Skeletons in the Attic (A Marketville Mystery Book 1) by Judy Penz Sheluk

declined for the moment. Began stripping old carpet. Revealed hardwood underneath.
    I reread the email. It was a recap of what he already knew, but it would suffice. I hit “send” and pondered my next steps. I knew I should finish stripping out the carpeting, but I was too sore and tired to think about it. That left going through my father’s papers, researching the best resource for figuring out the meaning behind the five tarot cards, or rummaging through the attic.
    I opted for my father’s papers. I carried the shredder into the living room. I remembered seeing a blue recycling bin in the carport, retrieved it, and put it next to the shredder. What didn’t need shredding could be recycled. I went to the small bedroom and push-pull-dragged my father’s filing cabinet down the hall and into the living room.
    The first task would be weeding out the meaningless. The idea being, if it wasn’t meaningless, it might have a meaning.
    The first few file folders were devoted to household expenses: hydro, natural gas, telephone, Internet, and cable. By the looks of it, he’d been saving them for the last decade. Since he hadn’t owned a business where he could write expenses off, there had been no need to keep them. I shredded the bills.
    The second batch of paperwork covered my father’s income tax returns for the past six years. I went through them line by line, but the only thing of real interest was an annual deduction for a safety deposit box at a bank in Marketville. I went to the kitchen cupboard where I’d tossed the brass key ring. Sure enough, there was a key that looked like it could have belonged to a safety deposit box. I made a note to contact Leith to find out how I could access it as the beneficiary of my father’s estate. People didn’t keep safety deposit boxes without good reason.
    Next up were a bunch of manuals which covered everything from tools and appliances to lawn mowers and a home gym. I vaguely remembered the home gym, a contraption that had all sorts of weights and pulleys, but it had been a few years since I’d seen it at my father’s house. So far, the filing cabinet was proving to be a bust.
    I went through the manuals one by one, tossing them into the blue bin after a cursory glance. Mixed amongst them was a travel brochure for Newfoundland and Labrador. I fought back tears, remembering my dad’s bucket list wish of whale watching.
    I was just about finished when I came upon a small sales catalog selling anatomical models of all shapes and sizes. I flipped through it and found a skeleton named “Morton” who looked suspiciously like the one currently residing in my attic. The fact that someone had circled that particular model in blue ink pretty much confirmed that they were one and the same. The final nail in the coffin—pun fully intended—was a receipt, tucked inside the back cover, for “1 papier-mâché casket” from a Toronto store called Macabre Crafts & Ghoulish Creations. The receipt was dated less than two weeks before my dad’s death. According to their letterhead, the firm specialized in props for the film and theater industry.
    Someone is playing a prank on you, Constable Arbutus had said. The coffin is nothing more than a stage prop, the skeleton a PVC medical model. Surely my late father couldn’t be the perpetrator of that prank. Or could he? Was the codicil in the will nothing more than an elaborate ruse? If so, why? I placed the catalog and receipt on top of my folder containing the rental agreements for Misty Rivers and Jessica Tamarand.
    A search of the remaining files offered a few more useless manuals, but no answers. Maybe the safety deposit box would hold a clue, but it was late Friday and Leith wouldn’t be back in the office until Monday. For the moment, that was a dead end.
    I looked around the room and spoke out loud, as if someone might actually be listening. “Damn it, Daddy, you’re really starting to piss me off.”
    I slammed the filing