Life Expectancy

packaged deer meat on the back porch and stored Nedra in the Amana.
        Before he consigned her to the big chill, he had stripped her naked.
        Then he painted her entire body-front and back, neck to toes-in the brightly striped and polka-dotted patterns of a traditional clown costume. She might have been alive for this.
        With what appeared to be stage makeup, he had grease painted her face to resemble that of a clown. He blackened three of her teeth and colored her tongue green.
        In a kitchen drawer, he had found a turkey-basting syringe. He removed from it the rubber squeeze bulb, which he painted red and glued over Nedra's nose.
        The makeup had not been applied in a slapdash manner. Judging by appearances, Beezo spent hours at the task, paying meticulous attention to detail.
        Whether she had been alive for all of that, she had certainly been dead by the time he used a needle and thread to sew shut her eyelids. Then he painted stars over them.
        Finally, he selected a set of deer antlers from the collection in Nedra's garage, and he tied them to her head. To get her into the freezer with the antlers, in a position that assured her face would be turned up to greet whoever found her, he had to break her legs in several places, a task he accomplished with a sledgehammer.
        Huey Foster said, "Jimmy, I swear, he did this 'cause he thought it was funny. He thought someone would open that freezer and laugh, that we'd all be snickering about Nedra in her clown getup for years to come, talking about what a joker that Beezo was."
        Standing there at the nurses' station, I was colder than I had been in the woods, in the blizzard.
        "Well, the crazy sick son of a bitch didn't get any laughs from us,"
        Huey said. "Not one smile. This young state trooper, he bolted from the house and threw up in the backyard."
        "Where is Beezo, Huey?"
        "Freezing to death in the woods, I hope."
        "He didn't go back there for Nedra's Plymouth?"
        "It's still in the garage."
        "He's not in the woods, Huey."
        "Maybe not," he admitted.
        "If he made it back up to Hawksbill Road and someone came along, he could have hitched a ride."
        "Who would be dumb enough to pick him up?"
        "What ordinary decent person wouldn't pick him up on a night like this?
        You see a guy not dressed for the weather, maybe standing by the Hummer, you think he broke down. If you don't pick him up, he's likely to freeze. You don't say to yourself, Better not pick him up, he looks like a murderous clown."
        "If he got a ride, he probably took the car."
        "And the guy who gave him the ride is dead in the trunk."
        "Hasn't been a murder in this town in thirty years that this creep and his son didn't commit."
        "What now?"
        "State police are thinking roadblocks. There's only five routes out of the county, and the snow already helps us."
        "He won't leave tonight," I predicted. "He has unfinished business."
        "I sure hope you're wrong about that."
        "I have a built-in oven timer," I told him.
        "You what?"
        "When I've got something in the oven, I always check it five seconds before the timer goes off. Always. I instinctively know when something's finished baking-and when it's not. Beezo isn't done."
        "You get that from your dad. He could have been a cop as easy as a baker. You too, maybe. Me, I had no choice."
        "I'm scared, Huey."
        "Yeah. Me too."
        As I hung up the phone, a nurse arrived to inform me that Lorrie had given birth. "No complications," she said.
        Boy, could I have given her an earful.
        In the delivery room, the red-haired nurse was at a basin in the corner, cleaning off our little miracle.
        Mello Melodeon was waiting for Lorrie to expel the afterbirth, gently massaging her abdomen to control the flow of blood.
        Whether or not I could have been a cop as easily as a baker, I could never have been a doctor. I'm not even a good patient.
        The only thing preventing me from passing out and breaking my nose against the floor was the certainty that Grandma Rowena would toddle in here and take a picture of me. She would have a disposable camera tucked in a pocket of that snowsuit.
        Using the photo as a pattern, she would needlepoint the scene of my humiliation on a pillow and give