Peril in Paperback: A Bibliophile Mystery

the past day or so. Was it all because of Lily? I wondered, but then realized Vinnie had begun to warm up to Grace when the older woman had confessed her true reason for inviting Fowler to the party.
    The mellow sounds of jazz filtered through the room. Kiki begged for a tarot card reading. Peter played backgammon with Harrison. Madge flipped through a magazine and Sybil drank too much.
    “Hey, pretty lady,” Nathan said, and sat down next to me.
    I laughed at that ridiculous line, but still flirted a bit with him. He was suddenly attentive to me again, probably due to the abundant shots of Scotch he’d just tosseddown his throat. He was a nice guy, but my heart wasn’t in it.
    I stood and said good night to everyone and headed off to my room. But once I got into bed, sleep was out of the question. I picked up Grace’s manuscript and continued reading where I’d left off the night before.
    For three fascinating chapters, Greta was entangled in a scandalous industrial-theft problem. No one knew who was selling the company’s top-secret ideas to the highest bidders, but suspicion was growing throughout the company and nobody trusted anyone.
    Greta hired lawyers to file restraining orders against her rival companies, but there were ways around the orders.
    She brought in a team of undercover detectives who set up a sting and several employees were caught in the web. She fired them all, including two of her favorite game designers, people she’d worked with for years.
    After the firings, things calmed down for a while. Greta and her board of directors breathed easier. Then weeks before Greta was to bring out their biggest game ever, a multimillion-dollar 3-D video reenactment of Battle of the Alien Worlds, their biggest competitor announced their newest game coming on the market one week before Greta’s.
    It was the exact same product! Only the name had been changed slightly to War of the Galaxy Invaders. It was a blatant rip-off and Grace—er,
Greta
, was furious. The thief was still working for her!
    Greta had always prided herself on her people skills. She was a genius with games, but she was also a decent person. Her employees had always loved her because she respected them and rewarded their efforts. But now she was stymied and hurt. Who among her workers had betrayed her?
    The thief was never caught. There was never another incident of industrial espionage, but the damage hadbeen done. Greta was never quite the same effervescent charmer after that.
    I closed the book, shaken by the depth of emotions the story touched in me. I hated that Greta’s experience had extinguished some of the lightness within her.
    Troubled, I stared at the pages. Had an ongoing proximity to murder done that to me? Had it made me more harsh? More judgmental? More suspicious of human nature? I hadn’t thought so before, but now I was afraid I might be wrong.
    Hell, just that evening at dinner, I had looked around the table and mentally accused a good number of Grace’s guests of murder. What did that say about me? Okay, yes, there actually
was
a murderer among us, but did that excuse my readiness to mentally accuse everyone in the room?
    I put the manuscript on the nightstand and turned off the light. While wrestling with the pillow to find the perfect spot for my head, I questioned whether the part of the book I’d read tonight was factual or not. Earlier in the week, Grace had told us that the company had recently suffered a loss of some money. Someone had been skimming funds. But she didn’t seem too concerned about it.
    In her book, though, the crime had been industrial theft. Someone had stolen her idea. Her creation. For Grace, that would be like stealing her soul. That loss would plague her much more than the loss of money would.
    But was it true? Had
Grace
been plagued by an industrial thief as
Greta
had been? Or were those chapters pure fiction? Before I dozed off to sleep, I made a mental note to ask Suzie about it in the morning.
    Sometime in the middle of the night, I was awakened by another strange noise. Unlike the last time I heard noises in the night, I was certain there was someone inside my room. Was it Bella’s murderer?
    The moon was obscured by heavy clouds so my room was cloaked in darkness. The floor creaked with every other step the prowler took toward my bed. I was frozen in fear, but knew I had to do something to save myself, knew I had to make a move.
    Did he have a gun? Maybe he was planning to