Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

usually work for me. Just asking.”
    “Mothers are like that. Luckily, your mom is not my mom.”
    “You sound like you mean that way too much.”
    “Guilty.”
    They settled down to read various pages, Temple perching on the tub rim, Mariah sitting on the closed throne. Then they exchanged sheets and read some more.
    “What do you think?” Temple asked finally, turning on the bathtub faucet again. The Teen Queen Castle’s water bill for this period would be humongous from resident spy work alone.
    “This stuff is Tabloid City. The kind of thing you’d see on CBS Investigates today. With that Dan Rather-not guy with the so dingy buzz cut. Why do old guys do that?”
    “Maybe so there’s less gray showing.”
    “Oh. Anyway, this case is so clear.”
    “Yeah?”
    “It’s like a movie. Old-guy husband is major upset that his young bimbo blowup doll wife”—Mariah looked up to make sine that Temple had noticed she was drawing on her brand-new info on blowup dolls—“is divorcing him and getting half of his money, along with a new boyfriend. She even gets the house while the judge is considering everything. This house. And she invites the new young boyfriend over. Think Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.”
    “And Bruce Willis is the Die-Hard husband?”
    “Right. So Bruce goes bonkers and puts on this ninja outfit with the Spider-Man hood—he was big on martial arts, remember, and Elvis and also Zen stuff, which you’d think wouldn’t be, like, getting him into murder. So he shows up and shoots away at everybody and paralyzes the wife’s daughter from her first marriage, wings the wife, kills the boyfriend, and disappears down the hidden passages and they never catch him.”
    “That left a lot of loose ends,” Temple said.
    “Yeah, but they’re all, like, so old now. What could they do?”
    “As you get older, Mariah, and you will, even old enough to drive a car, you’ll be struck by how young all the old people who used to be around you actually were.”
    “Huh?”
    “Age is relative. And bad blood has no expiration date.”
    This Mariah considered, biting on a painted nail that Temple grabbed away from her mouth before it became a serrated edge and ruined her ‘Tween Queen score.
    Mariah was still mulling over the implications. “You’re saying what’s happening now could go back to this stuff way back when?”
    “Just add twenty years to everybody’s ages.”
    “Well, the husband would be sixty-something. Too old to totter around here, I’d think.”
    “And the wife?”
    “She was a lot younger. Forty?”
    “Forty. Only ten years older than I am.”
    “No!” Mariah regarded Temple with true horror. “You’re only ten years away from that! I’d be... twenty-three, and old enough to drink.”
    “And vote.”
    “That too.”
    Temple felt oddly deflated by the notion that she was only ten years away from forty. She’d always thought of herself as only ten years away from twenty. It was the same thing but much more depressing looked at from the other end of the telescope.
    Mariah speared a blurred photocopy image. “She’d be thirty-five, the girl who was shot.”
    “Too old to compete here.”
    “Yeah. Not to mention crippled. None of it makes sense. They’re all too old.”
    That was Mariah’s callous teenybopper judgment. Temple shuffled the copies around. No matter how she juggled the dates and the dramatis personae, these murderous sinners and sinned against were indeed “too old” to be part of the Teen Queen reality show.
    Unless... she was looking at the wrong parts of the Teen Queen show. And the wrong reality.



Old Tyme Revival

    If Molina prided herself on anything, it was on being a thorough supervisor. The minute Temple Barr asked for copies of the Dickson mansion murders, she’d ordered extra copies for Alch and Su.
    “Savannah Ashleigh’s bodyguard,” Su said, looking up from the documents.
    Unfortunately, Molina knew exactly who Savannah Ashleigh was: washed up cinemactress; neuterer of Temple Barr’s cat, Midnight Louie; judge at the Teen Queen contest.
    “Bodyguard?” Molina bit.
    “This guy is forty. Too young to be the ex-Mrs. Dickson’s boyfriend and no way her ex-husband. Still. A bodyguard. That puts him on the premises with the wherewithal to commit murder.”
    Molina was not pleased to see a contemporary photo of Rafi Nadir spun across the table right in front of her nose. Her blood ran cold. Cliché, yes. Fact, you bet!
    She kept