Page 52 of Promise Keeper

"Any time now," Pamela assured us, checking her cell phone for the thousandth time.

"If it's Dalton Stokes," Ben said, "then we need to identify who would have had access to his bones and how."

"And who killed him," Walter said.

"We might never know who killed him," Ben said. "Our immediate goal is to figure out where his bones came from and who dumped them."

"One could lead to the other," I said.

Pamela's phone rang and our eyes shifted to her hand where she held it. "This is it," she said, and answered.

Ben gripped my shoulders. "I don't know why I'm so anxious," he said. "This is more nerve wracking than any big case I've worked."

"There have been nothing but dead ends. This could be the break we've been waiting for."

Walter crossed his arms and kept his eyes trained on Pamela, waiting for a sign.

"Okay," she said. "I see." Nothing gave us a clue. Finally she hung up and turned her eyes on us. "Are you ready to know?"

"If you don't tell us right this second I might have to flip out," I warned.

She laughed and shouted, "It's a match!"

We all cheered and hugged. Liam raced around our feet barking.

"Keep it down!" Mia yelled, storming into the room. "Some of us have homework!"

"The teenager telling the parents to keep it down," Walter said. "Now I've heard it all."

"So have I," Mia said, and turned on her heel.

I couldn't help but laugh. So many times it was me telling her to turn down her music, and now the tables had turned.

The laughter felt good. After a week of uncertainty and wandering blindly into corners, we'd finally found our mystery man.

There were two people in this town connected to Dalton Stokes. One was Fiona and I was certain she was telling the truth. The other I wasn't convinced was so innocent. And that red gunk on my pants wasn’t blood. If my intuition was correct, it was red paint. Red face paint.

It was time to talk to Steve Longo again.

* * *

The tent was closedup for the evening, and the door to Odd and Strange Metamora was locked. Steve lived above the shop, so I rounded the building and climbed the rickety stairs up the fire escape to the second story. The sun had set and in the dark I barely spotted Spook sitting on the landing. He licked his paw and swiped it over his ears.

"You get around," I told him, and scratched underneath his chin.

A door the size of a hobbit led inside from the landing, so I knocked on it and waited. At least it wasn't a window that I'd have to crawl through if Steve was home.

"Cameron?" he said, cracking the door open. "What are you doing out there?"

"I need to talk to you and the door downstairs is locked."

"There's a doorbell. I would've come down and opened it."

"Oh. Well, that makes sense. I sure wish I'd noticed that before climbing up the fire escape."

"Come in." Steve took my arm and helped me through the tiny door. "What can I do for you?"

He didn't look well. It had been a long week for all of us, but Steve was running on fumes and had been desperate for help in his tent all week. "How much longer does your spring carnival tent display go on?"

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