Page 105 of Killer Body

She felt control slipping away from her, like a thin string she could no longer continue to grasp.

“And she accepted your offer?”

“Yes.” He patted her hip. “Take it easy, baby. She’ll have her talk show and you’ll have Killer Body. Everybody wins.”

“You son of a bitch,” she said.

“Baby.” He reached out to pat her again.

“Don’t touch me,” she said. “Don’t talk to me. Don’tanythingme.” She couldn’t control the words, the anger that had been banked too long.

Jesse must have heard the difference in her voice. He backed away to the opposite edge of the bed and turned from her without another word.

Once she was sure Megan was okay, once this stupid Killer Body competition was over, she was going to have to figure out what to do about her life. She couldn’t go on like this.

The Interview

What were your goals prior to Killer Body?

I remember watching a tape of an interview Barbara Walters did with Barbra Streisand. Walters asked her if when she was a child, she knew she was going to be Barbra Streisand one day. And Streisand, looking on the brink of tears, said it was the only thing that could have happened, the only way it could have been.

I understand that.

When I was a child, I knew I was someone special, that I wasn’t like the others. Some of us are born with the knowledge. That’s what I believe.

I was never a child, not really. I was waiting for time to pass, for this. And now that I have it, in these moments of clarity between the darkness and the pain, my only goal is to keep it, no matter what.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Rikki

Los Olivos reminds me of the San Joaquin Valley. Instead of stubborn, sun-baked fields, grapes grow from gentle rolling hills. It’s a place that has embraced its history, either that or just not grown out of it. The feeling, as I drive down the street with the flagpole in the middle of it, is charming but cloistered.

Blond Elvis was right. With a population of about one thousand, there’s not a high school to be seen, but there are two elementary schools. Armed with no name, only my file and photos of Julie Larimore, I hit them both.

I’m not sure what to expect. Towns like this can be genuinely open, like Fort Bragg in the Mendocino, California, area. Or they can be closed. This one seems to fall in the former category. All of the people I talk to at both schools are helpful, but none can help me. One directs me to a retired art teacher who operates one of the town’s many galleries.

Roberta Matlock looks as though she never left the sixties. With long gray hair and no makeup, she is still as unassuming yet striking as the wheat-colored linen dress that almost covers her sandals. I meet her in the backyard of her gallery, which is an extension of the business itself. Wild sculptures—some decidedly western, some impressionistic—spill out onto the fenced-in lawn, among the pots of cactus and pansies. Standing there, still and straight, in the middle of them, she could be another sculpture.

I introduce myself and tell her I’m looking for someone who might remember someone who attended elementary school here in the late seventies or early eighties.

“That’s like yesterday to me,” she says. “I can remember far back or close up. It’s the middle that gets murky sometimes.” In spite of her low-key appearance, she has a school-teacher voice.

“The principal’s secretary said if anyone could remember a student, it’s you.”

“That’s because I was smart enough to retire before my brain was completely stewed.” She settles down on a wooden bench, so crudely fashioned I’m sure it was carved by hand, then painted white. Above the back, which is painted to resemble white bones, three skulls sit, mounted on red strips of wood, barely wider than sticks. The legs and base are fashioned to resemble those of a skeleton. “Join me, and let’s see what you have here.”

“I don’t know,” I say, regarding the skulls. “Those guys don’t look too friendly.”

“It’s a Day of the Dead piece,” she says. “From Guatemala, although most associate Día de Los Muertos with Mexico. Comfortable as all get-out if you don’t let your mortality issues get in the way.”

I could tell her a thing or two about mortality issues.

“That’s one way of putting it.” I sit beside her on the bench. “Are you aware of Julie Larimore, the Killer Body spokes-model?”

“We do get an occasional newspaper out here. Have they found her?”

Dread tinges her voice. She knows there’s only one way such disappearances usually end, and so do I, although I don’t want to think about that right now.