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daddy, I’m not gonna lose Tige too!”
    “Hold on, I’ll go fetch him. You stay out here, okay?”
    Agnes nodded.
    Fishing inside her oversized handbag, Maddy found a tiny Mag-Lite that she used for finding the lock on the front door whenever she and Beau had been out late at the movies. She clicked it on, pointed the bright laser-like beam, and then clamored through the crack at the base of the door. “Heaven help me, this is insane,” Agnes heard her grandmother mutter as she disappeared inside the mausoleum.
    There was a nervous moment when Maddy feared she might become stuck, her rump too wide for the narrow opening. Too bad she hadn’t been more faithful to that South Beach Diet she’d tried last summer. But with a plop! she pushed her way into the dark interior of the mausoleum and scrambled to her feet.
    The musty smell made her nose twitch. She thought she heard water dripping. Something scurried in the corner – a rat or the wayward dog? Oh my, was she crazy for doing this? Indiana Jones had not been one of her favorite movies, despite the home-state name. She didn’t have the adventurous fortitude to be a tomb raider, she assured herself.
    “Here, Tige. Nice doggie,” she called to the dark. However, her pencil-thin flashlight beam couldn’t make out any familiar shapes.
    “ Arf !”
    She turned the light toward the bark, spotlighting Tige sitting atop a moldy casket – Colonel Madison’s final abode no doubt. But what was that next to the dog? A man’s head?
    “Oh my,” Maddy gasped. There, bronze gleaming in the light of her Mag-Lite, was none other than the missing bust of Colonel Beauregard Hollingsworth Madison.
     
     

 
    Chapter Nine
     
     
Finder of Lost Objects
     
     
    “C ongratulations,” said the police chief as he posed for a photograph with Maddy Madison. “You gals found the danged statue.” The picture would run on the front page of Caruthers Corners Gazette , the town’s weekly newspaper. “Who would’ve thought to look for it in the cemetery?”
    Not Maddy – but she wasn’t about to give all the glory to a wandering dog. Take credit when you can get it, she told herself.
    Agnes and Tige were in the picture too, standing between Maddy and Chief Jim Purdue. Enough credit to go around, she supposed, although the police chief hadn’t really had a hand in the bronze bust’s recovery.
    “How’d you know the thief hid the goods in that tomb?” asked Beau on their way home from the ceremony returning the Colonel’s head to its marble pedestal.
    “Just a lucky guess,” she said, cutting her eyes to Agnes to signal their shared secret.
    “Question remains, who stole it?” Beau continued, eyes on the road.
    “Why, dear, you did.”
    “W-what?” Her husband nearly ran the Buick off the road.
    “That’s right, but it will remain our family secret. Won’t it, Aggie?”
    “Yes, Grammy. Mum’s the word.”
    “Why would I steal my own forefather’s bust?” sputtered Beau, regaining control of the big gas-guzzler.
    “Because you wanted to replace it with a full-sized marble statue. A bigger honor for the Colonel.”
    “Uh, how did you know?” he asked sheepishly.
    “Most of it was guesswork. But it was a clue when I found a receipt from a sculptor in Chicago and noticed that you’d withdrawn twelve thousand dollars from our joint savings account.”
    ≈≈≈
    “What about the size fourteen footprint?” asked Agnes. A precocious child, as it turned out. “Who did that belong to?”
    “That’s still a mystery, my dear. Beau swears he didn’t have any help in filching the bronze bust.”
    “Do you believe him?”
    “Well, he is my husband.”
    “Yes, Grammy. But do you believe him?”
    “No, Aggie, I don’t. That bronze bust is too heavy for one man to carry. And Beau has a bad back. He can hardly pick up the newspaper. And Gazette ’s been pretty thin lately.”
    “Then who?”
    “Has to be Ben Bentley. Of the three men with size fourteen feet,