Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

tugged on Temple’s ostrich-feather fringed sleeves, long enough for a medieval minstrel.
    Temple pulled back from the crack in the side curtains. “Yes. Your mother is about two-thirds of the way back, wearing ‘our’ outfit, with some guy.”
    “She’s with some guy? That must just be Detective Alch.”
    “Alch is sitting elsewhere in the audience.”
    ‘Then it’s some other girl’s father or something.”
    “They were whispering with their heads together.”
    “Must be a cop.” Mariah stuck her head through the curtain. “Must be... oh, gross. They’re, like, laughing.”
    “Mariah. Audiences have a lot of time to kill. They do things like that.”
    “Where’s Matt?”
    “Out of town, I think. The guy does look like a cop, though. I wouldn’t want to mess with him.”
    “That’s not Xoe Chloe speak.”
    Temple pulled Mariah back to check out the open bar and the three bartenders. One of them was Su.
    The videographers prowled the perimeter like hungry wolves, filming the audience, the scene, even the cat who dogged their footsteps, Midnight Louie.
    In fact, he was doing more than dogging their footsteps, he was sniffing them, like a dog.
    She spied Crawford Buchanan on the sidelines interviewing a Teen Queen candidate so tall he could look up her skirt by pretending to drop his notebook, which he was bending to pick up at the moment.
    Creep.
    Louie, perhaps drawn by the rolling pencil, had rushed over and was now sniffing his shoes.
    Must be the muck that stuck.
    “What’s my mother doing now?” Mariah asked.
    “She’s, ah... pulling out one of those little mirrored lipstick holders and putting on lipstick.”
    “What? She never wears lipstick. It must be a secret signal.” Mariah pushed past Temple to peek again.
    “She is! And that guy is watching her. Ick! That is way too... too.”
    “I’m sure it’s a signal,” Temple said confidently. That was the truth. Public lipstick applying could be. But she looked again. Yup. The guy was watching Molina’s every move. That kind of signal didn’t usually bring on the tactical squad.
    “Listen,” she told Mariah, feathering her fingers through the new haircut for maximum “perk.”
    “Just think about getting up on that stage without tripping and doing your talent routine. That’s our job tonight. Let the police and your mom do their jobs.”
    “I wish Matt was here.”
    “I don’t.” Temple put a hand to her straight blonde hair, the lime green ostrich feathers on her long sleeves fluttering like wings in the corner of her eye. He’d have a bird!
    “You look really... different.”
    “Higher praise I could not get. Now we better get into our lines and get ready to suffer through twenty-eight three-minute presentations. You know how long that is, counting applause, if we get any?”
    That forced Mariah to think and get her mind off her mother’s performance in the audience.
    That’s what it had to be, Temple decided. No way Molina was flirting. No way.
    “Sixty,” Mariah was saying, “an hour. And... twenty-four minutes.”
    “Add another forty minutes for the judges to score each act and for people to waste time getting on- and offstage.”
    “We’ll be her eforeverl”
    “Certainly will feel like it.” Temple pinched the curtain shut and prepared to be trapped backstage while all the action was going on out front.
    Theater was like that. She just hoped the police found some likely suspect for the string of murders that had wiped out three generations of one family so far, a family already decimated by a miscarriage of justice that never ended.

    Every blonde seemed to be ahead of Temple on the play list and every blonde seemed to do a Britney Spears song with every Britney Spears move ever patented.
    The program alternated ‘Tween and Teen Queen candidates, and Xoe Chloe was programmed dead last… wonder how that had happened, Temple thought, eyeing Dexter Manship at the judge’s table. The peeping place she’d found was far stage left, behind a gargantuan array of gladioli spears. Nobody backstage or in the audience had spied her, so she was able to watch her competitors swivel and shake their way to true mediocrity.
    When Mariah came through the curtain, it was like watching a tennis match. Snap her head to check her roomie’s poise. Great. The judges. Positive. Mama. Stunned. The guy with her had to put a hand on her arm to keep her in her seat, or maybe to keep her from going for her