Read Online Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3) by Sheila Connolly - Free Book Online Page A

car.
    “Hey, what’re you doing here? Does my mom know?”
    “She does indeed. She asked me to pick you up—some mix-up about your sitter.”
    “Great. What’re we going to do?”
    “I hadn’t gotten that far. How about we go to my house and start with some lunch, and we can take it from there?”
    “Sounds good,” Ellie replied. She climbed into the passenger seat and buckled her seat belt without being asked. She and Abby chatted about the school and what Ellie was learning until they reached Lexington.
    “Here we are,” Abby said.
    Ellie studied the building. “I like this house. It’s big, and it’s got lots of funny corners and things. Like that window seat.”
    “Actually it’s Ned’s—I’ve only just moved in, so I don’t know everything about it yet.”
    “Is he your boyfriend?”
    “Yes.” That was the simplest answer, and it was true, although it was a lot more complicated than that. Abby wondered what second-graders knew about adult relationships. If Ellie asked her if she and Ned were married, she wasn’t going to lie, but neither was she going to volunteer any information.
    Luckily Ellie seemed satisfied. “I like him.”
    Which was good. Abby wondered when Leslie would get around to telling Ellie that Ned was her biological father. She wasn’t going to touch that subject with a ten-foot pole.
    When Ellie had finished a glass of juice and a sandwich—and a few cookies—she said, “What are we going to do now?”
    “Do you have homework?” Even the early grades seemed to assign something to students these days.
    Ellie made a rude noise. “Yeah, but it’ll take me like ten minutes to do, and nobody cares because it’s the end of the year. Can we go look at the cemetery?”
    “Which one?” She’d already visited one in Concord with Ellie, and the one in Littleton, in the short time she’d known her.
    “The one out behind your house.”
    That surprised Abby. “Sure. But why are you interested, Ellie?”
    “I like cemeteries. And I like to see who’s there. Have you seen anybody there?”
    Abby assumed Ellie meant the departed residents, not living visitors, and she wasn’t going to pretend not to understand. “I think so, but I haven’t spent a lot of time there—I’ve been busy working on the house. Has your mother let you go back to the Littleton cemetery?” Where Ellie had met her not-quite-imaginary friend.
    “No, and I promised I wouldn’t sneak there either. Do you think Hannah will still be there when I go back?”
    “Probably, if you go looking for her. I think she knows a lot about waiting.” Poor Hannah had died well over a century earlier, at about the same age that Ellie was now. To Ellie, she had been a playmate.
    “Good!” Ellie bounced out of her chair and dutifully took her plate and glass over to the sink. “Can we go now?”
    “Sure.” Abby grabbed her keys and they went out the back door, which led to the scruffy yard. There was a fence separating Ned’s property from the cemetery, but it was easy to get over. Abby let Ellie go first and watched with some amusement as she started darting among the stones, bending down to read one now and then. Abby followed more slowly. She hadn’t had time to really explore this cemetery, as she had told Ellie. She and Ned had caught sight of someone, the first time he’d shown her the house, so she assumed there were relatives of some sort here—was that one of the reasons Ned had bought it? But then, it had been a moment of high emotion, her first visit to the house, so she wasn’t sure how much she had been picking up.
    She looked up from studying a fairly early stone to see that Ellie had sat down in front of a tidy row of eighteenth-century tombstones. Abby joined her, and Ellie pointed. “Look, a whole lot of Reeds!”
    Why was she not surprised? She sat down cross-legged next to Ellie. “Are they here now?” she asked. She didn’t see anyone, but maybe she’d have to give it time.
    “Not