Read Online Murder Bone by Bone by Lora Roberts - Free Book Online

pictures.”
    “I am.” Another pause. “Well, do the boys want to speak to me?”
    The boys would undoubtedly mention the bones if they spoke. “They’re pretty busy now. How about we call you around bedtime? Will you be in?”
    “I’ll be in,” Bridget vowed. She gave me their room number to add to the three pages of neatly typed instructions she’d left, and hung up.
    “Good,” Drake said. “You didn’t tell her about the body.” He put his cell phone on the table and stretched, yawning. “She might have cut short her vacation.”
    Drake has had a soft spot for Bridget ever since I met him. That didn’t bother me. A lot of people felt the same, men and women. She brought out people’s protective instincts, whether she needed to or not. I suppose it’s nice that Drake gets crushes on regular women like Bridget and myself, who are far, very far, from being fashionably scrawny young twigs. In my own case, the beauty is pretty much internal, so whatever Drake was seeing was in the eye of the beholder.
    These thoughts were dangerous. I had all too often lately found myself analyzing Drake’s seeming attraction to me. It was a short step from there to analyzing my own attraction to him.
    I looked into the living room, where Corky and Sam dove in and out of blanket-shrouded hidey-holes, and pulled myself back to the conversation. “Bridget certainly deserves this vacation. Anyone who lives full-time with children does. It would be awful if she had to come home early.”
    “I guess.” Drake looked vague. “I just didn’t want her and Emery coming back and cluttering up my investigation.” He grinned at me. “I know I can keep you in order.”
    “Why ever would you think so?” My exasperation wasn’t totally feigned.
    “Because you love a mystery. Confess, Liz. Why else would you get mixed up in them so often?”
    “How exactly did I get mixed up in this one?” I resisted the impulse to wipe that smug smile off his face. This is the reason why I can’t quite let myself be swept away by Drake. He can be so irritating. I think all men are, at least some of the time. Probably women are to men, too. I don’t need the aggravation.
    “ You stirred it up somehow. Just think, if you hadn’t let the boys dig, those bones would probably not have been discovered for decades longer.”
    “Nonsense. The city’s been chewing up the sidewalks at an ever-increasing rate. Cable, storm drains, sewer replacements—seems like they’re digging everything up constantly. They’re digging up the middle of the street out there now, you may have noticed. They’d have run across the bones when they re-do the sidewalk again in six months or so.”
    “You’re probably right.” Drake picked up the cellular phone again. “Don’t let me keep you.”
    I took the juice out to the living room, feeling deprived of the last word. There are many things about trying to sustain a relationship with a man that make me uncomfortable. My very need of the last word showed up a kind of competition with Drake that I had noticed before. Perhaps I was only capable of cessation of hostilities in a relationship, not true love. I didn’t like seeing things between men and women as a war.
    The boys had abandoned their fort and were standing on the window seat, their noses plastered against the glass. “He’s back!” Corky sounded ecstatic.
    “There’s no Bobcat, though.”
    I set the juice on top of the bookcase and joined them. Stewart, the Public Works guy, had returned, in a different truck with different accessories, which was double-parked in front of the driveway. We watched him rummage in the back of the truck and pull out a brilliant orange tarp. He flapped this toward the foot of the excavation, as if making a bed. After walking around to smooth it here and there, he put a portable barricade at each end and strung caution tape around. He stood off, surveying his work, and found it good. After a glance at the house, he drove