Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

feel like that. If felt like a miracle, like the inside of a snow globe when you shake it up and all the magical snow comes floating down on everything, making it... beautiful. What does she want now?”
    “Not money. The two-flat kept us afloat. It was worth that much. But she’s figured out someone had a stake in buying us off. She’s gotten to be a lot tougher lady.” Matt smiled. “It’s been good for her, actually. She just wants to know who and why.”
    “That’s a lot.”
    “She has no idea you didn’t die. Neither did I, until today.”
    “Big day for us both,” he noted, sipping from his scotch on the rocks, then setting the drink aside as if he was rejecting far more than an easy glow at a moment of truth. “I wouldn’t have abandoned either of you if they’d have let me know. I’m not a naive kid anymore. I promise you, there will be hell to pay.”
    “I... we don’t want to hurt anyone else. Just tell me what to tell her now that I know the truth. The kind lie? I didn’t want to know this. I didn’t need to know you. I wanted to find some crooked lawyers protecting an insulated, snobby family. Maybe I wanted to see someone sweat if I’m deep-down honest about it. But I didn’t want to find you. I don’t need you now. She doesn’t need you now. You’re irrelevant. Maybe you can make whoever in your family did this pay a little. Maybe that’ll make me feel better for seeing my mother lied to and let down a second time.”
    Winslow folded his cocktail napkin into accordion pleats. “The Winslows do go back to the Mayflower ,” he noted wryly. “Not the Washington hotel, the ship.” His face sobered again. “It would have been my father. He’s dead now. No one can make him suffer. My mother’s in a nursing home. She probably was an accessory. She has Alzheimer’s.”
    “Your father. Your mother.”
    “Your grandparents.”
    “They’re gone, then, both of them. What were they thinking?”
    “What all parents do: don’t let my kids make any foolish life-altering choices.”
    “I guess you didn’t, really, then.”
    “I did. Because I’ve never forgotten her.”
    “Is that what I tell her?”
    He pulled the drink back over and took a long hard swallow.
    “No. That’s what I tell her.”



Closet Encounter of the Third Kind

    Since this place is crawling with camera operators and just plain operators, I sic Midnight Louise on tailing Crawford Buchanan. (They deserve each other, in my opinion.)
    I leave my Miss Temple poring over old newspaper clippings and preparing to take her rest on a pussycat pillowcase.
    I decide to do what I do best: prowl by night. I have resolved to find and explore all the secret passages in the house.
    One would assume that after my namesake hour, the house would quiet down. One can assume nothing when it comes to crime or hordes of teenage girls.
    My midnight ramble will need some unwitting accessory work from someone human, and I am betting that enough humans are sneaking around unauthorized here to populate a small city.
    Naturally, I am forced to head first to Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s chamber. Some crass folk, including Miss Midnight Louise, were she here to know my plans, might imply that I am more interested in brushing whiskers with the Ashleigh sisters than in exploring secret passages. Quite the contrary. The one entrance to a secret passage I know of at this point is in the Ashleigh suite.
    A dude must start somewhere.
    So I amble down the deserted hall, rehearsing my speech to induce the Ashleigh sisters to let me in, when my first unlawfully wandering human comes shuffling down the same corridor.
    I flatten myself against a baseboard and hope the shadows will hide me.
    Not to worry. The sleepwalker is a blonde in pink pajamas, closely followed by a... a blonde in pink pajamas.
    The first blonde, Miss Silver by name, carries a sinister canister. It resembles a harmless can of shaving cream but those have been suspect since the foamy-graffiti-on-the-exercise-mats incident.
    “Shhh! Second Blonde urges First Blonde.
    “ Shhh , yourself. All we have to do is leave this in her bathroom and her hair will be history.”
    “Are you sure that phony label will stick on?”
    “I printed it out on my laptop on glossy adhesive paper. Looks like the real thing.”
    Sure enough. I crane my neck up and can read the name of a popular brand of hairspray. Makes one wonder what is really in it. Of course I have to follow them, and that