Pasta Imperfect - By Maddy Hunter Page 0,32

eyes. "Well, she was apparently wanting to ditch her assigned roommate and move in with Brandy Ann Frounfelker, the body builder, when lo and behold! Brandy Ann's roommate conveniently takes a header from the top of the stairs and Amanda gets her way."

Jackie's windpipe rattled with an odd choking sound as she proceeded to suck all the breathable oxygen out of the passageway. "Oh, my God! That's what's wrong with you! You think someone deliberately pushed that woman, don't you?"

"I didn't say that."

"But that's what you're thinking. Out with it, Emily. What do you know?"

I regarded her sternly. "Oh, God, I'm so glad you asked. Okay, here's the deal." I gave her the blow-by-blow version of what I'd learned about Amanda, Brandy Ann, Keely, and Cassandra, and when I finished, she nodded.

"You're right. Way too many coincidences. I think she did it."

"Me too!" I hesitated. "Which she?"

Jackie shrugged. "I don't know. One of them. You have the roommate thing going with Amanda. She might have given Cassandra a shove to open up space for herself in Brandy Ann's room, but that seems pretty over - the - top to me."

Over-the-top to a normal person, maybe, but would it seem over-the-top to someone who wrote zombie romances?

"Brandy Ann has the obvious body strength to push someone down a flight of stairs. You said she read Cassandra's stuff, so she knew the kind of talent she was dealing with. Seems possible Brandy Ann might have been trying to eliminate her strongest competition, especially if she heard Cassandra threatening to influence Gabriel Fox by offering him sexual favors."

Sexual favors in my corset dress. The nerve!

"Keely has 'suspect' plastered all over her. She'd worked with Cassandra. She knew her writing style. If she was the one who did the pushing, it was obviously for one of two reasons: either she wanted to zap her closest competitor, or she was getting even with Cassandra for canceling her subscription to her critique service."

I stared at Jackie, stunned. "That's the most extraordinary example of deductive reasoning I've ever heard you construct, Jack. I'm impressed. Really."

She fixed me with a numb look, eyes glassy, jaw slack. "You're right. It was freaking brilliant. Holy shit! How'd that happen?"

I sighed my frustration. "The only problem is, no one is going to bother listening to us. The police are convinced it was an accident precipitated by faulty footwear. Case closed."

"But what if they're wrong?"

I cast around for solutions. "Cassandra was in the room directly across from yours. You didn't happen to hear anything suspicious in the hall last night, did you?"

"Didn't hear a thing until Jeannette came clomping into the room at some wee hour of the morning. I hit the sack early to escape being subjected to any more of her self-adulation, so she decided to go exploring. You know how it is with self-centered people. They can't possibly function without an audience."

I smiled. She knew about that firsthand. "What time was that?"

"Sometime before midnight. She probably wanted to scout out some local eatery so she could write a critical review of their three-cheese pizza. You will talk to Duncan about getting me out of that room, won't you?"

"Promise."

"So what do we do now?"

I gnawed on that for a long moment. "I can't let it go. Etienne would discourage me from meddling, but I'm not comfortable with the police's conclusion. There's something going on here that doesn't feel right to me, and my gut tells me it involves Brandy Ann, Keely, and Amanda, either together or separately. I don't trust them, Jack. I think they're up to no good, so we better keep our eyes on them."

Jackie clapped her hands before tugging on my arm beseechingly. "This is so cool! Surveillance. Eavesdropping. Dirty tricks. Can we wear disguises? Please, Emily? You know how good I am with makeup. I could dress up like a guy! Remember how great I walked when I was a guy? Maybe I could do that again!" She peered down at her feet. "You think anyone will notice that my shoes aren't exactly butch?"

I guess her burst of deductive reasoning had only been a passing thing.

"Wow." I wasn't as high above sea level as when I'd stood atop Mount Pilatus in Switzerland, but I was still high enough up to make the bottoms of my feet tingle. The gallery was octagonal in shape, about ten feet wide, paved with white marble, and surrounded by a railing that stood waist high and might have been made of