Temple took a deep breath and explained, and then she swore her aunt to silence.
Temple was scheduled to see sweet-faced Beth but couldn’t stomach that after her confession to Kit. Beth was a super-sweet lady who seemed to live in a dream world, and Temple didn’t feel like deceiving another nice middle-aged lady who deserved a better menopause than an appointment with Xoe Chloe. She decided Xoe didn’t abide by schedules.
She headed for Consultant Room Three, Dexter Manship’s. It would be fun to play off someone she despised, a Crawford Buchanan substitute, so to speak.
Xoe didn’t knock, natch. Just swaggered in, swinging her hips and her belly button ring.
The high-backed leather chair behind the desk was turned away from her. (Wouldn’t you know sweet and savvy Aunt Kit had been assigned a room that looked like a porch but Dexter Manship had a Lord of the Manor study to commandeer?)
“Hey, man. I’m here.” Temple waited for an answer but got none. “A little early, like a couple hours, but what’s the point of being a go-getter if you can’t wake up the troops.”
No answer, not even a creak of leather.
Xoe leaned over the desk (all the better to create some cleavage) and shoved one wing forward with all her might.
The chair whirled around faster than Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho.
No wonder. It was empty.
Xoe put a hand on her bare hip and pouted for the cameras. She looked around. “Dude! Dude?” A glint of mirrored glass caught her eye. She swaggered over and helped herself to a swig of scotch on the rocks.
“What a setup,” she told the room, and the cameras. It was wonderful not wanting, needing, to win this thing. She could be her not-self. Very liberating. “Bet that’s a casting couch in the corner. The whole thing’s a setup. Right?” She toasted her glass to the room’s four corners. “It’s been fixed.”
She walked to the windows behind the desk, which overlooked the pool area. Two groups of seven girls were working out on the new hot pink mats or swimming in the heart-shaped pool while the other two groups were making the rounds of the diet/beauty/wardrobe consultants or “counseling” with the judges-cum-advisors and gadflies.
And she was indoors, in this shadowed room, with no one to shadow box. She set her glass down dead center on the desk, and ambled to the door. No coaster to buffer the expensive wood.
She didn’t know what she’d expected to find in here. Maybe a scorpion to tease, a statement to make. For a moment, she’d thought she might find a body waiting to be discovered.
But the room was empty, and the cameras had recorded a solo performance.
There was only one thing to do: go to her actual appointment with, sigh, Savannah Ashleigh. Late.
Chapter 22
A Meeting of Minds
Temple sidled into Consulting Room Four twenty minutes late, prepared to make surly obeisance.
Not to worry.
Savannah Ashleigh was striding away on the elliptical walker in the office, the TV tuned to the soap operas and a Cosmopolitan magazine splayed open on the machine’s control panel. Apparently, each judge had been allowed to import whatever they wanted to their offices.
Well! Temple was dying to see at what level, speed, and calorie-burning rate the woman was operating. However, the Cosmo issue effectively hid everything but its own provocative contents.
Savannah Ashleigh’s shiny spandex workout attire hid nothing. She had a Hollywood body, that was for sure, narrow but rounded. Her Dolly Parton hair bounced in one platinum blonde wave as she glided along at a rapid pace, her face delicately sheened with sweat.
Xoe leaned against the door and applauded, slowly.
That threw Savannah out of her rat race. She shook her head, batted her eyelashes, and observed her observer.
“Are you my ten fifteen?”
It was now 10:35, but Temple nodded. (Xoe was a shrugger, not a nodder, so Temple had to step in for her from time to time.) Reluctantly flipping the magazine shut, Savannah pressed her forefinger to the control panel and the green level control vanished … not before Temple noticed it was solid all the way to the top. Savannah was a serious strutter.
She eyed Xoe for the first time. “My, you’re a grim little thing. Pastels and brights, hon, are what you need. And, of course, someone will talk to you about that hair.”
Temple was willing to bet Savannah’s hair was about as natural as her own.
“Now sit down in that cute little chair, and I’ll sit at the desk and we’ll go over your program.”
“I have a program?” Xoe slouched into the seat indicated. “That makes me sound like a computer.”
“Don’t we wish. Program out the calories and carbs, program in the veggie shakes and distilled water.”
“That’d give me the shakes, all right.”
“Now.” Savannah was paging through the contents of the standard hot pink folder. “Hmmm. Could lose ten pounds. Definitely a hair and face makeover. I’ve been through your wardrobe—”
“When?”
“When you were out of your room, dear. Such trash. If it doesn’t chime, clatter, cling, or clash with every other color in your wardrobe, except for black, it isn’t there. We’ll be looking for something light, floral, and airy for you.”
“Are you recommending a scent or a wardrobe? ‘Cuz your recommendations stink.”
“A very good point, uh, Ex-oh-ee. A signature fragrance would be a fine addition to your wardrobe. I don’t think any other girl has mentioned a stinking problem, so you would be ahead of the competition. On that matter.”
“It’s Xoe-ee.”
“Oh. As in ‘Zoo.’ Well, you might consider a name change while you’re at it. Perhaps … Daisy.” She looked up to register Temple’s expression. “Or perhaps … not. Anyway, I’ve ordered some darling things for you, which should fit whether you work off those biggy, piggy ten pounds. Or not.”
Savannah rose, dabbed at her forehead with a floral hand towel, and escorted Temple to the door.
That was when some poor ‘Tween or Teen Queen candidate who had actually been left alone for a moment began to scream to wake the dead.
Savannah stood paralyzed in her tracks, hands over her waves of hairsprayed curls.
Temple sprinted out into the hall, not only beginning work on the biggy, piggy extra ten pounds but to find out whether a contestant had killed or been killed, or had just broken a fingernail.
Chapter 23
Exercised to Death
The screams continued, leaving no doubt that most of the contestants possessed well-developed pairs of lungs, not to mention any superstructure above them.
Mariah was three steps behind Temple, and Temple never thought for a moment of telling her to stay back for her own good.
They were both committed to serving time in what was quickly becoming a House of Horrors and deserved to know what was going on firsthand.
Temple and Mariah were apparently closest, for they burst through the double doors to the indoor workout room and found Silver standing hunched just inside the doors, screaming her heart out.
What riveted her gaze was instantly obvious.
A blood-spattered figure in a hot pink leotard lay slumped over an elliptical walker machine … the very kind of machine that Savannah had been putting throughits paces, or vice versa, just moments before in her private office.
Mariah gasped, and Silver screamed until her hair should have turned white had she not bleached it that shade long ago.
Temple gradually realized that the figure on the walker had pointed hands and feet. And then she saw that its bubblegum-pink flesh, spattered with a measles of blood drops, was rather … rubbery.
Footsteps were pounding into the room behind them and stopping.
“She looks like a Barbie doll,” Mariah’s clear young voice said.
Temple nodded. She’d heard of defaced and mutilated Barbie doll images showing up around town from Mariah’s mother.