Page 3 of Promise Keeper

"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?"

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