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the book and you died and—"
    "I died, all right. It's the other part you've got all wrong. Merilee didn't write So Far the Dawn . I did. And Pepper, I want you to prove it. Before that movie premiere."

Chapter 4
    "No."
    Talk about a mantra. Between the afternoon Didi told me she was Merilee Bowman's sister and the next day, I'd spoken the word no fewer than a hundred times.
    "No, no, no. I told you, Didi, there's no way."
    "But Gus said you were really good at this sort of thing."
    I was supposed to melt under the warmth of the compliment. At least that's what Didi had planned. She didn't know that I was way beyond being schmoozed by the warm and the fuzzy. After all, I'd been schooled by the best of them.
    Nobody does hard-nosed like a Mafia don.
    Just to prove how impervious I was to Didi's pleas, I got up from my desk. It was lunchtime, and I switched off my computer monitor and grabbed my purse and the brown bag I'd brought along with me from home. Peanut butter and grape jelly on white bread. Not exactly my favorite lunch (which was more in line with a Cobb salad and a glass of crisp Chardonnay at one of the darling little bistros over on Murray Hill) but I didn't have to remind myself that I had to learn to economize. Poverty was scratching at my door.
    And the noise was getting louder by the second.
    I twitched away the thought and headed across my office. For the third day in a row, the sun was shining (not a common occurrence inCleveland in the spring) and there was a picnic table outside the back door to the administration building. I had plans. And while they might have included PB & J, they did not include listening to Didi for one more moment.
    "Murder is one thing," I said to her. Again. "If you wanted me to find out who murdered you, I might be able to handle that. But fraud is a whole different ball game. Even if you could pay me…" I paused here to let the message sink in and to give Didi the opportunity to come up with some kind of solution to my thorny monetary problem. When she didn't, I sighed and went right on. "When I worked on Gus's case, I had help. Gus's help. I had no idea what I was doing. I was lucky I found out who killed him." Lucky , of course, is a relative word, and if I had the sense, I would have remembered it. Luck didn't have anything to do with the weeks I'd spent dealing with mobsters, mistresses, and federal agents. Of course, it did say something about the fact that I'd managed to survive them all.
    "It's not that I don't want to help you, Didi," I said, leaving out the part about how a little financial incentive would have made the want part more sincere. "It's just that I honestly don't know how. You're telling me that you wrote a book. A famous book. You're telling me that Merilee didn't. It makes my stomach hurt just thinking about how complex the whole thing is. Like I told you yesterday, I wouldn't even know where to start."
    "But Gus says you're smart."
    "Gus is a very good bullshitter."
    "And he says you're clever."
    "It's not something he ever told me when I was working on his case."
    "Gus says you'd never let down a friend."
    "And I didn't know we were friends."
    The way I figured it, any self-respecting ghost should have taken the not-so-subtle hint and hightailed it back to the Great Beyond. I guess Didi wasn't self-respecting.
    When I made a move toward the door, she blocked my way.
    "You're the only one who can help me."
    I had heard the same argument from Gus right there in that office, and not that long before, I answered Didi the same way I'd answered him. "I can't help. I don't know how. I'm not—"
    "A detective? Sure you are. At least that's what Gus says."
    I didn't want to admit that what I was really going to say was I'm not even sure I believe you . I just wasn't ready to tell Didi that the story she'd told was a little too outrageous for me to accept at face value. So far, the only proof she had offered to support her claim of being the author of So Far the