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

Moments after staking out Carolyn Bean’s apartment, she leaves it dressed in a skirt suit and heels.  She looks pretty and professional, but some puckering around her blazer’s buttons suggests she’s added a few pounds since its purchase.

You follow her to a nearby temp agency where she spends the day working as a receptionist.  It’s a sedentary job and the only exercise she gets, apart from lifting the receiver of the phone to answer incoming calls, is stretching to reach a crystal candy bowl at the edge of her desk.  Its placement indicates that it was intended for visitors, but its only visitor throughout the day is Carolyn.

At closing time, the teenaged secretary sweeps away the mountain of cellophane from the individually wrapped candies into a trashcan beside her desk, dons her blazer (which she leaves unbuttoned), and waves goodbye to her coworkers.  After purchasing a few groceries at a corner store, she returns home, where she trades her smart business attire for sweats, her desk chair for a recliner, and her computer for a flat-screen television.

You spend an hour watching her watch Project Runway as she noshes her way through her grocery store grab-bag.  A frozen burrito…Funyons…a pint of Ben and Jerry’s…Each treat she removes from the brown paper sack is more fattening than the last.  As Carolyn dozes off in her recliner with the last of her ice cream melting in her lap, you leave the scene having reached two conclusions.  First, she isn’t Tina’s next target.  Second, she won’t need anyone’s help in getting fat.

At least she’ll be fat and happy.  There’s no sign of her abusive boyfriend and it appears she’s achieved a modicum of financial solvency.  She’s just a nice blue-collar girl…which is why she probably wasn’t the smartest choice to monitor.  You run your harem like a business, but Tina’s passions run higher.  Carolyn was too unassuming to draw her ire.

You pull out your harem journal and review the other candidates—

Helen Macintosh is a twenty-nine-year-old trust fund baby who lives on a ranch near the outskirts of town. Pretty and petite (no more than 5’2”), Helen is hyper-disciplined about her figure and fitness at the expense of any social or civic contributions. While her rural location would make her easy to monitor and, coupled with her diminutive stature, easier to abduct, you ultimately omitted her from consideration because her family is of some prominence and she has a menagerie of animals including a half-dozen cats and two jet-black mares that a stable boy tends to twice a week.

Sexy Sophie Mitchell is the kind of girl who tried to latch onto you at every opportunity back in your halcyon Hollywood days. She's savvy, opportunistic, and has enough brains to know she doesn't need them.  In Southern California, she'd be a gold-digger.  Unfortunately, the regional prospects for a prospector were thinner than she was.  Of course, that didn't keep her from mining as much money as she could from the local men in return for some 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.  While you briefly considered turning the tables on her, she simply would’ve been missed by too many people.

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