Hannah and Norman gulped in tandem even though they’d already figured out the end of the story. It was still horrifying. But Mike seemed unfazed. Perhaps he’d heard even worse tales than this when he’d been a detective on the police force in Minneapolis.

“So what did you tell everybody about where Red was?” Mike asked.

“I said he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Nobody ever asked me any more about it. They all figured he left me because he didn’t want to take care of a wife and a baby. So are you gonna arrest me now? Or what?”

“What,” Mike said, earning a smile from Hannah. “There’s no reason to arrest you, Mrs. Henderson. It sounds to me like it was self-defense.”

“But I killed him, all the same!”

“What do you think?” Mike turned to Norman, and Hannah came close to gasping out loud. For a cop who always went by the book, this was quite a divergence.

“Justifiable homicide,” Norman said, jumping in quickly with his vote. “How about you, Hannah.”

“It’s certainly not murder. You killed him, but you were protecting your baby’s life.”

“Okay,” Mike said, smiling at Winnie. “As long as Doc Knight substantiates the injuries you described, this matter is concluded.”

“You mean

you’re not taking me to jail?”

“That’s right. Now here’s a hard question and I want you to answer it honestly. Did you switch those revolvers so that Dean Lawrence would die and keep his hands off that statue?”

Winnie’s mouth fell open and she looked as if a little puff of air from one of Bertie’s handheld hairdryers could knock her over. When she recovered, she shook her head vigorously from side to side. “I was already planning out what to do to keep him from moving that statue, and murder had nothing to do with it!”

“What were you planning to do?”

I was gonna chain myself to that statue, lock it with a padlock, and throw away the key. I figured by the time somebody got bolt cutters, it would be too dark to shoot it anyway.”

“Then you never thought about switching the revolvers?”

“’Course not! It could’ve been that young surfer in those commercials that got himself killed, and I got nothing against him. Or it could’ve been anybody that picked up that gun and was fooling around with it.”

“Okay,” Mike said, snapping his notebook closed and putting it in his pocket. “That’s what I thought, but I had to ask. It’s part of my job.”

“A person’s got to do their job.” Winnie looked very relieved once she saw that Mike believed her. “Are you gonna tell everybody that I killed Red?”

“I can’t see any reason to do that. It was over years ago.”

“But