Sickened, I took a break, letting the dogs out for a run around the yard while I made myself a ham and jalapeno sandwich, washing it down with a beer before returning to my research.
The various reality TV series on toddler beauty pageants were made after Bethany and Laini’s time on the circuit, but after wading through pages of posts, newspaper archives and old photographs, I tumbled across an old documentary from 1986, called Little Queens. The program followed four girls through a single pageant, all the way from the face-painting, hair-teasing process backstage, through their rhinestone-studded, sequin-encrusted performances out front, and on to the final crowning of the winner.
One of the girls was Bethany Ford, and even at the age of around seven, it was easy to see the woman she’d one day become. Little Bethany was blond, beautiful and diligent. She sat still while her mother applied an inch-thick layer of makeup and tugged her hair into an intricate bouffant, nodding at last-minute instructions, rehearsing her pre-written lines over and over again. In front of the judges, her posture was perfect, her routines flawless, and her smile relentless. She did indeed try harder.
My phone rang, startling me back into the present. It was Ryan, inviting me around to his place that evening.
“Come around seven o’clock, and we’ll talk,” he said. “I’ll throw in a steak and a few beers.”
“Okay.” I could fill him in on what I’d discovered and pick his brain for new leads. And, if I was honest with myself, it would also be good to spend some time with him. “Do you have hot sauce?” I asked before he could end the call. “And I mean scorch-your-taste-buds, make-your-eyes-water, fire-your-endorphins, hot sauce.”
“Does Tabasco count?”
“No. Tabasco falls so far short of the fire-inducing blazing red-hot hell I seek that it may as well be ketchup.”
“I could buy you something this afternoon?” he offered.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, Chief. I’ll come armed.”
I returned to watching the documentary, catching glimpses of a girl who might have been Laini in the background of footage shot in the dressing room. Her mother was dragging a brush through her sleek black hair and fussing over her face. When all the girls were led out to wait by the stage for their turn out front, the camera panned across a boy sitting scrunched in a chair in the corridor, hunched over an old Nintendo device. When the black-haired girl passed by him, he glanced up, said something and then returned his attention to Mario Brothers or Donkey Kong. Could that be Kennick?
I paused the video and rewound, watched again, frame by frame. It was him. The same black hair and the same mole high on his left cheek. He was onscreen for less than a second and then gone. Had it been that way generally in his life — with all the attention focused on Laini? Laini’s beauty, Laini’s performance, Laini’s achievements. Poor kid. It couldn’t have been easy.
The camera cut to show the girls doing their thing out front, under the scrutiny of a panel of five judges. As each contestant walked out, she said her name, age and ambition — “When I grow up, I want to be a ballerina. Miss America. A pop star like Tiffany. A ballerina. Miss America. The president. Miss America” — before sashaying down the runway.
Every time a new contestant came out, her mother would take up position behind the judges’ table to cheerlead her kid through the rehearsed routine. They mimed the movements and mouthed the words along with their onstage performer — gesturing for bigger smiles, straighter posture, more pizzazz — like puppet-masters remotely controlling their robotic marionettes. When the routine ended, the mothers returned to their seats, either hysterical with joy or sour-faced that their kid had botched it.
Bethany Ford confidently stated her intention to be a TV star. She wore a frothy dress edged with a swatch of pink ostrich feathers for her evening wear and a sequined top hat and matching tuxedo jacket over a white leotard and silver fishnet tights for her talent section, performing a three-minute show of magic tricks. They were pretty good, too. I watched closely but couldn’t see where she’d gotten the ace of spades from, or where the handkerchief had disappeared to.
When she finished with a graceful bow, the judges nodded and smiled, and the camera cut to Bethany’s mother in the audience.
“We’re in it to win it!” she said, her face glowing with fierce triumph.
Laini hadn’t been chosen as one of the four main girls followed in the documentary, which was a mistake, because she drew and held the eye like none of the other contestants did. When she stepped onstage, wearing a glittering dress the bloodred color of a ripe cherry, she lit up as though her inner glow couldn’t be contained by mere skin.
She seemed somehow more real than the other girls, and harder to forget. Her hair was darker and straight, her smile more mysterious. Where the others radiated in-your-face confidence, her charm was more playful, a little elusive. Almost fey. Where their charisma exuded out from them to the judges and the audience beyond like the shock wave of an explosion, Laini’s magnetism sucked you in, captivating you. You got a sense that she was playing at a fun game, not grimly determined to win a competition, and it was instantly more appealing.
She didn’t need to win. And so, of course, she did. Because we all secretly despise those who crave our approval and want to bathe in the light of those with true self-assurance.
Bethany placed second. Her high-wattage smile undimmed, she graciously congratulated Laini. Perhaps I only imagined the flash of emotion in her eyes as she met her mother’s disappointed gaze over the heads of the judges.
I tracked what I could of Bethany and Laini’s progress after that competition. Laini had won many more pageants but disappeared from the circuit before she became a teenager. Was that because her mother had died, or did she simply drop out because she was bored or burned out? Bethany continued competing, winning more pageants once her chief competitor had quit, until the Miss America competition which must have been the pinnacle of her beauty career. She failed to place in the top five.
She surfaced a year later as a weather girl on a local television station and then progressed to news anchor, where she stayed for several years before being swept aside for a younger woman. I felt a sharp pang of anger at the injustice, because The Hair was forty-five if he was a day. Such a double standard. Then again, maybe it had been Bethany’s choice to leave and start her own business.
I closed the search pages and videos. It was time to work. Truthfully, it was about four hours past time to work. The morning had slipped away in a dazzling blur of glitz and glamor. I spent the afternoon working so hard that for the first time, I began to see light at the end of my academic tunnel.
My parents popped over for a visit at around five, though I didn’t remember inviting them. Lizzie and Darcy went insane with excitement at seeing new faces — barking, baying, and running up and down the hallway until they’d rippled up the rug in a concertina-style pile.
“Sorry,” I yelled above the noise. “They’ve got too much pent-up energy.”
“Show me where the leads are, and I’ll take them out for a nice long walk,” Dad said.
The dogs’ excitement rose to fever pitch when they saw my father holding the leads, but the moment the front door closed behind them, all was blissful silence. Until my mother spoke.
“My, my. They sure do have a lot of stuff in this house,” she said, taking in the ornaments that covered every surface. “Trotskys, they’re called in Yiddish.”
“Tchotchkes,” I said.
“Yes, dear,” she said, on a long-suffering sigh. “And have you experienced any more strangenesses here?”
Since denying everything never seemed to succeed in getting her off my back, I decided to go to the other extreme.
“Oh, yes! I often hear funny noises.”
“Where?”
“In the ceiling.”
“Ooh! What kind of noises?”
“No rattling of chains,” I told her. “But loads of creaks and rustles.”
“That sounds like mice, dear. Any scratches in the walls?”
“Not in the walls, no.”
“That’s what you usually get when a house is haunted.”
“You live and learn. How about smells? Because I’ve noticed some odd ones.”
“Not sulphur, I hope! The smell of sulphur means a demon is about.”
“No, just mint and cola.”
My mother sniffed the air experimentally, then looked disappointed. “Maybe it’s just your toothpaste or candy. Anything else?”
“Lots! There’s a dismembered doll in the attic that spooked the crap out of me, and a child’s dressing table with an old hairbrush which still has hairs in it. There’s a clown figurine on a shelf in the living room which turns around by itself, and a mermaid statue in the bathroom that watches me while I bathe and shower. I had a moment when I thought the radio was playing a song especially for me. And sometimes the faucets drip.”
My mother blinked at me several times, while I waited for her latest wild theory. Pixies, maybe, or poltergeists.
Instead, she said, “Well, I suppose that could all be the work of an overactive imagination and absent-mindedness. Never mind, dear” — she patted the back of my hand — “at least you still have your visions.”
“Mom,” I said, shaking my head, “you never cease to amaze me.”
“How about a nice cup of tea? I’ll make it while you fix that carpet.”
I straightened the rug and went to the study to back up my documents. Mom stuck her head in the door while I was shutting down my laptop.
“Any cake or cookies to go with our tea?” she asked.
“There are some animal crackers in a bag in the pantry.”
She bustled off back to the kitchen, where I joined her a few minutes later.
“This is all that was left.” She gestured to the solitary cracker — a camel, my least favorite — on a plate on the table.
“No way, I couldn’t have eaten all of those.”
Could I? There’d still been lots left when I’d served some up to Agent Singh and Ryan. Singh hadn’t touched them, but Ryan had enjoyed them. Could he possibly have stolen my snacks? It was more likely that I’d been on autopilot when working last night and this afternoon, munching while I worked without being aware of it. Mushy brain syndrome — that’s what I had, probably due to being increasingly more in the then than the now. Or maybe finding Laini’s body had affected me more than I’d assumed, because problems with short-term memory were a typical symptom of post-traumatic stress.
“Perhaps next time you should buy a smaller packet,” my mother said. “It’s all too easy to fall into comfort-eating, and we all know what happens to our figures then.”
“Are you saying I’m putting on weight?”
“Of course not!” she said, though she gave my sweatpants a critical glance. “But, on the other hand of the coin, I will repeat Elizabeth Taylor’s words of wisdom: beware of pants with elasticated waistbands.”