Nadir frowned and dropped down to the carpet to mark the spot with an X of tape he’d taken from a dispenser on the spindly-legged desk near the door.
Temple, meanwhile, advanced on the mirror. Midnight Louie was shadowing her ankle like it was his lost love. She hoped that wouldn’t give her away. Savannah certainly wasn’t praising him as her savior.
But then, unlike Rafi, he wasn’t Savannah’s bodyguard. He was Temple’s.
She glanced down. In the now overlit room, Louie’s dark pupils were the eye of the needle in his enigmatic green eyes. They were aimed like arrows toward the target of the mirror.
Once in front of it, Temple’s fingernails tested the frame, looking for a mechanism.
Rafi came up behind her, his dark reflection encompassing her pageant-pink one for a moment, like an ugly storm cloud swallowing a remnant of the sunset. Would he recognize her now? Or had her gift for disguise fooled even a suspicious guy like him?
He eyed her for a long while. But it wasn’t really her he was looking at, for he then lifted the mirror off its hook as if it were made of cardboard. As if to prove something.
And revealed …
A paneled wall. A wall paneled in picture frame panels, rather.
His black work boot pushed at the bottom. The inside of the panel clicked inward, revealing a dark and mysterious passage beyond.
He stepped into the patch of black. “Stay here.”
“Wait a minute, dude. I found this.”
“Drop the dead-end-kid act.”
Temple’s heart dropped instead. He’d made her! Then he went on.
“You think you’re such a tough twerp. You’re a kid. In your nightie. Stay here.”
Temple rammed him from the side and forced her leg through, bunny slipper and all.
“This is nuts! The city is crawling with ballsy little broads. Stay here and pet the cats or something.”
“I’ll raise such a ruckus you’ll be the last person on earth to see inside that passage.”
Rafi, glowering like a World Wrestling Federation personality at intermission, reluctantly stood aside.
“Ladies first.” He didn’t, of course, mean either word of it.
That didn’t matter. Neither one of them would be first into the dark.
Midnight Louie hefted his tail into the air at a ninety-degree angle and preceded them into the lightless secret passage beyond.
Temple followed and so did a thin beam of light. She turned back to see Rafi hoisting a cigar-size flashlight he’d pulled from his jeans pocket.
The passage was pretty dull. Instead of being dank and vermin ridden, it was dry and dusty. Nothing moved in it but them. Louie spotted a few snakes to pounce on but they turned out to be electric cables.
Rafi pointed his narrow light at the seam where ceiling and walls met. More cables, affixed to the support beams by huge staples.
“The man who built this place was a bit paranoid, like Elvis,” Temple noted.
“Perfect setup for wiring and surveillance. That’s why the producers picked this house. It was wired for everything already. Must be more of these access passages all though the place.”
“Perfect system for sick pranksters to use,” she noted.
Rafi laughed. “Yeah. I’d call the producers of all these rigged reality shows sick pranksters. Amazing. People protest the increased surveillance touching their lives because of terrorists but love to watch their fellow citizens being eavesdropped on and filmed on the sly and tricked in these cheesy reality shows.”
“Inhumane nature,” Temple commented sagely.
The flashlight picked out the black shapes of hidden cameras strung along the corridor like suspended bats in a cave.
“The technicians must be running up and down these all the time,” she noted. “What keeps a really nasty voyeur from being among them?”
“Not a thing, bunnie babe. Not one thing. I suppose there’s no hope for it but to go back and guard that Ashleigh broad. Ain’t it amazing how the most irritating one aboard is the most careful to protect herself?”
“Oh, Miss Ashleigh isn’t the most irritating one here.”
“You have a better candidate?”
He obviously had not considered the male contingent. Dexter Manship … Crawford Buchanan … Mr. Hair Guy. Male chauvinism can be blinding.
They re-emerged smelling of dust and, it turned out, covered in it. (Only Louie seemed to relish the fact. He shook himself dust free in a few seconds, then began licking his coat in the proper direction again.)
No one much noticed their less-than-triumphal return. The room thronged with cooing girls in pink pajama sets intent on both soothing Savannah and courting her vote.
Even the Persian girls were now ensconced on the bedspread beside their recumbent mistress, purring away in solace and solidarity.
“Frightening,” Rafi noted.
Temple was sure that Midnight Louie concurred, and she was ready to join the both of them.
“I’m being stalked,” Savannah insisted. “I suspected as much but now that this demon, this evil black ninja, has shown up in my very room, I’m certain of it.”
The accusation caused all eyes to turn toward the trio returned from their expedition through the looking glass, all black in some sinister way. There was Louie, black as a witch’s familiar from toe to tail to tip of ear. Temple and her ebony Cher hair. Rafi Nadir and his Middle-Eastern looks in black denim. The lion, the witch, and the … Temple glanced at Rafi. No, he did not qualify as a wardrobe. Thank goodness.
“There’s a hidden passage,” he said, “behind the mirror. Anyone could have come in or out.”
Savannah sat up, all disheveled blonde hair (her usual style anyway). “My babies were in danger!” She gathered Yvette and Solange close, their eyes slitting in an expression of utter feline distaste mixed with bored sufferance.
Come to think of it, that exactly matched the expression on Rafi Nadir’s face.
“Nail it shut,” she ordered.
“Can’t,” he said. “The mirror covers the entire door.”
“Well, I can’t possibly move. It would upset the girls. Cats are far more attached to places than to people.”
Rafi visibly struggled not to say that in her case such a reaction would be justified. While he dawdled, Rome burned. Or at least Savannah’s baser instincts.
“Then you’ll just have to keep watch all night on this side of the mirror,” she purred.
Yes, she purred. She had doubtlessly been called upon to purr a line or several in every one of her B and C movies, and probably a few Ds, Temple thought. Or were those cup sizes: before and after augmentation?
As Rafi looked around in horror at his frilly duty-station-to-be, Savannah took charge. “You can sleep—or catnap rather, for you certainly don’t want to miss another intrusion—on the chaise lounge.”
He regarded this bejeweled pillow-heaped upholstered torturous curl of feminine furniture as if it were a medieval iron rack.
“I’ll do whatever it takes to prevent any further incursions,” Rafi said, through his teeth, “but I’ll sleep in the hall right outside the door. Just a scream away. Yours or theirs.”
He nodded at the languid Persians.
Savannah pouted but didn’t object. Temple supposed luring any man any nearer at all satisfied her vanity and reduced the fuss and muss of actual intimacy. But Rafi’s resistance to the siren of soft porn surprised Temple.
Was he possibly tiring of the superfeminine stereotype? Then again, he’d hooked up with Molina years before, so he must have something of a soft spot for hard women.
Scratch a male chauvinist and find a … masochist secretly in search of a dominatrix? Interesting.
“Good.” Savannah snuggled down in her many decorative bed pillows, dragging the Persian sisters with her. “You girls can leave now. I have a bodyguard.”
The Teen Queen candidates pitter-pattered out, the young and the sleep deprived, a herd of blonde bunnie
s.
Temple regarded her bunny slippers, a Christmas gift from her mother. They belonged with the herd. The rest of Temple/Xoe did not.
“You want me to take the chaise lounge?” she asked Rafi in a West Side Story teen-gang accent, using Savannah’s misnomer.
“No. I can handle both sides of the door, girly. Take yourself back to your bunk bed.”
“My little sis is probably having hysterics,” she conceded.
When she ankled out into the hall, Louie was making like Saran Wrap on her ankles again.
Everyone had accepted him as some stray mascot that had adopted the house. Cameras lingered lovingly on his liquid feline progress through the rich environs and the gathered Teen Queens. He strutted like a sultan with a private harem.
Temple decided she could do worse than to adopt the attitude everyone else had.
Mariah was waiting at the door to their room, as ordered, but barely.
One foot and an elbow and an inquisitive nose were in the hall.
“What happened? Who screamed?”
“Savannah Ashleigh and her cats.”
“Oh.” Mariah instantly diagnosed a false alarm. “That airhead gives Clairol a bad name. Every time anything male crosses her path, including that black cat there, she swoons. I thought that went out with corsets.”
“No one told Savannah. And corsets are back in, since Madonna. But Miss Ashleigh is a judge, so good little contestants don’t want to be caught on camera dissing her.” Temple looked up. “Although I’m betting all the cameras are trained on Savannah Ashleigh’s bedroom after tonight’s scare.”
“I need a shower,” Mariah declared. She looked in Temple’s direction and sniffed. Pointedly. “Where have you been? Smells gross. Let’s go.”
This call for a private talk was about as subtle as Emeraude perfume, but Temple retreated into the bathroom with Mariah for a quick consultation. She actually relished the moisture falling hot water would pump back into her desiccated sinuses. That “secret” passage had been as deserty dry as a pharaoh’s tomb.
“No!” Mariah, red faced and dewy from the makeshift sauna a few minutes later, was rapt. “A secret passage.”
“Packed with recording equipment. Nothing Gothic about it. Just high-tech snooping.”
“And with that bodyguard guy. He looks hot.”
Temple wasn’t ready to hear this from Mariah but allowed for teen exaggeration. “He’s just a middle-aged private cop,” she said carefully. “Nothing glamorous like a Day-Glo boy.”
“My mom hates those guys.”
“Day-Glo boys?” Temple asked, startled. From Max to boy bands? Where would Molina’s prejudices end?
“No, private cops.”
Maybe, but her mom hated this particular private cop even worse.
“He’s right, though,” Temple said. “All the pranks here smell like producers’ tricks to up the ante on the competition.”
“Cops have no imagination,” Mariah said authoritatively.
Nor did cops’ kids, thank goodness.
“Is that cat going to sleep with us?”
Temple considered Louie. And the fact that Mariah had seen him once, months ago, with Matt, and didn’t know he was Temple’s cat. Or, actually, he wasn’t Temple’s cat. She was Louie’s person. As such, he would sleep with them.
“Probably,” Temple said. “He’s an outcast. Savannah would never let him bunk with her precious Persians.”
Giggles were Mariah. “I’d love to see that! Her cats sure are pretty, though. Mine are kinda scrawny and stripey.”
“They’re delightful. I remember them as kittens. They were the cutest things.”
“‘Cute’ doesn’t cut it.” Mariah had suddenly plunged into one of those teen dives on a bungee cord to self-esteem hell.
“Look. I’ve been ‘cute’ my whole life, and I survived it.”
“Yeah … but.”
“I am not a ‘yeah … but.’ I am a real girl. Remember, your police professional mom hired me to look after you.”
“She did, didn’t she? That was weird. My mom doesn’t depend on anybody but herself.”
“Maybe that’s a problem.”
Mariah reared back. She had bought into Supermom herself.
“She can’t be everywhere,” Temple pointed out. “And you gotta admit some strange things are happening here.”
“But none of them are really real, are they? They’re all threats but no action.”
“You’ve got a point. This is a ‘reality’ show but the action is strangely unreal. You might even say surreal.”
“What does that mean?”
“Surreal?” Temple smiled at Midnight Louie, now sprawled out in the vast wasteland between her and Mariah’s sides of the gigantic bed. “Surreal is sort of like saying this big black cat here is our personal bodyguard.”
“Who’d want a cat for a bodyguard? I’d want Enrique Iglesias. Who’d you want?”
Temple considered. “Not Kevin Costner.”
“Who?”
Oops. Already over a decade out of date. “Ummm.” Nobody Mariah might know came to mind. “The Pink Panther.”
“The Pink Panther? Who’s that?”
And that gave Temple an opening to tell a fairy story about a world long ago and far away and very funny. She took them both miles away from the Teen Queen Castle with its secrets and strangers and perplexing puzzles that seemed to lead nowhere.
Chapter 29
Home Sweet Harassment
Molina couldn’t believe it. Only five days at the Teen Queen Castle and Temple Barr had phoned to report four incidents of threats and harassment. All of it sounded pretty amateur, but even one loose cannon in that hothouse situation was bad news.
She certainly had time to think this whole thing over at home. The house felt incredibly empty without Mariah in it, so empty that she hadn’t been able to sleep. This did not bode well for the coming teen dating years.
The competition house was being watched around the clock. It would have been hard enough to send Mariah off on her first independent stay away from home under normal circumstances. To do it under the wacky auspices of a reality TV show was way worse. To have edgy little acts of violence surrounding the Teen Queen competition made it a mother’s nightmare.
She wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. The ostensible reason was to feed the cats, Caterina and Tabitha, who were also up and hyper, looking lean, mean, and neglected. Meee-ow. Feed me. Their girly caretaker was gone.
Not to worry. Mama to the rescue.
The underlying reason to feed the cats was to search the fruit/vegetable drawer, then the freezer, for something sweet, fatty, and delicious.
No such animal in the Molina household.
Drat!
Wait!
What the heck is this?
A non-Weight Watchers frozen dessert.
Caramel. Chocolate. Six hundred calories. Thirty-three carbs. Eighteen grams of fat …
Mariah must have imported this anti-diet bomb to the family fridge.
No, she’d been fanatic about low-fat, low-carb foods the past month. Probably because she’d been hoping to get The Call from the Teen Queen people.
How could a detective-mother have missed that change of habit?
Been a little busy at work?
Molina balanced the frozen dessert package on one palm, weighing its presence here as well as its calories.
The frozen package chilled her hand. The icy chill drove deeper as she realized … this wasn’t just some forgotten purchase. This was another “gift” from the anonymous stalker.
She slid the kitchen drawer open and pulled out a large plastic baggie, one-handed. The frozen container might not hold prints and there probably wouldn’t be prints anyway, but she would check.
Meanwhile, her daughter was on her own in the Teen Queen Castle, which was also beset by stalker incidents.
Okay. Temple Barr was on the teen scene. Not bad for an amat
eur. A gifted snoop. But no professional.
What to do?
For one wild moment, Molina wanted to rip the dessert from the protective baggie, gobble it down, eat the evidence, take two aspirin, and think about it in the morning.
She picked up her cell phone.
Something bad in the neighborhood? Who you gonna call?
What was happening with Mariah, and how could a mother under siege deal with it? Not to mention Rafi Nadir stalking out of her past like a mummy brought to life.
Who you gonna call?
The latest number on her instant dial was Larry Paddock’s. Paddock. Hip, available, suddenly there and suddenly interested.
Not … unattractive. Probably a damn good undercover cop.
Suddenly there.
Molina hit a pre-programmed number. It was answered despite the late hour, thank God, but she’d expected no less.
“Molina. No, not exactly. Got a minute? Or twenty. Good. Thanks, Morrie.”
Chapter 30
The Extent of the Law
Matt still saw stars, not his fellow guests on today’s live edition of The Amanda Show, but from the intense television studio lights.
The lights made everything beyond the hot, faux living-room set seem unreal. No matter how many times he appeared on the talk show, and this was his seventh or eighth visit, he never lost the sense that everything on camera happened in an overcivilized dreamtime, not unlike the Australian aborigines’ mystical cycle.
Nothing mystical about leaving the studio for Chicago’s hyperactive streets. Now he was in a cab on traffic-jammed Michigan Avenue near Water Tower Place.
New York City soared, a stone forest primeval with thin tall buildings. Chicago squatted. The city’s broad, heavy-set edifices were also high and huge, but Chicago post-Carl Sandburg was more a sumo wrestler of a city. Manhattan was a wirewalker.
Now Matt was trading one thick tower for another, from the TV studio to an office building a few blocks farther up Michigan Avenue.
He carried a slim aluminum briefcase, accoutered more as a celebrity dilettante than a legal eagle. He’d bought it for this one occasion: broaching the law offices of Brandon, Oakes, and McCall. That decades-old name had been on the papers giving his mother title to the old, two-flat residence in the city’s decaying Polish section almost thirty-five years ago.
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