Fair Peril Read online

  As Prentis’s second wife, Tempestt had recently achieved that uncomfortable point in the marriage where she was beginning to understand why the first marriage had failed. The simple truth was, while Prentis put up a huge ego front, he had to be the most insecure man on the unhappy face of the planet.

  Always stewing about something. Always anxious about something else. Always wanting to know where she’d been, what she’d been doing, who she’d talked with. Jealous. Always jerking his chin up in the air and looking at her narrow-eyed, like he’d never believe her no matter what she did or said.

  Well, so much for the honeymoon. No wonder he thought everybody cheated; he had cheated on Buffy, hadn’t he? With her, Tempestt. And now that he was married to her, he would probably cheat on her too. Fine. Whatever. The minute she found out he was fooling around, she would stop going to bed with him, but she was going to stay married to him, and she wasn’t going to let him drive her over the edge like Buffy. Poor Buffy. If the woman wasn’t so nutso, Tempestt would have liked to have lunch with her. They could have a lot of fun comparing notes about Prentis.

  It was so great having the place to herself, with Emily gone too. That girl was a major pain in the ass. Miss No-Meat Superiority with her special menus.

  Tempestt found a vanilla-raspberry-pistachio color scheme she really liked, dog-eared the page, then looked up with an unfocused gaze. A thought had just occurred to her out of nowhere: suppose Emily’s absence and Prentis’s were connected somehow? Like, bad people had both of them?

  Nah.

  She turned back to her color scheme and found another one on the next page that she liked even better, lemonade-apricot-whortleberry, but looked up again, frowning; there was that damn smell. Some sort of heavy swampy odor had gotten into the house somehow—probably Prentis would know what it was. That was the main thing men were good for, knowing about houses and cars and stuff. Tempestt would ask him about the smell when he got back. It was kind of annoying that she couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Like, it seemed to move around. She would go into a room, and it wouldn’t be there, and then it would. Sometimes she could swear it was following her.

  Well, hell, let it smell. In thirty seconds her nose wouldn’t notice it anyway. That was the way noses were built. Which was a good thing when families had to share bathrooms. Tempestt flipped back and forth between the pages, comparing the vanilla-raspberry-pistachio room to the lemonade-apricot-whortleberry one.

  The phone rang.

  Tempestt jumped up to get it, pausing until the cop in the doorway gave her the nod so both she and the cop on the extension picked up at the same time.

  “Hello? Oh, hi, Amber.”

  It was not a kidnapper, just a friend with whom she chatted happily. “Nuh-uh, nothing yet. I figure he’s just trying to make me worried. Huh? Sure. Like, testing me. He doesn’t trust me. Well, what do I expect, I was the other woman … huh? No, he’s not all that great in bed. I’d have an affair in a minute, but why risk it? I’d rather have money than sex anyway. Yeah, it’s more fun and less trouble. Huh? Yeah, I’m okay, except I’ve got this headache from this stupid smell.” Which seemed to be getting ranker and pissier by the minute. “Yeah, there’s this awful kind of locker-room odor in the house.”

  And sometimes, swear to God, she felt like something was watching her. Like Prentis was right there watching her with his reassure-me eyes. But whoa, Tempestt did not mention that part. She did not want to go over the edge like Buffy.

  “He went back into the house and I left,” Buffy said for the sixth time.

  “You went there to ask him to ‘do something’ about finding your missing daughter.”

  “Yes.” Buffy had gotten tired of talking to these cops. They didn’t really listen. Gave the impression that they didn’t believe her.

  “At three o’clock in the morning.”

  “I couldn’t sleep, so why should he?”

  “In your nightgown.”

  “I was upset.”

  “And he said he was going to get a restraining order, told you your daughter was probably already pregnant, went back inside, and closed the door.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you simply left.”

  “Yes. I went home and reported Emily missing, and then I tried to get some sleep.” This was most certainly the truth. Buffy had told them basically the truth, omitting only the part about having turned Prentis into a fog. Though she was too tired to feel any guilt—moreover, Prentis was such a slime-enhanced primitive life form that he deserved whatever happened to him—still, she saw no sense in trying to explain Prentis’s transfogrified condition to these cops when they were not even capable of understanding that Emily was imprisoned in statue form on top of a pillar at the mall, as she had repeatedly told them.

  “Do you have any idea where your ex-husband is now?”

  “If he’s not in the house, then I don’t know.” Enough of this crap. “He hasn’t been missing for twenty-four hours yet, has he?” Buffy’s tone conveyed some feeling. “How come you’re looking for him, hauling people in to question them, the whole Dragnet routine, but when I call to say my sixteen-year-old daughter has run off with a naked frog, they tell me I have to wait for twenty-four hours before I report her missing?” It stunk that a politician was perceived as worth more than a young girl was.

  The cops were watching her steadily. There were three of them in the little room, two standing and one seated, just like on every cop show she had ever seen. “You’re upset now,” said the seated one, who was doing the honors. “The way you were upset when you last spoke to your ex, right?”

  “Damn straight I’m upset!”

  “And did I understand you to say ‘frog’?”

  “Yes. Well, I meant—oh, my God.” Buffy sat straight up in her chair, having just remembered something. “LeeVon.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I left LeeVon in the fountain at the mall.”

  “LeeVon?”

  “LeeVon Trubble. He’s a librarian. Well, actually, right now he’s a frog, but you can tell him from the other frogs because he has rings all over his head and a tattoo of Mowgli on his butt. That and, of course, the fact that he talks.” Buffy started to rise from her chair. “I’ve got to—”

  A large though not ungentle hand on her shoulder constrained her to keep her seat. “Ma’am,” the seated cop said, “there’s a nice, clean, comfortable facility on the other side of town, and we are going to take you there.”

  “Huh?”

  “I want you to go in for psychiatric evaluation, ma’am. It’s strictly voluntary, but I want to explain that if you don’t go, I will have to arrest you for beating up on these officers here.”

  One of the silent cops, not the one with his hand on her shoulder but the other one, unexpectedly spoke. “Uh, Chief. Something that jingled did crawl out of that fountain and bite me on the ankle. Felt like a goddamn stapler, only it was alive. I—”

  The chief swiveled in his chair and glared. “Don’t you start now.”

  “Oh, poor LeeVon.” Buffy struggled again to stand up. “I’ve got to get back. I can’t just leave him there.”

  “Ma’am, you’re not going anywhere except to the smiley-face ward.”

  Nine

  Buffy fell asleep in the cruiser on the way to the hospital. Being a passenger in a vehicle of any sort often had that effect on her. And once she started sleeping, she couldn’t stop, she was so beat-to-meat-dead-on-her-feet exhausted. She fell asleep again during admission. She walked in a narcoleptic trance to her room. “Looks like there’s no need for sedation,” somebody said. From other rooms came bizarre humanoid noises, but Buffy didn’t care: this place was more sane and under control than her life was at the moment. She slept.

  She zonked through the night and napped through the next day, between meals and shrinkly evaluations. The food sucked. As for the shrinks—well, it was wonderful to have anyone listen to her with as much interest as they di
d. If the food had been a bit better and if it hadn’t been for Emily and LeeVon, Buffy would have been tempted to stay. She enjoyed herself. When the shrinks asked her questions, she told them stories—the one about the goose girl and the talking horse Falada, whose severed yet speaking head hung under the gateway; the one about the youngest son and the toad and the treasure; some others. Between stories, she told them about Adamus and about turning Prentis into a fog by mistake when she had really only meant to turn him into a frog. They listened quite attentively and nodded greatly. Buffy liked them, and they assured her that they liked her too. A lot. They were probably going to want to keep her there forever.

  Getting out was no problem, however. Buffy phoned a co-worker who owed her a small favor and asked the woman to stop by her house after work and bring her a few things—if she was going to stay in the kookiehouse for long, she needed a few things, right? Right. So the friendly co-worker used the house key kept in the hyperrealistic plastic dog poop and brought Buffy, as requested, her toothbrush and toothpaste, some spare socks and underwear, and her nightgown. Specifically, her star-spangled nightgown. With the obsessive insistence that is humored in those who have gone gaga, Buffy had instructed the woman to bring her that nightgown and no other. “Appropriate garb,” she had babbled. “The rules are quite strict, you know.”

  At about two in the morning, when there was nobody around except the graveyard shift, Buffy lay clad quite naturally in her nightgown, which was appropriate garb for sleeping, but she was not sleeping. Having slept half the day, she was wide awake, silent, and waiting. When the la-la ward seemed quiet enough for her purpose, she heaved herself up, put on sneakers and socks instead of slippers, and headed out of her room and down the hallway, toward freedom.

  The young man behind the desk said, “Can I help you with something, Ms. Murphy?” All of the staffers in this place were very polite with patients who remained nonviolent. He did not say, “Where the hell do you think you’re going in your nightgown?” And he would chitchat a minute or two, making friendly noises, before he ordered, “Okay, Ms. Murphy, it’s time for you to go back to your room now.”

  Buffy told him, careful to spell it right this time, “Gimme an F, F! Gimme an R, R! Gimme an O, O! Gimme a G, G!”

  He watched her in the same bored, smirking way that the cops had watched her. In the face of that sense of superiority, it was easy to coddle anger over medium heat.

  “What’s it spell? FROG!” Then Buffy did not have to cheerlead any further. She walked around the desk, extracted the enfrogged staffer from the muddle of his clothes lying on the carpeting, then found his keys—they were what she wanted; enfrogging this poor guy was just a way of making him small and portable enough for her to handle. She fished the keys out of his trousers pocket and unclipped them from his belt. Meanwhile, she held on to him so that she would not step on him by mistake or lose him. “Where’s my stuff?” she asked.

  “Graa—graaa—” He seemed distraught.

  “Oh, never mind.” She had spotted the bank of little drawers, like safety-deposit-box drawers. She found the one with her name on it and used the little key to open it. Wallet, car keys, everything was there. Fine. Using the big key, she unlocked the ward door. “Don’t tell anybody about this,” she warned the frog gently, “or they’ll want to dissect you.” Then she kissed him, a businesslike smack. Lucky thing he was a guy, and—yes, he seemed to be hetero. Human again, but almost as bug-eyed as a frog, he stood naked and dumbfounded, attempting to cover the most interesting part of him with his hands. Buffy figured he would want to get his clothes on before he did anything about her escapade. Still, she did not have much time. She resisted the urge to take a good look, instead catching only a glimpse as she waved good-bye and twinkled down the corridor.

  Twinkled quite literally. She glowed in the dark, or her stars and crescents and planets did.

  “Hey!” yelled a security guard in a startled and unprofessional tone. Buffy yanked the nightgown up above her knees and ran.

  Like a rhinoceros, Buffy didn’t have world-class acceleration, but once she got her mass moving, then inertia kept her barreling along quite fearsomely. She found a door, ran outside—alarms went off. She ran some more, across the too-damn-big parking lot, then into a bewilderment of alleys. She ran until it was close to heart-attack time, then ducked behind somebody’s garage and leaned against its cinder-block wall gasping for breath, rasping and coughing and trying to listen; she couldn’t hear a thing above the thundering of her heart.

  As soon as she could, she walked on, trying to keep to the shadows even though she shone like a constellation. Briefly she considered ditching the nightgown; nakedness would have made her no more conspicuous than a five-foot-six white mushroom sneaking through the night. Right. Turn the nightgown inside out? Not a bad plan, would have meant exposing her fungal flesh only for a moment—but wait. Somebody’s compost heap. Buffy whipped off the black plastic covering and wrapped it around herself, capelike. So what if Zorro never smelled like this. Dimmed and aromatic but dashing, she walked on.

  Okay, buckle that swash. All she had to do was get to the mall, break in, swing from a chandelier or something, and rescue LeeVon and Emily.

  While eluding the cops.

  What LeeVon really hated about being a frog, he decided, was feeling so cold and naked all the time. He liked clothes, dammit. Leathers weren’t exactly cozy, but they had substance. They had a nice, aromatic, natural armoring quality. Manly. Whereas being a frog wasn’t a damn bit manly.

  His throat shivered. He squatted in the darkness in a few inches of water at the edge of the pool, keeping to the shadow of one of the boulders, alert for the approach of a bearcat or any other predator; already he had experienced terrifying escapes from a blue fox and a preternaturally nimble raccoon. Shift his perception a tad, he knew, and he would be squatting on the faux-marble edge of a mall fountain, but that would be no safer. People, or most people, were just as dangerous as raccoons to a frog on his own. At least this way there was a chance of a stray minnow. Food.

  Either way, there was a chance that Buffy would come back for him.

  Buffy. LeeVon’s throat throbbed. What was going on with her? Once upon a time, Best Beloved, there was a large and talented woman named Madeleine—but LeeVon knew only the beginning of the story. Once upon a time Madeleine had a missing daughter … What’s the story, Morning Glory?

  Why was he squatting cold, wet, hungry, naked, and frogiform in the darkness of a benighted shopping mall?

  LeeVon was a storyteller. Instinctively he knew that things like this happened for a purpose; he had long been conscious of his place as a minor character in a major and inscrutable story that encompassed the whole world of humanity. His talent was to act as a conduit of story; other people, if they had the heart, could find their stories in the books LeeVon ensorcelled with his hands. Sometimes he could help, sometimes he could see what other people needed to know. But he could not seem to help himself. LeeVon did not yet know his own story.

  Once upon a time there was a nice enough guy named LeeVon who—who was gay; did that factor in? Not necessarily. He knew gay people who were loved, who had true love.

  Whereas here he sat cold, starving, all freaking alone. No one who loved him, no one to kiss him and make him better.

  A nice guy with no goddamn story of his own.

  Dammit. Was he sitting in this cold, wet mess of difficulty just because he’d gotten sucked into being a croaker in Buffy’s chorus? Was he supposed to squat here and be wretched until she came back?

  Couldn’t think of any other option except to die and have it done with.

  An option that seemed more attractive with every slowly dripping minute.

  Oh, woe. Oh, exceeding unfair misery. Desolation twisted in LeeVon’s belly, surged between his narrow shoulders, and swelled his throat. He could keep silent no longer. Like an anorexic green-skinned Job, he cried out to the god of frogs.

  “Grooonk,”
LeeVon protested. “GROOOONK.”

  He had never croaked before. It provided a wonderful release. Moreover, he discovered in moving to a better location, one could do it underwater, where it reverberated interestingly through the ripples of the pool. But even better was to perch on a wet stone, noise pointed toward the dark dome of sky like a ranine coyote, eyes bugged wide, and let forth.

  “Roooogie,” LeeVon lamented. “Roo—grooo—GROOOOOOONK.” To the starless sky.

  He had thought that sky was dark. But it was not. It was serene gray twilight compared to the shadow that now possessed it.

  “GRAAWK!”

  The worst thing about wishing is that sometimes you get what you ask for. The worst thing about crying skyward is that sometimes something answers.

  The god of all frogs, or so it seemed to LeeVon, hurtled down upon him.

  With its chunky arms and legs spread like a flying squirrel, it plummeted—huge, a black monstrosity rapidly blotting out the sky, appalling. LeeVon caught just a glimpse of its glinting crown and its smoldering golden eyes before he yelped, pissed himself, and fled.

  He leaped for a crack between two boulders and wedged himself as far under their bellies as he could. The next instant the megafrog flopped into the pool, sending forth a tidal wave that nearly drowned him.

  “Ungrateful newt!” the frog roared. From where LeeVon watched and trembled, it seemed all mouth, a vast, gaping maw unto darkness, the gullet of hell. “Whining salamander! You dare to disturb my rest? Show yourself!”

  The god-sized ranine presence was so awful and fearsome that LeeVon wanted to close his eyes, but of course he could not. No eyelids. He had to look. The monster was more like a huge toad than a frog. Squatting in the water, it dominated the fountain and vicinity like a sumo wrestler in a kiddie pool.

  It had a golden crown. It had the golden cape of royalty.

  “Insolent polliwog!” Its great eyes seared the darkness, searching. “Where is your noise now? Don’t you want to croak?”