“I just wanted to say thank you for everything you did this weekend,” I told her.
“You’re welcome,” she replied crisply. “That’s nice of you to say.”
“This must have been a pretty harrowing couple of days for you.”
“You could say that. But we get through—we always do.”
She made it sound as if it wasn’t all that unusual for one of the houseguests to leave the premises in a morgue van.
“You heard about last night, of course. Any ideas about who scratched the doors?”
“Why would I? I was fast asleep in my cabin.”
“Well, you’ve probably got a sense of the houseguests by now. Does one of them seem crazy enough to do something like that?”
She finally stopped wiping and stared at me, her unblinking blue eyes telegraphing the fact that she thought we were all freaking crazy.
“Afraid not,” she said.
“You didn’t seem to like Devon very much,” I said.
“I don’t make it my business to like or not like the people who come here.”
“She didn’t eat anything you made. I had the feeling that annoyed you.”
“Wouldn’t it annoy you? Going to all the effort and having someone just stare at it in disgust—as if you’ve served them a slab of lard.”
“I’m pretty sure she had an eating disorder. Her behavior may have seemed rude, but it wasn’t anything personal. Devon wouldn’t have eaten anything from anyone.”
“If you ask me, she was just used to doing as she darn well pleased and having everyone at her beck and call. What do you call those women in New York? Divas?”
“Did she give you a hard time?”
“In every way you can think of. She didn’t like her sheets, and we had to change those twice. We originally put Jane in one of the smaller bedrooms downstairs, but she wanted Jane next to her, come hell or high water, and so Mr. Parkin got stuck with the smaller room and Jane was moved upstairs. Even her water. She had told Scott to stock plenty of this Fiji water—can you imagine having to drink water all the way from there?—and then she complained about the taste. Ralph had to drive into town and buy another kind—Evian—and she complained about that too. I suggested she try our well water, which suits us just fine, and you would have thought I’d told her to run buck naked through the woods. Though she probably would have liked that.”
Her face had turned red as she was speaking, not just a flush to her cheeks but a splotchy, angry red that exacerbated her dry, weathered skin. She pinched her lips, aware that she’d said more than she should have.
“I really do need to finish up here,” she said. “Do you need help packing your car?”
I told her I didn’t and made my way back downstairs. I pushed open the front door to see if Jessie was out by the car, and I found her saying an awkward good-bye to Scott. I tried to make my own good-bye as cordial as possible, since I knew I might need to be in touch with Scott. As I climbed into my Jeep, I noticed that several cars were already gone. People had wasted no time beating a retreat.
The drive toward the main highway was dicey, since there were still patches of ice on the road. My phone was totally out of battery, but Jessie still had a little power in hers. She called Nash to let him know we would be in the office in about two hours.
Next I tried Beau. He picked up his cell phone on the first ring.
“I’ve been really worried about you,” he said and sounded it. “I keep trying your phone, and it won’t even let me leave a message.”
“We lost power in a storm, and I wasn’t able to charge my phone. But thank God, we’re on our way back now.”
“What’s the latest?”
“Things became a lot more complicated. But why don’t I fill you in later—there’s a lot of ice on the road, and I need to focus.”
“I assume you’ll have to work late tonight.”
“Yup. But I’ll keep you posted.”
“Drive carefully, Bailey. I love you.”
“Same here.”
“Things back to normal?” Jessie asked after I signed off.
“Yeah. It’s terrible to say, but Devon’s death may have done my relationship some good.”
Though Jessie and I felt grungy as hell, after deliberation we decided that the smartest course of action would be to dump my Jeep in a midtown parking lot and go directly to Buzz. We’d buy time that way, and it would mean I might be able to leave work earlier that night. It turned out it had rained rather than snowed in Manhattan, and we had to leap over huge puddles as we hurried up Broadway to the office.
The first thing I did, after putting off Leo’s barrage of questions, was to head for Nash’s office. Nash was handsome (if you like barrel-chested guys about forty-four with gray-tinged hair slicked back at the sides), fun, flirty, and occasionally moody. Rumor had it that he’d had flings with several different women in the office and his wife had apparently given him an ultimatum: Keep it in your pants or get kicked to the curb.
“I’ve got Devon slated for the cover,” he told me, shoving his reading glasses from the middle of his nose to the top of his head, “unless something better happens in the next ten hours.”
“What could be better?”
“Katie leaving Tom. Angie leaving Brad. Katie hooking up with Angie. So what’s the deal? She o.d.?”
“No sign of that. Of course the tox report might turn up something. We won’t know anything official for a couple of days.”
“What’s your hunch?”
“I keep coming back to the eating disorder angle. There’s definitely a fatality rate connected with that. Your heart can give out from the strain.”
“Keep me posted twenty-four/seven, okay? You’ll write the main story. When the issue hits Thursday, I want you to do most of the TV for this. We could get you on sooner, but I want to sell as many copies as possible, and that means waiting for the right moment. The fact that you were at the scene is perfect. Everybody’s going to be eating their hearts out.”
I hoped so. From what I’d been hearing, sales had been sluggish this year, and it would be nice to see a boost.
As soon as I was back in my cube, I wrote an update for the Web site and then typed up a timeline of the weekend. Over the next few days it would just be too easy to lose track of the sequence of events. I met with the art department after that and reviewed the layout they were putting together for the story, and I also touched base with one of the writers working on the sidebar about Devon’s life—just to make sure our stories didn’t overlap in any way.
Next it was time to focus on writing my piece for the magazine. Back at Scott’s, I’d e-mailed one of the interns and asked her to pull together everything Buzz had done on Devon in the past. A stack of magazines, with colored Post-its poking out from the pages, had been left on the floor by my desk.
As I thumbed through the past issues, I soon saw that about 80 percent of the coverage of Devon was devoted to her fashion acumen. Buzz is notorious for its weekly “Fashion Tragedies” spread, where celebs get slammed for the lame job they sometimes do getting dressed, but one person always gets singled out under the heading: “She Got It Right!” Not infrequently that person was Devon. She’d had a knack for putting together a totally hip look in a way that seemed completely effortless. Nothing was ever matchy-matchy, and though all the pieces appeared to have been plucked randomly from her closet, the final result was the embodiment of cool. She’d been a risk taker, too, and when major style trends were traced back, she was frequently at the epicenter. There was one shot of her from a while back in suspendered jean shorts and a black Amish-style hat. If I’d worn that outfit, people would have wondered if I was attempting to reprise the Harrison Ford role in Witness, but on Devon it was edgy and fab.