Jane Cody’s biggest character flaw was that she didn’t realize how incredibly lucky she’d always been. The documentary was a perfect example. She hooked up with Desmond Sullivan on a dubious project to profile the life of a woman who was of absolutely no interest to anyone. Then it turned out that even if no one cared that Pauline Anderton had lived, everyone cared that she hadn’t died. She stopped singing after her husband’s death—they should have given her the Nobel Peace Prize for that—and went to live with her sister and brother-in-law in some hellish suburb with a name that sounded like a skin disease. When the sister dropped dead, everyone mistakenly thought it was Pauline who had kicked the bucket. So off she goes to Florida with the brother-in-law, who—hard to imagine, but there’s no accounting for taste—had always had a yearning for her. She would have stayed there in Gulf City, yet another of the planet’s garden spots, and lived out her days in happy, senile obscurity, if only Jane and Desmond hadn’t tripped over her and blown her cover.

Rosemary had to admit that Jane had had the good sense to spot the story’s sideshow appeal and exploit its potential. She ran with it—ran right out of public television, for starters—and panhandled some money from one of those cable stations that are desperate for anything they can market as a World Premiere. If you believed what Jane had told her, they’d finished filming the next biography in the series she was producing. Desmond Sullivan’s Anderton book had been published six months ago. Rosemary had stumbled over a couple of respectful reviews, but so far, judging from its rank on Amazon.com, it was far behind Dead Husband in sales. She wasn’t going to gloat over that fact—not in public, anyway. Too bad for Desmond’s sales figures he and Jane hadn’t discovered that Pauline Anderton had murdered a few people or was really a man. Even Jane Cody couldn’t guarantee that much luck.

Ever since college, Rosemary had felt competitive with Jane. She wasn’t sure why that was, although she suspected it had something to do with the similarities in their personalities. People talked about competition between friends as something shameful, but what greater compliment is there to someone you love than to want to rise to her level of accomplishment—and then leave her in the dust as you climb past her?