The Harem on the Hill (Part XCII) (Patreon)

You open your journal to the entries for the three remaining girls. Hopefully, you can deduce the one Tina will most likely target next.

Helen Macintosh was a twenty-nine-year-old trust fund baby who lived on a ranch near the outskirts of town. Pretty and petite (no more than 5’2”), Helen was hyper-disciplined about her figure and fitness at the expense of any social or civic contributions. While her rural location made her easy to monitor and, coupled with her diminutive stature, likely would’ve made her easy to abduct, you ultimately omitted her from consideration. Her family was of some prominence and she had a menagerie of animals—including a half-dozen semi-feral cats and two jet-black mares (the only things she seemed to care about besides herself) that a stable boy tended to twice a week.

Next, there was nineteen-year-old Carolyn Bean. Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths, but Carolyn’s was wooden and had caster oil in it. Her parents had been killed in a car accident when she was eighteen, and she was surviving—barely—on a fast food job and a dwindling insurance settlement. The big-eyed orphan, who looked straight from a Margaret Keane painting, naively hoped her abusive, thirty-something boyfriend would be her meal ticket, but she didn’t know what you knew—that the sleazeball was married with three kids and had no intention of leaving his wife. Carolyn’s lack of friends and close family, coupled with the bonus of a two-timing beau who would likely be the chief suspect in her disappearance, made her inclusion on your shortlist tempting, but you eventually scratched her as well. The boyfriend complicated matters and, even though you genuinely felt sorry for her, this wasn’t a rescue mission.

Finally, there was sexy Sophie Mitchell. Back in your halcyon Hollywood days, Sophie was the kind of girl who tried to latch herself onto you at every opportunity. She was savvy, opportunistic, and had enough brains to know she didn’t really need them. She would’ve been considered a gold-digger in California, but here the prospects for a prospector were thinner than she was. That didn’t keep her from mining as much money as she could from the local men in return for a little reciprocal drilling. So far, it had netted the twenty-six-year-old lots of costume jewelry, a Toyota Camry, and a studio apartment near the family home of one of her wealthier conquests (Mike Pettington, the owner of Quicker Liquor, a regional chain of liquor stores). She was the proverbial big fish in a small pond and, although you briefly considered making her a much bigger fish, she simply would’ve been missed too much.

Based on the information in your journal, which girl do you stake out?

Nota Bene: Longtime readers should be able to deduce which girl Tina is likely to target. Hurry! Her fate, as well as yours, may hang in the balance!