Fair Peril Page 10

  Prentis knew who was the only person in the world loony enough to be dinging his dong at this hour.

  The chimes sounded again.

  Goddammit. But Prentis knew he had no choice. With his face under iron control, reminding himself that he was not a lonely boy any longer but now a lawyer and a statesman, he got himself moving warily toward the door.

  Buffy was leaning on the chimes for the third time when Prentis opened up.

  “If you keep harassing me like this,” Prentis said, blocking his front doorway with his Health Club bod, “I’m going to have to get a restraining order.”

  “Your daughter’s missing.” Buffy considered that she was giving him one last chance. “I just want you to do something. What about that Honorary Member of the Association of Sheriffs thing you bought? Make your friends find her.”

  “Hell, she’s probably already pregnant, what’s the point?”

  This time his boorishness didn’t shock Buffy’s breath away. This time it merely hardened her. He had done it, he had gone too far; he was doomed. Buffy said, “I was mistaken when I called you a toad, Prentis.”

  He turned on the Reaganesque charm. “Well, we all make mistakes.”

  “Damn straight. You’re not a toad, you’re a frog.” Wrath was simmering. Buffy stirred in the perverted sense of humor and started her incantation. “Gimme an F, F! Gimme an R, R! Gimme an O, O! Gimme a G, G!”

  Prentis’s attempt at charm had blinked off. He was flinching back from her, uncertainty wavering on his face. “You’re nuts.”

  “What’s it spell? FROG! What’s it smell like? A FROG! What’s it look like? A FROG! What’s it quack like? A FROG! What is it? A FROG!”

  Unfortunately, it still smelled, looked, and quacked like Prentis. “You’re psycho!” he quacked in his flat, central-Pennsylvania accent. A trifle pale under his salon tan, he ducked back into his pseudo-Tudor lair and slammed the door.

  “Damn!”

  Buffy drove home in a deep indigo funk. What had gone wrong? It had seemed like a straightforward enough plan: transfrogrify Prentis into a portable batrachian form, grab him and hold him hostage until his mother cooperated and vouchsafed information, then find Emily. Then, once Emily was safely home, let the Pestt or somebody kiss Prentis to give him back his gonads. Nobody would call the cops; as a politician, Prentis certainly would not want the sort of publicity that centered around having become small and green, and anyway, there’s no law against keeping a couple of pet bullfrogs. It had seemed like a certain, simple, and invulnerable plan.

  “You were going to put that in here with me?” LeeVon exclaimed when she told him about it. “A testosterone-prone hetero running for office? Thank God it didn’t work.”

  “Look, it should have worked.” Buffy slumped over the table and laid her head on her cushy forearms. She mumbled to the tablecloth, “Everything’s wrong. Emily’s gone and nobody gives a damn.”

  Silence. Then there was a tambourinelike jingling as LeeVon hopped forward. “I’ve been thinking about her.”

  “Good.” Buffy did not move. “I’m glad somebody besides me can spare her a thought.”

  “Now listen, Best Beloved. This is not directly about Emily, but just listen. You asked me what it is like to be a frog. I’ll tell you. It is very strange. I see everything differently. I am looking straight at you, but you are not you; you are bigger.”

  “Oh, thanks.” She burrowed deeper into her own arms.

  “No, listen! By bigger, what I mean is mightier, stronger. More primal. A black-haired conjurer in a spangled gown—except it’s just the Buffles sitting there in blue jeans after all.…” His tone grew wry and tender, yet uncertain. “I don’t know how to explain it. Everything is canted, slanted, shadowed differently, haloed in a golden light.”

  That jolted Buffy upright. She sat stone straight and peered at him. His eyes were shining golden. Of course, frog eyes always did.

  “Like in a dream,” LeeVon said. “Have you ever had a dream of your own house, but in the dream it is somehow familiar and strange at the same time? Your house, yet not your house?”

  Buffy barely nodded. “Maybe a frog’s eyes see things differently.”

  “Maybe. But you are not a frog. What was it like when you were looking at that book?”

  The memory made her uncomfortable, yet seduced her like the call of wild geese in the sky. “Very strange.”

  “Like you were in a dream?”

  “Not a dream exactly. More of a—a different reality.” Different and therefore more exciting.

  “Like there is another place? Only it isn’t a place. It’s a trick of seeing.”

  “I don’t know, LeeVon.” She felt dead tired, too tired to think. “What are you saying? Spit it out.”

  “Emily is with the prince.” LeeVon spoke slowly. “And he is a prince of Fair Peril, what most people call fairyland. He’s a fairy-tale prince. So Emily is in fairyland, right? Just as I am at this very moment, since I have been turned into a frog, which is not a possible event in the world we know. So I am in fairyland, like Emily.” LeeVon’s cautious voice had gone so soft Buffy could barely hear him. “But fairyland is not a place.”

  Dead tired, Buffy still could not sleep, not while Emily was still missing. Sometime after midnight, she lay stark stony awake, forearms resting on her forehead as she stared at the dark ceiling, stared as if the night could tell her something. Stared as if staring could help her see the stars through all the barriers between them and her. Stared past the fake, greenish-white phosphorescent stars spangling her own nightgown sleeve.

  “Good heavens,” she whispered, and then she sat straight up, banged herself on the head, and yelled it. “Good heavens!”

  “Graaah!” In the aquarium, LeeVon was startled awake by her shout.

  Buffy rampaged out of bed. “Good grief, it was the stupid nightgown!”

  “What? Best Beloved, what are you saying?”

  “I forgot about the goddamn appropriate garb!”

  Only a few minutes later, Buffy stood at the security-lighted front door of the Prentis Sewell residence in sneakers and her stars-and-planets nightgown. The way the spell read, a cheerleader’s outfit seemed to make more sense (and Buffy winced from imagining herself in one), but hey. This would work. It had worked before. Buffy pounded gleefully on the door. “Prentis! Get your vote-grubbing butt out here.” She played joyful rhythms upon the door chimes. “Prentis! I’ve got a treat for you.”

  This time he came to the door in silk pajamas. Two ways you can tell the essential truth about a man: how he acts when he’s drunk, and what he sleeps in. Prentis was a wimp, though he yanked the door open with an impressive show of energy.

  “That does it,” he declared in a voice that attempted movie-stud manliness but skidded too high. “I’m calling the cops.”

  He’d call the cops on her, but he wouldn’t call them to make them find Emily? Screw him. Ire and perversity at the ready, Buffy gabbled rapidly, “Gimme an F, F; gimme an O, O; gimme a G, G!”

  “You are a total fruitcake.” Wary-faced, Prentis was retreating. Buffy jammed her foot in the door so he couldn’t close it.

  “What’s it spell—” Suddenly, DAMN I messed up, Buffy realized what it spelled, but inertia carried her onward. “FOG! What’s it smell like? A FOG! What’s—”

  Prentis thinned, dislimned, and vanished. A dense and malodorous six-foot miasma, however, hovered over his doorstep.

  “Prentis?” Buffy whispered.

  No reply. Her ex had never been one to hold back in times of stress. If he had been able to talk, Buffy decided, she would have been hearing some impassioned comments from him. But as all she heard was a swampy silence, it seemed that a fog, unlike a frog, couldn’t talk. No mouth.

  No kisser.

  How was a person supposed to bring Prentis back, supposing she wanted to? Which Buffy most certainly did not, but still … she felt kind of bad.

  Already the fog was starting to swirl and
dissipate in the April nighttime breeze. “You’d better get inside before you get wafted away,” Buffy said. Forget taking Prentis hostage; the fog did not appear particularly portable. “Can you do that? Can you move around?”

  Apparently so. The fog withdrew. Buffy called, “Okay, well, so long, see ya,” and closed the door, shutting Prentis into his own home so that he would not become a dissipated person. Uh, effluvium. Just call him Mister Sewell.

  Ha-ha.

  Cheered by her pun, Buffy got into her car and drove off sedately, thoughtful. She felt sure that Tempestt was not smart enough to figure out that the odor in the bedroom was her husband, but she hoped Fay would not catch on too soon. Her dealings with Fay, she decided, were going to have to take place largely on a basis of bluff.

  It was exactly twenty-four hours since Emily had disappeared. Buffy went home and called the cops.

  Fay came shooting in like a gilded yam hurtled out of a potato launcher as Buffy was sucking at her second cup of morning coffee. The bored cop who had taken her report had left hours before, but Buffy had not been able to get back to sleep, or rather, to get to sleep at all. Paradoxically, therefore, she did not feel awake. She was just working herself up to ask LeeVon whether frogs slept, and how they did it with no eyelids to close, and whether their chinless heads ever nodded until their proboscises drooped into the water, when Fay came crashing in.

  “Murphy!” Fay shouted quite loudly for a woman her age. “What have you done with my son?”

  Sluggish, Buffy did not respond. Let Fay rant awhile first. Jeez, it wasn’t hard to tell who rated. It didn’t matter what happened to the granddaughter, but touch the son and whoa, baby.

  “Murphy!” Fay screeched. “Answer me!”

  Buffy gave her no more than a bleary stare. It hurt her eyes to try to look at Fay at that hour. What a way to start the morning. Buffy would have summoned Fay after her third cup of coffee, maybe, but meanwhile, here she was, the bitch of glitz, and it was beginning to occur to Buffy to wonder how she had gotten herself into this situation. Okay, sure, she had picked up a talking frog in the woods, but did that mean she had to end up in a pissing contest with the ormolu ogress?

  “I know you’ve got him here somewhere.” Fay checked the aquarium first, gave LeeVon a scornful glare—You call that skinny thing a frog?—then rampaged through the rest of the house. Buffy watched. She’d never been able to understand how some women could sprint in high heels, glitter-gold Wal-Mart heels yet. It was an ability she grudgingly had to admire. She got up and poured herself her third cup of coffee.

  “Where is he!” Fay shrieked, reentering the kitchen.

  Buffy sat down with her coffee and put her slippered feet up on a chair. “Where’s Emily?”

  “Emily, Schmemily! You tell me where Prentis is right now or I’ll call the cops.”

  “Go ahead. May the cops help you as much as they’ve helped me.”

  “Yaaaaah!” Fay lifted her golden-clawed hands in the manner of a witch who has been pushed beyond her limited patience. The gesture actually woke Buffy up, because OUCH. She felt it. Felt it physically, felt it rip into her as if her shirt had disappeared along with her common sense—Fay was not touching her, yet somehow those metallic fingernails were tearing her skin.

  It hurt, ow, ow, OW. But stubbornness or sheer weariness kept Buffy from vocalizing what she felt. She sat like a frog on a log, stoical. “I’m missing a child, too,” she pointed out, “and I didn’t notice much sympathy from you. Where’s Emily?”

  “Eeeeyaagh!” Fay stamped her resplendent feet, then lifted her hands again, more collectedly this time. “Gimme a—”

  “Changing me into some damn thing won’t help you find Prentis,” Buffy said. “Besides, I doubt you can do it.” In actuality she felt the quick sweat of severe fear trickling down her ribs. But being married to Prentis for twenty years had taught her how to play poker. And she had some basis for her bluff; she knew she had the power to summon Fay, whereas Fay had not thus far shown the power to summon her. For whatever obscure reasons—and Buffy was not sure she even wanted to understand them—for whatever reasons, the supernatural pecking order seemed to have placed her above Fay.

  Fay knew it, too. She lowered her hands, and this morning she was a gold-and-crimson person, her face flushed with frustration. “Oooooogh!”

  “Where’s Emily? C’mon, Fay. I’m supposed to be at work.”

  “So am I,” LeeVon put in morosely from the aquarium.

  Fay flung up her hands again, this time plunging them into her own brittle, glittering coif and traumatizing it into astonishing disarray; she now resembled either Phyllis Diller or a supernova. “Where the heck do you think she is!” Fay shrilled. “She’s right the heck where you’d expect! Where is Prentis?”

  “Right where you’d expect,” Buffy said, and it was true. Prentis was at home.

  Fay’s claws attacked the air again. Once more Buffy felt their magical impact slashing at the tender skin of her chest and belly. Once more, with the assistance of pride and perversity, she managed to sit without showing that she felt anything.

  “Eeeeyaagh!” Fay’s frustration rocketed her right out the door. Buffy let her go. She listened, heard Fay’s Eldorado squeal away, then took a deep, shaky breath and slumped in her chair.

  Her frog du jour asked, “Are you okay, Best Beloved?”

  “I think so.” LeeVon was a friend; Buffy did not mind peeking down her own shirt in front of him, for the first time in her life glad that the size of her frontage required her to wear an industrial-strength bra. Red welts covered the parts of her that it did not protect. “Ow. That bitch. You should see what she did to me.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Damn her.” But even though it hurt like hell, the skin was not broken. Buffy let go of her shirt with a gesture of dismissal. She sat where she was and tried to think what to do next. “Well,” she said, not as steadily as she wanted to, “that did not go quite as expected.”

  “Like anything ever does?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Duz, schmuzz, buzz my cuz. Missing work again, gonna get fired, okay, find a different job, but who’s gonna hire. Buffy couldn’t think. Her mind felt as foggy as Prentis’s entire insubstantial quiddity, and once more she was so tired that she might as well have been floating on air, even though her hunkers rested firmly on her kitchen chair. She kept her eyes open yet saw nothing that made sense. The ceiling shone like water. The aquarium seemed to drift up and turn to haze. Kiss me, miss me, yeah, yeah, a frog is not a dog. Where the hell is Emily, right where you’d expect her to be—

  Buffy sat bolt upright, suddenly and sublimely lucid. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said to LeeVon. “She’s at the mall.”

  Eight

  “There’s her car.”

  As LeeVon could not see out the Escort’s window from his nest of soggy paper towels on the passenger seat, he could not confirm this. Anxiously Buffy drove closer to the metallic-mauve Probe.

  “It’s hers, okay. There’s her SAVE THE RAIN FOREST bumper sticker.” Buffy veered with more fervor than accuracy into the nearest parking space. Made it without hitting anything.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” LeeVon said.

  Without replying, Buffy hurried around to his side of the car, picked him up along with some damp paper towels to keep him comfortable, and cradled him in her hands.

  “The car might have been there since yesterday.”

  “I don’t care. I know she’s here.” Huffing along at her fastest thunder-thighed stride, Buffy carried LeeVon into the Mall Tifarious.

  It was a gargantuan new mall designed to put shoppers into an ambience-induced euphoria in which they would buy, buy, buy. Sunlight streamed down through three tinted-glass domes into circular courtyards six stories high, each of which featured a fountain culminating in a pedestal upon which rose a fairyland-themed sculpture incorporating a lot of gilded filigree: a rearing deer with lacy wings; a frilly-dressed girl with a garla
nd of golden roses; a heavyset, toadlike, verdigris-mottled frog with a fussy filigree crown and butterfly wings that looked way too delicate to support his bulk should he ever want to fly. Nonsensical but evocative verbiage was inlaid around the pedestals in gilded mosaic tile: “Maypoles, hollyhocks, white snakes, soul cakes.” “Wishing hearts, coltslip, nightspring, a gold ring.” Et cetera. Translucent oriflamme-cut banners trailed down from railings painted white and pink and lavender blue dilly dilly. Curving stairways of the same dilly-dilly ilk connected the six levels of shops, but never in such a way as to facilitate efficient passage from bottom of mall to top or vice versa; the goal, rather, was to send the consumer wandering in a disoriented daze past as much merchandise as possible.

  “There’s no damn sensible way to do this,” Buffy complained to LeeVon after attempting a comprehensive scan of the first and second floors. The placement of the escalators was staggered. The elevators were hidden in the penetralia of the anchor stores. “This place is annoying.” Buffy had never been a happy shopper or a mall enthusiast. If she absolutely had to buy something, she preferred to go to Wal-Mart and get it over with. New clothes to her meant bringing home two packets of pastel-colored cotton panties from the supermarket; home decorating was prissy-print toilet paper. The Mall Tifarious was wasted on her. “Everything’s plastic,” she grumbled, though the potted trees, four stories tall, were real. “Where’s Emily?”

  LeeVon was ignoring her. “James the butler!” he exclaimed with delight that jingled his face like wind chimes. “Now, he could unfrog me.” The object of his approbation was a carved, wooden, rather two-dimensional effigy snootily holding a tray outside The Bombay Company. “I love Anglos.”

  “That’s a pseudo Anglo,” Buffy grumped, “outside a pseudo-Brit store.” No Emily. They moved on.