Peril in Paperback: A Bibliophile Mystery

what she’d just described.
    “Grace has the prototype up in the game room,” Bella said, then snapped her fingers in time to her words. “Check. It. Out.”
    “I will.”
    “Coolio.” Without another word, she set her empty glass on a small console table in the hall, then slunk around me until she once again walked close to Marko. The man didn’t acknowledge her outwardly since he was deep in conversation with Suzie, but I saw him stealthily reach back and grab Bella’s thigh. She slapped his hand away, but she was smiling. And his action signified his complete awareness of her nearness.
    Body language didn’t lie. There was more between those two than a mere office friendship. And even though I couldn’t imagine what Bella saw in Marko, I was perfectly happy with yet another distraction this week.
Are they in love?
I wondered, though I doubted it.
    In both appearance and attitude, they weren’t exactly a match made in heaven. Both were tall. Marko looked to be in his early fifties, with pale skin and half-spiky, half-balding silver-blond hair. I estimated that Bella was in her late thirties.
    Maybe it was uncharitable of me to think it, but she was simply too beautiful for Marko. Not that he was ugly, exactly; he was handsome enough in a quirky sort of way. I’d only just met him, but I’d already been treated to his devious smile and his proclivity for waggling his eyebrows suggestively. And his snickering. I suppose there were plenty of women who were attracted to the type of man who would never grow up. Bella had said it best: Marko was twelve years old in almost every way.
    He continued to bounce around among the different groups, giggling for a few seconds and then turning to someone else. He appeared to have the attention span of a squirrel that had just spied a nut falling from a tree and was gone in a flash.
    Was Bella really involved with Marko? My first impression of her was of someone who sauntered into a room like an exquisite gazelle and expected to be adored by all of humanity. But early in our conversation, I picked up on her quick intelligence and droll sense of humor, along with an underlying nervous energy that would probably be useful in the frenetic, competitive world of computer games and videos.
    How Marko survived in that same world, I had no idea. Maybe he had hidden depths. Or maybe his twelve-year-old mentality was perfect for that world. Whatever his secret was, it worked for him.
    As we reached the ground floor and moved en masse toward the dining room, Suzie sidled up next to me and whispered, “I’m officially pissed off.”
    “Why?” I asked, concerned for her.
    “See that guy in the boring gray suit?” She pointed out a man fast-walking ahead of us halfway down the hall. Hunched shoulders, small balding head. Then he turned and I saw the scowl on his pinched face.
    “Whoa,” I whispered. “Who is that?” He looked like a cartoon character, the smarmy kind of guy who would steal milk bottles from babies. Even from behind he looked disagreeable.
    “Yeah,” Suzie said with a knowing nod. “That’s Grace’s lawyer. I didn’t know he’d be here. He’s the biggest jerk. The fact that he’s here tells me Grace must be planning to make some changes to her estate.”
    “Are you worried?”
    “Of course she’s not worried,” Vinnie said. She had somehow materialized on my other side. “Suzie is Grace’s favorite niece. She would never cut her out of the will.”
    “Don’t let Kiki hear you say that,” Suzie muttered. “She thinks she’s the favorite.”
    “Kiki is a nice girl, but Grace loves you best.”
    Kiki was Suzie’s younger cousin. I’d met her earlier and liked her immediately. She was a few years younger than Suzie and shared her semi-warped sense of humor. She seemed sweet and was frankly beautiful in a clean, wholesome way, with long dark hair and big blue eyes.
    It had been a shock to find out during the cocktail party that Kiki’s mother was Madge Crawford, the ill-tempered woman I’d met in the hall earlier.
Poor Kiki,
I thought,
having to grow up with a mother like that.
But, thank goodness, she seemed to have inherited her father’s genial attitude.
    Kiki’s father, Harrison Crawford, was Grace’s older brother. There was another sister, Jeannie, who was my friend Suzie’s mom. But Jeannie had passed away five years ago.
    Vinnie leaned closer and lowered her voice. “That Fowler man is not a nice person. I ran into him