I made relatively quick work of selecting a couple of items for which Baby Hallard would doubtless be eternally grateful and waited patiently while the clerk wrapped my purchases in crimson-and-white tissue paper. I had a feeling I was going to enjoy the role of mad, frivolous auntie.

It turned out that neither my life-changing decision nor my shopping expedition had taken very long, so I decided to spend some time browsing through the books section before returning to the hotel to change for the evening’s activities. What had once been a maze of haphazardly shelved texts had also been transformed by a decorator who must have trained at Barnes & Noble. In fact, I realized belatedly, it now officially was a Barnes & Noble. I happily passed up the self-improvement section since I’d decided to let myself go to complete and utter seed. I probably needed some new and eccentric interests to go with my embrace of a Miss Havisham lifestyle. Perhaps I could take up rug hooking. Or spelunking.

However, none of the books in the Hobbies section seemed to call out to me, although I did toy briefly with a coffee table tome on papier-mâché. But it weighed as much as a few lead ingots, and the mere thought of hauling it back to New York left me exhausted. It was time for a fresh infusion of Diet Coke. I abandoned the book and went off in search of caffeine.

True to the Barnes & Noble décor, there was a café on the second-floor balcony, and since I no longer cared about things like cellulite I purchased both the brownie and the Rice Krispies Treat instead of wasting precious time choosing between them. I found an empty table and sat down to enjoy my version of afternoon tea. I quickly settled in to a nice rhythm: a bite of brownie, then a sip of soda, followed by a bite of Rice Krispies Treat, and then another sip of soda. Heaven. I hadn’t felt this good in days.

My table offered an excellent view of the first floor below me, and I gazed down at the shoppers in a state of chocolate/sugar/caffeine-drenched euphoria, amusing myself by counting Harvard scarves. I was up to sixteen when I noticed that one of the scarves was draped around a familiar pair of broad shoulders browsing the shelves. Its owner’s blond head was bent down to examine an open text, and there was something familiar about the blond head, as well.

It was Jonathan Beasley, studly professor by day, crazed killer by night.

My reaction was a bit slow. On the one hand, his sinister presence should have jolted me into a state of high alert. On the other hand, I was having such a nice time with my soda and empty calories that I didn’t want to interrupt it by panicking. It would be such a waste of truly delicious junk food.

Then he looked up in my direction. Our eyes nearly met, but I quickly pulled the bag with Baby Hallard’s onesies onto the table and ducked my head behind it. When I peeked back around the edge of the bag a moment later, Jonathan was flipping through another book.

I still didn’t panic. Rationally, I didn’t really think Jonathan would try to kill me or anyone else in the middle of the Coop. But a crazed serial killer was, by definition, crazed, and it didn’t seem to make sense to take any unnecessary risks. With a sense of calm resignation, I gave a last, wistful look at my brownie and my Rice Krispies Treat. Well over half was left of each. But I had to find a safe spot to call O’Connell and tell him where he could apprehend his suspect. Giving up on love didn’t mean neglecting my civic responsibility to help fight crime.

With a sigh, I collected my things and followed signs to the stairwell, staying as far away from the balcony railing as possible in order to keep myself out of Jonathan’s line of sight. The safest thing to do was find a ladies’ room and call from there, and I was pretty sure there was one on the third floor, which had the added benefit of being where they kept books about science, which didn’t seem to be one of Jonathan’s areas of primary interest. I headed up the flight of stairs, my legs powered by the amounts of caffeine and sugar I’d managed to ingest before being so inconveniently interrupted. The ladies’ room was deserted, and I locked myself in a stall and reached for my cell phone. I was getting so used to being perpetually freaked out that my hands were perfectly steady. I was in great shape to perform surgery or operate heavy machinery if the opportunity should arise.

Of course, all I wanted to do was make a simple phone call, but I should have known better than to think anything that I tried to accomplish that day would be easy. I stared at the screen of my cell phone in frustration as it searched fruitlessly for a signal. Nothing. I turned it off and then on again, but instead of the little bars indicating signal strength the space showed a lonely X. And the phone persisted in making the same whiny noise it had been making earlier in the day.

So much for the relative safety of the ladies’ room. I obviously needed to find a quiet spot closer to a window, but I’d stay up here with the science books. Holding the Blackberry in front of me like a dowsing rod, I kept my eye on the screen as I wandered through the rows of bookshelves, all stuffed with texts on various ’ologies, waiting for some little bars to appear.

I probably shouldn’t have been so confident that everyone’s favorite psycho killer wasn’t scientifically inclined. I had to skirt more than a few nerdy-looking types who’d plopped themselves down on the floor to better examine books about spiders and quasars, but I wasn’t expecting to turn a corner and nearly collide into Jonathan Beasley. He was leaning against the shelves with his back to me, a book propped open in his hands.

Whatever he was reading must have been gripping, because my gasp of horror didn’t register. I hightailed it back around the corner from which I came and made a beeline for the stairs. Except that I’d been so focused on my cell phone screen I’d completely lost track of where the stairs were. And I’d never been gifted on the navigational front. This deficiency, combined with being somewhat challenged in the height department, left me at a bit of a loss. I was essentially trapped in a maze of bookshelves I couldn’t see over, without a clue as to the direction in which my escape route lay. Which would have been all right if there weren’t a serial killer a few feet away who was likely only temporarily distracted by whatever he was reading.

I scampered up one row of shelves and down another, turning to the left and then the right, hoping eventually to locate a perimeter of some sort that I could follow. Instead I just found science nerds, using their breaks from the research lab or computer center to hang out in the bookstore and create a human obstacle course. When I judged that I was at least a few rows away from Jonathan, I stopped to ask one if he knew where the stairs were only to find that he didn’t speak English. The second guy I asked favored me with a look so blank that it left me wondering if I spoke English.

The calm resignation I’d felt a few minutes earlier was gone, morphing into a far less calm sense of panic. I quickened my pace as I threaded my way through the seemingly endless rows of shelves. Relief flooded through me when I finally spied a red exit sign on a distant wall.

I leaped over the sprawling limbs of a couple more science nerds, my eyes focused on the exit sign and salvation. I cleared the last row of books and headed for the door.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of crimson-and-white wool. Then an arm encircled my neck, nearly throwing me off my feet as it drew me into its grip.