Unknown - Cat_In_A_Hot_Pink_Pursuit

Mariah sat Temple down on the closed bathroom throne (Temple thought of Elvis’s last hour) and grabbed her hands. “I was so worried.”

“About me?” Foolish Temple. Teens were teens.

“No, about me! What do you think? Do I look hot? Will my mom kill me? Does this new haircut make my face look even more fat? What about these loser clothes they picked for me? What about my talent song? Is ‘Defying Gravity’ too obscure, too dweeby? Whaddayah think? Whaddayah think?”

“Chill, Baby-O. Xoe Chloe is on your case. Wicked is the hottest musical on Broadway, and ‘Defying Gravity’ is the current overcoming-teenage-angst anthem. Every girl feels like a misunderstood witch at your age. Plus the song’s a showstopper for a darker voice, which you have in spades! As the song says, until you try, you’ll never know. We’ll run the wardrobe and the routine and we’ll both come out smelling like, oh … Rose’s green apple juice in a killer martini.”

“Yeah. That’s cool. Apple green. I saw those feathers. You’ll knock ‘em dead.”

“Speaking of which—”

“The show’s over, right? That’s what my mom hauled you outa here to say. She always ruins it for me.”

Temple grabbed Mariah’s plump little shoulders and refrained from shaking.

“Mariah. She does not. She’s putting her shield on the line to keep the lid on the murders here, just so you can get up there and be shallow like all the other little ‘Tween Queen wannabes.”

Mariah stared at Temple’s sudden stern turn. Then her eyes teared over. “I don’t know what happens. Sometimes it seems like everything’s so endlessly awful.”

“Sometimes it is. Not now. You’re just feeling Wicked Witch of the Westly. The police aren’t going to close the show down. They want everybody bottled up here while they do some very complicated background checks. And they’ve imported some undercover pros to prevent any more violence, so expect to see a couple new crew members. Your mom is following some very interesting leads, thanks to … us. We have to keep it together and let the show go on until the police have enough evidence to name and charge the person behind all this. We are … undercover distractions. We gotta be good at it, right? That’s our real job. This stupid contest isn’t the point. I’m not Xoe Chloe, and you’re not Madonna, Jr. We’re us, underneath it all, and we have more important jobs than winning this thing, right?”

“I guess.”

“You guess right.”

“But the talent show is tomorrow and then they judge and then it’s all over.”

“Right. Then we judge and then it’s all over. Capische?”

“That is so Sopranos.”

“And we are the contraltos, right? We are different.”

“You sure are.” Mariah grinned.

“Dare to be … you and me,” Temple finished. “Defying gravity.”

Chapter 53

Tailings

The hour is once again my namesake one and I am stationed outside the Ashleigh suite trying to figure out how to get in.

This is when Miss Midnight Louise happens along. Yeah. Like she is following me.

“What ho, Romeo?” she inquires in the acid tones granted only to the female of the species, any species, and guaranteed to shrivel the cottontail off a bunny rabbit, not to mention other attachments of which I am unduly fond.

“Stalking the Ashleigh girls again, I suppose,” she adds. “When are you going to get that those snooty purebreds are too good for you?”

“When I lose my self-esteem, which will be never. So. You are emulating the Crawfish and descending to domestic snooping.”

“Just wondering why you were slacking off on the job.”

“I am not slacking anything, Louise. I need to gel through the looking glass again.”

“You and little girls named Alice.”

“You recall that one of ours started her on that famous adventure. Holy Havana Browns! How am I going to get in there without Miss Savannah Ashleigh seeing me?”

“I do not see why you cannot rely on your dubious inside connections. Of course, neither one of them would come if you came calling.”

This gets my goat, and my llama too. I stick a mitt under the bottom of the door, shoot out my shivs, and make what pathetic scratching noises I can.

Sure enough. In thirty seconds flat, I am playing pattycake with a set of soft, moist pads from the other side.

Throwing Louise a superior gaze over my shoulder, I hunker down for a game of whisker teasing and whispering via the quarter-inch crack.

In a minute, I have convinced the Ashleigh girls to make a heck of a commotion in the service of getting me into the secret passage. They are quite aware of this area, especially Yvette, as she is wont to play with her own image in the mirror for hours, Solange informs me. But she thinks she can tear Yvette away from herself long enough to do what is needed.

Miss Louise and I retreat against the opposite wall and wait.

Not for long.

The shrieks, human and not-so, emanating from beyond the door result in an adjoining door slamming open against the hall wall, and Mr. Rafi Nadir, clad only in unzipped jeans and sneakers, charging down the hall and through the door like a cannonball.

Louise and I exchange a look, then shoot through on his sneaker heels. Well, sneakers do not have heels,as such. Suffice it to say that we are in like dingleberries dangling from a shih tzu’s tail.

There is a lot of fluffy pale hair flying in the room, part of it Persian and the other part of it Horst of Beverly Hills, and most of it eiderdown from some terminally clawed pillows.

Quick thinkers, these Persians. They have staged the Mother of All Pillow Fights to upset their mistress and bring the troops running.

While Mr. Rafi Nadir inserts himself into the pile of flying fur, shrieks, and flailing claws both human and feline-I admit that even I would quail at such a task-I hurl myself at the pressure point that turns the mirror into a revolving door, and Louise and I whisk into the dark beyond, pausing to pull it shut behind us with paw power times two.

“So this is what you wanted?” she asks in the absolute dark.

I wait for my eyes to acclimate. That probably takes a little longer than for her, but I do not wish to make this obvious.

“Shhhh. I am thinking.”

“I can see you would need absolute quiet for that. Why did you want to be here?”

“Is it not interesting that this house has been honeycombed with hidden passages since the time it was built?”

“I have heard that creepy Crawford dude prattling about the big shootout here into his microphone. No doubt these passages made the escape of the masked killer easier twenty years ago. Everyone thought it was Arthur Dickson himself, and no one could prove it. But what does a long-dead scandal have to do with teen queens today?”

I am about to tell her, which would be interesting as I do not know yet myself, when there is a cracking sound and a vertical bar of light appears behind us.

That is how I first saw Elvis, as a narrow bar of light in the Action Jackson attraction tunnel under the Crystal Phoenix a few months ago.

I am eagerly awaiting a return engagement of the King when the light vanishes with a click and another click brings a swash of light into the tunnel.

Louise and I plaster ourselves to the dark walls, avoiding detection but not avoiding the fact that it is Rafi Nadir bearing a flashlight into our midst.

I also glimpse shadowy forms by the now-closed mirror-door.

In sum, we are not alone, times three.

Louise has dashed across the aisle in the darkness and now brushes against my shoulder. “Great. We are here but so is the hired bodyguard. What do you suppose he wants?”