Ah, so he’d built his palace of paranoia on that little patch of quicksand. I was a Name in the field of Romance, therefore I could prevail upon the publishers of WiPP to delete Wellcome’s real reviews and insert some of my own creation. Sure, I could. Now that I saw whither his twisted thoughts tended, I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or pity the naiveté that believed genre authors could influence anything except their editors’ drinking problems.
“Look, Wellcome, I’m telling you that I didn’t have anything to do with—” I began. Then a stray thought struck me. “Could you hold the line a sec?”
Without waiting for his answer, I put down the phone and fetched my copy of WiPP, opening it to the reviews. Something was nagging at me, worrying the corners of my mind. It was a scrap of legendary lore that I’d acquired years ago, back in college, when Lord of the Rings held all the secrets of the Universe and my holiest desire was to get an elf greased up, buck naked, and ready to rock ’n’ roll. But when I wasn’t dreaming of more unorthodox uses for pointed ears, I read a lot, everything from trilogies to treatises on myth and folklore. After all, when you just know you’re going to be the Queen of Elfland (or at least the Love-Slave) you don’t want to make the gaffe of addressing a troll as if he were a dwarf, or calling a boggart a bogle.
From out of the mists of those damned embarrassing memories, a graceful white creature stepped. It printed the grass of an emerald meadow with its cloven hooves and knelt beside a tainted fountain. It touched the poisoned waters once with its horn. Once was all it took. The waters bubbled up bright and clean, free of all contamination.
Carefully I ran my fingers along the inner spine of the magazine until they encountered the faint trace of stickiness I had been half expecting. No matter how carefully you lick a batter spoon clean, some residual goo will cling to it until it’s properly washed, and no matter how painstaking you are about getting all the apple filling off a sliver of unicorn’s horn before you drop it between the pages of your magazine . . .
“Wellcome,” I said wearily, picking up the phone again, “I confess. I did it. I used my amazing professional influence to force the publishers of With Pen and Passion to drop your original reviews and substitute mine, but it wasn’t supposed to happen until the April issue, as a prank. I’ll be happy to contact them ASAP with a full retraction. Good enough? Good boy. Good-bye.”
I didn’t wait for him to answer. I hung up the phone but it took a while before I could unclench my hand from the receiver. I stood there for some time, silently cursing the incredible-but-true reason behind the metamorphosis Wellcome’s vitriloic rants had undergone along with the promise of confidentiality I’d made to Greta Marie.
As if you needed to be sworn to secrecy! I thought. Outside of Bowman’s Ridge, who the hell would believe you if you did talk about the unicorns?
I finally got a grip on my emotions and sat down to dinner. I was pleased to see that Rachel had cleaned her plate while I’d been on the phone with Wellcome. It wasn’t until she’d scooted upstairs to do her homework that I noticed a double heap of mashed squash covering my fish sticks. I molded a tiny little voodoo doll of Wellcome Fisher out of the surplus squash, drove a fish stick through its heart, and enjoyed my dinner in peace.
Peace is precious because, like chocolate, it never lasts long enough to suit me. Wellcome Fisher took the next bus to Montpelier, rented a car, and showed up at my house the following afternoon, without benefit of invitation. I would have set the dogs on him, but we don’t have any dogs and Gorbaduc wasn’t in the mood.
His first words to me when he stepped out of the car were, “I don’t believe you, you shameless Machiavellian magsman!”
“Fine, thanks, and you?” I muttered. I have nothing against reality save the fact that there is no way—short of small arms fire, a Doberman, or a dimensional trapdoor—that you can hang up on a face-to-face encounter with a petty-minded twit like Wellcome.
“I have here in my hand certain documents—” he began, wagging a clutch of papers at me as he advanced like grim Pedantry, “—that prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that your confession is as full of holes as your plots. Behold the galleys of those same reviews which you claim to have removed and replaced! They are precisely identical to the versions published.”
I frowned. “So what’s the problem? Of course they’d be identical. That’s how galleys work, you know. Who gave you those?”
“They were given to me by the editor of With Pen and Passion approximately three months ago, as is the usual procedure for production of all of my columns. According to my wont, I faxed back the typographical errors and kept the galleys themselves for my library. The problem, as you so infelicitously put it—” (Here a needle-toothed leer spread itself over Wellcome’s face, a grimace for a dyspeptic possum to envy.) “The problem is that when I filed these galleys they were my reviews as originally written, but when I took them out for inspection yesterday, after our delightful conversation, they had somehow become yours.”
(The unicorn bends his head over the polluted stream and touches it once with his horn. The magical powers of purification act immediately, but they can’t distinguish one drop of water from another. Unicorns don’t do partial cures or managed care. It’s all or nothing.)
“Tell me the truth, Barbara,” Wellcome was saying. “Tell me how you managed to accomplish this, short of hiring cat burglars to infiltrate my domicile.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Then perhaps you can tell my attorney.”
“You wouldn’t believe me and neither would he.”
“Faugh!” (The man actually said Faugh!)
“It’s a long story and parts of it are pretty far-fetched.”
“You’re not scaring me, Barbara; I’ve read your Elizabethan series.”
I held on to my temper by counting the bristly ginger hairs springing from Wellcome’s ears, then said, “If it were up to me, I’d tell you straight out, devil take the hindmost. It’s not. It involves someone else, a respected and respectable person who lives in this town. I’d like to keep living in this town too, so I’m not going to tell you dick without this other person’s permission, and I don’t care if you sue my ass off.”
“And if this person gives consent?” Wellcome’s pudgy lips drew themselves into a moue of anticipation.
“Then I’ll tell you everything.”
“Hmph. Very well. Let us be on our way.” He pivoted on one battered loafer and headed for his rental car. When I neglected to come bounding after, he paused and in tones of the highest snittery commanded, “Well, get in. You say the person you must consult likewise lives in this dainty suburb of Ultima Thule? Fine. You shall play Virgil to my Dante and bring about a meeting without delay.”
I decided that some battles aren’t worth fighting: Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, and that includes getting down to word-wrestling with this pedigreed SOB. I got into the car and directed him back to the center of town, where I led him straight into the coffee shop.
“And what do we call this fallen temple of Epicurus?” Wellcome inquired loudly as we walked through the door. It was past the breakfast rush and before the lunchtime crowd, a few minutes short of eleven, for which I gave thanks. The only witnesses to my mortification were the three waitresses, two young mothers preoccupied with keeping their toddlers from shoving toast into each other’s ears, and Muriel.
“We don’t need to call it anything; it’s the town coffee shop,” I gritted.
“Ah. How delightfully self-referential. And what unspeakable offense against human society have I committed that entails even temporary incarceration here as my punishment?”
“That’s what I’ve always admired about you, Wellcome,” I said. “Your simple yet elegant style. I brought you here because this is where we’ve got the best chance of meeting the person we’re after. Now can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
“I’m assuming a decent cappuccino is out of the question. I’ll settle f
or a clean cup.” He sniffed, wrinkled up his nose dramatically, and made a great business out of whisking off the immaculate surface of one of the counter stools with his handkerchief. Muriel saw him do this, her expression unreadable. I performed the usual pantomime of those forced to keep company with chowderheads: sickly smile, shrug of shoulders, silent mouthing of It’s-not-myfault. Muriel pressed her lips together and went into the kitchen. While I writhed, our waitress came over and Wellcome asked her what was the ptomaine du jour in a voice so carrying that even the young mothers took note of us.
Oh, for a cloak of invisibility! or even just an Acme anvil to fall from the ceiling and squoosh Wellcome into clod-butter. I placed my order, though I had precious little appetite for anything except a certain critic’s head on a platter.
It was while Wellcome was ingratiating himself with the waitress by staring at her breasts that Greta Marie arrived. My sense of timing had been impeccable: She always made her delivery at around eleven o’clock. She backed in through the door, an apple pie balanced on either hand, a look of intense concentration on her face. I hailed her by name and she startled like a duchess drygulched by a whoopee cushion, then recovered and smiled.
It took me a while before I realized that she wasn’t smiling at me.
“You’re Wellcome Fisher!” she gasped, rushing forward, still bearing pies. I couldn’t say whether her bosom was heaving with the strain of unbridled passion, but the front of her tatty old Navy peacoat was imitating a bellows pretty well. “The flyleaf photo just doesn’t do you justice. Oh my! Babs never told me that you were one of her writer friends. This is such an honor! I simply adored Lady Gwendolyn’s Gallant! So rich! So detailed! So—”
Forty minutes later, I walked myself back home. If Wellcome noticed me leave, he made no demur, and as for Greta Marie, she’d scarcely noticed my presence to begin with. I left the two of them seated at the counter, gazing deeply into each other’s eyes, Greta Marie telling Wellcome how wonderful his book was and Wellcome telling Greta Marie that she was so very, very right.
That was the last I heard of Wellcome Fisher for weeks thereafter. WiPP made no inquiry into the unique eruption of sweetness and light in Wellcome’s reviews, and the man himself seemed to have dropped the matter. He also seemed to have become a regular fixture in Bowman’s Ridge, motoring up whenever he had the time, just to be with Greta Marie. Townsfolk saw them walking hand in hand down Main Street, a public display of affection that was the Bowman’s Ridge equivalent of indulging in the love that dare not bleat its name on the church lawn. Eyebrows lifted, tongues clicked, and whoever coined the phrase “No fool like an old fool” must’ve been raking in the residuals for all the times the good Natives muttered those very words under their collective breath. If Greta Marie overheard, she didn’t care. She was happy.
I suppose I should’ve been happy too. I suppose that as a Romance writer I should’ve sat back and enjoyed such a picturebook-perfect ending, cue violins and soft-focus fadeout. Unfortunately, just because I write the stuff doesn’t mean I believe it. My outlook on life would be so much serener if I did. It’s impossible to enjoy a front row seat for Happily Ever After when you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, and if I knew Wellcome, it was going to be a brogan.
So I waited, and Thanksgiving came and went. I waited, and the Christmas decorations went up all over town. I waited, and Bobo Riley stuffed two pillows down the front of his old red union suit, slapped on a cotton batting beard, and passed out candy canes to all the kids who came into his hardware store with their folks. But as for Greta Marie and Wellcome—? Nothing. Not even a rumor of trouble in paradise. It was just too good to be true.
Muriel agreed. “I don’t know what’s gotten into the girl,” she said to me. (In this town you’re a girl until you become the charge of your husband or the undertaker.) “She’s all atwitter, can’t find her head using both hands and a road map most days, and irresponsible—? I don’t like to say how many days she’s skipped bringing in the pies, and when she does, the quality’s fallen off something terrible. When I think how good those pies used to be, I could just weep. Not that I’d ever mention it to her. Poor child would die. On the other hand, she really ought to know. I don’t suppose you’d consider—?”
Which is how I came to be driving up the Old Toll Road to the Bowman place in the snow. I’d taken the precaution of calling ahead. No way was I going to risk my neck jouncing over ice-filled ruts for nothing. Greta Marie told me how much she’d be looking forward to my visit, and then:
Dear Babs, So sorry I missed you. Got a call from the postmaster that there’s a registered letter for me downtown from my Wellcome. Let’s make it another time.
Very truly yours,
Miss Greta Marie Bowman
I tore the note off the front door and stuffed it in my pocket, then went stomping back to the car, thinking bloody red thoughts. Just as my gloved hand touched the handle, I heard a loud trumpeting sound, the singular, strange, fascinating cry of the unicorn. I looked back at the house and saw one come walking around the corner in stately beauty.
It was the largest of the three, the one who’d given me that contemptuous stare the first time I saw the critters. He’d changed; his horn was back, grown almost to full length. It shone with its own pale phosphorescence, a flickering blue-green flame. The beast held his head high and seemed to be in the best of spirits. Maybe animals can’t smile, as we humans understand the grimace, but they do have their ways of letting the world know they’re happy, and this was definitely one happy unicorn.
Was, that is, until he saw it was only me. I could mark the exact moment when recognition struck him right where the horn grew. His feathery tail, once flaunted high as a battle flag, now drooped with disappointment. His whole demeanor seemed to say, I was expecting someone else. A spark of anger kindled from dashed hopes turned his eyes a dangerous scarlet. How dare I be anyone but the woman he was waiting for? He lowered that long, razor-edged horn in a manner that made my heart do a drumroll of dread. I’d seen how fast he could run and I knew that there was no chance of my getting inside the car before he reached me. I wondered whether it was going to hurt when he skewered me for the heinous crime of not being Greta Marie.
Then his head bent even lower, so low that the tip of his horn came within an inch of the ground. A dull gray film obscured its glorious fire. Sorrow had conquered anger. He let out a little whicker of misery that wrung my heart with pity.
I went up to him and threw my arms around his neck, crooning words of comfort. Yes, I talked to him as if he were a despondent collie pup. Yes, I voluntarily brought myself within easy stabbing distance of the horn. Yes, I’m an idiot, I admit it, it says so on my driver’s license. If you want proof-positive of my stupidity then consider the fact that I went into writing because I wanted a high-paying, glamorous job where everyone respected me and internecine mudslinging just wasn’t the Done Thing. But I couldn’t turn my back on the poor creature.
“There, there,” I said, running my hands through his flossy mane. “She’ll be back, you’ll see. It’s just that she’s a little soppy now. Love makes you temporarily brain-dead.”
The unicorn looked me in the eye, his gaze eloquent. Don’t sugarcoat it, my lady, he seemed to say. You and I both know what love leads to. She may be back, but she won’t be the same, and where are we going to find another virgin at this time of year? Those Christmas parties are hell on maidenheads.
“You mean that Greta Marie and Wellcome have—?” Curse my imagination! The very thought of Wellcome alfresco and taking care of business was enough to purge a catfish. My conscious mind immediately tacked up wall-to-wall signs reading Don’t Go There, Girlfriend. Don’t Buy the Ticket, Don’t Even Ask to See the Full-Color Brochures.
The unicorn flared his nostrils, scorning the whole hideous idea. Ah, true, true: Would he still be hanging around the property if Greta Marie had done the dire deed with Wellcome already? But to judge by his hangdog expression,
he figured it was only a matter of time.
“Look, I’m sorry, but what can I do about it?” I told him. “Greta Marie’s happy. I realize she’s been neglecting you, but—”
The unicorn snorted again and tossed his head, casting off my paltry attempts at consolation. I watched as he picked his way across the farmyard, heading toward the straggle of apple trees. I thought I glimpsed the images of his two companions in the distance, under the spindly shadow of the branches, but that might have been a trick of light on snow.
I cupped my hands to my mouth. “Don’t give up!” I called. “Please don’t just walk away! Even if she and Wellcome Fisher do get nasty, it’s never going to last. Greta Marie’s not stupid and she’s not desperate: One day she’ll see him for the ego-leech he is, unless he slaps her in the face with it first. That’s when she’ll really need you. She’s been good to you for God knows how many years; you owe it to her to stick around. Nice unicorns. Good unicorns. Sit! Stay!”
I was babbling, but it got their attention. Three shimmery streaks of marine light lifted beneath the barren orchard boughs, three pairs of glowing garnet eyes winked at me once before vanishing.
I drove back to town alone.
Greta Marie was in the coffee shop, seated on one of the stools at the counter nearest the big display window up front, reading her registered letter over a steaming cup of Muriel’s best brew. It was a wonder she could make out the words for all the stars in her eyes. When she saw me come in, she broke from covert in a whir of bliss.
“Babs, it’s so wonderful! I do hope you forgive me for not being at home when you called, but it was such a good thing I came to town and got this letter. Darling Wellcome! I know he meant to give me a few days’ notice, but when one is as significant a figure in the field of belles lettres as he, sometimes it’s simply impossible to take time for personal matters until the demands of one’s career have been met.”
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