The Fairy-Tale Matchmaker (11 page)

“They were right,” Johnny Blue said, coming up
behind her. “That's a great song. I think your band puts magic into your songs when you play like that.”

“They're just songs we've written,” said Cory. “I'm glad everyone liked them! You know, I was about to go looking for you to say thanks. If it weren't for you, tonight would have been a disaster. Those ogres were about to turn ugly!”

“You mean they weren't already!” Johnny said with a laugh. “Seriously though, you don't need to thank me. I didn't do anything special. You would have turned them around soon enough.”

“Hey, Johnny!” shouted one of the ogres standing in the doorway. “Me and the boys want to buy you a berry juice!”

“Listen, you all played really well,” Johnny told Cory, Daisy, and Cheeble, who had come over to see him. “I just wanted to congratulate you.”

“Johnny!” the ogre called again.

“I've got to go. Someone has to keep an eye on them when they get like this,” Johnny told Cory and her friends before heading to the door.

As Cheeble went to talk to Olot, Cory tried to find Daisy in the crowd. She finally spotted her talking at a table of young elves. When Daisy took a seat with them, Cory decided not to interrupt or wait around for her. Feeling oddly alone, Cory left for home.

It was sprinkling off and on when Cory woke the next morning. The sky looked gray and dreary, and she was still tired from being up late the night before. She wished she could stay in bed, but Suzy was expecting her. Crawling out from under the covers, Cory made herself get dressed and staggered into the kitchen, yawning.

“What are your plans for the day?” her uncle asked as he set a cup of juice by her place at the table.

Cory pulled out her mushroom stool and slumped onto it. “I got a job helping a woman named Suzy do inventory. She's selling everything in her seashell shop and moving to Greener Pastures.”

“I have a friend who moved there,” said Micah. “It's supposed to be a very nice retirement community.”
Thunder rumbled and he turned to look out the window. “Drat! I hate flying to work in a thunderstorm. I suppose I'll have to take the pedal-bus. In that case I should go now. The bus always takes longer in bad weather because so many people use it. No one wants to fly in weather like this.” Snatching a piece of nut bread from his plate, he gave Cory a quick kiss on her cheek and hurried out.

Cory scowled at the rain as it grew heavier and began pounding at the window. She doubted that the pedal-bus ran all the way to the beach, but if it did it was going to be a long, wet ride.

By the time Cory had eaten her breakfast and was ready to leave, the rain had let up, although the sky was still overcast. Hoping to get to Suzy's before it started raining again, Cory flew as quickly as she could. Drops were just beginning to fall when she stepped onto the porch. Suzy had some of the shutters down to block the rain, but the rest were open to let in the cool air.

“There you are!” said Suzy. “Come on in! We have a lot to do today, but we were so fast yesterday that we might be able to get it all finished. We'll be working in the storage room. You start with the odds and ends and I'll start with the jewelry. That seemed to work well yesterday.”

Cory followed Suzy through the house, aware that she was gawking like a tourist. Once past the door to the shop, the seashell house was spacious with curving passages and large rooms where the builder had broken through the shell's dividing walls. The floor would have been slick if it hadn't been covered with gritty sand that gave it traction. It was light inside; everything was white and the shell itself was nearly translucent with a faint pink cast.

“This is beautiful!” said Cory.

“I love it,” Suzy said, caressing a wall as if it were alive. “It's going to be hard to leave, but it's time. I'm getting too old to keep the shop going and I need to relax a bit. Collecting the seashells, making my treasures, and selling them takes up all my waking hours and I'd like to try something else for a change. Macramé, maybe, or I might take up the drums. I'd also like to read a book, something I haven't had time for in years. Let's see now … You can start with the vases on this shelf while I go through this box of rings.”

They had been working for nearly two hours and had made good progress when Cory heard an odd scraping sound. “What was that?” she asked.

“What was what?” asked Suzy.

“Listen! There it is again.” Cory looked toward the ceiling. She was sure the sound had come from above.

“That's odd,” said Suzy. The noise grew louder as they listened until it seemed to come from all around them. “I don't like the sound of that.”

Cory followed Suzy out of the storage room and down the hall to the door leading onto the porch. Suzy opened the door and stopped with a gasp. There were crabs everywhere, climbing on the tables, skittering across the floor, even dangling from the seashell wind chimes.

“Watch out!” Suzy exclaimed, pushing Cory back and slamming the door shut. “I've never seen anything like this before and I've lived here for thirty-two years. Stay here. I'll be right back.”

“Shouldn't we close the rest of the shutters?” Cory called after Suzy, who was running down the hall.

“We will!” Suzy shouted over her shoulder.

Cory lost sight of her and was left alone wondering how they could get the porch cleaned off. The crabs were scratching on the door now; Cory even saw the doorknob move. And then Suzy was back, lugging buckets inside a round metal tub with a lid.

“Here,” said Suzy, handing her a bucket. “Scoop up as many as you can, but be fast about it. They're speedy little critters.”

Crabs tumbled into the hall when Suzy opened the door. While Cory picked them up, Suzy ran onto the
porch to collect more. Cory slammed the door shut as soon as she could, then turned and headed for the steps.

“Where are you going?” Suzy asked.

“To dump these in the ocean so I can collect more.”

“Don't do that! Put them in here!” Suzy said, poking the metal tub with her foot even as she emptied her own bucket into it. As soon as Cory had added the crabs she'd collected, Suzy clapped the lid on. “Good! Now help me close the shutters.”

Crabs were still swarming up the steps when Cory and Suzy started closing the few open shutters. “What are you going to do with all the crabs?” Cory asked.

“Eat them, of course,” Suzy said. “I love crab soup and steamed crabs and crab cakes and—”

The crabs froze, making Cory wonder if they had understood what Suzy had said. Suddenly, they began to turn away from the door, climb down the table, and scrabble at the closed shutters. Above them, the noise of scurrying crabs moved to the edges of the porch roof, followed by soft thuds as they hit the sand.

“These are smart crabs!” Cory said as she and Suzy continued to collect them.

“Not really,” said Suzy. “If they were, they wouldn't be here in the first place.”

It took them the rest of the morning to collect all the crabs that had been trapped on the porch. When they
were finished, Suzy took some to her kitchen to steam for lunch. Cory and Suzy returned to work in the storeroom after they'd eaten. It looked as if they really might finish taking inventory that day, until Suzy discovered a stack of boxes she'd forgotten.

“It's getting late,” said Suzy. “And it's going to take a few hours to get these done. Would you be able to come back tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Cory told her. “Do you think we could have crabs for lunch?”

“Honey, I'm going to be eating crabs for days, and enjoying every minute of it!”

Cory couldn't be sure, but she thought the scratching of the restless crabs in the metal tub sounded louder.

The sun was shining when Cory woke the next morning and the weather promised to be beautiful. As she flew to Suzy's house, Cory thought about how nice it would be to take a dip in the ocean after they finished inventory, or at least wade along the water's edge barefoot. As she neared the cove, the screeching of gulls made her pull up short and flutter in place. A flock of seagulls was circling Suzy's house, screaming and diving at anything that moved. Afraid that a gull could mistake her for a bug when she was tiny and snap her
up in its beak, Cory landed a good distance away and returned to her human size.

The gulls spotted her when she was approaching the house and came swooping down at her. Waving her arms in the air to fend them off, she ran as fast as she could across the sand. Suzy had left all the shutters closed except for one. She was standing in the opening, shouting, “Run faster!” when a determined gull tried to peck Cory. “Duck!” Suzy shouted as she lobbed an empty clamshell at the bird.

Cory ducked and the shell hit the gull's head. It swerved, startled, just as Cory darted up onto the porch. Suzy slammed the shutter while Cory caught her breath. “That was close!” Cory said. “Thanks!”

“Closer than you think,” said Suzy. “We'll go to the bathing room to clean up your hair.”

“What's wrong with my … Oh!” Cory said, touching something wet on the back of her head.

Cory grimaced when she thought about what the seagulls had done, and scarcely noticed the rooms they passed through on their way to the bathing room. She tried to see her reflection in the shell-framed mirror while Suzy wiped the worst of the bird droppings out, but she couldn't see much.

“Bend down and stick your head in the sink,” Suzy told her.

Cory closed her eyes as warm water doused the back of her head. When she opened them, she took the towel Suzy offered and dried her hair as she looked around the room. It was a cozy room with a huge shell for a bathtub and a smaller one for a sink. Seashells cupped the fairy light on the walls while tiny shells of pale pink, yellow, and orange covered the floor.

“I've never seen anything like this!” Suzy said when Cory handed her the damp towel. “First the crabs yesterday, then the gulls today. I wonder what's making these critters so crazy!

“Last night I looked at the boxes we found,” the older woman continued as they walked down the hall. “We should have the inventory finished in no time. I probably could have finished them myself without much trouble, but I'd already asked you to come back, and I do enjoy your company. It makes the job fun having someone to talk to, don't you think?”

Cory agreed. She liked working with Suzy, although she could have done without the encounter with the gulls.

When they reached the storage room, they divided up the boxes and got to work. They finished a few hours later, but Suzy wouldn't let her helper leave until they'd eaten crab cakes for an early lunch. When it was time for Cory to go, Suzy led her onto the porch. The
screaming of the gulls was louder there than in the house, and Cory began to wonder if she should stay until the gulls had gone.

She was about to mention this when Suzy took three of the live crabs from the metal tub. “What are those for?” asked Cory.

“They're your ticket out of here,” Suzy told her. Opening one of the shutters a crack, she pointed at it, saying, “You go out this way when I tell you to. Just give me a minute.”

Cory shrank while Suzy opened the shutter on the opposite side of the porch. Pulling her arm back, the woman hurled the crabs as far as she could. The screaming of the gulls grew deafening as they converged on the three flailing crabs.

“Go!” shouted Suzy.

In an instant, Cory was out the small gap and darting away from the house. She didn't slow down until she was well away from the beach and was sure that she had left the gulls behind. Somehow she didn't think she'd go back anytime soon for a dip in the ocean.

It was early afternoon when Cory reached her uncle's house. She expected to see him outside working in his garden, but no one was there. When she landed on the walkway, she found the muddy paw prints of a large dog heading away from the house toward the street. Following the paw prints back to the house, she discovered that two of her uncle's prize roses had been uprooted. The garden hose lay next to one of the holes, trickling water into the mud. Cory ran to the side of the house to turn off the faucet.

“Who would have done such a thing?” she wondered out loud, although she had a good idea who it might be.

Planning to change into clothes that she wouldn't mind getting dirty, Cory started up the steps and found that the muddy paw prints led all the way to the door.
She shook her head in dismay when she saw mud splattered on the door and the wall on either side. A folded leaf was stuck in one of the bigger globs on the floor. Poorly written in crayon, the note said,

A scowly face was drawn on the note.

Cory took the note inside and sent a message to the Fey Law Enforcement Agency.