Page 34 of Promise Keeper

Liam and Ellsworth jumped down from the couch and followed along behind us as we trotted up the stairs.

"He likes that cat, doesn't he?" Monica asked, watching them.

"He does. He doesn't seem to miss the other dogs with Ellsworth around."

"Don't get any ideas," she said. "We're not keeping your pack of misfits."

"Are they behaving for Quinn?"

"He says they're doing really well, especially Colby and Jack."

"No way! Those two are doing well? I figured they'd be running around wild and distracting Gus."

"No. Gus is doing good too, but Quinn says Colby and Jack are really taking to the agility course."

"Wonders never cease."

I reached for the attic door and paused. "I don't want to know what those little buggers did up there."

"It's probably worse in your mind than in reality," Monica said, turning the doorknob and opening it for me. "Let's go look."

I followed her up the stairs into the attic. It was already getting warm up there. In the summer it was like a sauna.

"That's where they come in," I said, pointing to the vent. There was a hole in the screen Ben had put up.

"Looks like there's some insulation torn out of that wall over there," she said, pointing to the far wall. "It's all piled up like a nest."

"There better not be babies over there.” I slowly crossed to the gathered pink fiberglass insulation.

"I don't see any," Monica said, beside me. "They have some clutter over by that box."

To my right there were a few stacked boxes of old Christmas decorations that were most likely older than I was. On the floor there was a gold angel, a couple broken red glass ornaments, and a few white ceramic things that looked like icicles.

"Not too bad," Monica said. "They didn't really tear anything up or leave you a nasty mess."

"No, not bad," I agreed, kneeling to pick up the Christmas decorations. I put the angel back in the box and began collecting the icicles. I'd have to come back up with a broom for the broken ornaments. "Mon, take a look at these icicles," I said. "I thought they were ceramic, but I think they're ivory maybe."

She came over and I handed her one. She turned it back and forth, studying it. Then she squealed and tossed it half way across the attic. "Cameron! Those aren't icicles! They're bones! Rib bones, or finger bones--some kind of bones!"

I dropped the ones in my hand. "Oh, good gravy. I think we found the rest of our mystery man."

15

The bones in the attic put a damper on our trip to Nashville. We called Ben and he came home and waited with us until Walter and Pamela could come and collect them. In the meantime, I'd changed out of my jammies and made myself presentable and the three of us sat around the kitchen table.

"The raccoons must have brought the bones here from the park," Ben said. "The little plague spreaders. I'm surprised everyone in this town isn't sick."

"They aren't spreading the plague," I said. "That was rats in London or New York or somewhere. Anyway, we have antibiotics now."

"Carl made me chase them out of the church basement," Ben said. "You know how I feel about basements."

He hated basements. I figured with Irene as his mom, she probably locked him in the basement when we was a kid and traumatized him for life.

Who was I kidding? She'd never do that to her baby boy. She was only rotten to everyone else.

"I'm glad you survived that ordeal," I said. I'd been in that church basement a hundred times and there was nothing scary down there but black mold from all the times the basement had flooded from the canal overflowing.

"When is Irene picking up Ellsworth?" Monica asked. "I can get his things together."

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