1 Catered to Death by Marlo Hollinger

that Claudine was something of a cold fish but this look was really incredible. I almost expected instant ice crystals to start forming on Monica’s dress.”
    “Interesting,” Steve said. “How did Monica react?”
    “She didn’t. She was so busy staring at Frank’s hand on Monica’s knee that the building could have burst into flames and she probably wouldn’t have noticed.”
    “Maybe ol’ Frank was something of a player and had something going on with both Monica and Claudine?”
    “I thought the same thing.”
      “He must have been quite the ladies’ man. Was he good looking?”
    “I guess so.” I hadn’t told Steve that there was something about the late Frank Ubermann that reminded me just a little bit of vintage Robert Redford. Steve always got so ridiculously jealous whenever I watched The Way We Were which I only did two or three times a year . I decided to compare him to Burt Reynolds instead. “He was a little bit like Burt Reynolds in his prime. Sort of confident and cocky and definitely comfortable in his own skin and around women. Nice looking but he came across as more handsome than he really was because of his attitude. Alpha male all the way.”
    “Do you know if he was married?”
    “I think so. He said he was going camping with Sylvia this weekend and I assumed that’s his wife.” I shuddered. “How awful for his wife to get a phone call saying that her husband had been murdered. Especially in such a bizarre way.”
    “Murder is murder,” Steve replied matter-of-factly, “but you’re right. Getting shot by an arrow has to be one of your lesser happening crimes in today’s world. That must have hurt something fierce. I wonder why they were using regular bows. Wouldn’t you think that a school would use something with safety tips?”
    “I thought about that too and I asked Simpson why Eden Academy didn’t use something that was safer for students. He said that Frank was a stickler for accuracy. Frank was a Boy Scout leader for years and years and was really into the whole outdoor thing and that he wanted to teach the kids how to shoot with the real deal, not an imitation.”
    “Well, I bet he wishes he’d gone with the imitation now,” Steve observed. “Frank Ubermann sounds like he was pretty heavily into the whole macho thing. A lesser man would have been pretty leery of teaching high school students how to shoot bows and arrows without any protection.”
    “Maybe he trusted his students,” I suggested.
    “He was a fool if he did. Maybe it was a student who did him in. That’s a possibility—a kid with a grudge against him for flunking him.”
    “I don’t know—a high school student?”
    “Have you watched the news lately? Innocence is a thing of the past.”
    I considered and then rejected the idea. “It still seems too well thought out to me. I don’t think Tyler would have been able to come up with something like that when he was in high school—not that he would have ever done anything like that in the first place.”
    “Tyler barely managed to get his butt to school most of the time he was in high school so I seriously doubt he could have master minded any kind of plot, criminal or otherwise. DeeDee, let’s get back to what happened today. The lunch ended and then what?”
    “Well, let me think. I was cleaning up when I heard this horrible scream out in the hallway. I went to the door just as Claudine was running up the stairs shouting that Frank was dead. It seemed like everyone came out into the hall and raced down the stairs to the basement at the same time.”
    “Did you go too?”
    I nodded.
    “What did you see? Exactly?”
    “Frank was in the gym lying on the floor right in front of one of those bull’s eye targets.” I drank more wine as I remembered how Frank Ubermann had looked stretched out on the floor, an arrow sticking out of his chest straight up into the air like something out of an old western. His blue eyes had been open and had