Fair Peril (11 page)

“Emily's missing.”

Prentis puffed his chest and scowled. “I hear you ruined her party.”

“Better than ruining her life.” Could he think of nothing but taking potshots in the post-marital war? At least she had been
there
for the party. “Suction the wax out of your ears, Prentis. Emily is missing. Gone. She's run away.” Prentis belonged to the old boys' network; he might be able to get the cops to do something.

“She's got a right to run away after the trick you pulled.”

Dear God, what was it going to take to make him get the picture? Buffy had thought he might be able to see past their personal differences long enough to focus on helping their youngest child. Silly thought.

“Prentis,” she said between her teeth, “may I draw your attention to the fact that your garage door is hanging open and the Probe is gone.”

His stare shifted and his scowl turned to a frown. “Hey.” He swiveled and bawled into the house, “Tempestt!” After waiting for a short while, he raised the volume. “Pestt!”

It was a measure of Buffy's agitation that learning in this way of Tempestt's uncomplimentary nickname failed to cheer her.

“Pestt! What's Emily gone and done with the Probe?”

A sleepy soprano response wafted from upstairs.

“She's not there? Did she wreck the car and not tell me?”

“For God's sake,” Buffy exploded, “forget the damn car! We've got to find Emily!”

He turned back to her and gave her his what's-the-big-problem look. “Emily? Hell, she's a kid, she's probably out cruising with her friends. Snuck out without telling us. I'll give her what for when she gets back.”

Buffy said, “She's out cruising with a—” How to explain this in terms even a politician like Prentis could understand? “She's with a young man who is entirely too old for her.”

“
Is
she!” Prentis crinkled into his most charming running-for-office grin. “Well, she's sixteen. She's legal. That's about the age I liked them when I started screwing them.”

It knocked Buffy's breath away. He might as well have punched her in the gut. She staggered back. It would not have hit her as hard if she had thought he was being boorish on purpose to hurt her—but she knew better. He was being Prentis.

“Just joking,” he said.

“You are a toad,” Buffy managed to whisper. “A total, odious toad.” She turned her back on him and ran, her bare feet colder than the pavement, colder than the April night air.

Driving around feverishly till dawn, talking to the kind of people who hang out on street corners all night, Buffy did not manage to track down Emily or Adamus. Instead, outside a bar that echoed the neon glow in the east, she found LeeVon. She would probably not have noticed him, as she was not in the habit of scanning what came out of bars, except that he was serenely standing there watching for sunrise in his underwear.

“LeeVon?” She pulled over and took another look. It was him, all right. Black-rimmed eyeglasses. Mr. McGregor on the left arm, Peter Rabbit on the right. T-shirt with holes in it. Bullwinkle-print boxer shorts. Well, of course, she should have known; what else would a guy like LeeVon wear under his black leathers? Bullwinkle shorts. Bony knees and wrinkled orange socks.

“Buffles!” He smiled like the dawn, delighted to see her, not at all concerned about being seen in his underwear, and alcoholically unimpaired as he bent beside her window to talk with her. “Mercy heavens, Best Beloved, what are you doing here in your nightgown?”

“You should talk. Strip poker?”

“Nah. Nude dude needed my clothes.”

She jumped so hard she rammed her head against the Escort's ceiling. “Ow! Adamus?”

“Are you okay?”

“Compared to what! LeeVon, help me out, come on, my daughter has run away with my frog. The naked guy, was it Adamus, dammit?”

His mouth came open and hung that way, showing the stud in his tongue. It had never made sense to Buffy how that thing didn't click against his teeth when he talked.

“LeeVon!”

He stammered, “The—the Cinderella in the car, was that your little darling? It was! But—but I didn't recognize her. She was changed somehow. Different.”

“When!” Buffy barked.

“Pardon?”

“When were they here? Just now?”

“Oh, no. Hours ago. I went back inside and played Candyland.”

“Great. Just lovely. Wonderful.” Buffy jammed the car into gear. “So now the handsome prince is running around in your black leathers.”

“Black jeans, actually, and a leather jacket.”

“Only you would give him your clothes.”

LeeVon seemed surprised at her comment. “Well, he needed them.”

“Right. LeeVon, get in.”

“Pardon? My bike—”

“As if you can ride home on your motorcycle in your BVDs? Get in the car.”

He did so, complaining, “Nobody better take my bike.”

Stamping on the gas, Buffy veered off at a reckless vector, trying hard not to hate all men. She didn't want to be that way. She actually did know some nice men. Knew some people with good marriages, too. Women her own age, even. She managed to keep her volume down when she said, “My daughter is missing and all you can worry about is your bike?”

“No, my bike is
one
of the things I'm worried about. Tell me what is going on with Emily.”

He knew her name? Points for LeeVon. Not everybody remembered the names of other people's kids.

Buffy told him about it in full, amphibious detail, slowing down almost to the speed limit as she became absorbed in the story.

“Emily's an idealist,” LeeVon said once she had briefed him. “I mean, a lot of kids are, teenagers, more than most adults like to give credit—but Emily has always been completely committed to the fairy tale. Whom did you name her after? Emily Dickinson?”

“No. I loathe Emily Dickinson.” Weird old witch; every poem Emily Dickinson ever wrote could be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and most of them sounded better that way. “I just named her.” She had always liked the name Emily. It sounded pretty.

“There's poetry in her just the same. Elinor Wylie. Not so much Sylvia Plath.”

She forgave him completely. Good God, Emily was an individual to him, a person, not just somebody's kid. A lot more a person than she was to the cops or her own father.

“The idealism is what worries me. When it comes to a cause, Emily's unselfish.” Buffy found herself pulling into her driveway.

“What are we doing at your place?”

“I have no idea.” Buffy only then realized that she had given up for the time being. The initial search was over, and unsuccessful, and it was time to regroup. She led the way inside—the door swung unlocked and open, the way she had left it. “Watch the broken glass.”

LeeVon hunkered down and started cleaning up the shards of her window.

“I can do that.” Buffy stepped into her slippers.

“Well, I know you
can,
Best Beloved, but let me help. Do you have a piece of cardboard that will fit the orifice?”

She found some and got it taped in there, then brought LeeVon the dustpan and whisk broom, then made coffee. LeeVon finished with the floor and sat at her kitchen table in his Bullwinkle shorts. She served coffee, sat across from him, and sipped. Outside, birds were piping like flutes. The refrigerator hummed, matronly. The pseudo-satin-stitch daisies on the plastic tablecloth lay soothingly white under the fluorescent light. Everything seemed very calm.

“All you can do, I guess,” said LeeVon, “is wait.”

Buffy did not answer. Too tired. Idly she flipped through
Batracheios.
Wait? LeeVon was right, there was nothing else to do, but she was afraid for Emily; Addie was the enemy now, yet she missed him, she wanted him back; in the too-damn-early dawn, after a night of driving at top speed to nowhere, she felt adrift, borderless, disoriented. LeeVon the librarian was her buddy and he had given her this book and she was looking for something to point out to him, but she couldn't quite remember what. The book had grown and changed since the last time she had read it, and she could feel the green cover alive and warm and flexing in her hand. The glossy pictures of frogs in green suits and creamy waistcoats winked at her. “Here it is,” she muttered, happening upon the headline that had interested her. “Transfrogrification. One part wrath added to two parts perverted sense of humor. Coddle the mixture over medium heat.” She had that part under control. Wrath, heat? Just think of Prentis. The sense of humor was her own. No problem. “In appropriate garb, repeat the following gibberish: gimme an F, F! Gimme an R, R! Gimme an O, O! Gimme a G, G! What's it spell? FROG! What's it smell like? A FROG! What—”

The dawn hush was rent by a startled and distinctly ranine scream. Buffy looked up and LeeVon was not there.

“LeeVon?” She saw his black-framed eyeglasses lying on the floor. What was going on?

“Graaaah!”

She stood up and leaned across the table to look. A medium-sized bullfrog sat amid a muddle of cotton underwear on LeeVon's chair, a frog with miniaturized rings crowding its nostrils, lips, eyebrows, and the edge of the flat circle that passed as an ear. A frog with miniaturized tattoos, including an interesting one that Buffy had not previously seen, on its butt.

“
Nice
tat! Who is that naked kid? Mowgli?”

“Buffy, unfrog me!”

“Well hung! Kipling would be proud.”

“
Buffy!
”

“All right, okay.” Denial, also known as delayed reaction, had always been one of Buffy's strongest qualities; she was just beginning to mentally process the most recent calamity. “Did I do that? Okay, okay!” As LeeVon emitted an indescribable vocalization, “All right, just chill out a minute. Let me find the instructions.”

There was a difficulty, however. Adrenaline had jolted her wide awake and snapped her out of her floating sense of not-quite-self; consequently,
Batracheios
presented itself as bookishly normal to her, a coffee-table volume of annoyingly cute pictures and bad poetry. Buffy spent a full hour going through it page by page and could find nothing on how to turn a man into a frog. Nothing at all. And certainly nothing on how to unfrog him.

“LeeVon,” she said finally, “let me pick you up. That's a buddy.” She did so. “Now don't panic, but I'm going to put you in the aquarium for the time being, to keep you nice and moist.”

“Graaaaah!” The stud in the end of his four-inch, front-mounted tongue thrashed in the air, catching the light.

“I said, don't panic!”

“Graaaaaaaaah!”

The frog's distress, combined with everything else that had gone wrong, affected Buffy with a degree of existential desperation she had never previously attained, angst beyond tears, a despair that smashed right through her armor of cynicism. Woe afflicted her, desolation sufficient to make her stand in the middle of her kitchen with a hyperventilating frog in her hands, throw back her head, and bawl, “Fairy Godmother-In-Law! Fay! Get your droopy patootie over here!”

Fay never swore. She prided herself upon never swearing. She might not be a lady by some people's standards of wealth or style or status of birth, but, by gosh and golly, she could, and would, be a lady in deportment.

However, when that Murphy person's summons yanked her out of her chair and hurtled her streetward like horizontal bungee jumping, it just slipped out. Fay said, “Damn!”

Then she detested Murphy worse than ever for making her do that.

Fay knew herself to be a pro, a minor but longtime practitioner in fair, perilous power. She knew the Murphy person to be an immensely talented amateur. At first, years ago, Fay had been pleased and proud that her son had recognized that talent, had married a woman so much like his old mother. But very shortly she had come to wish he had married Little Bo Peep, a sheep, anything else. It is hard for an old pro when an amateur possesses the untrained power to boss her around. No matter what other considerations might arise, Fay's goal in dealing with the Murphy person had for years remained focused and simple: to protect her own niche and status, achieved through a lifetime of hard work and political maneuvering (Prentis had learned most of what he knew from her) and sucking up to the Queen.

Driving faster than she liked toward the unlovely and out-of-whack Murphy residence, Fay thought about all this and said, “Damn,” again—it just slipped out again—which made her furious. Mad enough to commit an act of rebellion. She stamped on the brakes; despite the power of Murphy's summons wrenching her innards, she wrestled the Eldorado to a stop at the curb. “All right, just a minute,” she grumbled. She wanted to check her purse.

Hastily she dumped the contents out of her massive gilded bag, then repacked it: all four of her marriage licenses, divorce papers, death certificates. Mirror, lipstick, mascara, eyelash curler, cellulite cream, nose-hair remover. Several sexual hang-ups in the latest decorator colors. Her son's fraternity paddle. The papal encyclical on birth control. A sheaf of newspaper clippings about various child abuse cases. An inferiority complex, pink. Birth and First Communion certificates for her children. Prom corsage. Emergency-room rape kit. The swimsuit issue of
Sports Illustrated.
Checkbook, credit cards, press-on faux fingernails. A box of baking soda. A religious tract on the evils of masturbation.

Fay frowned. It did not seem like enough, not if she had to defend herself, considering the mood Murphy was in. She glanced around the interior of the Eldorado.

Some people's cars are best conceptualized as mobile stereos. Fay's was not one of those. Fay's car was a mobile closet.

Fay smiled. From a stack of old newspapers she selected the one with the article about Murphy's mother refusing to testify that her husband had assaulted her. That went into the purse. She also jammed in a can of Ultra Slim-Fast and an aerosol dispenser of Strong-To-Last breath spray.