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Authors: Lynn Harris

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BOOK: Death By Chick Lit
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Or, wait. Shit. Was that it? Or were you supposed to run
toward
the mountain lion?
Lola glanced behind her, covering the move by pretending to scratch her ear with her shoulder. No one. Too late.
Should I call Bobbsey? And tell him what? That I happened to see the same oddball in two places, and at no point did he move toward or threaten me in any way?
Lola reached her garden. A clematis vine had sprung from its trellis, reaching across her way like a bony arm.
No, she thought, I’m gonna keep this to myself. Remember, I’m supposed to be helping Quentin by knowing stuff the cops don’t, and remember, I’m supposed to be solving the mystery and turning it into a book. Kind of the way that woman did, the one who talked her kidnapper out of kidnapping her by reading him the Zone Diet, or some such? Or did we later find out that she was saved not so much by the soothing words of Barry Sears but by the fact that she gave her attacker crystal meth? Anyway. That lady was plucky. And, of course, she’s now totally writing a book.
Lola wrapped the stray vine back around a stake and tiptoed inside.
Uch, of course. My brave “escape” from the guy who was clearly not chasing me made me come home without the damn paper.
There’s always the
on
line, she thought.
No
. It’s so freaking late. Get to bed, Somerville. Whatever you do, do
not
turn on the computer.
Lola fired up her Mac.
 
Publishing Biz to Perp: We Meant “Cutthroat” As a Metaphor
Sadly, Not Your Usual
Royalty
Party Report
Posted by Page Proof
 
Acclaimed and adorable chick lit author Mimi McKee, 31, was found mysteriously murdered at her own party, a celebration of the publication of her novel
Gay Best Friend
at the ultratrendy Bowery watering hole, Cabin 9. Coquettish and comely even in death, she lay in a rarely used basement storage closet, her stylish wrap dress revealing just hints of ivory thigh and décolletage. Ms. McKee’s throat had been viciously slashed with a broken cocktail glass.
Could the weapon of choice be a nod to the beverage of choice of the typical chick in McKee’s genre of lit? Police declined to say, noting that the killer was still at large. “I assure you, we’ll get the guy. And by ‘get’ I mean ‘nab,’ not marry,” said police detective Bradley Bobbsey, who admitted to being an aficionado of the promising young writer’s work.
Reached at home late at night in Mexico, Maine, Ms. McKee’s distraught parents declined to be interviewed. A relative said only that the burial would be private.
Others who knew McKee were shocked to hear that she fell victim to a violent crime. “She’s was just such a sweet all-American girl,” said McKee’s third-grade teacher, Priscilla Wren, roused from slumber by the shocking news. “I still have the note she wrote me about how much she loved the hot dog stands everywhere in New York, because they made it so easy to buy food for homeless people.”
McKee’s seemingly unthreatening boyfriend, Quentin Frye, was questioned and later released.
The body of Ms. McKee was discovered—too late—by partygoer Lila Summerville, who appeared to have been wandering, confused, in the basement. Ms. Summerville claimed to be a fellow “writer,” but her “books” did not appear on a search of
Amazon.com
.
 
What the—?
Told you you should have gone to bed, thought Lola.
Ping! Instant message from Annabel. She was still up, too?
“Oy, SORRY,” Annabel typed. “Saw the article. At least he got your name wrong?”
“SLEEP!” typed Lola.
“XOXOXO!” typed Annabel.
“ZZZZZZZ!” typed Lola.
Lola closed her computer and tiptoed into the bedroom, stopping on the way to peel her contact lenses out of her sore eyes. The room was perfectly still, with not so much as a breeze whispering through the curtains that Lola had paid a nice Italian lady to make, which was the kind of business you could still, if you knew where to look, get done in Brooklyn. She tossed her clothes on the floor and climbed into bed with Doug. He was sleeping on his back with his knees up, which Lola found bizarre and adorable, though it made her have to trade spooning for a sleeping still life more like fish knifing.
I don’t know how to solve a murder, thought Lola. I can’t dust for fingerprints. I’m not even like Doug, who figures out the ending of
CSI
:
Dead Model
in the first ten minutes. What was I thinking? What have I done?
She rolled over. Her eye caught the stack of books on her nightstand, bathed in the faint yellowish glow of her family hand-me-down clock radio, a clunky vintage model with an analog face.
I am never going to finish
Anna Karenina
.
But you know what? Books. That’s what I’ve got that they don’t. They know blood spatter patterns, but I know Mimi’s world. That’s gotta count for something. Plus, I recall very clearly from Encyclopedia Brown that a person’s reflection appears upside down in a spoon. You never know when that could come up.
Anyway. Tomorrow.
Lola shifted onto her back, her left shoulder touching Doug’s right. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
Just. Need. To. Sleep. On. This.
Her alarm went off.
Nine
Hell’s Bells.
“. . . and with a $1000 pledge, Garrison Keillor will leave the outgoing message on your answering machine,” said NPR.
“Grplnah,” said Doug.
That wasn’t even a catnap, thought Lola. Not even a bird nap. Not even an ant nap.
Doug rolled over. “Sweetie, go back to sleep,” he said, eyes closed.
Catnap.
Dogs.
Lola leapt out of bed.
“Wish I could,” she said, kissing Doug on the nose. “Looks like you’re sleeping for two.”
Fifteen minutes later, after prodding her contact lenses from their own brief rest, wrestling her hair into a ponytail, and giving her garden a quick bare-minimum spritz, Lola was sipping a blue-and-white paper cup of crappy bodega coffee—whole milk, one sugar—as she crossed the girdered bridge over the canal. An orange sun, pale and round as a canned peach, was just beginning to cast its muted light. The air still carried a bit of a damp chill; Lola was glad she had grabbed her light cotton jacket and also that she, a big believer in breakfast, had thought to stick in its pocket a couple of Fig Newtons.
Lola shot an appreciative glance at one of her favorite features of the canal: a rickety red caboose-shaped structure topped with a huge bin full of stones, perched on the bank like a giant square pelican. The faded sign read Lundy Crushers, which, not coincidentally, was also the name of the borough’s women’s roller derby team. Ever wonder where rocks come to get crushed into gravel? Here’s where. There are whole worlds out there—out here—that most of us never think about, Lola mused.
Her only company was one seagull, who landed on the railing and stared at her sideways as she passed. This is why I am a morning person, thought Lola. Even if I haven’t slept. Now’s when I can think.
Thank goodness she had remembered: today was the day she’d promised to dog-sit for Daphne Duplex. Thirty seconds of sleep notwithstanding, Lola was trying—with measured success—to convince herself that having to dog-sit today was a good thing.
Daphne, successful author of
So Many Men, So Little Taste
, lived about ten blocks away, on the “good” side of the canal. She’d been wise enough to buy her apartment several years earlier, so she was now sitting pretty in a renovated row house at the end of the kind of street that was called a Place. An abandoned warehouse nearby was set to become an Organic Depot. There was talk of moving the New York Giants into a stadium complex to be built over toward Brooklyn Navy Yard, but the plan was being viciously protested by neighborhood activists who had nobler notions of community development (but whose sports experience, frankly, was limited to hot yoga). These people were particularly angry—and fair enough, given that many of them had been driven out of Manhattan when Hamilton Fish Town, the East Village’s storied affordable housing complex, had been razed to make way for a Wal-Mart.
Daphne had called Lola just yesterday morning—which now seemed like an eon ago—with an emergency on her hands.
“Hallo, Lola, it’s Daphne Duplex. Got your cell from your book publicist, hope to death you’re not sore.”
Ex
-publicist. “Mind? I’m just glad she still has my number.”
“Oh, you
are
a stitch,” said Daphne. “But say, Lola, I’m in a bit of a pickle. I was wondering if you could do a gal a terribly big favor. I’m on the last day of my book tour here in—let’s see, if it’s Wednesday, it must be St. Louis—and it seems my regular dog-sitter has discovered that her new fella’s allergic to bassets. She insists she can’t stay another day.”
“With the boyfriend?”
“You raise an excellent point, but no. With the pooches. Would you be a peach and pop over tomorrow?”
Does she think I don’t work?
More times than she could count, Lola had told someone she was a writer, only to hear, “I’m so jealous! You must get to, like, go to the park all day and journal.”
Then again, of course, Daphne was now a work-at-home writer, too—though that was a recent development. The etiquette column she’d written for a now-defunct Web magazine had outlived its parent, unlike the once-popular online advice column that Lola wrote before and during her stint at the ill-fated Ovum. But then a fancy agent had called Daphne and said, “Love your column. Do you think there’s a book in there?” Said Daphne: “I do now.”
At least that’s how Daphne had told the tale, twisting her trademark pink scarf, to a rapt audience of pals, including Lola and Annabel, over cocktails. “Bella?” Lola had whispered. “Can you please go get me a rage-tini?”
But even if my time
is
more flexible than other people’s, which admittedly it is, I need more of it for me, thought Lola. I’m not as tireless as I used to be, nor—more importantly—as desperate to please.
Lola’s big plan for her thirties, all two of them so far, was to “put herself first,” like all the magazines said she should. It was time, she had recently declared, to stop trying to be all things to all people—all people, of course, being emotional extensions of Audrey and Morris Somerville—and to start focusing on numero uno, and numero uno’s career. Oh, and numero uno’s marriage. Right. Shit.
All of which means, Lola had resolved, that I really must learn to start saying no.
“So you’ll do it?” Daphne asked.
“Sure,” said Lola.
As she walked, Lola focused on the upside of dog-sitting, which was to begin with this daybreak visit to the dog run. Lola knew she couldn’t skip that; not only would the dogs be desperate to go out at their usual time, but, knowing these dog runs, if she didn’t show up with Daphne’s pets, someone, someone whose dog no doubt owns some sort of raincoat and four tiny boots, would tattle. But given the dogs’ schedule of outings—dog run, walk, dog run, walk, vespers—she’d figured she’d set up shop and work over at Daphne’s, where it’d be nice and quiet.
Especially now that I really have some thinking to do, thought Lola. It’d be the follow-up to the thinking she’d been doing in the cab home from Quentin’s, which itself followed the thinking she’d been doing ever since her book hadn’t turned out to be exactly a runaway bestseller. It had all started off so perfectly those few years ago. That is, the last time she’d solved a mystery, she’d gotten a book deal out of it. Oh, and a husband.
At the time, Lola had become an instant It Girl—her own special-edition Ben & Jerry’s flavor, fan mail from Ira Glass, the whole nine—and stayed that way for one It Girl unit of time. Unfortunately, by the time
Pink Slip
was actually published, the public had moved on to the next It, whoever it was, and neither Lola, nor her book, could compete with that. All the buzzing interest in a Lifetime movie about her story, a reality show about her then-upcoming marriage, a Michael Moore tell-all about everything that happened (the producers pitched it as a “fuckyoumentary”), had fizzled and faded. Still, the scattered reviews of
Pink Slip
—including the eleven five-star reader write-ups posted on
Amazon.com
, nine of which were authored, using various pseudonyms, by Annabel—were overall positive. The book itself, to be fair, was doing okay.
But after all she’d done, all she’d written, all she’d accomplished, just okay was not okay with Lola.
Lola knew she couldn’t coast on the past forever. She knew she needed new ideas, a fresh, motivating, identity-reestablishing
raison de writer
, but, for so long, nothing had been forthcoming.
So, Lola had been thinking. Maybe I really was right to say yes to Quentin. Maybe this really is an opportunity. An opportunity to get my mind off petty jealousies and help others. An opportunity to come to the aid of someone who wouldn’t have lost his girlfriend if I hadn’t found her for him. An opportunity to remember what’s truly important and meaningful in life. An opportunity, if I play my cards right, for a new, and even better, book deal.
I am a somewhat good person, thought Lola.
She fished the key out of a planter and opened Daphne’s door.
 
 
It did not take long for Lola to realize that her day of dog-sitting was not going to offer the kind of opportunity she’d had in mind.
Ten
“Seriously, Annabel, I can’t get a freaking thing done.”
Lola had come back from the dog run expecting Gibson and Sidecar to be tuckered out from all that running around on their itty stumpy basset legs, long ears dragging like useless brakes. She figured they’d then go ahead and do what dogs do: sleep for the next five hours. The second she’d sat down and turned on Daphne’s computer, she’d found out she was wrong.
BOOK: Death By Chick Lit
4.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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