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“Yeah, I’m here, and so are your cronies,” she said, subjecting Chase, Gran and Uncle Alec to some particularly nasty side-eye.

“Better start talking,” said Uncle Alec. “Why did you kill Kimberlee?”

For a moment it seemed as if Abbey was going to hold out, but then she relented.“Oh, I guess it’s no use. Kimberlee was inching her way to the top by any means necessary, and one of those means was my precious husband.”

“Seger? This is about Seger?” asked Odelia, surprised.

Abbey nodded.“He’s one of the top talent agents in the business. He makes or breaks careers and Kimberlee wanted him to make hers. Only he didn’t think she had what it took so he declined to take her on as his client. So she hired a private detective to dig around in his past and found some damaging little thing he did years and years ago. If he wouldn’t launch her into the big time, she was going to expose it and destroy his life and, in the process, probably mine, too, as these things have a habit of spreading like wildfire and taking down everyone who’s tainted by association.”

“What secret?” asked Odelia.

She frowned and shook her head, indicating she wasn’t prepared to tell them.

“We’ll find out,” said Alec.

“I’ll bet you will,” Abbey said ruefully. “Kimberlee had Seger in her pocket and was starting to make some frankly unreasonable demands. If he kept pushing her his own career was going to suffer. Everyone complained about Kimberlee, on every set of every project she got involved in, and it was starting to affect the way people viewed Seger. This is a business of trust. If Seger pushes an actress who can’t deliver and makes a nuisance of herself wherever she goes, people are going to start asking questions, and pretty soon she was going to drag my husband down with her. So I did whatI had to do.”

“You set up the meeting and you killed her.”

Abbey nodded.“It wasn’t hard. I hated her guts with a vengeance. Not only did she use Seger, but she also came on to him, and when he refused, started pestering him even more. She was a jerk.”

“Where did you get the cyanide?”

“On a movie set in Lithuania a couple of months ago. The sound guy was former Russian intelligence. He had a couple of cyanide pills from his days in the service and gave them to me as a present. In case I ever got fed up with my director. He only said it half in jest. The director on that shoot really was a terrible pest. So I put some of that cyanide in a Coke can and gave it to Kimberlee. She loved Coke Emerald, and especially since this was from Emerald’s personal stash, which has just that extra kick the others lack.”

“How did you get your hands on that can?”

“Emerald gave it to me—in fact she gave each of us a can of Special Coke Emerald: Kimberlee, me, Verna, Alina… So when I was in there, I offered Kimberlee mine and then when she was dead, I took hers so people would simply figure she’d killed herself.”

“How did you get her to drink it?”

“She was a Coke addict. Easily downed a gallon a day. I went in there to talk about a new project Seger was setting up for her—she was eager to direct her own movie and he’d found a producer who was willing to take a chance on her—and to discuss the stuff that had just gone down with Alina.I said I hated Alina as much as she did, and she just gobbled it up. Started thinking up ways and means of murdering Alina in the most gruesome way possible. Ironically enough she was drinking a lethal dose of cyanide as she sat there fantasizing about killing Alina.”

“How did you know about the secret passageways?”

“Emerald showed them to us last year. Said we could use them to sneak into each other’s rooms for slumber parties and if we got tired of our husbands.”

“What about Shauna?”

She frowned.“Who?”

“The maid you pushed down the stairs.”

“Oh, that.” She shrugged. “I think she saw me. She was in my room when I stepped out of the wall, right after Kimberlee was killed. It probably didn’t take her long to put two and two together. So when I saw her shove that note under your door I just figured it was time to end her. So I did.”

It was hard to believe that a woman who appeared so utterly sweet and kind could turn out to be such a ruthless killer, Odelia thought.

“And to think I liked you,” she said finally.

“Oh, but I like you, too, honey,” said Abbey, putting a hand on Odelia’s arm. “But it’s every woman for herself in this business. And it was pretty obvious to me you knew something, so you had to be silenced.”

“It was you and Seger I heard talking last night, wasn’t it? You were saying how careful you’d been and he was expressing his concern.”