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  “Oh, please, how many running egg cups did you own?” Nell said. “You don’t even eat eggs in cups. Come on. Let’s get the last of this upstairs before she changes her mind and decides to keep it.”

  “She can’t,” Suze said, sliding off the freezer. “She needs the room for her incoming two thousand pieces of Fiestaware.” Suze dusted off the seat of Riley’s sweats. “You know, while she’s at it, she should get rid of Stewart’s golf trophy and Stewart’s freezer. After all, she got rid of Stewart.”

  “Let’s just get her out of the house.” Nell slid a box labeled “breakfast set” off the shelf and then, as she turned, caught sight of the freezer chest with the golf trophy sitting on top like a tombstone.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself.

  “What?” Suze said.

  You’re just sensitive about freezers, Nell told herself. Lynnie would make anybody morbid about ice cubes.

  “Why are you looking at the freezer like that?” Suze said.

  Nell put her box down on the concrete floor, her heart pounding like mad.

  “You’re breathing funny,” Suze said, breathing a little funny herself.

  Nell swallowed and walked over to the freezer. She picked up the trophy carefully and set it on the floor, and then she took a deep breath and tried to lift the lid.

  It was locked.

  “We need a key,” she told Suze.

  “I’ll get it,” Suze said and came back a minute later with the key, saying, “Margie didn’t even ask me why.”

  The lid stuck at first, and then gave way with a creak, as if it hadn’t been opened in years, like a casket in a Vincent Price movie. But when Nell looked inside, it was full to the brim with everyday white packages labeled in black marker “porterhouse, 6/93” and “sirloin, 5/93.”

  “Thank God.” Nell leaned on the side of the freezer in relief. “Talk about a morbid imagination.”

  “They’re all from 1993,” Suze said, her voice sounding odd. “They haven’t used this freezer since Stewart left.”

  They looked at each other, and then they began to unload the top layer of white packages.

  “This stuff should be thrown out anyway,” Nell said, stacking beef. “It can’t be any good anymore.”

  “If it was, Margie wouldn’t eat it,” Suze said. “It’s not—”

  Her breath went out on a whoosh, and Nell forced herself to look at Suze’s end of the freezer.

  There, wrapped in green plastic, one cheek against a package labeled “grilled hamburgers 6/93” and the other next to a package labeled “grilled porkchops 5/93,” was something the size of a man’s head.

  Nell swallowed and took a deep breath and then she tore the brittle plastic away. Beneath it was an unpleasantly blue, pudgy face topped by blond hair with a lot of brown stuff crusted in it.

  “Stewart,” Nell said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Suze said, “Oh, God,” and turned her back and slid down the side of the freezer case, and Nell shifted enough of the packages to see that the rest of Stewart’s body was there, that nobody had decapitated him or otherwise chopped him into steaks. “He’s all here.”

  “Oh, good,” Suze said faintly from the floor.

  “So,” Nell said, trying to keep her voice calm. She began to repack the freezer, taking pains to replace the meat as neatly as before.

  “Uh, Nell?” Suze said, her voice still unnaturally high.

  “We have to think,” Nell said, still stowing meat. “So we’ll just put this all back and think.”

  When she had the last of the packages back in place and the lid closed again, Nell sat down beside Suze, who had put her head between her knees.

  “He’s been in there since 1993.” Suze lifted her head. “That’s Margie for you. ‘Maybe they’ll never know.’ My God.”

  “Margie didn’t know,” Nell said. “She’s a vegetarian. You know how she feels about fresh food. She’d never look in here.”

  “It has to be Margie who put him there. Anybody else would have done something with the body in the last seven years.”

  “Like what?” Nell said. “Look, Margie couldn’t have put him in the freezer. Stewart outweighed her by a hundred pounds.”

  “She could have dragged him down here. By his feet.”

  Nell winced at the picture of Margie dragging Stewart down into the basement, his head bouncing on the stair treads. “Could you have kept Jack in the basement that long?”

  Suze tilted her head. “Yes. But then I’m really mad at him.”

  Nell tried to picture Tim wrapped in plastic in the basement in their old house. It wasn’t entirely impossible. There had been a time not too long ago that she would have positively enjoyed it. A little payback for freezing her out. “Maybe. But I think I might have trouble sleeping at night.”

  “Soy milk and Amaretto,” Suze said.

  “We have to call Gabe,” Nell said, and then she stopped, hearing voices upstairs.

  “What is it?” Suze said.

  “Budge,” Nell said.

  * * *

  An hour later, Gabe was scowling over the fire marshal’s report when Chloe knocked on the door, marched in, and plopped herself down in the chair across from him.

  “Our daughter is getting married,” she announced. She was tan and healthy and happy in spite of the concern on her face.

  “Welcome back,” he said. “Lu’s not getting married. He turned her down.”

  “What?” Chloe was, if anything, more upset. “How could anybody turn her down?”

  “He’s sane,” Gabe said. “Also he’s a good kid, and he loves her. He’s not going to screw up her life, although she’s doing her damnedest to screw up his.”

  “You like him,” Chloe said.

  “I like him,” Gabe said. “I’d like him better if he wasn’t sleeping with my daughter, but somebody’s going to do it, so it might as well be him.”

  “He’s a Pisces.”

  “Is that good?” Gabe said. “You’re a Pisces, right?”

  “For you, it was awful. You’re a Taurus. For Lu, it’s excellent. She’s a Capricorn. What do we know about him?”

  “He’s Nell’s kid.”

  “Really?” Chloe sat back, calm again. “Have you realized Nell is your soul mate?”

  “Yes. Try not to gloat.”

  “I’m not gloating, I’m happy. Even with the stars behind you, you could have screwed that up.” She stood up. “I’m going to go home and call around until I find Lu. I want to meet this Jason.”

  “You’ll like him,” Gabe said. She turned to go and he said, “Hey. It’s good to see you again.”

  “It’s good to see you, too,” she said. “I’m going to Tibet next. You know anybody who’d like to buy The Cup?”

  “Possibly,” Gabe said. “Put Nell on it.”

  She nodded and left, and he thought, Tibet? and then dismissed her from his mind. Half an hour later, there was another knock on his door and this time Lu stuck her head in. “Can we come in?”

  “We who?” he said, and she pushed the door open farther and came in, pulling Jason Dysart behind her. “Oh.” He felt suddenly guilty because he hadn’t called Jason the night before. If he’d gone to see his mother and found that burned-out apartment—

  “We’re engaged,” Lu said, her eyes bright, daring him to make a scene, making him forget the fire for a moment. “See?”

  She held out her hand, and Gabe was taken aback at the size of the ring.

  “You knock over a jewelry store?” he said to Jase, wanting to smack the kid for tying Lu down so young.

  “My mother’s china cabinet,” Jase said, looking fairly miserable for a newly engaged man.

  “Do you want this?” Gabe said to him, ignoring Lu. “Or are you just caving in because she cut you off?”

  “I want this,” Jase said, his face darkening at Gabe’s tone. “We’re going to wait to get married until I graduate, but not until Lu graduates. Compromise.”