So Pretty It Hurts

you?” I asked.

“No, of course not,” she said. “Are you accusing me of something?”

“Someone went back into Devon’s room, and I’m anxious to know who it was.”

“Well, it wasn’t me.”

“Okay, fine. Any more thoughts about who the second person to call extension seven was?

“What?” she asked defensively.

“You told me you got a second call on extension seven—at about two thirty.”

“If I’d known who it was, I would have told you then.”

My, my, she seemed awfully testy.

I picked a sandwich off a platter before Laura whisked it away, and then joined Jessie on the couch.

“Where the hell is everybody?” I whispered. “Are they all holed up in their rooms?”

“Whitney and Cap were up here earlier. They each had a glass of wine and a sandwich and barely said two words. He looks weird, all pinched and stuff. The second detective—the one who was guarding the door—came by for coffee and then left, saying they hope to be back later to pick up the body. Oh, and Scott was up here for a bit. I couldn’t even look at him.”

“Any word on the road?”

“Not good. It seems like we’re all going to be bunking down here again tonight. By the way, at what point does a body begin to stink?”

“By tonight it’s going to smell pretty ripe.”

“Oh, fabulous.”

“I still need to talk to Christian and Tory. I guess I’ll wait around here for a while, and then I might have to start banging on a few doors.”

“Laura mentioned that Sandy was going to be serving an early dinner—at around six. So people should start to surface then.”

For the next few hours, Jessie and I hung in the great room, drinking coffee from an insulated carafe that Jessie had brought over to the coffee table. At around five, with darkness descended, we suddenly heard a burst of noise from the level below, as if three or four people were talking at once. It took me a minute to realize that it was the television in the media room. I went downstairs to check out who was there.

Christian was alone in the darkened room, staring at CNN on the screen.

“You okay?” I asked.

“About as well as can be expected,” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen.

“I assume you’ve spoken to people at the modeling agency, right?”

“Of course. Everybody’s in shock—total shock. But I don’t know if I should be talking to you. You’ll just feed it all to Buzz.”

I gave him the off-the-record line I’d offered everyone else.

“Well, I don’t have much to talk about anyway,” he said, finally looking at me.

“This must be a blow to the agency.”

“Absolutely. Devon was one of our top girls.”

“Were you close to her?”

“Of course I was close to her,” he said, flicking his hand back and forth over the collar of his tight beige crewneck. “I’ve been her booker since she was nineteen.”

“I thought she started even younger than that.”

“She did—she was with another agency the first couple of years, but I convinced her to come with us.”

“Is that common, to make a switch?”

“It can be. Contracts in this business are never iron-clad. I mean, Devon was grateful to her old place. One of their scouts had spotted her in a bus station when she was sixteen. But they never saw her full potential. I don’t believe in starting at the bottom and working your way up. I think you start at the top, and if it doesn’t work, you keep going down a level and find out where it settles. From the very beginning I sent Devon out to the top photographers. They loved her. By the end of the year she’d made over a million dollars.”

“When did Cap come into the picture?”

“A few years later. When you make that much money, you need someone like him. Especially if your momma’s a drunk and you’ve got a no-good stepdaddy.”

“Were Cap and Devon tight?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Was it a good working relationship?”

“He absolutely doted on her. She was his prize client.”

“Friday night, you were talking about how models are often screwed up about their eating. I take it Devon had an eating disorder of some kind.”

“No, that was over and done with. A lot of girls in their teens suffer from that.”

“But clearly Devon was experiencing a relapse lately.”

“Oh, please, I knew you were going to do this. You’re just looking for dirt. You won’t attribute it to me, but it will still end up in that rag.”

“I’m only interested in the truth. If she died due to an eating disorder, that’s going to come out anyway.”

“Like I told you, that wasn’t an issue anymore.”

“And she wasn’t scared or worried about anything this weekend?”

“Scared? I have no clue what you’re talking about. Devon wasn’t scared of anything.”

“Just one more question. Did you call extension seven during the night?”

“Extension seven? You mean to say I needed a shirt pressed or something? Hardly. What is this anyway? You’re starting to sound like Miss Marple.”

Suddenly the TV screen grabbed our attention. It flickered a few times, and then suddenly died. The room was now in total darkness.

Maybe, I thought, the freezing rain had knocked out the satellite dish. And then from a distance I heard Jessie yell, “Bailey, where are you?” and I glanced toward the hallway. There was no light coming from anywhere. The power had gone out. Great, just the hell what we needed.

Chapter 7

“Oh, brilliant,” Christian exclaimed. “Just fucking brilliant.”

“There are candles on the table upstairs,” I said. “I’ll go grab a couple. Why don’t you call Scott and see where he is.”

“Call him? How?”

“Here,” I said, tossing him my BlackBerry. “His cell is in the address book.” I’d programmed it in during my car ride with Jessie.

“Bailey?” Jessie called again from the great room. “Where are you?”

I yelled that I was coming and tried to maneuver my way out of the media room, though just before I reached the door I rammed my foot so hard into a piece of furniture, it felt as if I’d kicked a car. Finding and climbing the stairs was even trickier. The barn had become familiar to me over the past two days, but in the pitch- dark, I was clueless.

“Jess, you still near the couch?” I called out once I’d reached the top of the stairs.

“Yup. What made the freaking power go out? The snowstorm’s been over for hours.”

“It might be the ice,” I said, inching my way toward her voice. “It’s probably coated the power lines and