Page 49 of Without a Clue

No, if there’s one thing I can help with, it’s this.

I know poisons.

I know core motivations for murder.

I know how to erase fingerprints, just as I know how to find them with nothing but a little cocoa powder in your pantry.

Just as I know how to forge them for someone else (a skill best left unsaid at the moment).

This is just another one of Hugh’s books. That’s the way I’m going to have to chase this, or else I’ll never be able to take it on.

Surgically.

With all emotion removed.

One page at a time.

And, I guess, with a knife behind my back and one eye over my shoulder.

“Easy there, Pip.”

I pull out of my mental resolve moment and realize I’m gripping the sugar spoon over my coffee like a knife. Jackie, sitting opposite me at the breakfast table, looks entirely appalled.

Nash gently takes hold of my hand and lowers it.

We’re back at the dining hall, all carried off by the breakfast march with Neena in the lead. To be fair, nobody really wanted to stay behind in the author/murder wing alone.

Nobody, I’ve realized, seems inclined to want to go back to the “safety zones” of our bedrooms—or that doomed hallway—ever again.

The sun is bright over the horizon, giving the room full of windows a heavenly sort of air. Light glints on everything. The chandeliers above. The gold-rimmed glasses. The heavy silver platters heaped up with egg casseroles and bacon. A harpist plays in the corner.

You’d never in a million years imagine a corpse, or two, below deck.

Jackie frowns at me and I realize I’m doing it again, this time choking the sugar packet. She moves over to the other side of the table. It’s just Nash and me now.

“Okay,” Nash says, “who are we going to interview first?”

“We?” I say, screwing up a brow. “Who’s ‘we,’ cowboy?”

“Yes, we. You do all the talking. I’ll just be in the background.”

“You have a workshop this morning. There is no ‘we.’”

Nash frowns. “You can’t imagine after everything, I’d let you do an interview alone with a potential killer. There’s no way—”

His voice goes distant. He simply shakes his head.

I imagine the mental image of Carragan on the floor, face down, is fresh in his mind.

“No,” he says simply. Firmly.

Is this what it feels like? To have someone so staunchly by your side? A knight in shining armor, if you will?

I’ve seen it in the movies.

Read about it a few times in books.

But man, it feels good.