Convicted Read Online Free Page A

bluff on my part, but it worked. Apparently no one loves theater as much as a drama major.
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    NONE OF THIS EVER MADE the papers. And as far as I know, the police didn’t hear about it.
    Cokie started a business to provide assistance and home care to seniors. She invited Lydia and me to her wedding. Aside from the bride and groom, Kayla Harding, and us, Cokie’s parents were the youngest people there—she’d invited all her elderly friends. It was one of the coolest (and rowdiest) weddings ever.
    Oh yes. She ended up marrying some clown.

H arriet read the letter again. She wasn’t sure why; each re-reading upset her as much if not more than the first.
    â€œOnce again, I must tell you that the ending of this story positively reeks,” Kitty Craig had written. “I can’t imagine any reader believing Lord Harold Wiggins would choose this method of killing off his enemy, nor would any reader believe he could manage to mask the taste of antimony by mixing it into the braunschweiger. Rewrite.”
    Harriet Bently had been writing the popular Lord Harold Wiggins series for ten years now. She knew exactly what dearest Harry (as only Harriet had liberty to call him) would choose to do in any given situation, even if her editor did not. After all, Harry had moved into Harriet’s life—lock, stock and barrel. No, she didn’t invite him to tea like a child’s imaginary friend; but she thought of him constantly, and had grown comfortable with his presence in her life. Like any series character and his author, they had become quite attached to each other.
    It was more than Kitty Craig’s rude tone that upset her. Kitty was notorious in the publishing industry for her biting, sarcastic remarks; Harriet told herself (not entirely successfully) that she shouldn’t take Kitty’s insults personally. What upset Harriet was Kitty’s disregard for Lord Harold Wiggins’s intelligence. His trademark was to effect justice without costing the English taxpayers a farthing for an imprisonment or a trial; once Lord Wiggins knew who the guilty party was, he cleverly killed the villain. In this book, Lord Wiggins made sure the poisoner Monroe would never age another day by slipping him a lethal dose of antimony. Monroe was a villain of the first water, and certainly deserved the punishment Lord Wiggins meted out. Harriet couldn’t help but feel proud of her protagonist.
    Her previous editor, Linda Lucerne, had loved Lord Harold almost as much as she did. Linda never changed much more than a punctuation mark; Kitty used industrial strength black markers to X through pages of manuscript at a time. Pages that had taken hours of research, planning, writing, and rewriting before they were ever mailed to Shoehorn, Dunstreet and Matthews (known affectionately as SDM), the esteemed publishers of the Lord Harold Wiggins series.
    Yes, Linda Lucerne had loved Harriet’s style, and said so from the moment she accepted the first novel, Lord Wiggins Makes Hay While the Sun Shines . And make hay he did. Linda’s faith was proved justified, and the success of Makes Hay was repeated in Lord Wiggins Beards the Lion in His Den and the next seven Lord Harold Wiggins books. Alas, Linda had suffered a heart attack just after the tenth book, Lord Wiggins Throws Pearls Before Swine , had been mailed off to SDM. Upon her recovery, she had opted for retirement from the publishing industry.
    Harriet tried hard to remember a sin she might have committed that would have justified so mean a punishment as having Kitty Craig become her new editor.
    She had known other writers who had suffered under Kitty’s abuses. Upon learning that Kitty would be her editor, Harriet had complained long and loud to her agent. But Wendall had pointed out that Kitty had been personally chosen for Harriet by Mr. William Shoehorn III. He had also mentioned that unless she was willing to come up with a new main character,