Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “It’s not little.”

  He suddenly lunged forward, his booted foot smacking the floor.

  She jerked back, retreating. It had worked. Xoe Chloe had made him too mad to see past her cheesy, mouthy exterior.

  “Listen, little lady.” He caught her arms and pulled her close and spoke low. “My job is to guard the Ashleigh broad but I’ll give you some free expert advice. Somebody around here is this close to the edge. You don’t want to end up spattered on the exercise machines, stay in your room. Don’t wander around alone; do as you’re told.”

  “And you’re protecting Savannah Ashleigh by lounging around in the den?”

  His grip tightened. A fist came up.

  Temple dodged but she couldn’t break free. Her “pal” Rafi wouldn’t do this to her, but it was instructive to see what he’d do to some unknown young girl. How had she ever thought he might be a smidge better than the sleaze-ball Molina had made him out to be?

  She winced, expecting a blow.

  Instead he waved a cat-whisker-thin black wire at her.

  “This place is bugged. Surveilled. All for the camera crews. But someone, maybe anyone, must be using this setup to watch and hear whatever he wants to, anytime. I’m going to track his ass through the same wires he uses to terrorize you people. Get it? Now shut up, get back to your room, and save your own pierced little skin.”

  When he let her go, she almost lost her balance. “Surveilled” was not a word but Temple decided this was not the time to mention that. He stalked off without waiting to see if she was taking his advice.

  He was right, though. They were all experimental rats in a maze. Technology was their reason for being here, and their Achilles’ heel.

  Could Rafi himself be the creep who was stalking the show, relishing being called in to track himself?

  What a mess. The cast and crew were too large, the pool of victims too numerous, and the potential evil-doer too easily hidden.

  It was just a matter of time, she knew—and Rafi had indicated that he knew too—before someone really got hurt.

  And not even Lieutenant Molina could do a thing about it.

  Rafi was right about one thing: she belonged upstairs keeping an eye on Mariah, 24/7.

  Chapter 26

  Midnight Attack

  “So what’d you find out?”

  Mariah was sitting cross-legged on one side of the giant bed, painting her toenails atop the pink silk bedspread.

  “Whoops!” Temple grabbed her notebook, opened it flat, and poised Mariah’s chubby little toes on top of it. “You might drip.”

  “I won’t drip,” she said, looking up.

  Temple looked down just in time to watch a red glob of nail enamel hit the notebook and pool there like a gobbet of designer-shade blood.

  “So spake Dracula,” Temple said. “Everybody drips painting their toenails. It’s a girly rule since the Garden of Eden. Eve did it. Evita did it. Even the Dixie Chicks do it. We don’t want to trash the room. That’ll give us black marks in the competition.”

  Mariah said nothing but bit her lower lip in concentration as she painted her last big toenail.

  “You’re acting like one big drip,” Mariah finally said. “You’re like my mother. I can’t do anything right.”

  “You’re doing everything fine, just not over the pink silk bedspread with the scarlet nail polish, all right?”

  Temple sat on the bed’s end. “Is something wrong?”

  “Just that this whole place is stupid, and everybody in it.”

  Temple pasted a cautionary finger to her lips.

  “I don’t care,” Mariah said, even louder. “This place is creepy, even without the shaving cream threats and the just too gross rubber … thing on the exercise machine. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I want to go home.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Mariah starting picked at her cuticles where the polish had smeared, peeling off tiny flecks of dried enamel.

  “I’m the only girl in my category who has to do two hours of workouts a day and live on Bugs Bunny leavings.”

  Temple paused, not knowing what to say. Then Mariah said it for her.

  “I’m the only girl here who has to lose weight to win. It’s not fair! I’ve only got a week left, and now all I can see when I do the treadmill is that stupid, bloody balloon girl. Maybe she got spattered because she was too fat too.”

  “You’re not fat.”

  “You sound like my mom, and I don’t believe her either.”

  “It’s baby pudge. You haven’t hit your full height is all. You’ll be willowy like your mom in no time.”

  “Her? Willowy?”

  “Well … maybe maple-y. She’s a little solid for a willow; cops need to be. But she’s not overweight.”

  “Oh, yeah? She’s a member of Weight Watchers and she’s always on me to join too.”

  “Weight Watchers.” Temple felt numbed by surprise. She’d never pegged the terrible Lieutenant Molina as out of control in any area.

  “She only has to go once in a while ’cuz she’s a life member,” Mariah added. “I’d have to get weighed every week and sit around with a bunch of fat old ladies.”

  Molina a lifer in Weight Watchers. Okay, that did fit with what Temple knew of the woman. Disciplined. Did it once and it was over. The kind of person who could quit smoking in one day. But once upon a time … Molina had been pudgy too? Hard to imagine but very pleasant to contemplate nonetheless. Even though Temple was noticing her own weight creeping up since hitting year thirty.

  “Listen,” Temple told Mariah. “If you’ve got a few pounds to lose, start now while it’s easier. You already look pinchier in the cheeks and waist, so that rabbit food and extreme exercise must be working. A lot of it’s probably only water weight.”

  “That’s another thing. I hate that! It’s so gross. It hurts and it makes me look fatter.”

  “Listen, kiddo. Everything women do makes us look fatter, including appearing on camera. Maybe it isn’t us looking fatter but the world deciding how we should look. You made the finals, just the way you are. They must really, really like you.”

  Mariah frowned. “That last phrase sounded familiar.”

  “Sally Field on winning an Oscar. Everyone thought she was too kiddish and ‘lightweight’ to do that. But she did. Twice.”

  “Is that the little old lady who plays somebody’s mother on some sitcom? She did? She won two Oscars?”

  “Against all odds, and with the usual monthly bloat.”

  Mariah set her nail polish bottle—the label read “Hot Hibiscus”—atop the nightstand beside her.

  “I’ll think about it,” she allowed.

  “Good. Can I turn the light out now?”

  “I guess.”

  Temple took that as the teenage equivalent of a yes.

  She slipped out of her wig and into her nightshirt once the light was off, and then into the aaahhhh-cool, four hundred-count sheets right after that

  Molina a Weight Watcher? Nothing wrong about that. Admirable, really. Except Temple couldn’t stop grinning. Molina with her shoes off, weighing in like a lamb? Counting calories instead of counts on a rap sheet? Worried about that universal female bugaboo, weight

  Ummm, sweet dreams are made of these.

  Temple awoke in the dark, suddenly disoriented. Strange room, strange bed, very strange sense of unease.

  Had she just heard something? She listened. The hidden cameras didn’t click, rattle, and roll, so the constant surveillance wasn’t making her antsy.

  Something was.

  What?

  A restless, hungry feeling. The menus at this place were low-carb, low-sugar, and low-fat. That could get on one’s nerves.

  Temple pushed herself up on an elbow and turned her bedside light onto the lowest wattage.

  Not too low to show her a bed that was way too flat on the other side.

  “Mariah?”

  She pushed out of the bed and went
to the bathroom door. It was shut. Was the poor kid having her period now? No wonder she had been so down.

  Temple let her knuckles rap gently on the door.

  No answer. She pushed, gently. The door wasn’t locked but opened into utter darkness.

  A flick of the light switch produced a fluorescent flood of light that left Temple blinking.

  In the bright-white glare, something red stood out.

  After about thirty seconds, Temple could tell what it was.

  Red letters. Red letters written on the mirror above the sink. Studying them made her eyes water but she spied the bottle of Hot Hibiscus on the countertop.

  YOU’RE A BUNCH OF BLOODY BITCHES the nail polish block letters declared. Well, sometimes. Yes. Mother Nature was like that.

  Had Mariah done this? Not likely. Had Xoe Chloe sleepwalked and scrawled this angry comment on her competitors? Not likely.

  Someone had been in here, though, appropriated Mariah’s nail polish, and gone to work behind the closed bathroom door with neither of them the wiser.

  Or maybe not. Because Mariah was gone. The bed was flat, the bathroom was empty. The closet—Temple swooped the sliding doors open on a plethora of nauseous pink—was turned into a Stepford Wives zone and was empty of human habitation. Under the bed the cupboard was bare.

  Mariah was gone.

  Oh, bifurcated Barbie dolls! Temple’s prime assignment was missing in action.

  She shoved her feet into a pair of low-heeled mules, pink, of course, but her own bunny variety from home, and headed for the door.

  Ooops. First she doused the lights and felt her way back to her bedside, whisking her Cher hair off the lamp-shade and onto her head.

  Outrageous is the best disguise.

  She grabbed the key-chain pepper spray from her purse and burst out into the hall. It was as black as the bathroom had been before she’d turned on the light.

  Someone was having fun with the mansion’s light board. And not a hidden cameraman. They craved light.

  She felt her way along the wall, with no idea of where she was going, only that she’d trace the power outage to its origin.

  The producers had been diligent in soft lighting every inch of the place so that their cameras could record every twitch of a contestant Only the bedrooms provided absolute dark.

  Mariah. Temple felt cold sweat break out all under the irritatingly hot wig. Her charge. The reason she was here. Gone.

  And someone painting bloody threats on their bathroom mirror while they slept.

  While Temple slept.

  She began to appreciate the constant needle of maternal anxiety. It was a drug, being responsible for someone else, for a young, helpless, naive someone else. Mariah. A picture in Temple’s mind’s eye, teenage whining, painting her toenails fluorescent red.

  If anything had happened to her … forget Molina! Remember Temple’s own panic.

  Something brushed her legs.

  She screeched and hugged the wall.

  It brushed again.

  Furry.

  An eighteen-inch-high tarantula? She wouldn’t doubt it in this Hell House.

  Some sound between the first low buzz of an alarm clock and a purr pushed against her bare legs.

  High furry boots, or … Puss-in-Boots, Las Vegas style.

  “Louie?” she rasped. Whispered. Ground out.

  The feathery presence drifted away but a step caught up with it.

  Okay. She was either tailgating an ostrich or following a fine-feathered friend who just happened to have a cat tail.

  In the dark, all things being equal, it was probably a cat. Her cat. Hers not to question why. Hers but to do or die. Into the Valley of Doubt marched Temple and her phantom feline.

  A slice of light beckoned in the distance.

  Was this a trap laid by a sneak-thief psycho nail-polish correspondent? Or … enlightenment?

  Temple felt another plumy brush against her bare calves and decided she need to be very Zen right now, right here.

  She pushed toward the light, into the light … and through a swinging door into the mansion’s brightly lit and darkly designed kitchen, all stainless steel and black marble and granite.

  And all … Mariah. Sitting on a black granite counter-top in her pink Teen Queen nightshirt, sucking on a raspberry Popsicle.

  “You total idiot!” Temple accused, knowing this was not the proper esteem-building tone but she had lost that concern. Funny that relief could be so enraging. “I was worried to death.”

  “Around this place that’s serious,” Mariah said. “How’d you find me?”

  “You’ll look terrific on spy TV.”

  “One Popsicle. Sugarless. That’s the best they have in those three giant refrigerators. It’s not a federal case.”

  Temple eyed the Popsicle stump. “Sugar-free, really? Where are they?”

  “Bottom freezer drawer, fridge on the left.”

  Temple eyed the black marble floor between here and there. Not a creature was stirring, not even the proverbial mouse. Or tarantula. Or cat.

  “How’d you know where to look, really?” Mariah asked. She wanted an answer.

  “Oh, maybe I was ready for a taste of faux sugar myself.”

  “It’s fructose. Real fruit sugar. That’s better than added sugars or even artificial ones.”

  Temple boosted herself up on the kitchen island beside Mariah. The black granite’s chill seeped through her thin cotton T-shirt.

  “I’m sorry I was crabby,” Mariah said.

  “That’s all right, kid. I get crabby too.” She leaned into Mariah’s ear. “You’ll be even crabbier when you know that someone used up your whole bottle of nail polish writing nasty notes on our bathroom mirror.”

  “No!” Mariah looked around, her soft young features squinching into suspicion, and annoyance. “This place is getting off the wall. The show’s gonna be ruined.”

  “Unless the Teen Queen slant was a front from the first, and the show was always intended to be an updated game of Clue.”

  “What’s Clue?”

  “Let’s shuffle off down the hall again. I think that’s safer than talking here. And we sure don’t want to steam up our bathroom mirror again.”

  “Why not?” Mariah jumped down and actually held a hand out to help old Temple make the same leap.

  “Evidence,” Temple whispered against her ear again.

  She had a feeling the location of this last prank would merit some serious, and open, police involvement. And probably the presence of the one person that the two of them least wanted to see here: Mama Molina.

  They sat up the rest of the night, leaning against the foot of the giant bed while Temple explained the game of Clue to Mariah, and Mariah explained current teen hotties to Temple.

  All of their dialogue was suitable for public replay.

  Breakfast was served at seven, just like at camp. So once Mariah had been escorted to the ‘tween dining area, which was ashriek with excited girls having so little to chew on that they were chewing on each other, Temple headed for the Teen Team offices.

  “Oh, Beth, thank God you’re here.”

  The bustling, plump woman paused in pawing through an open file drawer.

  No wonder. That had definitely not been a Xoe Chloe opening line.

  “Why, Zoo-ey, what are you doing here, dear? You’re supposed to be at breakfast right now.”

  “I kinda lost my appetite. Got a stomach full of red nail polish last night.”

  “You … you drank some red nail polish! Oh, I knew you looked like a paint sniffer. This means expulsion.”

  “Hold on to your granny panties, lady. The nail polish was the writing on the mirror in Mariah’s and my bathroom. Like the hot foam jobs on the yo-yo yoga mats in the patio area the other day.”

  “Writing? Like—?”

  “Like handwriting? Like graffiti. You know, nasty messages in public places. Only our bathroom is private. I thought.”

  “I must s
ee it … we must see it. At once.”

  “Then you’ll call the cops.”

  “The police? Oh, no.” Beth Marble paled, if that were possible for one so wan. “The producers don’t want them here.”

  “Gonna be hard to keep them away. Better if you play Sally Citizen and call them before they call on you. Cops get agitated about the littlest things.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, I’m a little thing, right?” Xoe Chloe spun to indicate her punk but petite form.

  “The police.” Beth Marble imitated her last name and plunked down into her chair as if the weight of Michelangelo’s David had suddenly descended on her from above. “Dexter will be so disagreeable about that.”

  “What’s new? Besides, he doesn’t run the show. You do. Don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m head coach. The show was my idea. But Dexter’s the star.”

  “I thought all of us mini-teen wonders were the stars in the making.”

  “You’re not the draw. No one knows you. As the show unfolds, yes, they’ll get to know the candidates and like or”—she glanced significantly at Xoe Chloe—“dislike them. And then they’ll vote for the winner. But Dexter has the right to discount an audience winner at the last moment. The final decision is his. He’s the star maker. Thus, he’s the star.”

  “Thus. You learn that in Latin class forty years ago, lady? So. Dexter has audience veto power. I wonder what an enterprising girl has to do to get ole Dexter’s vote. Sleep with him?”

  “No!” Aghast. “You’re almost all minors. That’s unthinkable. Such a thing would never happen.”

  “Happens all the time in the halls of junior and senior high schools. Read the paper.”

  Beth frowned sternly. “Not here. We have cameras all over the place. Any hanky-panky would be recorded.”

  “All the better to titillate the viewers, eh? Then you must have our bathroom action on tape. Whoever wrote the hate note would have been sneaky, and pretty good at it. But no one could write in the dark, especially with something as thick and quick to run out as nail polish. It took a whole bottle, which means it took some time.”

  “We aren’t allowed to record in the bathrooms, young lady.”