Page 30 of The Claiming of the Shrew
“I don’t want to be in this stupid crew anyway!” she flared, and with that not exactly sparkling example of witty repartee, she stormed out of Maggie’s room.
The hallway had emptied. She could hear voices from Gloria’s room, where presumably the star was being consoled by the rest of the cast. Fawkes was also gone—yet another thing to be angry at stupid Maggie for. The only person still around was Joy, who came toward her quickly.
“Are you okay? Leah?”
“No!” Leah snapped. She stopped and leaned against the wall to press a hand against her eyes. On top of fighting with Fawkes earlier, this was just too much.
“Oh, honey.” Joy put an arm around her, and Leah relaxed into her. Joy might be annoyingly overbearing sometimes, but she did give good, comforting hugs.
“I hate everything,” Leah said into her shoulder. “They think I did it. Maggie kicked me off the crew.”
“What?” Joy pulled back, suffused with righteous fury. “That woman is getting a piece of my mind right now!”
“No—no, wait—” Leah tried to pull her back. As satisfying as it would be to watch Maggie get a fully charged death ray of protective-big-sister Joy, it probably wouldn’t help her case. “Calm down! Think of the bean, Joy. The bean.”
“Sometimes Mama needs to murder someone,” Joy growled, but she let Leah coax her back down the hallway.
The door of Joy’s room was already a crack open. Leah pushed it the rest of the way open, then stopped at the sight of the pillowcase, which she had left under the bed, lying on top of it.
“Oh,” Leah said.
“Yeah,” Joy said. “About that.”
“Shut the door, quick!”
Joy pushed the door shut. “So I am going to assume you have an explanation for this.”
“Did you look in it?”
“Of course I looked in it. Are those the things you’ve been helping Hester look for?”
Leah sighed and sat beside the pillowcase. She twitched it open just to check that they were talking about the same thing and it hadn’t been replaced with, say, a pillowcase full of pillow. The sparkles of diamonds and gold gleamed from within.
“I found this in Fawkes’s room earlier.” It came out as a half whisper.
“Oh, sis.” Joy sat beside her and put a hand on her back. “Did you tell Hester?”
“No. Not yet. I want to know—I just have to be sure before I do.”
“I understand.” Joy’s voice was serious, completely devoid of the usual big-sister teasing. “I can’t even imagine what I’d do if it was Bar. What did he say?”
“He says it’s not his and he’s never seen any of it before. Which of course is what he would say whether or not he actually did it.” Leah ran a hand over the lumpy surface. “If it is him, then he’s been lying to me the whole time. But if it’s not, someone set him up. I just don’t know how to decide.”
“You’re going to figure it out,” Joy told her. “You’re Detective Shrew, remember?”
“Yeah, well, Detective Shrew may have lost her investigative partner.” Leah looked at her hopefully. “Do you want a job?”
Joy raised her hands. “I want tohelp, but I’m busy too, you know. I’m not prepared to go sneaking around at all hours. You need to get Fawkes’s side of the story.”
“I did already. Sort of. And I was going to talk to him tonight, but he disappeared. I don’t know where he is now.”
Her shrew approved of finding Fawkes. Her shrew approved of it very much. TheMINEMINEMINEMINEMIIIIIIIIIIIINEwas deafening, almost drowning out Joy.
“Have you thought about, you know. Calling him,” Joy was saying. “On a phone.”
Leah shoved her shrew to the back of her mind and held up a finger, then another. “Thing one, I don’t have his number.”
“You don’t? Really?”
