Intimate Relations, Rebecca Forster [best ereader for manga .txt] 📗

that a lot. The men always notice me, but the women act like I'm a toadstool." Karyn twirled a lock of hair and checked out the ends. "When I'm rich and famous, I'm going to be nice to everyone."

With that, the girl fell back on the mattress, spreading her legs and arms like a kid making a snow angel. She looked at Cori. She turned her head to Finn and gave him a look that he couldn't quite decipher. She wiggled her fingers, and tipped her chin up. Cori suppressed a laugh when Finn crossed his eyes.

"Oh, come on you guys. What kind of detectives are you? This is a clue."

Karen stopped wiggling her fingers and pointed straight up. Cori and Finn looked at the ceiling.

"And we're looking at what?" Finn asked.

Karyn laughed and scrambled up. She knee-walked over the mattress to the giant picture above the bed.

"Not the ceiling, silly. The picture."

With one hand she held the side of the big, unframed picture. The fingers of the other one ran along the bottom of the canvas. The next time Karyn flashed them a mischievous grin was just before they heard a click and a whir. The click was clear and had come from inside the bedroom; the whir was faint and was coming from the closet. Karyn scrambled off the bed.

"Come on. You're not going to believe it."

Finn and Cori followed her back to the closet, but it looked different now. Some of the shoes and purses were gone and in their place was an opening and beyond that...

"Well, I'll be," Cori said. "A panic room."

21

"If you see a jar that says drink this, don't," Cori said.

Karyn giggled. "I would if it made me taller."

"'Tisn't a panic room," Finn said.

They were in an eight-by-ten room. There was no bed, no food, and, something he found very interesting, no obvious way to call outside for help. The room was a state of the art studio filled with recording equipment, lights, cameras, and desktop computer. There was a full soundboard and a bank of screens. From her social media posts, it was clear Roxana recorded all around her house, not in the sterile environment of a studio.

"Did Roxana say what this room was for?" Finn asked.

"Are you kidding?" Karen sniffed. "She didn't know I knew about it, so of course she wouldn't say anything. I found this when I was cleaning, you know, dusting under the painting."

"Who dusts under a painting?" Finn asked.

"I told you she was good," Cori said. "I'd hire you if I could afford you."

"It's a gift," Karyn said. "Anyway, I almost peed my pants when that wall opened up. Then I couldn't figure out how to get it closed, and I almost peed my pants again. I knew Roxana would fire me if she thought I was snooping—which I wasn't— but then I figured out how to close it."

"And where would that little doohickey be?" Cori asked.

"It's a button under the brown Louis Vuitton bag. It took me forever to find it."

Finn went into the closet, lifted the bag, and saw the button. Whoever had constructed this room had done an excellent job. The mechanism to close the hidden door rested in an indentation that looked to be nothing more than a flaw in the wood. He shook his head in admiration and then smiled as he imagined Karyn rummaging through the place, half out of her mind as she looked to cover her tracks. He rejoined the women just as Karyn was showing Cori how to operate the equipment.

"Is our warrant good for this?" Cori asked.

"We are in the house," Finn said. "What are you showing us, Karyn?"

"Okay," she said. "So this is like top-of-the-line recording equipment. I mean, it would cost me a fortune to do a high end audition tape if I had to pay for a studio decked out like this."

Her fingers ran over the computer keyboard. The center screen populated with file folders. She leaned across to the soundboard and adjusted the levels.

"When I figured out that Roxana was gone more than she was home in the last year, I started using this place."

She sat back and crossed her arms. Her long hair had dried into waves and curls. She smelled like chlorine and sunshine. Karyn tipped her head back, splitting her attention between Finn and Cori. Finn could see a spattering of freckles across her nose.

"I made a couple of audition tapes, and that was it," Karyn said. "I swear. I mean, what was I hurting? I didn't take anything. I was really careful."

"I don't think Roxana will be caring any now," Finn said.

Karyn smiled and he saw the girl she had been before dreams of Hollywood entered her head.

"I don't really care about her, but I wanted you guys to know that I wasn't trying to take advantage. I just work so hard, you know? She had so much."

"You're good as far as we're concerned," Finn said. "Besides, if snooping was a crime, half the world would be in jail."

"What's this?" Cori held up a cap of some sort with little buttons dangling from it.

"Oh, it's for MoCap—motion capture," Karyn said. "The studios use it for like super hero stuff. Video games. You put it on your head, put those little round things on your muscle points, and it records your movements. I don't know if Roxana ever used it. Could be she was thinking about doing some sort of app of herself."

Cori put it aside. She had no idea what the girl was talking about.

"So, Karyn," Finn said. "If you've something you think we should see, now would be a good time to bare your soul."

"I already bared everything and you're interested in my soul? That's funny." Karyn giggled and then raised her hands over the keyboard like a maestro. "Okay, then. Let's get this show on the road."

Cori settled on a stool in the corner of the room. Finn perched on the edge of a desk