Free Winter at the Door by Sarah Graves Page A

nearest barn, wiping his hands on a rag.
    “Help you?” Smiling but businesslike; introducing herself, she saw his eyes register the official car and the fact that she was a cop, but not with any concern.
    “Roger Brantwell?” she asked, not thinking he could be; his face, while friendly, was thin and ferret-like.
    “Oh, hell, no,” he said, laughing in reply; a
pleasant
ferret. “I’m Tom Brody, I’m just the hired man around here. Or one of ’em,” he added. “Place is crawling with ’em, as you can see.”
    He waved a flannel-shirted arm around the neat, organized-looking barnyard: wood crates stacked here, farm machinery parked there, nothing random-appearing. And Brody was right, the place bustled with men—no women, Lizzie noticed—busy hammering or painting or hauling or fixing big pieces of equipment she didn’t recognize, in the bluish late-afternoon light.
    As she watched, Missy came out onto the broad porch that ran along the side of the house. A wooden porch swing on heavy chains hung by a window full of red geraniums; she stopped by it.
    “What’s up?” she asked, gently jouncing the baby she held in her arms and not sounding any more friendly than she had the night before.
    “Got something I’d like to run by you,” Lizzie said. It had occurred to her earlier, but she’d wanted to ponder it.
    “See, I’ve got this kid Spud working for me,” she began when Missy had invited her inside and sat her down in the kitchen.
    Not enthusiastically, but she’d done it. And not just any kitchen: new ceramic tile, stainless steel, polished granite, and a door leading out to a sunroom with wicker and ferns, a fountain trickling prettily in the corner, made this one look fresh out of a decorating magazine.
    “Spud?” Missy responded skeptically. “That freak?”
    “Yeah, well.” Lizzie spread her hands. “He doesn’t seem so bad. Why, should I know something?”
    Missy had put the baby, a handsome and placid little boy about a year old, into a crib in the lamplit sunroom, where he’d promptly fallen asleep.
    “No,” she said, “I guess not. I don’t know how anyone stands looking at all that body piercing of his, though. That nose stud, ugh.”
    Which was what Lizzie had thought, too, but judging people on their style choices didn’t seem right, and after what she’d seen on the streets of Boston, it wasn’t even especially exotic.
    Also, the kid had seemed very eager; pathetically, almost.
    “Yeah, well, maybe you can keep me from having to look at it so much,” she told Missy. “I was hoping I could get you to come work in the office for me.”
    She needed someone so she could have regular office hours without being stuck there herself, and for that Spud wouldn’t do at all. But Missy had begun shaking her curly head even before Lizzie finished.
    “Oh, no. I couldn’t. I’ve got the baby, and—”
    “But I thought your mom took care of him?” As Lizzie spoke a young woman wearing an apron over blue jeans and a sweater came through the kitchen, carrying a can of Pledge and a dust rag.
    “And it’s not like you’re stuck here doing the cleaning,” Lizzie added when the girl had gone. The Brantwells’ program of hiring help went for inside as well as outside, apparently.
    “It won’t make you rich, just twenty hours a week—”
    Not that Missy needed the money, obviously. Every surface in the place glowed with what Lizzie recognized as the effect of plenty of cash: new, clean, shiny, not a speck of dust or smudge of a fingerprint anywhere, and the cars outside were new, too.
    “—but at least there won’t be drunks trying to strangle you,” she added, and at this Missy did crack a smile.
    But her mind was made up. “Thanks. But it wouldn’t work, I’m afraid. My dad’s got some really rigid ideas. It’s only because it’s family that I even talked him into the bar thing.”
    Lizzie sipped coffee. It was intensely pleasant, sitting in the bright, clean kitchen