However, considering I wasn’t the one with the gun, I had little choice. I backed up, praying that one of the ladies in the cheery blue uniforms would see us.

No such luck. Between herding tourists, the colorful lights, the singing dolls, and the boats backing up one after another behind us, no one even glanced our way.

I walked slowly backward, deliberately veering to the left, where a stream of pink light shone down from overhead. As my captor followed me, the light played across her face.

I sucked in a breath. “You! You’re the one who’s been threatening me?”

Lani Cline chuckled. “Gee, what tipped you off, Sherlock?”

I narrowed my eyes at Jennifer Wood’s co-star. Hey, you try being brilliant when you’ve got a gun pointed at your tatas.

“You killed Hattie Carmichael,” I said, the gears in my head churning overtime.

“Who?” she asked.

“My neighbor.”

“The old lady in your condo?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure she could see me through the darkness.

“Look, I swear she was an accident,” Lani said, in her perky fake-teen voice. “All I meant to do was trash your place, scare you. But this nosy old hag comes barging in like she owns the place, yelling about the TV being too loud. I didn’t have any choice. I had to shut her up.”

“So you killed her,” I said, my throat thick with emotion. So Mrs. C. hadn’t been my favorite person in the world. In fact, she was kind of a pain in the butt. But to hear her talked about as if she were nothing more than an inconvenience grated on my nerves.

“I just meant to shut her up. That old thing had a set of lungs on her like you wouldn’t believe. So, I grabbed a bookend and hit her on the head.”

“But why?” I asked, taking a small step back, my butt coming up against a wall. I tried to feel around behind me for anything I could use as a weapon. Unfortunately, dolls are notoriously safe. I shifted to the left slightly, trying to get a good look around the tower for any sort of escape route. To my right, Lani stood holding the gun. To my left was a line of dolls glued to the floor. If I could distract Lani long enough, I might have a chance of jumping over them…“I mean, why threaten me in the first place?” I asked. “I never even wrote about you?”

Suddenly Lani’s perky little face scrunched up into an ugly mass of anger. “That’s the problem! Three years I’ve been on that moronic show, having to play second fiddle to some nitwit teenager. I’m a classically trained actress. I played Ophelia at Harvard!”