Page 42 of Four Steps to the Perfect Fake Date

Ceecee shrugged. “I dunno. That’s just what she said.” She kept her eyes peeled, scanning the road around them. “Where do you think they went?”

“They’re not criminal masterminds, and the island isn’t that big, so I think we can find out.” He pressed a few buttons on the console until his phone rang through the system to connect to the station.

Teri answered on the second ring. “Sheriff?”

“You know Daphne’s grandmother and her two friends?”

“Sure,” Teri answered.

“Where do they live?”

“Mabel lives up on the north end with Claude and Helen Davis. Harry and Greta are neighbors. They share a duplex on Fourteenth Street.”

“You know the addresses?”

“I’ll find ’em,” she said. “Something wrong?”

“No, just checking up on them.”

“Roger,” the woman said. “I’ll send the addresses through shortly.”

Calvin waited for Teri’s message as he headed toward Fourteenth Street. Once the address came through, he parked in the duplex’s leftmost drive, gave Ceecee a stern look as she lowered the window with an impish look on her face, then headed up the path to knock on the door.

There was no answer on either side of the duplex. A neighbor poked her head out.

“Something wrong, Sheriff?”

“I’m looking for Greta and Harry,” he called over the hedge.

“Haven’t seen either of them since this morning. They were heading to the Sunrise Diner for breakfast.”

And after breakfast, they’d hung around his mother’s house. Which meant there was only one more place they could be.

“Thanks,” he said, and got back in his truck.

“We’re heading to the north end?” Ceecee asked, following the direction of Calvin’s thoughts.

He reversed out of the driveway. “We’re heading to the north end,” he confirmed.

“This is so much fun,” Ceecee proclaimed. “But what if they’re not at Mabel’s house? Where will we go?”

“We’ll do exactly what they were trying to do to us, kid,” he said, grinning. “Stake ’em out and wait until we get some answers.”

Chapter 16

Daphne’s head ached. As they pulled up outside her parents’ house, she barely heard the chatter from the three older ladies as she unclipped her seat belt and slid out of the car.

What a pointless exercise that stakeout had been. All she’d accomplished was being found out by the one man who couldn’t know anything about this stupid scheme.

She’d be better off sticking to accounting. Clearly Daphne wasn’t cut out for the high-risk lifestyle of stealing back decades-old cast-iron pots with the help of three geriatrics of dubious sanity.

“We’ll have to go again and get a look at the backyard. I wonder if they have cameras,” Mabel mused as she made her way to the door. “Do we know any hackers?”

“They definitely have cameras,” Harry said, thumping after Mabel onto the porch. “Rich people love cameras.”

“Maybe we can find a hacker on the dark web,” Greta suggested. “My granddaughter said that’s where all the criminals hang out.”

Daphne rolled her eyes up to the sky and prayed for patience. “We don’t need to hack any cameras,” she said. “I just need to get in there, find an excuse to wander away from the party, and then look through the cupboards until I find the pot.”

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