Free There's Something About Marty (A Working Stiffs Mystery Book 3) by Wendy Delaney Page B

service.”
    Two minutes later, I was in the kitchen listening to him channel surf when I heard my grandmother open the back door.
    “You ladies must have been having quite a game.” I glanced at the clock on the stove. “It’s almost ten. You’re usually home from Mrs. Doolittle’s by nine.” And since Angela Doolittle lived several miles away on the south shore of Merritt Bay, and my eighty-year-old grandmother didn’t like to drive at night, often closer to eight.
    Gram set her purse on the kitchen table and dropped into one of the hardback chairs like she was dead on her feet. “We got a late start. Estelle finally called Angela from the hospital to let us know that she couldn’t make it.”
    “Uh-oh.” I remembered this morning’s commentary about Estelle’s driving and wondered if any of those sirens I’d heard were for her. “Is she doing okay?”
    Gram blinked her hazel green eyes, slightly magnified behind her trifocals. “Is she doing okay? Honey, Estelle’s fine. It’s her great-grandson who was taken to the hospital. Poor little thing.”
    Estelle had been a widow for so many years and had surrounded herself with such a menagerie of cats, I’d never thought of her as having anything but four-legged children, much less great-grandchildren. “What happened?”
    “From what Estelle was able to get out of Phyllis—”
    “Wait! Phyllis? Phyllis Bozeman?”
    Gram nodded. “The boy’s granny on the mother’s side.”
    That meant that this was Aubrey’s kid, and we were talking about Marty McCutcheon’s former girlfriend, which piqued my interest all the more.
    “According to Estelle, Phyllis was babysitting the boys to let the parents have a night out. Then, while she was cooking their supper, the toddler slipped out through the dog door.”
    I sucked in a breath, a twenty-year-old memory flooding back from when I had babysat Frankie’s little kids and the panic I’d felt when one of them pulled a similar disappearing act.
    Gram shook her head. “I guess she found him eating some plant in the yard.”
    “Oh, no!”
    “The good news though is that she rushed him to the ER, and it looks like he’s going to be fine.”
    “Thank goodness.”
    “No kidding. A little kid like that, it wouldn’t take more than a couple bites of a poisonous plant to kill him.”
    I couldn’t help but wonder if the same could be said for a man of Marty McCutcheon’s size.
    “But thanks to Phyllis’s quick thinking, she saved him,” Gram said, pushing to her feet.
    “She also gave him the opportunity to eat the plant, so I wouldn’t give her too much credit.”
    Gram patted my shoulder and headed toward the refrigerator. “I give credit where credit is due. Sounds like the parents did, too. I guess Estelle’s grandson went on and on about how grateful he was that Phyllis was a master gardener and recognized that it was a poisonous plant.”
    A master gardener who knows about poisonous plants and her former boyfriend’s penchant for hot sauce?
    I shivered, my skin prickling with gooseflesh as my brain churned over the possibility that this was more than a coincidence. “Did Estelle mention the name of the plant?”
    “I don’t know. Angela talked to her, I didn’t.” Gram pulled a juice glass out of the cupboard and filled it with milk. “Why do you want to know the name of the plant? It’s probably something so common that I have it in my yard.”
    “Just curious. Stuff like that is good to know.”
    She narrowed her eyes at me. “Since when do you take an interest in gardening?”
    Ever since Phyllis Bozeman’s name had come up twice in the same day.
    I shrugged a shoulder as I opened the jar of Dijon mustard that Steve liked. “I’m interested in lots of things.”
    “Is one of them about to eat a sandwich?”
    Gram knew I’d been making a lot of late night trips across the street to be with Steve, so there was no point in denying the obvious.
    “He had to work late and missed out on