Frozen Stiff by Mary Logue Page B

me.
    They sat down and swapped halves of their sandwiches, even though Curt wasn’t crazy about olive loaf. His meatloaf sandwichwas on thick whole wheat bread that his mother baked. Hers was on slightly above average store-bought bread. She thought they complimented each other. She started with the meatloaf and then would move on to the olive loaf.
    “Don’t you wish we had a Starbucks down the street?” she asked.
    “A big frappucino would sure taste good with our pumpkin bars.”
    “The cooks here just don’t seem big into the idea of an espresso machine.” Meg neatly folded up the wax paper that her sandwich had been wrapped in. She reused it as many times as she could. For the environment. “Speaking of Andy,” she said, “did you hear that Bonnie Hegstrom had a baby?”
    “Yeah, Kenny told me in fourth. I’m probably the last person in the whole school to know.”
    “Doesn’t she live like in the next farm over from Andy?”
    “Yeah. So what?”
    “Well, do you have any idea who the dad is?”
    Curt slumped back in his chair and frowned. “Geez, I haven’t seen Bonnie with any guy. She rides my bus. She usually just sits with one of the other girls. You don’t think that Andy...?”
    Meg raised her shoulders. “He’s the closest guy to her. Could have been literally just a roll in the hay.”
    “Boy, he’s never said anything, but then we don’t tend to talk much about those kind of things.”
    “Why don’t you see what you can find out?”
    Curt scrunched up his face. “Really?”
    “For me?” Meg rubbed his ear lobe. She knew he just loved that. “You know, for the putty factor.”
    11 am
    “And the cleaning lady,” Amy said as she climbed into the passenger side of the squad car.
    Claire had asked Amy to come back to the department with her as the floor nurse had assured her that they would let no one enter Daniel Walker’s room except the nurses and doctors. His room was right across from the nurses’ desk and Claire trusted them to keep a good eye on him. Plus, Walker seemed fully capable of yelling for help. By the time they left him, he was complaining about the service in the hospital. Being nearly frozen to death didn’t seem to have affected his vocal chords.
    Claire wanted Amy to start checking alibis. She also thought it was time to talk to Walker’s lawyer and find out who got the money if he died.
    The squad car turned over hard a couple times, sounding like a cow stuck in a chute, then caught and roared to life. Even through her polar-fleece gloves, Claire could feel the frigid cold radiating out of the steering wheel. “The cleaning lady, what?”
    “Has a key. She let herself in while I was searching the house. I forgot to mention that. Sara Hegstrom. You know her?”
    “Don’t think I do.”
    Amy rubbed her gloved hands together. “Her husband’s Clyde. They have a farm out on Goatback.”
    “So that makes four people with keys besides Mr. Walker: his wife, his daughter, his cleaning lady and his handyman. No butler.” After scraping a small peephole through the ice on the windshield, Claire crawled out onto the street. The plows had been by but the slick surface of the roads was still treacherous.
    “I guess a cleaning lady is as close as we’re going to get to a butler.”
    “Yes, but why would the cleaning lady want to kill him?”
    “Search me,” Amy spoke with her head tucked turtle-like into her jacket collar. “Although maybe she was letting herself in today so that she could be the one to find him out in the snow. Clever.”
    “You’ve been reading too many Agatha Christies.” Claire pulled into the government center lot. They both sat for a moment, not wanting to get out of the warm car. The sun was shining in a vivid blue sky but it looked pale and far away.
    “I don’t get her books. Too prim and proper for my taste. I like James Lee Burke better. Plus, there’s never any snow in an Agatha Christie,” Amy pointed out with