Grandma called at eight o’clock.
“I’m at the Rickert viewing,” she said, “and I could use a ride home. I don’t suppose you could come get me? There’s a lot of people here, and it’s going to be a big traffic mess, so you could pick me up on the side street by the driveway going to the garage area.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”
Fifteen minutes later I turned onto the side street and saw Grandma crash through a hedge that bordered the funeral home driveway and wave me down. I stopped the Buick, and she grabbed the door handle, wrenched the door open, and jumped inside.
“Go, go, go,” she said.
I took off and gave her a sideways glance. “What’s this all about?”
“I didn’t feel like talking to anybody. And the cookies weren’t so good either. By the time I got to the cookies there were only Fig Newtons left, and they get under my dentures.”
When I drove up to my parents’ house, my mother was standing on the sidewalk with her arms crossed over her chest.
“Uh-oh,” Grandma said. “I’ve never seen your mother standing there like that.”
“She looks mad.”
“Yeah, I wonder what brought that on.”
“Did you try to pry the lid open on a casket again?”
“No way,” she said. “The lid was already up.”
“Did you stick the dead guy with a pin to make sure he was dead?”
“I didn’t do that either. And I only did that once, when Mabel Sheindler looked so lifelike. And I didn’t knock over any vases or set anything on fire.”
I parked and got out of the car with Grandma.
“What’s up?” I asked my mother.
“I just got fourteen phone calls about someone hitting Joseph’s Grandma Bella in the face with a chocolate cream pie when she was walking out of the funeral home. They said she was going out the side door for some reason, and someone came out of nowhere and hit her with the pie.”
“Did they know who did it?” Grandma asked.
“Bella said it was you.”
“That’s a fib,” Grandma said. “I bet she never even saw who did it. I bet someone lured her out through the side door and then sneaked up behind her and reached around and smushed her with the pie. Those chocolate pies are a big gooey mess. She would have had pie in her eyes when that person was running away. She just thinks it was me, because I have her spooked. She don’t know for sure.”
“Were there witnesses?” I asked my mother.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “Nobody mentioned witnesses.”
“Well, there you have it,” Grandma said. “It’s her word against mine.”
My mother narrowed her eyes at Grandma. “I know you did it.”
“No need to get your panties in a bunch,” Grandma said. “It was just a pie. And anyway maybe it was an accident. Maybe the pie slipped out of someone’s hand and landed in Bella’s face.”
“Is that the story you’re going with?” my mother asked.
“Yeah, I think I’ll stick with that one,” Grandma said.
Morelli and Bob were watching television when I walked in.
“My mother called,” Morelli said. “Someone got Bella with a chocolate cream pie. A full-on face job.”
I squeezed in between Morelli and Bob. “Seems like a waste of a perfectly good pie.”
“I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of whoever did it,” Morelli said.
“Do you mean because of the curse thing?”
“I mean because of the Sicilian revenge thing.”
He hooked a finger under the hem of my T-shirt, lifted it up, and peeked under.
“This is going to be fun tonight,” he said. “Just you and me.”
“Are we going to use the One-Second Wonder Tool?”
“No. We’re going to do it the old-fashioned way. We’re going to use my wonder tool.”
Oh boy.