Fearless Fourteen - Janet Evanovich [61]
“No. It was about my grandmother. She’s having a friend drop her off here, and then I’m going to give her a ride home.”
Zook smiled. “I bet she did something bad and she’s afraid your mother will ground her.”
“Close enough,” I said.
I padded downstairs in the dark and looked out the front window. No police car yet. I walked through the house to the kitchen to get a bottle of water and checked on the yard. No one digging, but there was a bar of light under Morelli’s garage door. Gary was still up. Or maybe Gary was afraid of the dark. Lucky for Gary there was electric in the garage. Unfortunate for Morelli, since he was paying the bill.
I returned to the living room, and Morelli joined me.
“You didn’t have to get up,” I said to him.
“No way was I going to miss this.”
We saw headlights glide to a stop in front of the house, and we went out to say hello to Carl and Big Dog.
“Here she is,” Big Dog said to me, opening the door for Grandma. “Maybe your mother should put a bell around her neck.” He looked at Grandma and shook his finger. “No more sneaking out at night. It’s dangerous.”
“Thanks for the ride,” Grandma said. She looked in the car at Carl. “My regards to your mother.”
Carl smiled and nodded.
“Thanks,” I said to Carl and Big Dog. “I really appreciate this.”
“We would have hauled her in, but it was too embarrassing,” Big Dog said. “She was the only one we could catch.”
Morelli waved them off, and I buckled Grandma into the SUV.
“Where’s your shovel?” I asked her.
“I didn’t have one. I was just supervising. I went to Elmer Rhiner’s viewing and Marion Barker was there with Bitty Kuleza. And Marion said she heard Rose was always saying how she was gonna take her fortune to the grave. And one thing led to another, and it ended up that we thought it would be a good idea to dig Rose up and take a look. So Bitty gave me a ride, and we met Marion and her two grandsons at the cemetery. Her grandsons are real big guys, and they were doing the digging.”
“That’s crazy!”
“Yeah. I don’t know what it is about that money, but it’s just got ahold of me. It’s a beaut of a mystery.”
Morelli drove the short distance and parked in front of my parents’ house. We watched Grandma sneak in, and we waited a couple minutes to make sure she didn’t sneak back out.
“You should snap me up,” Morelli said. “Not many men would marry you after meeting your grandmother. You’re lucky to have me.”
I looked over at him. “Is that a proposal?”
There was total silence for a couple beats. “I’m not sure. It just popped out.”
“Let me know when you’re sure.”
“Would you say yes?” Morelli asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“I bet I could convince you it would be a good thing,” Morelli said. “How about taking a look at my assets?”
Oh good grief.
It took us about twenty minutes in the alley behind the bonds office to appreciate his assets. When we finally returned to his house, all the lights were blazing and two squad cars were angle-parked at his curb. Morelli slid to a stop, and we hit the sidewalk at a run.
“What’s going on?” he said to the cop at the door.
“Your houseguest heard someone break in and called 911.”
Zook was standing in the hall, hanging on to Bob’s collar. “Right after you left, I heard someone at the back door,” Zook said. “Bob heard them, too, and he started barking, and he never barks if it’s someone he knows, so I grabbed Bob and brought him into my room, and then I locked my door and called 911. I put all my lights off and looked out the window at the backyard, and just before the first police car showed up, I saw two men run out of the house and across the yard.”
“What did they look like?” Morelli asked.
“I don’t know. Just average. I couldn’t see. It was real dark. But one of them had a shovel.”
“You have forced entry on the back door,” one of the cops said to Morelli. “And the basement door was open. Other than that, everything seems okay.”
After everyone left, Morelli walked through the house, checking windows and doors. He searched the basement, the closets,