So Pretty It Hurts

“You invented the stuff about Cap and Devon. Probably to make Devon’s life seem juicier.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “You’re just jealous ’cause I beat you to the punch with the book.”

I shifted my position slightly, feeling less than comfortable with her in the contained space of the bathroom. And then I noticed something—the ripe, sour smell of sweat. It was the exact same odor that had been thrown off like a stink bomb by the person who sent me tumbling down the stairs.

Chapter 14

Rank sweat was rank sweat, and it might be hard to tell one person’s from another, but a little voice in my head was screaming that it was Jane I’d smelled Sunday night.

Any satisfaction I felt from my eureka moment was trounced by the fact that I was currently alone in a bathroom with her. If she’d purposely shoved me down the stairs, she might not think anything of harming me now, and I could feel my heart starting to pump harder, urging me to hightail it the hell out of the apartment.

“I guess the bottom line is that we’ve all got to do what works for us,” I said as casually as I could manage. I began to ease my way toward the door, hoping she wouldn’t sense my sudden panic. “From one writer to another, though, I’d be careful. People sometimes sue if you make them mad enough about what you’ve written.”

“Thanks for the tip,” she said sarcastically. Please, I thought, as I took a step out of the bathroom, don’t let her tear out the shower rod and try to crack my skull with it—or go for my jugular with the cuticle nippers. Thankfully, she didn’t seem to be reading my mind.

“Look,” she said. “Like I said, I’ve got work to do. . . .”

“Understood,” I said. She led me back to the front door, and as soon as I stepped into the hall, she slammed the door hard behind me.

I felt a rush of relief. I jabbed at the elevator button several times, knowing I wouldn’t feel totally safe until I was out on the street.

On my way to the apartment I’d noticed a small French cafe just up the street, and now I hurried over there. I found a table, ordered a cappuccino, and took out my composition book. I jotted down my conversation with Jane as word for word as I could remember.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made that Jane was the one who’d scratched the barn doors. The vandalism had occurred roughly an hour after Jane left my room, an hour after I’d told her that Devon’s saga lacked the kind of layers a story needs to go big-time. Jane probably decided a scary, middle-of-the-night swashbuckler during the weekend Devon died would help make the story more enticing to potential publishers. Hell, it might even help get the whole thing optioned for a movie.

What I didn’t have any sense of was whether Jane had slipped the Lasix into Devon’s water. Interestingly her sweat attack in the apartment had occurred when I’d brought up the diuretic, but on the other hand, some things didn’t add up. If Jane had killed Devon by doctoring her water, it would have been smart to lie low afterward, not create any more drama—and let everyone assume that Devon had died naturally. By tearing through the halls at night and trying to terrify people, Jane had fostered the idea that something sinister was going on at the barn. Which meant to me that she might have been Zorro, but not the murderer.

And yet, if she was nutty enough to run around in the dead of night in a poncho with a rusty farm tool, she might not be rational at all.

I’d been staring off as I mulled all of this over, and for the first time my eyes snagged on something across the room: a guy with longish brown hair, drinking an espresso at one of the small wooden tables. He looked a little like Beau, and suddenly the events from last night, which I’d temporarily sandbagged from entering my brain, all came flooding back. I’d been avoiding Beau, but sooner or later I was going to have to return his calls. He’d made it clear that he wanted to talk things over. I just didn’t know where talking was going to get us. After Devon’s death, I’d brushed away my worries about his trip to Arizona—because it felt so good to share with him all the awful stuff about the weekend—but the problem hadn’t really gone away. The bottom line was that no matter how much time I spent with Beau, he continued to seem elusive and mysterious to me. He was even planning on spending the holidays with his family rather than me. That didn’t seem like a man who was fully committed.

I checked my watch. As I’d determined earlier, it was just a short walk to First Models, and this seemed like as good a time as any to ambush Christian with a visit. But before I headed over there, I decided to phone Beau. I just couldn’t bear going any longer without confronting the situation.

No one was sitting close to me in the cafe, so I took out my BlackBerry and made the call. I didn’t hear any background noise when he answered, which suggested he was still at home rather than at his studio.

“Hi, it’s me,” I said, not knowing how else to begin.

“Where are you, anyway?”

“SoHo.”

“So you’re not home, after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I dropped by your place about fifteen minutes ago. The doorman said you’d gone out, but I thought you might have bribed him into saying that if I came by. I suspected you were really up in your apartment stewing.”

“Stewing? That expression kind of implies I’m doing a slow boil over something unnecessarily.”

“No. I was just acknowledging that you’re obviously pissed. But to just go incommunicado makes me think you’re making a lot more of this than you should be.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Look, Bailey, I can totally understand why it would tick you off royally to hear a phone message like that. But that girl means nothing to me. It’s not an issue for us.”

“But she meant something once, didn’t she?”

“What?” He’d sounded annoyed when he blurted out the word, but then his voice softened. “We need to talk face-to-face, Bailey. This isn’t something we should be dealing with over the phone.”

“Okay.” I said. “When?”

“How about tonight then? At around eight?”

“That should be fine. If for any reason I’m going to be late, I’ll let you know.”

“What’s happening with your work situation? Did you find out who’s trying to sabotage you?”

“Nothing yet. But I’m turning over every stone.”

“Okay, well, we can talk more about it when I see you,” Beau said.

We signed off, polite toward each other, but hardly gushing.

And yet it seemed, I realized, as if Beau truly wanted to work things out. I felt a momentary easing of my anxiety, like the relief you feel when you run a hand you’ve just burned under a stream of cold water. Good for the moment but most of the time it doesn’t last.

I paid the check, took a deep breath, and headed for First Models. The agency turned out to be in a sleek ten-story building that also housed an ad agency and some other random businesses. When I boarded the elevator, an insanely tall platinum-blond girl, who had to be a model, followed me inside. She was carrying a huge silver tote bag and in her right hand an itty-bitty Chihuahua puppy. She cooed at it a couple of times, and in response the dog flicked his tongue at her lips. It made me think of what Whitney had said about Devon. She’d wanted a baby for the same reason she’d wanted a dog: for the unconditional love it guaranteed.

The blond disembarked with me on four, where the elevator opened directly onto a small reception area. A receptionist sat at a desk, leafing through a copy of W magazine. To the left of the desk was a conference room with the door open. A woman was snapping pictures with a small camera of a gangly, red-