Glenda’s gaze landed on Jean’s and her smile bloomed with both mischief and a slow wink as she stroked the soft fur of Kodo. The diamonds in her tiara battled with the diamond on her finger for center stage, but they were both dim compared to Glenda’s sparkling eyes. Obviously, Kodo’s presence had warned Glenda to us being there, but now that she’d caught our eyes, she slid her gaze toward where the contestants were submitting their entries.

“The judging will be anonymous,” Jean explained, watching for when Tami noticed Glenda on the judge’s stage. The seats in the audience were filling rapidly. “Supposedly, no one will know whose dish they are judging, but Glenda will know Tami’s style without a doubt.”

“Will we have to withdraw?” I asked, wondering where the AIs were going with this plot and trying to get Jean, Tami, or Glenda to give me a clue with our wonderfully underused skill of communicating with each other mentally.

“I’m not sure,” Jean admitted.

Your good, shocked reaction is exactly why we didn’t tell any of you that I was coming, Glenda spoke into my mind finally just as I was about to panic. I started to relax and then thought better of it. We had been getting some feedback in the comments that I wasn’t as good at acting as I should be. My skill could go up all day long, but if I was also a director, it didn’t quite work right because I was always just a little bit in charge of what was going on.

“Does Tami know?” I asked Jean, letting my worry stay on my face and using every ounce of my acting skill for it.

I was answered with a squeal that rivaled the lobby of the hotel and rose over the crowd like a bomb siren. Tami had spotted Glenda on the stage after turning in her dish. Tami wasn’t one for pretense of any sort, unless it was about their business, for which she had ultimate discretion. Then again, Tami was that person who ranged from zero to 1,000 with nary a step in between, so she was certainly playing to character.

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“Tam Tam!!” Glenda didn’t even bother to pretend to have a lack of knowledge of her friend, throwing up her hands and rushing across the stage, nearly toppling Kodo, who hadn’t been ready for the quick movement. Then again, maybe he had been ready for it, because his next move was to slip a paw into the purse of the judge next to where Glenda had been seated. That judge, a Mrs. Courtney Pomfrey according to her nametag, was too busy pursing her judgy lips at the two women embracing at the edge of the stage to notice Kodo. I quickly looked away to where everyone else was watching Glenda and Tami embrace with cheek-kissing enthusiasm.

“This is impossible,” Pursed-lipped Pomfrey called out above the whispers that were starting to ripple through the crowd.

An announcer, who had a nametag that proclaimed him the Mayor, tapped the microphone on the podium to try to pry away the attention of the crowd and Tami and Glenda who ignored him as they giggled at each other. He got more assertive by saying, “Ladies,” in that tone that men have to shut us women up. That got the goat of at least half the audience, who were what made up a southern area of this side of the Mississippi, who turned to glare at the Mayor, who, like most men, didn’t notice the peril he’d invoked with the tone.

“Us?” Tami and Glenda turned to the man with mirrored arched brows.

“Is there a relationship that we should know about here, Ms. Glenda?” the mayor tried to find his masculinity again under the glare of women that he was starting to feel.

“I had no idea that one of my oldest friends would be competing here,” Glenda proclaimed, as Tami put on a pretty flush of faked embarrassment that made me green with jealousy. “You are competing aren’t you, darling?”

“Yes, actually,” Tami admitted without a touch of concern or dismay. “I just turned in my dish.”

“You are quite lucky, Mr. Mayor,” Glenda eyed the Mayor in a way that had him squirming. “Though no one has a chance against her.”

“This does cause a pickle,” the Mayor tried to sound stern, but he’d lost all credibility.

“There is bound to be bias,” Mrs. Pursed-lipped Pomfrey sniffed, and I realized now that she must be the wife of the mayor for the way she cast stern glances at her fellow-southern-women who were supposed to be supportive of her man. This was the language of southern gentility. It had been studied and perfected as an official language of southern women. “We either cannot allow Ms. Glenda or Ms. Tami to participate in order to remain fair to the other contestants.”

There was a murmur that spread, and I distinctly heard a woman behind me whisper to her companion, “That’s rich, considering her cousin Jerry is competing.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Glenda declared so casually that it was clear her recent royal status had gained her a penchant for being obeyed. “I, for one, have paid a lot to be a judge here and don’t intend to step down as judge.”

“I suppose I could withdraw my entry,” Tami crossed her arms over her chest and called the pompous pair’s bluff. “If you’re willing to refund my entry fee.”

Considering that the materials Tami had used to create her masterpiece were a lot less than Glenda’s fee, I was sure they’d choose that option until someone pushed through the crowd to whisper in the Mayor’s ear. The murmur rippled back across the crowd like we were all doing the wave, gossip-style. “Is that Tami Remmington? The Tami Remmington?” was what was going through the crowd even as the Mayor was bending to his wife with bugged out eyes that turned into his wife’s nearly audible gulp.

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“I’d be willing to take my entry to the next cookoff,” Tami shrugged, Hex’s eyes giving an odd magical essence to Tami’s casual stance.

This was a serious problem for the Mayor, who was going to lose the most famous eccentric chef his little town had ever known because his wife had not fully vetted the guest list. I could see a scenario unwind in the eyes of that AI Mayor actor and that was our impressive special effects department at work. The scene consisted of news vans peeling into the cookoff parking lot any second, followed by newspaper headlines of the Mayor losing the next election due to having kicked this huge celebrity to the next town over. That town’s Mayor, a longtime nemesis of this town’s Mayor, would smilingly merge their towns, take over, and run both this Mayor and his wife out of town tarred and feathered.

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“The entries are anonymous,” the Mayor’s wife looked up to her husband with similarly bugged out eyes.

“Anyone having tasted Tami’s cooking would know it from anything else without any labels,” Glenda challenged their pathetic version of a retreat. “I’d know her signature from the best in the world, because it is the best in the world, but if you don’t let me judge it, I’ll withdraw with her. There is nothing in my contract about using me as a means for disqualifying good contestants so that some backwater can promote their own relatives over true talent.”

“The best is the best, whether it is a local or a celebrity,” the Mayor tried to backtrack from Glenda’s stare.

“I won’t have you penalizing me in favor of locals just because you need to make something fair,” Tami agreed with Glenda. “I assumed that my fame was clear on my application. I’m not sure I’m comfortable competing in a rigged competition. I’ll be judged on my cooking merits or nothing at all.”

It took an AI to make that sound reasonable. I was lost as to what their purpose was. What followed was something that likely shocked everyone in the town and the next town over. It shocked me. Ms. Toovers stood like a beacon of sanity in the whispering crowd and strolled leisurely up to the stage. With a slightly smug gesture, she waved the Mayor aside and took his place at the microphone.

“Don’t be silly,” Ms. Toovers took over the microphone from the Mayor. “If my head chef can compete, then surely we won’t be turning away his only competition in years. As a sponsor and board member of the chamber of commerce, I approve Ms. Remmington’s entry and trust someone as well-known as Ms. Glenda is in the foodie community. Just because I’ve supported the Mayor’s campaign doesn’t mean his lovely wife grades my chef above her cousin. I, for one, welcome the competition.”

Silence stood in a pregnant moment between the three women at the center of the controversy, but it broke in the next as the Mayor’s wife laughed and clapped her hands, followed by the echoing applause of the crowd. Tami’s entry was accepted. Glenda introduced Kodo to Ms. Toovers and the Mayor’s wife, who actually giggled as Kodo returned her diamond watch like some stage magician. There was laughing and subtle challenges and such that could only exist in the language of southern women. I ducked. I crossed my arms and watched the whole thing from my safe chair in the middle of a crowd that didn’t notice me at all for the commotion going on.

Tami won, much to the chagrin of Ms. Toovers and her head chef, who invited us to an elite afterparty. We turned her down, which surprised me, but that turned out okay because Ms. Toovers ended up slumming it with the rest of us shleps as we shared our food and spirits around and even Ms. Toovers’ chef admitted that Tami had deserved to win. Tami laughed off Ms. Toovers’ attempts to replace her chef with Tami, passing him an extra jar of apple pie moonshine that would only take his chili and BBQ sauce one tiny step closer to hers.

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“I make all my own ingredients,” Tami gave the poor man a sympathetic pat on the arm. “From the moonshine to the Dijon mustard.”

“You bought the honey,” I accused her, and she laughingly admitted it readily.

“And I won’t tell you from where,” Tami insisted. “That shall remain my secret.”

“May I taste it?” he cajoled, like a beggar orphan, his eyes sure that he could place it if allowed to taste it.

“You already did,” Tami shook her finger at him and handed him a shot glass of the moonshine instead. “On the cornbread.”

“There is a cruel streak in you, Ms. Remmington,” Ms. Toovers took the shot glass that the chef had refused in favor of chasing a ferret. It had been a horrible thing to say to the poor man, who then went in search of any crumb of cornbread he could find. Tami had only said it right after she’d fed the last of the cornbread to Kodo.

“I have standards,” Tami answered with a shrug. I gave a little chuckle from where I was still cleaning up the scraps from the kitchen. “That side of me doesn’t have a lot of patience for people who claim to be chefs and don’t have the same high standards for what they’ll put on a table.”

We’d set up a little firepit and fed it most of what was left of our firewood, something else Ms. Toovers’ chef had inspected curiously. Tami had handed out a jar of the moonshine to everyone who had competed. The officials had taken down the tents and the park had become a bunch of dots of firepits surrounded by lawn chairs that were occupied by those who (if they’d lived in the real world) would wake to splitting headaches and very little knowledge of the previous night.

“How much of this moonshine do you have stored in the trunk of that Thunderbird?” Ms. Toovers said with raised eyebrows, clinking her shot glass to both Tami and Jean’s. Even having asked the question, she didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s a good thing the Mayor is telling law enforcement to look the other way about it.”

“I’m intense in the kitchen, but that ends when I leave the plates to the dishwashers,” Tami admitted. “I like a party as much as the next girl.”

“It has me thinking maybe I’m open to yet another wife,” Ms. Toovers flirted lightly, but obviously half-heartedly.

“Aren’t you still supposed to be on your honeymoon with the last one?” Glenda challenged Ms. Toovers with a wicked smile.

“One should have as many wives as one can support, according to some biblical texts,” Ms. Toovers teased Glenda.

“I’m just off my own honeymoon,” Glenda admitted with a smile. “I don’t know how you do it. I’m more than content with one and if he had others, I think I’d have to kill them all to make sure he appreciated me.”

“I’ve had to cut my honeymoon short for this event,” Ms. Toovers admitted, with a conspiratorial wink. “But my Candy will be waiting for me once I’ve completed my rounds. I’ve left her in Monaco with a spending limit at the casinos that should keep her happy until I’ve done my duty with my other spouses. It is a duty I take very seriously.”

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I found Ms. Toovers chef going through our garbage even as I was emptying some crumbs into it. He had the grace to look chagrined, but he didn’t come up off his knees as he noticed a nibbling Kodo peek out from behind the shelves. Is there anything more sympathy-inducing than a poor man reduced to bargaining with a ferret for the last bite of cornbread? I had to give it to him, he was persistent. All for a taste of honey?

“Good help is so hard to find,” Ms. Toovers tipped her empty glass toward her chef as she noted my turning down his bribe of a stack of bills to get the cornbread from the ferret.

“He’d have had more luck bribing the ferret,” Tami joked, even as I leaned down into the ice bucket for a chilled white wine. “Janet is one of the good ones.”

“Thanks,” I told Tami sincerely, plucking a set of three wine glasses down from a shelf in the outdoor kitchen. It was the same wine that Tami had used for the Dijon mustard, but the chef didn’t need to know that. I poured out three glasses and handed them out to Jean, Tami, and Ms. Toovers.

“I have better luck with wives than assistants,” Ms. Toovers complained. “I don’t suppose you’d lend me your Janet for a few days.”

“I’m pretty sure slavery was outlawed,” I muttered under my breath, but they ignored that for the most part. The spiders didn’t. I got another one-liner and gave myself a fist bump for it.

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“I wouldn’t dream of stealing her away from you, but someone loyal with a good sense of wit and circumstance is just what I’d need to make sure Candy’s apartment is set up nicely for her,” Ms. Toovers suggested, almost too casually. “It’s just that she’s coming home to the new place day after tomorrow and I’d like her to have some meals in the fridge and no surprises.”

“What do you think, Janet?” Jean turned to me, like this wasn’t the whole reason for our presence at this cookoff. I sent a silent thank you to Writer AIs since it would never have happened organically.

“It would be great if you could just do a few days of housesitting, so I know it’s all set up for her return,” Ms. Toovers warmed up to the idea. “You wouldn’t have to do much. Just make sure the fridge is stocked, she has some staples in the cupboards?”

“I could whip up a few meals,” Tami offered like I’d accepted already. “I’ll meet you there in the morning, cook up some stuff she could just warm up after her trip, but then we’d have to get on the road again.”

“It’s just two days,” Ms. Toovers got this speculative look on her face that made me think that I was walking into something hinky. Of course I was.

“Why not,” I answered them all as they ignored me, making plans.