My phone buzzed. Dad.
Grandma reached over and turned it face down on the console.
“Courthouse first,” she repeated. “Then the bank. Then there’s one more place.”
“What place?”
She looked directly into my eyes. “My house.”
I swallowed hard. “Why?”
“Because if they’ve done what I think they’ve done, your parents didn’t just leave me there today.”
She reached inside her coat and pulled out a small envelope.
Across the front, written in my grandfather’s handwriting, were two words: HOUSE DEED.
“I hid this before they came to pick me up,” she said. “I wanted to know whether they would go looking for it.”
Her voice dropped. “They wanted me out of the way.”
PART 2
I need to tell you something about my grandmother, because my parents forgot it, and it cost them everything.
Grandma Eleanor was not a confused old woman.
Before she retired, she spent thirty-one years as the office manager for a law firm — the person who actually ran the place, who knew where every document lived and what every signature meant.
