Free Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3) by Sheila Connolly

answer. “What’s that?” She pointed.
    Abby followed her finger and saw only a pile in a corner of the lot, against the back fence, covered with many generations of leaves. “I don’t know. I haven’t lived in this house for long. Should we find out?”
    “Sure.” Ellie approached the mound, which was about six feet across, and poked it with her stick. “There’s something hard under there.”
    “You want me to see if I can find a rake or a shovel or something?”
    “Okay,” Ellie said, not looking away from the mound.
    Where the heck would rakes or shovels be? Abby wondered. She hadn’t needed one before, since she’d arrived in the spring, so no leaves to collect or snow to move. Cellar? There was no garage, which seemed surprising. Maybe there had been a small barn or stable at some point, but once horses were no longer part of daily life, it had been torn down or fallen down on its own. If she looked she might find the remains of a foundation, but that wouldn’t explain the mound at the back. She approached the back porch and peered under it, and was rewarded with a rusty rake. She made a mental note: if she was going to do any kind of gardening, even if it was no more than clean-up, she needed to find the right tools. And garden gloves. And trash bags.
    She carried her find back to Ellie, who was now kneeling at the edge of the mound and digging like an eager puppy. “What’ve you got?”
    “Old china. Some bottles. I think there were cans, but they kind of fell apart because they were rusty.”
    “Be careful, Ellie—if there’s glass, you could cut yourself. I’ll have to get some gloves, but I don’t have any now.” Of course, Ellie might lose interest quickly.
    “You found a rake? Can you take the dead leaves and stuff off the top so I can see better?” Ellie asked.
    “Sure, no problem.” Luckily it hadn’t rained recently, so the leaves and the leaf mold they had turned into were easy to move aside. Once she’d cleared a portion, she realized that a whole patch of ground over six feet wide seemed to be littered with detritus. “Ellie, I think we’re looking at an old dump for the house.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Well, a century ago there was no garbage collection. Actually there was much less garbage or trash anyway. Food stuff you could compost, or just let rot, or feed to pigs if you had any. Same with paper stuff—you could burn that, along with leaves. So what’s left?”
    “Things that don’t burn or rot,” Ellie said promptly. “Like glass and china.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Can we keep digging?”
    “Sure, why not? I don’t have any other plans. Let’s see what we can find. You know, when I wasn’t much older than you, I wanted to be an archeologist.”
    “You mean, look for dinosaurs?”
    “More like historical sites, from the Middle Ages or even earlier. Do you know how much you can learn from a dump like this?”
    “You gonna tell me?” Ellie asked with a wicked grin while she kept on sifting through the antique trash.
    “Of course. I like teaching. And looking at this kind of thing, and what you pull out of it, you can tell what people ate—at least, when they didn’t grow all their own food—and how they ate. I mean, from what we’ve already seen, it looks like they had more than one kind of china, and some of it’s pretty fancy. Which meant they sat down to dinner, nicely, and maybe even had a lot of guests. And given the time this place was built, they probably had a servant to do the dishwashing, maybe even the cooking.”
    “Wow,” Ellie said, looking impressed. “So this is kind of like a diary of things instead of words.”
    “You could look at it that way,” Abby agreed. “Why don’t I take this side and you can work on that one?”
    “Deal,” Ellie said and resumed scrabbling.
    After a couple of hours, both Abby and Ellie were covered with mud, dirt, and some things Abby didn’t want to examine too closely. She had wondered for a