Page 30 of Promise Keeper

I pushed the framed photo of the mummy and the rest of the circus cast further under the table. "Nothing."

"Your poker face is about as good as your baking, too, which is to say, not good at all." He reached for the photo frame and caught the end of it.

I pulled it and he yanked it back. We played tug of war with the photo under the table, glaring at each other. "Let go, Roy," I said between gritted teeth.

"What trouble are you into now, Cameron Cripps Hayman? As your lawyer I have a right to know."

"You aren't my lawyer, and you have a right to know absolutely nothing."

"Well, missy, that goes both ways then, don't it?"

I stopped tugging on my end of the photo. "What do you know?"

"If you want to know about a certain dumpster and some bones, then tell me what I've got ahold of under the table."

Working with Roy was like negotiating with a terrorist. "It's just a photo," I said. "I want to see if there's a date on the back, but need to take it out of the frame to find out."

"Why didn't ya just say so? Let me handle this." He gave a quick tug and the frame jerked right out of my fingers. "BRB as the kids say." He winked and shot up out of his chair, singing the army cadence again like he was soused. He was, but not that soused.

Heading for the tent, he stumbled and weaved, then tripped and dropped the frame, breaking the glass.

"What did you do?" I asked, rushing up to him. I got close enough to whisper in his ear, "Nice fake trip."

I plucked the photo from the broken glass shaking the shards from it and flipping it to the back before Steve came running out of the tent to see what the shattering glass was about. There were a series of names and an R to L, indicating the names matched the people pictured from right to left. Then it said Longo Circus 1938.

"1938?" If the journal was dated 1929, that meant Dalton was still in town nearly a decade later. He and Estelle hadn't run away together after all.

"1938," Steve said, reaching out for the photo. I hadn't noticed him come out of the tent and walk up to me. I hadn't notice Roy wander over to the fire eater either, but where there's a lady in a bikini with a stick lit on fire, there was Roy - moth to a flame I supposed.

"It was a good year for the circus," Steve said. He took the photo and gazed at it, longingly, as if he wished he'd been around for the heydays his great-grandfather lived through.

"How do you know it was a good year?" I asked.

"It was the biggest year and the last year," he said. He pointed to the people in the photo. "The Living Tree Man. He had a condition that made his skin look like bark. Here's Martian Mary, see how she's blue? It had something to do with her genes. My mom used to tell me stories about them all the time."

"What about this guy?" I asked, pointing to the man in the front. "The mummy?"

"My family didn't talk about him," he said.

"Why not? He was part of the circus."

"I don't know. I was always told not to ask about him, it made my dad angry."

"That's strange. Don't you think?"

"It's odd and strange," Steve said, then smiled and waved an arm out toward the sign above the tent. "It's where it all started."

Good gravy, I'd almost had him and there he went, back to the propaganda for making money. If I wanted to know what happened during the three years torn out of Estelle Brooks's journal, I wasn't going to find it here.

"I better go find a box or a bag to put this broken glass in," Steve said. "I don't think Roy's going to be much help tonight."

"No, I guess not. He can barely stand, let alone make balloon animals. I'll ask Johnna to take him home."

"Probably for the best," he said, and headed to the tent with the photo.

The fire eater had given Roy her flaming stick thing, which was alarming. I jogged over to intervene. "He shouldn't have that," I said. "He's literally playing with fire. Next thing you know the tent is up in a ball of flames."

Roy waved the burning stick in my direction. "Always so dramatic, Cameron Cripps Hayman! Can't a man have a little fun without you raining on his parade?"

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