Read Online Fudging the Books by Daryl Wood Gerber - Free Book Online

with a key to this house, Miss Chastain?”
    “Yes, I’m the only one with a key, but”—Coco glanced tearfully from me to Bailey to Cinnamon—“I don’t lock the front door. Ever. It’s a bad habit, I know, but I never use a key.”
    Was she crazy?
    “We live in such a safe neighborhood,” Coco added.
    In this day and age, that was just darned naïve.
    Coco swallowed hard. “Please, you have to believe me. Why would I want Alison dead? We were friends. I didn’t do this. Someone is framing me.” She swiveled and glowered at Ingrid with such spite that the young woman retreated a step.
    “Chief Pritchett,” I said, doing her the honor of calling her by her title, not her first name, “what document was Alison working on?”
    “Why?” Cinnamon tilted her head. Her eyes narrowed.
    “She must have been completely focused on her work not to have noticed her killer.” I gestured to the window and explained my reasoning. It was dark out. The reflectionworked like a mirror. “If she did see the killer, she trusted whoever it was.”
    “You see?” Ingrid shouted. “That proves it. Coco did it. She lives here. Alison wouldn’t have swiveled in her seat to talk to her.”
    Though I didn’t like the young copyeditor, I had to agree with her. But Alison was familiar with a lot more people in town than simply Coco. On the other hand, anyone other than Coco entering the house unannounced between midnight and now would have been suspect, right?
    No, Jenna. Coco did
not
do this.
    “I’ll bet . . .” Ingrid inhaled sharply, her thoughts coming faster than her breath. “I’ll bet Alison told Coco about the cuts she was making.”
    Coco visibly bristled. “What cuts?”
    All heads turned toward her.
    “To your latest manuscript,” Ingrid said. “You were getting too wordy. Alison said you would throttle her for the myriad cuts she was making.”
    Cuts
. Were the scissors metaphorical? I gazed at Cinnamon, who appeared to be wondering the same thing, her gaze roving from the scissors to Coco and back again.
    “Uh-uh.” Coco wagged a finger. “We were done with edits on my latest manuscript. We’d already gone through that phase.”
    “You told her not to edit you at all,” Ingrid said. “You told her you had proprietary ownership.”
    I flashed on the fake fight Alison and Coco had performed at the café earlier. Had there been some truth in their sparring?
    “I was kidding.” Coco eyed Cinnamon. “Here’s how it goes. I turn in the manuscript.” She used her hands to explain the process. “Alison reviews it. She makes suggestions. Then I—”
    “Made,” Ingrid inserted. “
Made
suggestions. Past tense.”
    Coco snarled but continued using the present tense. “Alison sends them to me. I work on her suggestions and return the manuscript. Then she sends it to Ingrid.” Coco glowered at the copyeditor. “It was your turn to review. My latestmanuscript should be on your desk. That can’t be my manuscript on the computer.”
    Cinnamon held up a hand to keep everyone at bay and edged toward the computer. Reading from the screen, she said, “Chocolate Bombs. That seems to be the title of a recipe. Is it yours, Miss Chastain?”
    Coco blanched and muttered, “Yes, but that wasn’t . . . why would she have—”
    “There are other documents here,” Cinnamon said, leaning forward and dragging the documents aside so she could read titles beneath. “A second Chocolate Bombs file. One for Chocolate Desire. Another for Chocolate Macadamia Bites. All yours?”
    “Yes, those are my titles, but—”
    “There are comments on this topmost document from three different sources in the margins,” Cinnamon went on. “
Alison Foodie
in green,
Author
in yellow, and
Copyeditor
in light blue.”
    “Copyeditor. That’s me,” Ingrid said then quickly corrected herself. “I mean,
I
; that is I. Alison doesn’t . . . didn’t want her authors to get confused. She used her first and last name so