Free Norway to Hide by Maddy Hunter Page A

open and Jackie bustled into the room weighed down by so many shopping bags that she looked like a clothes tree that needed uncluttering.
    “Welcome back!” Nana scuffed across the floor to give her a hug. “What a haul.” She read the lettering on the bags. “Marimekko. Stockmann. Here we thought you was in the Big House, when all the time you was shoppin’. Where’s the police station? In a mall?”
    “Hardly. I left my bags at the front desk before I joined the little witch hunt in the conference room. The nerve of those people!” She dumped her stash onto the bed at George’s feet. “Can you believe they dragged me off like a common criminal? I can see why they took Bernice in; she looks like Public Enemy Number One. But me? The only thing I’m guilty of is eating off all my lip gloss and forgetting to reapply.”
    “I’m so happy they let you go!” I hopped off my bed and gave her a welcoming hug. “Did they release Bernice, too?”
    “Yup. We rode back in the same cab with Annika. Thank God they let Annika go to the police station with us. I don’t know what we would have done without her.”
    “What made them decide to let you go?” asked George.
    “They obviously had no evidence to implicate either of us. Besides, we both had airtight alibis.”
    I regarded her oddly. “Bernice didn’t have an alibi. That’s part of the reason why she came under suspicion.”
    “She musta made somthin’ up,” said Nana. “That Bernice can think on her feet real good. That’s part a her mystique.”
    “She didn’t have to make anything up,” said Jackie. “She told them she’d been talking on the phone while she was in her room, and when the police investigated, it all checked out.”
    “Who could she possibly have been talking to locally?” asked Tilly. “Bernice doesn’t know anyone in Finland, and she’d never pay for long distance.”
    “The front desk. She was on the phone with them for two solid hours complaining her little heart out. The desk clerk actually documented it, because he thought the hotel could use her call to instruct new employees about how to be diplomatic with cranky Americans. Since Bernice couldn’t have been on her room phone and strangled Portia at the same time, they had to cut her loose.”
    “They’ve already established the time of death?” I asked. “That was fast.”
    Jackie looked unimpressed. “It was a no-brainer. There was a narrow window between the time the last person signed out of the sauna and the time when you found the body, so that had to have been when the killer struck. And the great irony is that if this had happened next week, the police would have caught it all on videotape because the city is installing surveillance cameras throughout the entire underground concourse. But the system isn’t operational yet. Can you believe the bad luck? I can’t think of an instance of poorer timing.”
    “Custer leading his troops into battle at the Little Big Horn,” said Tilly.
    “The Titanic steaming through that ice field in the North Atlantic,” said George.
    “Melanie Wilkes havin’ that baby a hers on the very night the Yankees was attackin’ Atlanta,” said Nana.
    We stared at her in silence.
    “What?” she complained. “Don’t Southern fiction count?”
    “Out of curiosity, Jack, how did you come by all this detailed information?”
    “Annika has a drinking buddy on the force, so she pumped him for details. I appreciated your offering to come to the station with us, Emily, but Annika was right to discourage you. We needed someone who could shmooze in the mother tongue.”
    “Did you come up with an airtight alibi, too?” asked Nana. “We was wonderin’ where you was all afternoon and evenin’.”
    Jackie removed a fistful of loose papers from her purse. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the perfect alibi: shopping receipts stamped with the date and time of purchase. Isn’t technology wonderful?” She fanned them out like a