This Is Not A Chapter, But...

Dead Ringer

…when last we saw poor Blainey Blair, she was on her way back to St. Regis, where she has been working as a chaplain, to break it to her boss, the Director of Pastoral Care, Fred Moseley, that she’s been moonlighting as an assistant to a local P.I. and her current case involved a former patient at their hospital, Rachel Roper. All kinds of potential conflicts of interest there. On top of that, she’d just had a meeting with Cathy Stearnes, the young CNA who was the first to discover that Rachel had died right under the nose of the staff at the tony private hospital WindDancer. That meeting had gone badly off the rails.

Things are a mess and Blainey isn’t completely sure what’s next. She’s hoping you can hang in there while she figures out just how she is going to approach Fred, how she can enlist her other boss, the secret one, the P.I. Mark Danner, in finding some legal help for CNA Cathy, who Blainey is pretty sure is going to get saddled with blame, since the CEO of WindDancer sure isn’t going to take it.

On top of all that, Blainey owes Rachel’s brother, the millionaire Weston Roper, an update about the case, which in spite of WindDancer’s efforts to gloss over a suspicious death that happened in their facility, has been officially ruled a homicide. But she doesn’t really have an update for Weston, except to tell him she pissed off Will Keating, the cranky chain-smoking pathologist he’d hired to do the autopsy, since Weston didn’t trust WindDancer with those arrangements. Blainey is working to get back in Will’s good graces — not just for the sake of the case but also because she really likes the guy and had hoped they could be pals. Or something.

Actually, the list of people who are pissed off at Blainey is fairly impressive. Chad Miller, the detective who warned her to stay the hell out of his way, Cathy Stearnes who, it’s true, Blainey had lied to in order to get a face to face, and Delma and Frankie, two of her oldest and dearest friends who think she has gone off the deep end with her investigations side gig. Mavis, the administrative assistant for Pastoral Care, makes no attempt to hide her dislike. She and the oily faux-Buddhist chaplain at WindDancer, Lamar Gustafson, hold each other in mutual contempt, having crossed paths before, and not in a good way.

And I think we can expect Blainey’s boss, Fred Moseley, will be added to the list in a matter of hours.

But things are going to be sorted out soon, don’t you worry. And Blainey Blair has her own list — people she’s looking at as possible suspects. She’s keeping that to herself, for now, but she knows she’s getting closer to finding Rachel’s killer. She can feel it in her bones.

New here? If you want to read from the beginning, go here for Chapter One!