So Pretty It Hurts

“How did you manage to survive so long?”

She snorted and took another bite of muffin. This time she waited until she swallowed before answering.

“It’s simple,” she said finally. “I stayed ’cause of the money. She paid combat wages. I made major overtime from driving her up here this weekend. And the reason she never fired me is because she liked having me around. She’d never had anyone in her life who she felt this superior to.”

She set the muffin down and eyed the basket for another as if blueberries had lost their magic for her.

“Are we about done?” she asked, glancing back at me with almost a glare. “I’m not used to getting up at three, and I’m not really in the mood to talk.”

I decided to try one more tack: Get straight to the point.

“Did you go into Devon’s room tonight?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said. Did you go into Devon’s room after you learned she was dead—and remove something?”

“You mean like the cash from her wallet? That’s a pretty nervy thing to ask.”

“No. A bottle of ipecac.”

I could tell from the look in her eyes she knew exactly what that was, and I wasn’t going to get any “Ipe- what?” line from her.

“Why would I do that?” she asked.

“So that no one would know she was bulimic.”

“I couldn’t care less what people think of Devon Barr.”

“Did she have an eating disorder?”

“I assume this is going directly into Buzz magazine?”

“I would use it just as background.”

“She might have,” she said, shrugging. “A month or so ago I started noticing that she didn’t seem to be eating very much. Unless you count green tea, bottled water, and the flecks at the bottom of the Special K box.”

“Last night she called Laura, one of the girls who helped at dinner, and said she wasn’t feeling well. Were you aware of that?”

“Why would I be aware of that? I assisted the woman. I didn’t sleep with her.”

“So you never checked in on her last night after you left here.”

“No.”

“Did you ever call extension seven during the night?”

“What? This is getting ridiculous. Do you mind if I eat my breakfast in peace?”

“I’m almost done. Devon told me she was frightened up here. Do you know why?”

Her brown eyes widened, curious.

“No,” she said. “What was the reason?”

“She wouldn’t tell me. After a minute she just clammed up.”

Jane shrugged. “Maybe it was like a Twilight Zone episode,” she said. “She took a look in the mirror one day and saw the real her. That would have been really frightening.”

She plucked another muffin, this one corn, and after plopping it on a plate, headed over toward one of the sofas. There were other people I wanted to talk to, but it was time to get Nash on the phone and fill him in on what had happened.

I hurried back to my room, squinting in the passageway from the emerging daylight. To my surprise the snow had turned to a steady rain that streaked and fogged the windows. Hopefully it was warming up, and some of the snow on the road would melt away.

Back in my room, I called Nash’s cell. Though he was used to being phoned at all hours—particularly with celeb DWIs—he answered groggily.

“Give yourself a minute to wake up,” I told him. “Because I’ve got big news.”

“Christ, that is big,” he said after I’d taken him through everything. “How soon can you get me something?”

“I have my laptop with me, and it shouldn’t take me more than thirty minutes to write something up and e- mail you. Then I’ll file reports as things progress.”

“Where are you exactly, anyway?”

“About two hours north of the city. The one fly in the ointment is that it’s been snowing like crazy. On the one hand it’s a good thing because I want to talk to people here—and they’re stranded. But eventually Jessie and I need to find our way back to Manhattan. It’s a little bit like The Shining up here.”

He told me that he’d be pulling staff into the office to dig background for the story and begin producing the obligatory sidebars on the life and times of Devon Barr.

“See if you can find anything about her having an eating disorder,” I said. “I think it could have played a role in her death.”

I needed to start writing stat, but there was one thing I had to take care of first: let Cap know I was now filing the story. Plenty of reporters I knew at Buzz would just go ahead and deal later with any flak that resulted from all the people who’d been bruised in the process. But I never liked to play things that way. It’s not that I’m such a goody-two-shoes, but in the long run people treat you better if you’ve been fair with them. I would need Cap as I pursued this story, and I wanted to alert him to the fact that within the next hour the Buzz Web site would be announcing the death of Devon Barr.

There turned out to be no need to go all the way back to the other barn. As I came down the stairs into the first-floor foyer, Cap was just emerging from the passageway.

“How are you doing?” I said. “This must be really devastating for you.”

“Yes,” he answered grimly. “It is.”

“Do you have a few minutes? I’d like to talk to you.”

“Actually I don’t. I need to retrieve some papers from my room.”

“How about later then?”

“I don’t really think it would be very smart of me to talk to you.”

“I’ll be straight with you,” I said. “I do have to file this story. It’ll be live on the Web site before long, and it will most likely be the cover story of the magazine on Thursday. So wouldn’t it be better for you to have control over the information that gets out there? Plus, I promise you, I won’t sandbag you in any way. I’ll keep you abreast of what I’m doing.”

He shook his head in despair.

“Let me think about it,” he said and moved off.

If Devon had been his lover, this had to be eating him up. Yet there was something else to consider. If the autopsy indicated foul play and he had been her lover, that would make him a prime suspect. I wondered if I should have told the police about the conversation I’d overheard between the two of them—Devon demanding that he would “have to tell her”—but I didn’t like the idea of making trouble for him unnecessarily. If the death was ruled a homicide, I could always inform the cops later.

I reentered my room and headed for the small antique desk near the window. Stretching my arms out, I plopped down at the desk. My laptop was already set up there, since I’d planned to do a little research for upcoming articles. I started to open a file, and then I realized something was out of whack. My laptop wasn’t in the same spot it had been in earlier. I like to rest my arms directly in front of it, so I generally leave about four or five inches between the computer and the edge of the desk But now my laptop was right up to the very edge of the desk—as if someone had pulled it closer.

I caught a breath and instinctively looked behind me. There was no one there, of course, but I knew that someone had been in my room. And it wasn’t necessarily the person who had taken Scott’s keys. Jessie and I hadn’t been given keys, so my room had never been locked. Anyone could have gained entrance.

I jumped up from the desk and made a quick sweep of the room. Nothing was missing, and nothing else seemed disturbed. What could the person have wanted? And why check out my computer? To see what I was