The cases around here are not your standard domestic brawl or robbery or occasional crime of passion. There are those, too, but that’s the easy stuff, all fluff compared to what she is usually taking in, the cases that cost her sleep at night and keep her looking over her shoulder at odd times. There were three heads in a freezer, right there in a normal avocado-green Kenmore—obviously old, given the color, but still running, which someone said later was certainly a fine recommendation for a Kenmore; terrible circumstances but a fine recommendation. The testimony revealed it to be a twenty-one-cubic-foot Kenmore top-freezer, even though the accused continued to call it “the Kelvinator” throughout his trial—“my momma’s Kelvinator”—leaving the whole court to feel like they’d gotten spun around in a time machine and spit out somewhere eighty years ago.

The use of freezers has unfortunately been a popular thing, especially for crimes committed in the heat of summer. It seems the involvement of mothers also comes up often: Momma owned the house, Momma owned the freezer, it was Momma herself there in the chest freezer out in that garage, her legs mixed in with those of deer and rabbits—a 12.8 cubic foot Frigidaire in white; there’s very little color choice in chest freezers, it seems, but Shelley did make a notation for herself, something to share with Brent, which she thought would be an interesting topic of conversation, if she ever talks to him again, that the use of freezers to hide crimes crossed all class lines. There were just as many Viking and KitchenAid freezers as there were Amana and Kenmore—murdering and freezing the body was not just a low-class crime, but it is why she had insisted they buy a Bosch refrigerator, much to Brent’s impatience and obvious irritation when she said she wanted that one because it was the one brand she had not heard about being used.

“There’s always a first,” he said, and for a moment she froze, right there in Lowe’s, Harvey and Jason still in her vision, sitting on a riding lawn mower. Jason was more than old enough for her to trust him with his little brother by then, which was a relief; Jason had been a boy she needed to tether to her, wrist to wrist, with what looked like a long telephone cord so she wouldn’t lose him in a crowd.

“Shelley.” Brent jiggled her arm. “That’s a joke.”

“I knew that,” she said, and made herself laugh. “I really did.” And she said how she was just keeping an eye on the kids; she was excited about a new refrigerator, and how Jason had told Harvey the one about is your refrigerator running? Better go catch it!