Somebody Else's Ashes

Harriet Pell has kept the lost property room at the Teasel Depot for twenty-two years, and before that she spent nineteen years deciding whether people's accounts of their own belongings were true. She can tell you who owned a thing. She can usually tell you what they lied about. What she has never once been able to do is leave a thing unattributed.

So when a brass cremation urn comes off the four-twelve engraved DELPHINE R. MOWRY, and Delphine Mowry is alive, and sitting in the Grange Hall that afternoon with a cash box, and voting on Thursday to turn Hattie's basement into a storage unit. Hattie carries it up Chapel Street and sets it on the shelf in front of her.

Dell Mowry is not amused. Dell Mowry is frightened. She refuses in writing to claim her own urn, and will not say why.

By six that evening she is dead at the foot of fourteen wooden steps, the county coroner is calling it a fall, and Hattie Pell has four objections, no standing, and one missing ledger.

Teasel, Pennsylvania has eleven hundred and forty people, one pharmacy, one funeral home, and a train that comes twice a day. Somebody in it knew exactly which stair was wet.

A warm, funny, fair-play mystery. Every clue is on the page. Nothing on the page will make you flinch. And the sleuth is nobody's idea of nice.