Unknown - Cat_In_A_Hot_Pink_Pursuit

“Anything wrong with that?”

“Just don’t go pretending you actually care about any of us.”

“But I do.”

When Temple snorted and looked away, Kit went on. “If we women leave it up to men to judge women, we’ll end up with the Taliban.”

Temple was speechless at the conviction in her aunt’s tone but Xoe squirmed in her chair. “This is way heavy stuff, lady.”

“She ain’t heavy, she’s my sister.”

Temple blinked. Maybe she had to banish tears. “That’s brother, lady, that quote. ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”’

“It can’t work both ways?”

“Not in my world.”

“Get a different world, then. Make one.”

“I’m trying.” For an awful, role-playing moment, Temple was Xoe Chloe Ozone, teen girl rebel. Her Aunt Kit was good. Very good.

Kit smiled crookedly, at her. “Try a little less hard, and try being a little more soft, huh? Being interesting isn’t the kiss of death in the real world. It just looks like it sometimes.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Temple stood and slouched away. She was such a fraud.

Who else around here wasn’t?

Including a stalker/killer.

Before she reached the door, Kit leaped up to intercept her.

“Oh, fashion faux pas! You’ve got mascara smudgesunder both eyes. You surely don’t think raccoon eyes are punk?”

Before Temple could defend her waterproof brand of mascara, Kit leaned close and whispered, “We need to talk somewhere. Privately.” Kit nodded to a small door at the left and whispered again. “Adjoining privy. They had it right in the old days, didn’t they?”

Temple recognized the word for “private” as applied to old-time bathrooms. But Xoe Chloe just looked puzzled, then nodded and followed Kit past the coffered wooden door into a bathroom equipped for a Victorian household, wood-paneled, with matching enclosed tub and toilet.

Once there Kit turned the faucets on full, retrieved a pair of thong panties that were drying over the edge of the tub, thought better of it, grabbed a tea-rose-embroidered hand towel instead, and tossed it over some sort of sprinkler spigot in the ceiling.

Thong panties? Temple thought. “I don’t think they can have cameras in the bathroom,” Xoe Chloe whispered.

“Just to be safe, sweetie.” Kit sat on the broad tub surround and kicked off her shoes, a pair of svelte but sensible pumps. Pink. She was an ex-actress after all, and tended to dress for real life as if it were a play.

“Not in the bathrooms,” Temple said. “Invasion of privacy. Even for reality TV. Cross my heart. But it never hurts to be safe.”

“Exactly,” Kit said. “What’s up, niece?”

“Oh, darn! I was afraid you’d make me.”

“The big, black hair and big bad attitude did the job until I spent a bit more time with you. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, and it’s even worse to play your old Aunt Kit. What happened to your dear curly red head, which I first glimpsed when you lay in your mother’s arms spitting up on my fifty-dollar infant jumpsuit christening gift, which was a lot of money when you were born, dear, although now it wouldn’t make a decent tip at Lutèce.”

“Wigs are us here in Las Vegas. So I was an ingrate from the first, huh?”

“An expressive child, I would say. Not one afraid to make her opinions known, of the infant menu or the world at large.”

“How did you end up here—?” they began in unison.

Kit took the next line. “Money, dear heart. My feeble celebrity as a romance author doesn’t get me many freebies but this was one of them. I bet the producers thought my theatrical background would make me more exciting on camera. Poor things. The stage was my métier.”

“You’re plenty lively. And just who are the producers? We keep hearing about them but never see them.”

“Money men. It’s the same everywhere. They keep out of sight so no one can dun them for funds or tell them what to do. I call this particular set Toddman and Goodson, an old-fashioned pair of late-middle-aged men living vicariously through the stuff that dreams and network profits are made on. All the hip young producers are making CSI imitations. I imagine you haven’t seen them, my dear, because they look like accountants and you’d never recognize them as the powers that be. So, why the wild child persona?”

Temple took a deep breath and explained, and then she swore her aunt to silence.

Temple was scheduled to see sweet-faced Beth but couldn’t stomach that after her confession to Kit. Beth was a super-sweet lady who seemed to live in a dream world, and Temple didn’t feel like deceiving another nice middle-aged lady who deserved a better menopause than an appointment with Xoe Chloe. She decided Xoe didn’t abide by schedules.

She headed for Consultant Room Three, Dexter Manship’s. It would be fun to play off someone she despised, a Crawford Buchanan substitute, so to speak.

Xoe didn’t knock, natch. Just swaggered in, swinging her hips and her belly button ring.

The high-backed leather chair behind the desk was turned away from her. (Wouldn’t you know sweet and savvy Aunt Kit had been assigned a room that looked like a porch but Dexter Manship had a Lord of the Manor study to commandeer?)

“Hey, man. I’m here.” Temple waited for an answer but got none. “A little early, like a couple hours, but what’s the point of being a go-getter if you can’t wake up the troops.”

No answer, not even a creak of leather.

Xoe leaned over the desk (all the better to create some cleavage) and shoved one wing forward with all her might.

The chair whirled around faster than Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho.

No wonder. It was empty.

Xoe put a hand on her bare hip and pouted for the cameras. She looked around. “Dude! Dude?” A glint of mirrored glass caught her eye. She swaggered over and helped herself to a swig of scotch on the rocks.

“What a setup,” she told the room, and the cameras. It was wonderful not wanting, needing, to win this thing. She could be her not-self. Very liberating. “Bet that’s a casting couch in the corner. The whole thing’s a setup. Right?” She toasted her glass to the room’s four corners. “It’s been fixed.”

She walked to the windows behind the desk, which overlooked the pool area. Two groups of seven girls were working out on the new hot pink mats or swimming in the heart-shaped pool while the other two groups were making the rounds of the diet/beauty/wardrobe consultants or “counseling” with the judges-cum-advisors and gadflies.

And she was indoors, in this shadowed room, with no one to shadow box. She set her glass down dead center on the desk, and ambled to the door. No coaster to buffer the expensive wood.

She didn’t know what she’d expected to find in here. Maybe a scorpion to tease, a statement to make. For a moment, she’d thought she might find a body waiting to be discovered.

But the room was empty, and the cameras had recorded a solo performance.

There was only one thing to do: go to her actual appointment with, sigh, Savannah Ashleigh. Late.

Chapter 22

A Meeting of Minds

Temple sidled into Consulting Room Four twenty minutes late, prepared to make surly obeisance.

Not to worry.

Savannah Ashleigh was striding away on the elliptical walker in the office, the TV tuned to the soap operas and a Cosmopolitan magazine splayed open on the machine’s control panel. Apparently, each judge had been allowed to import whatever they wanted to their offices.

Well! Temple was dying to see at what level, speed, and calorie-burning rate the woman was operating. However, the Cosmo issue effectively hid everything but its own provocative contents.