Cat In A Topaz Tango

“My mother got you out of the closet again,” Mariah accused. “You’re both shills for my mother. Please! I need to help Ekaterina. She wouldn’t have made it without me. I did her clothes, her makeup. She can dance but she doesn’t know a thing about being with it.”

The blind leading the blind, Temple thought.

“Where is your . . . client?” Rafi asked gravely.

“Well, my allowance would only pay for bus fares,” Mariah said. ‘So we’re sorta camping out. There was a huge line waiting outside the ballroom anyway, and everyone came early and was sleeping until they opened this morning and let us sign up.”

She glanced over his shoulder. “Uh-oh. Mombot heading straight for us. I shoulda known she’d be here too.”

Temple glanced back. Molina was grimly advancing on them.

Louie chose that moment to jump down and rub encouragingly back and forth on Mariah’s bare calves.

Rafi took Mariah by the shoulders and turned her to welcome, and face, her mother. Still, she had a wall of defensive male in black denim behind her.

“Mariah!” Molina bent to take custody of her daughter’s shoulders. “What possessed you to pull this kind of stunt? We were about ready to put out an Amber Alert for you.”

“You can’t! I’m not a kid! I’m thirteen.”

“You sure are a kid. Amber Alerts can go out on kids up to eighteen.”

“No! They’re old.”

“What was so important you had to scare all of us so much? Me, Morrie, Mrs. Alverez across the street?”

“I needed to help somebody.”

“Help somebody? Why would you be so foolish to listen to anybody but me and the nuns at school? You’re not in a position to help anybody.”

“Yes, I am! And she won! Just a couple hours ago. I’m sorry. Really I am. But EK needed a chance.”

Molina straightened up, her knees visibly shaky. “What’s this about?” she demanded. “Who, or what, is this EK?”

She asked Rafi, Temple noticed, as if he was to blame just for having gotten to Mariah first. As if she’d given up on asking Mariah anything.

Mariah’s mouth froze in mid-answer, and shut as stubbornly as her mother’s.

“I don’t know,” Rafi admitted.

“Mariah was just going to show us.”

Molina turned to Mariah. “Show me,” she ordered.

Subdued, Mariah turned away and led them around the corner to the elevators.

The four joined the people waiting for the cars. Most of them stared at Louie, still playing thread-the-needle with Mariah’s calves. She looked down at him and stifled a nervous giggle.

Mama was not happy.

Temple supposed they looked like a normal family to the clustered strangers: mama, papa, kid, and oh-you-kid, one of those awful Goth girl teen delinquents. That would be her. Like any normal family, none of them said anything, except for Louie, who growled occasionally when some stranger bent to pet him. Temple scooped him up and pushed him into the tote bag.

When they finally got an elevator, Mariah only pressed the next floor up. Ballroom level.

“How’d she get here?” Molina asked Rafi.

“Bus.”

“And the fare?”

“Allowance.”

“Not anymore.”

“Not a good idea. Grounding would be better.”

“Step two. No allowance will be step one.”

Mariah rolled her eyes at Temple.

They were almost the same height, Mariah a little taller. The two adults repeated the similarity at a foot higher: Molina almost six feet in low-heeled moccasins; Rafi a little more than six feet. Temple/Zoe felt like a firstborn daughter. Ick!

She hiked the tote bag again bearing the remarkably docile Midnight Louie. He must have realized he was failing to follow the Feline Rule of Domination.

Louie used the opportunity to tangle a forepaw in her hot and itchy black wig.

She was glad this masquerade would soon be over.

Leaving Laughlin

Twenty minutes later they were all standing in front of a long table with an adamantly bored middle-aged grump behind it.

“But I’m assigned to dance with the cute one of the Los Hermanos brothers,” the lanky thirteen-year-old girl known as EK protested, tears in her eyes and voice. “I won.”

“I need the signature of a parent or guardian,” the guy said. “You’re a minor.”

“Grandmother Dzhabrailova is in Las Vegas.”

“We’re signing up the winning girls here and now for tomorrow night’s show. Sorry, kid. The cast has gotta be locked in before we shut down the operation and we gotta leave this ballroom in an hour.”

Hotel staff were already slamming folding chairs shut and stacking them on dollies. A couple guys had their eyes on the last folding table left standing. This one.

“You can’t produce a guardian now, I’ll sign up the runner-up.” He nodded at a blond girl wearing an expensive highlighted hair-cut and a bored look that failed to cover hope so intense it seemed to sizzle off her.

Ekaterina’s dark brown hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail in a dollar store band. She was a thin, gangly girl, doe-eyed and desperate.

“Mom,” Mariah pleaded.

“Mom” stood resolute. “I’m not a relative. I can’t sign for her. Besides, I don’t know what this is about, who she is, who’s responsible for her—”