairs and through the hall to the kitchen. "What's going on? Did something happen?" She was still in her flannel pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. Her dark hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun.
"Did you just wake up?" I asked.
"No, but I haven't been out of my room yet."
"Guess who found another dead body," Roy said, jerking his thumb in my direction.
Mia gasped. "Who was it?"
"We don't know," I told her. "It's a skeleton." I relayed the story of Liam and the raccoon and the turned over trash can.
"Oh my gosh!" She ran over to Liam where he stood lapping up water from his dog bowl and scooped him into her arms. "That must've been so scary for you," she said to him. "Those rotten raccoons." He licked her nose.
"Yes," she said, cooing at him, "you are my brave boy."
"A brave boy in a new shirt," Johnna said, raising her brows and pursing her lips. "Where'd he get that?"
"That ain't one of yours," Roy pointed out.
"Monica brought it this morning," I said. "A woman in Connorsville makes them."
"A woman in Connorsville, huh?" Johnna grunted under her breath.
Monica was upstairs transferring her packed items in the box I'd crushed into a new box. I hoped her ears were burning. I had no interest in defending her choice of Dog Diggity dog clothes suppliers. There were more important matters to discuss.