No, on second thought, I’m going! I’ll just pop another Stress-Less pill and wash it down with an itsy bitsy glass of sherry. That should get me through the night.

To: Jausten

From: DaddyO

Your mom just left for bingo. I told her I was staying home because I had a headache. And she fell for it!

What a perfect opportunity to spin my web and trap the Hugo Boss Strangler. Yes, sweet pea, it’s time for The Nose to spring into action!

Chapter 12

I shuddered when I checked my e-mails the next morning. Lord only knew what mischief “The Nose” was up to. Really, sometimes I think Daddy shouldn’t be let outside without a leash.

Back on the home front, Prozac continued to be a good little Weight Watcher and dug into her Lite ’N Lively Liver Tidbits with gusto.

“Oh, sweetie,” I gushed as she hunkered over her bowl, “I’m so proud of you.”

I considered celebrating my victory in the battle of wills with a nice big plate of bacon and eggs and a toasted English muffin dripping with butter but decided against it. For one thing, I didn’t think Prozac would appreciate my pigging out on bacon and eggs when she was stuck with her Lite ’N Lively liver glop. And for another thing, I didn’t have any bacon. Or eggs. Or English muffins. Or butter, for that matter. A quick survey of my refrigerator yielded little more than a chunk of moldy Swiss cheese and jar of martini olives.

So I nuked myself some instant coffee and settled down with the morning paper.

I took one look at the front page and gasped in dismay. There, smiling out at me from under the headline PMS MURDER VICTIM, was a picture of Marybeth Olson, taken in the days when she was alive and well and driving everybody crazy.

But it was what was underneath Marybeth’s picture that set my heart pounding. Yes, lined up beneath the unnerving caption AT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME were snapshots of the six remaining PMS Club members: Pam, Doris, Ashley, Rochelle, Colin, and yours truly, Jaine Austen.

There I was plastered on the front page of the L.A. Times—a murder suspect. Even more horrifying, they’d used my driver’s license photo. The one where I looked like an extra from Dawn of the Dead. (If only I’d returned their calls last night, maybe I could have dashed over with a decent picture.)

I looked down at that awful picture and groaned. I looked like a poster girl for schizophrenia. If a jury had to convict one of us by looks alone, I’d be doing time in the pokey before the afternoon was out.