Someone is trying to sabotage the Miss Mall Beauty Pageant. Is it the contestant who will do anything to win the crown, or the competition outside the stage for the other beauty pageant?
Tropes:
- Alpha Bitch: Corinne, a serial beauty pageant winner who expresses a fierce desire to win Miss Mall, earning her a place on the suspect list.
- Beauty Contest: The case centers around someone setting up accidents around rehearsals for the Miss Mall beauty pageant.
- Chekhov's Gun: Shelby makes the connection to the culprit when Corinne talks about labeling her cosmetics with her initials, reminding Shelby that all the pageant set workers label their tools with their initials, meaning the tools used to sabotage the set—which were unlabeled—could not have been found from the workers’ tool sets, and therefore could not have been used on the fly by Corinne or Guy Micheals, more likely to have come from Mrs. Makella’s hardware store. But what makes Shelby certain of Mrs. Makella’s guilt is seeing sawdust fall from under the stage when people stepped on it. The stage itself was sabotaged, and stepping on it would have hurt the people stepping on. Neither Corinne and Guy knew about the stage, or else they wouldn’t have been so pushy to get on it, confirming their innocence.
