Like a modern-day Nancy Drew in a much more expensive outfit, Housewife Emily Simpson is determined to solve The Secret in the Parked Car on “The Real Housewives of Orange County” on Wednesday.

As in, did Housewife Jenn Pedranti get up to some hanky-panky with beau Ryan in a parked car? And was she glimpsed in flagrante delicto outside the mall? And does it all really matter?

This is a mystery more difficult to decipher than the one that opens this week’s episode, in which the first images we see are of Fisker, Emily’s dog, romancing a piece of her patio furniture.

“Look at him!” she tells husband Shane here in the role of Nancy’s pal Ned Nickerson. “He’s going to town on that pillow, man.”

The Case of the Horny Hound solved, the episode makes us wait until almost the end before Emily puts her detecting skills back into action during a party to celebrate or commemorate the closing of Cut Fitness, the gym owned and operated by Housewife Tamra Judge and husband Eddie Judge, and the same gym where Jenn met Ryan.

“Can I ask you a question because I’m kind of confused about the timeline,” Emily asks Jenn as the interrogation begins.

“Just be honest,” Tamra tells her, prompting Jenn to shoot her a quizzical stare.

“Be honest about what?” Jenn says next in a camera confessional. “Are you trying to imply that I was sleeping with Ryan? Well, I wasn’t.”

Meanwhile Housewife Gina Kirschenheiter, usually Bess Marvin to Emily’s Nancy, is of no use to the investigation this time. Just the idea of infidelity upsets her, she repeats. So like a good girl sleuth, Emily sits back and waits for her suspects to reveal themselves through dueling video confessionals.

“I met Ryan, he gave me a gift,” Jenn says. “There was no sex in the car in the parking lot.”

Tamra is unconvinced: “I feel like Jenn tells different stories to different people but I went it all with her,” she says.

“The situation is probably a lot more salacious than what she is letting on,” Emily postulates the camera. “And I’m just trying to get in there and get it out. Because that’s what I (bleeping) do.”

The book remains open on this case. Before Emily can solve it, Tamra and Eddie cut a Cut Fitness cake, and after Tamra shoves a chunk in Eddie’s face she goes after Emily, and the two of them end up chasing each other around the gym, frosting smeared on their faces and mashed into their hair until the credits roll.

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Here’s what else we saw this week:

• I haven’t seen the tax returns, but it seems pretty obvious that Housewife Heather Dubrow is the richest of this bunch. Just look at Heather, her husband and plastic surgeon Terry Dubrow, and their four kids sitting at their dining room table as Heather asks the family chef what he’ll soon be plating for their ordinary weeknight family dinner. Spaghetti squash, ribs, chicken with artichokes and asparagus, if you wanna Dine Like The Dubrows.

• Housewife Shannon Storms Beador and her boyfriend John are out shopping for crystals; well, Shannon is at least. For protection, she tells the clerk at Earth Stones in Laguna Beach. This happily provides us with a montage of Shannon’s past use of crystals including a clip of the time she had jewels embedded in her teeth. For healing, she explains, and here I’ve just been flossing all these decades.

• While Shannon’s still perusing the pretty rocks Tamra calls to apologize for the bad behavior on the yacht party in the previous week’s episode. Earlier, we’d seen Jenn show up at Cut Fitness to ask Tamra how she was feeling the morning after she cruised and boozed and blew her stack at Shannon at sea.

“I thought about having a beer for breakfast, that’s how bad I felt,” Tamra replies.

“You told her she could go (bleep) a duck,” Jenn says, helpfully trying to refresh Tamra’s blurry memories of the night before.

“Where did the duck come from?” Tamra wonders.

• Friend of the Housewives Taylor Armstrong, formerly on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” invites Heather over to work with her and her acting coach on her scenes for a movie in which Taylor seems like she’s been cast as a reporter trying to solve a murder in Oklahoma. (In classic girl detective lit this makes her a grown-up Penny Parker.)

Why Taylor needed Heather, who once upon a time appeared in a few television series, and Lauren Lim Jackson, a Broadway actress turned coach to help her is unclear. Or it is until she starts to read her lines.

Try to find your “reporter voice,” Jackson urges her, and then suggests breathing exercises that seem like they were based more on the Kama Sutra than the Stanislavski Method.

Related links

The Real Housewives of Orange County: They’re on a boat! And one’s gonna jump!
‘The Real Housewives of Orange County’: Tamra returns!
Meet Jennifer Pedranti, newest member of ‘The Real Housewives of Orange County’
Real Housewives of Orange County reunion: Who’s hot for Jimmy Fallon, who got a colonoscopy?
Real Housewives of Orange County reunion: Who ate $30,000 worth of sushi?