But tired as I was, sleep seemed to retreat the second I put my head on the pillow. After tossing and turning for a few minutes, I decided that if I was going to have insomnia, I might as well get something done. I turned on the bedside light and looked around.
I picked up Living Graciously in a Single Room and began flipping through it. Like most of the decorating books Mother had given me in the last few months, it was long on pretty and short on practical. But still, I liked decorating books. I could easily have lost myself in all the eye candy if the pictures hadn’t kept reminding me of Ted’s murder.
Looking at one strikingly minimalist room, I found myself murmuring, as usual, “Nice - but where on Earth do they put their stuff?” And then found myself mentally back in the midst of Mrs. Sprocket’s stuff. Had I searched her house thoroughly enough? I assumed Mrs. Sprocket had no connection with the murder - but what if she did? Another death within a few months of Ted’s - was there anything suspicious about it? Was anything suspicious happening around Mutant Wizards in March or April, when Mrs. Sprocket died? Apart from the first appearance of Nude Lawyers from Hell, nothing that I knew of. I scribbled an item on my to-do list to ask Rob when he first began to feel something was wrong around the company. And another to ask Dad to check out Mrs. Sprocket’s death. It wouldn’t be hard for him, by now he and the local medical examiner were probably playing poker together.
The book contained one section all about creative space dividers. Mother had bookmarked that section, so my first reaction was that we needed to bring her up to see the Cave; apparently nothing else would convince her that we were not in need of creative ways to divide space. We just needed more space. Not to mention the feet that to judge by the examples in the book, its author considered space dividers creative only if they were made of strange and expensive objects that included lots of sharp poimts and dust-catching crannies. I wondered what the author would think about Ted’s copier-box dividers. Probably too practical to rank as creative. And Ted’s basement lair certainly didn’t qualify as gracious one-room living. And exactly how had Ted snagged his living quarters? Was he really renting them, or just acting as caretaker for Mrs. Sprocket’s heirs? Was there some way I could find out? And - I tossed Living Graciously in a Single Room aside. Obviously it wasn’t going to keep my mind off anything. Instead, I picked up the romance books I’d brought back from Ted’s secret stash. I began browsing through them, half reading, half skimming.
They weren’t deathless prose, but they weren’t badly written, either. And while Anna Floyd, whoever she was, had definitely found a single plot and was busy running it into the ground, I did find her plot a little more to my taste than the ones in the romances some of my aunts devoured.
All the heroines were tall, assertive blond women. Not conventionally beautiful or in the first flush of youth, but still compellingly attractive, to judge by the number of gorgeous men chasing them. But - and this was the part that interested me - in all three books, the actual heroes were not the gorgeous guys. They were shy, mild-mannered, bespectacled, studious chaps, oddly appealing despite their outward goofiness or scruffiness.
Not that the silly heroines noticed this right off the bat; they would dismiss the heroes as uninteresting wimps and spend most of the book drooling over the most buff, square-jawed, perfectly groomed and dressed stud in sight. Who invariably turned out to be a villain, of course, once the heroine made the mistake of boarding his luxurious private yacht, flying to Vegas on his personal Learjet or, in the case of the historical novel, showing up for what was supposed to be a respectable house party attended by a trio of widowed aunts as chaperons, only to find herself trapped in a remote Scottish castle with the local chapter of the Hellfire Club.
Enter the heroes, who, when it came to a pinch and the women they’d been adoring from afar were in danger, would cast off their spectacles to reveal flashing if myopic eyes and shed their mousy garb to reveal lean, muscular bodies that enabled them to rescue the heroines from the clutches of the rogues - now revealed as having the courage of marshmallows.
I liked the fact that the heroines invariably played an active role in their rescue, fighting side by side with the heroes against whatever sinister crowd of minions the villain could muster for the grand finale - piratical deck hands, seedy security guards, or loutish thanes. Although the fighting wasn’t particularly well described - what little detail she gave was somewhat inaccurate, at least when it came to swordplay and martial arts, about which I knew enough to be picky. But of course, her focus wasn’t on the fighting - in the heat of battle, her heroines would find time to notice the heroes’ firm, cleft chins and high cheekbones. During the final clinches each buxom blonde would already be planning to refurbish her rescuer with a better wardrobe and contacts - or, in the case of the historical romance, more flattering spectacles.