Free The Haunted Bones (A Lin Coffin Mystery Book 3) by J A Whiting Page B

it was an older model? It seemed kind of big. Like a big old Lincoln?”
    “I wish I had paid more attention to it.” Lin started towards the mausoleum. “Let’s go have a look.”
    When the girls and Nicky reached the front door of the tomb, Lin focused her flashlight on the lock. She moved it about and gave it a solid yank. The bolt unfastened. Lin blinked with surprise that the lock came undone. She leaned forward tilting her head so she could inspect the lock more closely. “This is clever work. Someone cut the bolt from behind. It looks fine until you see it from the back. It’s cut so that it looks locked and it requires a good pull on it for it to loosen.” Putting her hand on the large metal handle, she pulled the door open with a loud metallic creak.
    “We’re not going in, are we?” Viv fussed.
    Lin stepped inside, shining her light along the crypts in the walls. Viv stayed in the doorway.
    “There are five crypts. It’s a family entombed here.” Lin moved closer to see if any of the crypts looked to be tampered with.
    Standing outside, Viv pointed her flashlight above the door. “It says ‘Sparrow’ above the doorway. That’s the family name.”
    Lin moved her hand over the large marble squares in the wall that marked each crypt. A small central hole in a plate on the marble seemed to be a lock hole. She pointed the flashlight beam at the holes. “This is odd. There seems to be scratch marks on some of these crypts. I wonder if someone used a piece of metal to pick the locks.” Lin tried to tug on the edges of the marble to see if it would move. “I can’t open it.”
    “Oh!” Viv practically screeched. “Don’t open anything. Lin, don’t open those crypts.”
    “I wouldn’t open it. I just want to see if it moves.” Lin emerged from the mausoleum. “We need to report this. I’ll call the police in the morning.”
    The girls and the dog followed the paths through the cemetery heading back to the trail that would lead to their parked truck.
    “We need to come up with a reason why we were here so late at night.” Viv kept nervously looking about the open space. “Or the police might think we’re involved in stealing bones.”
    “Well,” Lin tried to come up with an idea. “We could say that during the day we were biking on that dirt road that leads to the cemetery and you lost a necklace. We think you lost it when we were sitting in the cemetery resting before our return ride. We came back to look for it.”
    Viv narrowed her eyes. “In the middle of the night?”
    “Maybe we could gloss over that part?”
    “We better come up with something more believable than that,” Viv suggested. “Why not just tell the truth?”
    Lin tilted her head. “That I see ghosts and they want me to figure this out?”
    Viv smiled. “No. Tell them you found those bones and you were reading on the internet about graves being robbed and wondered if this could be the case here. So we decided to come walk around and see if anything looked amiss.”
    “Won’t they be suspicious because we’re here late at night?”
    “It’s the only time we could both do it” Viv said. “We have businesses to run during the day.”
    “Maybe.” Lin thought it over and wondered how the police would handle the information. “I wonder if I should report it to Quinn first? Since he’s the manager, he might want to be involved in the call to the police. I don’t want to jeopardize our professional relationship.”
    “That’s a good idea.” Viv agreed. “Tell him in the morning and then you can make the call together.”
    The girls arrived at the entrance to the trail. “Where’s Nick?”
    Viv spotted the dog walking in the woods to their right. “He’s there.” She pointed. Out of the corner of her eye, Viv saw something and she hooked her arm through Lin’s and pulled her behind the trees at the beginning of the trail.
    “What?” Lin questioned her cousin’s action.
    Viv stared at the office