Today's Reading
PROLOGUE
If a Body Drops in a Broom Closet, Does It Make a Sound?
My name is Eleanor Dash, and I'm the bestselling author of the Vacation Mysteries series.
That's not immediately relevant to my current situation, but it feels like something you should know about me from the jump.
I write murder mysteries for a living. I think up ways to kill people and then I do it. On the page, that is. I haven't actually killed anyone.
Not yet.
Oh, wait, that's not true. Not technically.
But that was a story for another book. So.
Moving on.
Despite the fact that I wing most things, you should also know that I always figure out the who, what, when, where, and why of the murder(s) before I start writing. I enjoy doing this. It's a fun puzzle to me. To figure people out—their motivations, hurts, and resentments. Why are they striking out? What was the last straw? How are they going to do it?
It's fascinating.
I mean, have you ever thought about it? What might push you to the brink so you'd see the most terrible act as a solution to your problems?
You don't have to answer that, but it's not a rhetorical question.
Not entirely, anyway.
So, why am I telling you all of this before we even get to the first chapter?
There's a method to my confession, I assure you.
Let me, as they say, set the scene.
I'm at Emma Wood's wedding to Fred Winter, her co-star in a movie called When in Rome. Emma's been my best friend since childhood, and this movie is based on a book I wrote ten years ago that's been (finally, and oh my God, I can hardly believe it!) adapted into a film. They wrapped filming two days ago in Santa Monica, and then the entire cast and crew came to Catalina Island for the wedding.
Because Hollywood.
It's been a balmy October day on this lush island one nautical hour off the coast of Los Angeles in the Channel Islands. But though you can't tell from the lingering sunset bathing the Descanso Beach Club in a warm orange glow, there's a hurricane heading our way, because of course there is.
You didn't think we were going to be at a wedding on an island without a storm, did you?
Okay, good. Because this is that kind of book.
Everything that can go wrong will.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Anyway, a lot of shit has happened since we got here yesterday, but the most important thing is that, just now, when I was trying to find the bathroom during the wedding reception, I ended up finding a dead body in the broom closet instead.
I know, right?
No one's supposed to die at a wedding.
But the person lying next to a stack of boxed toilet paper with a cake-cutting knife sticking out of their back is dead.
I've had some drinks, but not so many that this fact escapes me.
The large pool of very red blood forming a halo around their body is one clue.
Their open-eyed gaze into the middle distance is another.
There's no doubt about it: I'm staring at a freshly dead person in an eight-by-ten room. And the smell of their death—the iron tang of their blood, the fluids the body releases at that pivotal moment, the anger that drove the knife that deep into their back, right up to the hilt—is almost overwhelming.
...
