Unknown - Cat_In_A_Hot_Pink_Pursuit

“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.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 lampshade 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.