Page 67 of Head Room (Caught Dead in Wyoming #15)

DAY EIGHT

SATURDAY

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

My eyes opened early.

I never do that.

Wedding day jitters?

Except this was Wedding Number Two. Shouldn’t this have happened yesterday?

I told myself to drift back into sleep.

I felt myself relaxing. Easing. Listening to voices . . .

My own.

Not a novel about a mystery, but a novel that is a mystery.

Kit’s.

You follow the clues and make the story your own.

The writing of a novel was a mystery Irene tried to solve with her XXs for names she hadn’t yet found.

Mrs. P’s voice. Naturally, I directed her to Tom, which makes it likely though not irrefutable that she used those names, whether unconsciously or deliberately.

Thomas — for my Tom? — the nephew who’d died. But what about the others?

People were no mystery to Irene.

Saw right through to their backbones, Connie said. The best at all kinds of puzzles, Frank said.

A new voice.

That’s a real kind of work, not like filing papers. And not even in a filing cabinet.

Penny said that. But there was something else about filing.

Filings as registered agents.

Good heavens, had Penny known about that?

Not as much as Sheridan, but growing here, too, all wrapped up in one or two . . .

The phrase head room from inside my own head. That marble rolling around.

—papers . . . filing . . . names . . . mail . . . too many—

Kam at the fire department the first time I went there.

Jay Haus and Kam Droemi.

Puzzles. All kinds of puzzles.

That was Frank Jardos.

Two more voices. Mine, internally only, thinking about head room. And then another one.

Kit again.

We — authors — might pick up bits and pieces from real life, but then we slice them up, mix them with other things, strain them through our imaginations.

Bits and pieces from real life . . .

Puzzles. All kinds of puzzles.

. . . Don’t know how it’s going to turn out . . .

Irene Jardos did puzzles, all kinds of puzzles. When she was writing her manuscript, potentially putting in bits and pieces from real life, but without knowing the ending.

Not giving a solution, because Nance’s murder hadn’t happened yet. But she could have given her observations of people, the ingredients that led to the crimes. Observations cloaked within the story.

Puzzles. All kinds of puzzles.

C’mon, Irene, give me something.

My eyes opened wide.

And it wasn’t the wedding.