by Page Turner
“I didn’t say anything,” Karen said.
“You didn’t have to,” Roscoe said.
Karen sighed. It was a taste of her own medicine, being read in a way that she couldn’t read. Usually she was on the other side of things, her empathy bringing to her one-sided insights.
“I envy you, you know, Karen,” Roscoe said.
Karen frowned. “Really? Why’s that?”
“I’d do anything to be able to turn off my telepathy, even for a little bit,” Roscoe said. “Even if it meant I had to tag along everywhere to do it like the Poky Little Puppy.”
“I don’t know whether to thank you or hit you,” Karen said.
“I know,” Roscoe replied.
“I’m not sure you’d turn it off even if you could. Even with the constant din, I think you like knowing what other people are up to,” Karen said.
Roscoe smiled. “Are you sure you’re not telepathic?” he said.
Karen pulled two small plastic plates and plastic forks from her hoodie.
Roscoe boggled. “That thing’s massive on you, but wow… Is it also a bag of holding?”
Karen frowned and ignored him.
Viv held her ceramic cafeteria plate forward and scraped two small portions on the plastic plates. Penny and Karen began to eat.
“You know, I should scout the back alley at Ballhaus again. They make an excellent Jagerschnitzel there. The gravy reminds me of this sauce. And they always make too much,” Penny said.
Viv smiled. Never change, she thought affectionately.
“Oh don’t worry, she won’t,” Roscoe replied.
“What?” Penny said.
“Never mind,” Roscoe said.
He summarized the plan to the detectives as they continued to dig in, sharing his suggestion that they go to the media.
“Regina Withers!” Penny exclaimed. “I’m in.”
Karen frowned. She found her mind drifting back to her years on the ranch, as it always did when she spent more than a few moments around Ryan. She thought of Matt-Mike. The way he always found a way to humiliate her. To insinuate that she was different than the rest of the kids.
He always seemed to know what she was thinking, just the way Ryan Roscoe did. And had a way of using it against her.
Roscoe met her gaze, seemed to register what she was thinking, and yet he said nothing aloud.
That’s strange, Karen thought. Why is this something he doesn’t want to talk about?
Roscoe glanced at her nervously.
“Best of luck, girls,” he said. “And give Regina my love.” He rose with his tray.
“Regina Withers,” Penny said again, flushing. “If that isn’t a lifelong dream.” She smiled. “I used to watch her all the time, growing up. It was a way of taking of my mind off the shitty foster homes I was in. Murder’s a Hell of a palate cleanser. Dramatic. Makes for a good distraction. And Regina… she’s something else. She hasn’t aged a day either. She still looks just like she did when I was a kid. I don’t know how she does it.”
Viv felt a bubble of jealousy in her chest. “Pancake makeup, lighting, and film editing, I’d imagine,” she snapped.
“Maybe,” Penny said, so excited still that she didn’t register the venom in Viv’s tone. “Guess we’ll find out.”
Straight Out of Central Casting
Afflicted with Christmas morning syndrome, Penny rose early on the day they were due to see Regina Withers.
Early even for early.
The sun had yet to come up. Astronomical dawn was a ways out still, let alone its followers nautical dawn and civil dawn.
Over the years, Penny had learned to distinguish well between all three dawn stages of morning twilight, along with their crepuscular nighttime counterparts – astronomical dusk, nautical dusk, and of course civil dusk.
Astronomical dawn is the state at which the sky is no longer completely dark. It is the very beginning of the lighting of the sky, becoming possible at the moment that the sun is still 18 degrees below the horizon.
Nautical dawn follows when the sun is 12 degrees below the horizon. Its name comes from it being the point at which sailors can see the horizon while at sea. During nautical dawn, the sky becomes just light enough to tell the sky from the land and sea.
When the sun reaches 6 degrees below the horizon, civil dawn follows. At this point, visibility increases to the point at which most objects are visible and that it’s possible to begin to do some things outdoors. Not everything, but some things. A bit of activity commences.
Penny didn’t want to look at a clock, but a simple glance out the window let her know that the sun was more than 18 degrees below the horizon.
She rose and crept down the stairs. She briefly considered making coffee, but worrying that the smell would wake the others, she instead began to boil water on the stove. The tea kettle was old, a gift from a former friend, a fellow dumpster diver and thrifter who had found it at a yard sale. When she’d been gifted the kettle, it had been painted caution orange with many bare patches where the paint had degraded over the years.
Penny had stripped the paint from its surface and repainted it a soft baby pink. More her taste for sure.
As usually happened whenever Penny couldn’t sleep or got up early, finding herself faced with darkness, she felt strangely energized.
What is it about the darkness that attracts me? Penny wondered. It was inconvenient to say the very least, her natural tendency to want to be up at night and to sleep during the day.
It had all worked out a little more gently in the days when she was a college student. She would stay up for classes, taking multiple long naps in between, and then rise to pull an all-nighter.
But her work at PsyOps had placed her mostly on the day shift with the occasional investigative foray at an indecent hour of evening or morning. Ever-so-occasional.
Far less than she’d expected going into the profession. Different than what the television she’d been riveted to as a young girl had led her to believe. In those stories, a mix of fictional dramas and true crime documentaries, detectives were often portrayed as gritty nightwalkers who beat the darkest streets.
In her favorite programs, the detectives were there taping up the scene within moments of the murders, most of which took place in the wee hours of either morning or night.
Instead, her caseload unfolded much more haphazardly. It was actually quite rare that they were the first ones to a scene. And people seemed to kill others pretty much whenever they wanted to and the time it took for anyone to discover the body (or bodies) later varied widely, with an additional lag representing how long it took law enforcement in general to arrive, let alone her specific team in the event that they did get called in.
An awful lot of these summons seemed to happen during daylight hours. She’d willed herself to be on days as a matter of survival.
Workdays could be long. Naps were elusive. So much for the good old days of college all-nighters.
At least this awakening had been a sweet one. Penny had come to woven into a web of hands and arms, with Viv and Karen both wrapped around her.
True, it had been difficult to extract herself from this matrix, but it was a nice reminder that while her unconventional relationships sometimes carried headaches, it wasn’t without its benefits. Ones that were hard to understand had you never been in such a situation.
Besides, the headaches were relatively minor. They mostly came from outside the relationships in the form of misinformed questioning from people who seemed to lack any sense of normal boundaries when they were presented with a novel model of interpersonal relating.
That a person could be non-monogamous, multi-committed, and happily, stably so was a foreign concept to a lot of people she met. And she could almost see a timer counting down from the moment that they first realized she was unt
il the point that they felt comfortable asking her invasive questions. The questioners sometimes posed these as real “gotcha, you’re pulling my leg, it can’t be as you say, tell me the truth,” devastatingly incisive inquires, but they were actually pretty routine to her as the questioned.
They said the same things over and over again.
Some of them were working with a real learning curve. Their view of meaningful romantic and sexual love required a man and a woman and exactly one of each. Having more than one woman involved (no men, the horror!) was confusing enough for them without adding in stack overflow problems posed by three people being involved.
She wasn’t sure how many times she’d been asked some variant of “How do you have sex without a man involved?” But she knew it had been a lot. And that this question had come from a diverse set of people, from a variety of different demographics.
If she had to come up with a singular unifying factor though, something shared by everyone who asked this question, it was that the person asking it either lacked a sexual imagination, underestimated the sensual potential of hands and mouths, or both.
As well as the emotional potential, Penny thought, as her water came up to boil. She switched off the stove before the kettle could whistle.
She thought again of how encased she’d felt as she woke, nestled between Karen and Viv. How safe and how loved.
Awfully good posture for a woman named Withers, Viv noted, as the TV host glided into the room for their afternoon meeting.
It’s almost like she’s on rollerskates, Viv observed. It was a peculiar thing to behold, how smooth her gait, a phenomenon rendered even more strange by the fact that Withers was wearing four-inch stiletto heels. Her long legs balanced improbably on minuscule points.
Roller-stilettos? Viv thought, stifling a laugh.
The laugh sounded disrespectful to Penny, who frowned and shot Viv a warning gaze. Don’t mess this up for me, Penny thought, wishing for the umpteenth time that she were an expressive telepath and not hounded by checked out undead hordes. It would be ever-so-convenient to be able to silently tell Viv to knock it off.
Penny quickly turned her gaze back to Regina and proceeded to beam a smile at the host that made her look an awful lot like a sunflower who’s just finding the sun.
“Sorry I’m late,” Regina Withers said.
She was not late of course but precisely on time. But if there were one thing Withers had learned early in her life, it was that it was good to start out at a disadvantage the first time you were meeting someone new.
This was something she could never explain to other people, nor would she, preferring to keep the knowledge to herself as a secret upper hand. It was counterintuitive, the idea that you wanted to meet new people as humbled, less than them.
But she’d found doing so to be a powerful social accelerant. It caused others to let down their guard around her. And to open up to her in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise.
This was truly important as her profile had risen over the years, being able to establish rapport quickly. Or to instantly effect something of a peer relationship.
Or at least an affected peer relationship.
Because while Withers had gotten great at delivering sincere apologies and humbling herself in front of others, she hadn’t felt the corresponding emotions of chagrin, humility, or even self-doubt in years.
She was simply good at broadcasting those emotions. A broadcaster, not much of a feeler. Fitting for someone in television. Hadn’t she been introduced at the last awards show she attended as “inveterate broadcaster?”
“We’re on your schedule, Ms. Withers,” Penny said. “No worries at all.” She did her best to appear composed but was fangirling so hard internally that her stomach had risen up in her chest and she felt as though she might puke.
Penny’s foster siblings had been a mixed bunch over the years, but there was one in particular that she’d been close to. A foster sister who’d also been orphaned and abandoned while still a baby, just as Penny had. There was a game that Penny used to play with her foster sister where they would fantasize about who they’d have as parents if they could choose anyone in the world.
Penny’s choice for dream mother was Regina Withers. There was something soft, willowy, and incredibly feminine about the TV host, and yet Withers didn’t have a hint of submissive surrender. No sign of weakness anywhere about her. Withers had a readily apparent steely reserve. Withers was beautiful, warm, and intelligent – and simultaneously took no shit.
Her hair flounced and shone without a single strand ever going out of place. Withers always looked perfectly put together and yet showed no outward signs that she cared at all about her appearance, a combination that Penny had tried hard to emulate over the years.
In her fantasies, Penny imagined Withers not as a stay-at-home mom who drove her to activities and baked cookies but as a professional mom working late or away on location, leaving Penny either by herself (ideally) or in the care of a stream of competent nannies. Mommy Withers wouldn’t always be around, but when she were she would be present and attentive and take a great interest in everything going on in Penny’s life.
And when she was away, Penny would be able to watch her on TV.
Her foster sister had pointed out how strange it was that even in her fantasies Penny had dreamed up a mom who was part time.
Penny responded to this observation by calling her foster sister a name, starting an argument. Unable to fully grasp, let alone explain, that she would feel suffocated with a helicopter parent or even a more, normal full-time situation. That she was the kind of latchkey kid who found doors she couldn’t unlock to feel like readymade prisons.
Regina Withers represented her perfect mom: Busy enough to keep from smothering her but caring enough to continually check in.
Standing before the celebrity in the flesh was surreal, particularly because the TV host had barely aged in the many years since Penny had first seen her on television.
The phone on Regina Withers’ desk beeped.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” the timid voice of her secretary ventured.
“Yes, Allison?” Withers replied.
“I have a Mr. Orson Eck on the line for you, ma’am.”
“Tell Mr. Eck I’ll call him back,” Withers said. “I’m in a very important meeting.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The phone beeped again.
Penny beamed at those words. Regina Withers – The Regina Withers – thought it was important to meet with her? (And yeah, okay, with Viv and Karen, too. Whatever.)
Wow!
Viv, however, wasn’t flattered. “What are you doing talking to the Ecks?” she asked.
“I didn’t know that was against the law, detective,” Withers countered, smirking.
“Yeah, Viv. You don’t have to be rude,” Penny said.
“No, no, it’s fine,” Withers replied. “He’s one of the talent, you see.”
“Talent?” Viv said.
“He’s a cast member. On To Heck with the Ecks,” Regina said.
“I’ve heard of it,” Penny said. She almost added on (truthfully), “But Viv won’t let me watch it because she says it’s trash.” But she caught herself just in time, feeling that Viv was in bad enough of a mood already. No need to make it worse.
“What does that have to do with you?” Viv asked pointedly.
Regina Withers sighed. “I take it you’re not a fan.”
“I don’t watch it, no,” Viv said. “I don’t watch reality TV at all if I can help it.” To Viv’s thinking, To Heck with the Ecks was just another permutation of an idiotic trend, a camera crew following around the rich and famous and then desperately splicing together scenes in a vain attempt to make some kind of vaguely watchable programming.
Viv wasn’t about to admit it to Penny – lest she be called a hypocrite �
� but Viv had seen exactly one episode of To Heck with the Ecks while out visiting her mother, who was a raging fan of the show, and all reality TV for that matter. The Ecks were incorrigible playboys. Filthy pigs about it, really. The episode she’d seen had them trying to lure unsuspecting drunk women back to their mansion and get them to strip down in the hot tub before asking them to leave in the meanest way possible.
No sex required. Just debasement and humiliation. Although they did have their way with some of them before insulting them and kicking them out.
The Eck boys were engaged in a competition. Both scored the women on a number of different factors that made them worth more points: Appearance, fame, wealth, intelligence. She forgot what else.
The whole thing had made her sick. A couple of adolescent-acting boys treating women like hunting trophies.
Viv’s mother, however, had laughed heartily at the women’s humiliation. “Stupid tarts,” she’d said, chilling Viv’s blood.
Like you’re any better than them, Viv had thought but knew better to say.
“Ah, not a viewer? Well, that’s okay. Can’t have everyone watching, can we?” Withers said. “I’m the executive producer.”
Viv’s face fell. She didn’t have to say how could you? aloud. Her expression did all the work for her.
“Look,” Withers said, reading the message loud and clear. “I know it isn’t high art or anything. But it pays the bills. And it keeps me in the loop.” She paused. “It’s not fair, but there seems to be a hidden expiration date to be on television as a woman. One must have backup plans.”
“You don’t look a day over…” Penny began. Then she stopped, not wanting to venture what number to say, not knowing what age it would please her idol to be mistaken for. Especially since she’d ventured such guesses in the past with others and had been excoriated for saying one too high, or in some cases so absurdly low that they recognized the bald flattery and lashed out for that.
Withers cocked her head as people always did when you started a sentence this way, waiting for the number.
