Belles lettres? Wellcome? The only demand ever attached to his career was “Please, please, please, don’t write another book!” As I seated myself on the stool beside hers, I did a rapid mental translation of Greta Marie’s words, allowing for drift, wind resistance, drag, and converting from the Stupid-in-Love scale.
“There’s something vitally important in there and he didn’t bother mailing it until the last minute?” I presumed, nodding at the letter. Muriel brought me my own cup of coffee, glanced at Greta Marie, then looked at me and raised her eyebrows in a manner that said Lost Cause.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Greta Marie chirped, pressing the unfolded sheets of spiral notebook paper to her heart. Wellcome might waste words, but never stationery. “He says he’s coming up today, and that I’m to meet him here because there’s no sense in him driving all the way out to my place and then all the way back into town to the travel agent.” She pronounced those last two words as if they’d been Holy Grail, fraught and freighted with a deeper meaning than was given mere mortals like me to know.
“Planning a little trip, hm?” I asked, striving to keep it casual.
“A very special sort of trip, Babs dear.” She blushed. “I do think he’s coming up to ask me . . . to ask me if I would consent to become . . . if I would consent to become his—”
“There you are!” Wellcome Fisher burst into the coffee shop with the élan of a juggernaut. He shouldered his way between us, nearly shoving me off my stool without so much as a word of greeting. Usually it is a fair treat to be ignored by Wellcome Fisher, but not when it means you’ve been relegated to the role of superfluous stage dressing. I was miffed. I got up and moved, taking my cup with me.
Wellcome slithered onto the stool I had vacated. He looked Greta Marie up and down, his gaze severe and judgmental. “You’re not prepared,” he accused.
“Prepared, dear?” It was sickening to see the way Greta Marie went into mouse mode at the sound of her master’s voice. “But—but I’m here. You did say to meet you here, didn’t y—?”
“Ye gods, and was that all I said?”
Greta Marie cringed, but she summoned up the gumption to reply, “Well . . . yes. That and the part about going to the travel agent.” She extended the letter for his inspection and added, “See, darling?”
He rolled his eyes, playing the martyr so broadly that I wondered whether he had a pack of stick-on stigmata hidden in the pocket of his anorak. “Merciful powers above, you’re a supposedly intelligent wench: Do I have to spell out everything for you, chapter and verse? Are you that literal-minded? Are you incapable of basic inference?” He paused, striking a toplofty pose, apparently waiting for the applause of the multitude.
Now mind you, the hour of Wellcome’s self-styled Calvary was lunchtime and the coffee shop was packed to the gussets with the usual Natives, all of whom knew and respected Greta Marie Bowman. It was out of this selfsame respect that they went deaf, dumb, and blind by common consent. They understood that she had fallen in with this acerbic yahoo of her own free will, they realized that she had brought all her sufferings down upon her own head voluntarily, they were firm in the belief that she should have known better, but damned if they were going to underwrite her humiliation, deserved or not. No one present reacted to Wellcome’s words with so much as a glance in his general direction. In fact, as far as the good folk of Bowman’s Ridge were concerned, Wellcome wasn’t even there. They didn’t just ignore him, they nullified him.
Gadfly that he was, Wellcome did not take kindly to being overlooked. The Natives’ lack of cooperation irked him. He took a deep breath and brought his fist down on the countertop just as he bellowed, “You peruse, but you do not read. Have you no grasp of subtext?”
Poor Greta Marie. I could see her lips begin to tremble, her eyes to shine with tears that didn’t spring from joy. “I’m—I’m sorry, dear,” she said, her voice all quavery. “I—I suppose you mean I ought to be prepared for—for our trip, yes?”
Wellcome slapped his brow and let his celluloid smile glide across the room. “Finally!” he informed the audience. They gave no sign that he had spoken. “At the very least, I expected you to be packed.”
“Packed? But—but how could I? I wouldn’t know what to bring. We haven’t even discussed where we’ll be going.”
His shoulders sagged. Now he was both martyr and victim. “I thought you listened to me,” he complained, wounded to the marrow. “Haven’t I said time and time again how the winter weather affects my artistic spirit? Haven’t I spoken of my very deep, very basic need to follow the sun?”
“You did mention something about visiting your aunt in Tampa every year, but—”
“Well, my dear Auntie Clarice has just written to say that she is going off on a holiday cruise this coming week, and that we may have the use of the condo in her absence, with her blessing.” He beamed at her as if he’d just laid the crown jewels of Zanzibar at her feet.
Greta Marie turned pale. “Oh no,” she said, hands fluttering before her face. “This coming week? Oh no, it’s much too soon. I couldn’t possibly make all the arrangements. Reverend Fenster is too taken up with the Christmas season, and we Bowmans have always been married from the Congregational church. Besides, there’s simply nowhere we could book a large enough hall for the reception, let alone arrange for refreshments, and what about the blood test and the license and my gown and—”
Wellcome’s brows rose and came together until he was glaring at Greta Marie from beneath the shelter of a hairy circumflex. “What the devil are you jawing about?” he demanded. “Since when does one need a blood test to go to Tampa?”
“Oh,” said Greta Marie softly. She folded her hands above her bosom and repeated, “Oh.” Her head bowed like a flower on a broken stalk. “I thought you meant we were going to be—” she began, then sank into silence.
“What? To be what?” Wellcome was mystified. For one fleeting moment he seemed rapt by words that were not his own as he attempted to solve this present conundrum. “Do you imply—? That marriage twaddle you were spouting about your ancestors and the First Congregational Church—? Surely you weren’t serious?” Without waiting for her reply, he dismissed the very possibility with a brief wave of his hand. “No, no, you couldn’t have been; something else must be nibbling your liver. Spit it out, woman! I don’t indulge in telepathy.”
Greta Marie set her hands firmly on the edge of the counter. I swear that I could see the ranks of Bowmans long gone form up in ghostly phalanx behind her and then, one by one, add their ectoplasmic might to the stiffening of her backbone. By degrees she sat up taller, straighter, prouder, looked Wellcome in the eye, and coldly said, “I thought you were a gentleman.”
There could be no greater condemnation uttered by a woman of Greta Marie’s age and station. For all his failings, Wellcome was not slow on the uptake; the penny dropped, the “marriage twaddle” that he had dismissed as ridiculous returned to leer at him, nose to nose. I saw the flickering play of emotions over his countenance: shock, comprehension, a smidgen of shame, and then the urgent realization that if he didn’t act fast, he was in peril of losing face before the one earthly creature he loved above all others.
If you think the creature in question was Greta Marie, you haven’t been paying attention.
Frost crackled at the corners of his mouth as he smiled thinly and said, “Well. Here’s a surprise. Don’t tell me that you still cherish orange blossom dreams at your age?”
Greta Marie jerked her head back as if she’d been slapped. His words jarred her to the core, that much was plain to see, but the old blood bred hardy souls. She drew her mouth into a tight little line and refused to give him the satisfaction of a reply.
This sat ill with Wellcome, who would have preferred more concrete evidence that his words had hit the mark. “And I thought we understood each other,” he said, reloading his figurative blowpipe with a freshly venomed dart. “What a sorry disappointment you are. I expected mor
e of you. I believed that you were different, that you were a woman of perception, a woman of spirit, one to whom the petty constraints and empty rituals of society mean nothing so long as she can serve Art.”
That did it. That was my limit. “Art my ass,” I blurted out. “You just want to get laid.”
Wellcome curled his lip at me. “Enter the white knight,” he drawled. “And what concern of yours is this? Barbara Barclay, champion of Romance! I should think you’d want to encourage your friend to seize the golden opportunity I’m offering her. Do you honestly believe she’ll get many more like it on this side of the grave? If she ever got any before.”
“I don’t have to sit here and listen to this!” Greta Marie stood up and started for the door, but Wellcome blocked her escape.
“I urge you to reconsider,” he counseled her. “I’ve always been passably fond of you, you know, especially your good sense. Certainly a woman like you, wise enough to perceive the rich aesthetic contributions of my work to world literature, must also see that I have only your best interests at heart in proposing cette petite affaire. Tampa is lovely at this time of year. Do you want to end your days as a hollow husk, a top-shelf virgin whose life will be forever incomplete without so much as the memory of a man’s attentions? I’ll spare you that horrible fate, but you’re going to have to be a good girl and—”
Greta Marie just gave him a look; a look that plugged his chatter snugger than jamming a badger in a bunghole; a disinterested, calculating look such as a farmer might give a stubborn tree stump, mentally debating which was the best crack into which to jam the dynamite.
“My ancestor, Captain James Resurrection Bowman, received a grant of land in this town as a reward for his heroism in the Revolutionary War,” she said. “A friend of his received a similar grant, except his was much smaller and located on Manhattan Island. He offered to swap, Captain James chose to decline. In retrospect it was a stupid choice, but it was his own. All my life I have followed Captain James’s example; I have always made my own choices. If I remain a virgin until I marry, it will not be for lack of such . . . generous offers as yours, but because that is my decision to make and no one else’s.”
“Talk about stupid choices,” Wellcome snarled.
Still calm and collected, Greta Marie gave him one short, sharp, effective slap across the face, and it wasn’t a figurative one either, no sirree. And with the echoes of flesh-to-flesh impact still hanging on the air she said, “The only stupid choice I made was loving you.”
The incredible happened: The denizens of the coffee shop, to a man, rose to their feet and gave that slap a standing ovation. Bobo Riley from the hardware store was even heard to let out an exultant Yankee whoop that would have put a Rebel yell to shame.
That should have been Wellcome’s cue to leave, making as gracious an exit as he might hope for in the circumstances. Alas, Wellcome had never been a man to read the signs or take the hint. If you told him his writing clunked like a freight train off the rails, he took this to mean that it had the power of a runaway freight instead.
He seized Greta Marie’s hands. “So you do love me,” he exclaimed triumphantly. “Ah, I see your little scheme: You’re playing hard to get. You’ve read far too many of the shoddier sort of Romance novels, those dreadful bodice-rippers—” (Here he looked meaningfully in my direction.) “—and you want a rough wooing. So be it!”
He was more athletic than his nascent paunch and pasty skin might lead you to believe, fully capable of sweeping a grown woman of Greta Marie’s size off her feet and out the door before any of us could react. She shrieked in shock, not fear, but she didn’t struggle as he made off with her. Maybe she thought she’d already made enough of a scene in the coffee shop to last Bowman’s Ridge well into the next century.
I was the first to address the situation. “Hey! Aren’t we going to do something?” I demanded of my fellow townsmen.
No one answered. Most of them went back to eating lunch. Bobo Riley looked as if he wanted to take action, but something was holding him back.
“Babs . . .” Muriel jerked her head, indicating I was to sit back down at the counter. Dumbly I obeyed in time to hear her whisper, “It’s not our place to interfere in other folks’ domestic quarrels.”
“This is an abduction, not a family spat,” I hissed. “If I know Wellcome, he won’t stop until he’s stuffed Greta Marie into his rental car and driven her all the way to Tampa! And then what? She hasn’t got enough cash to come back on her own hook, and would she ever dream of calling anyone up here to send her the bus fare home?”
Muriel didn’t say a word. We both knew the answer: Greta Marie would sooner become a beachcomber or—the horror!—give Wellcome his wicked way with her before she’d ask a fellow Native to lend her some money. On the other hand, her fellow Natives would sooner allow a thrice-cursed outlander like Wellcome Fisher to make off with the last living Bowman than they’d ever dream of interfering directly in someone else’s personal matters.
“Well, I don’t care what the rest of you do, I’m not going to put up with this!” I announced and started for the door. A large, work-hardened hand darted in front of me to hold it open. I looked up into Bobo Riley’s kind blue eyes.
“Mind if I walk with you down street a bit, Mrs. Barclay?” he asked. “I just happen to be going your way.”
Within two minutes I found myself transformed into the most popular woman in Bowman’s Ridge. Simply everyone in the coffee shop was suddenly seized with the simultaneous urge to pay their check and join me for a little stroll down Main Street. Even Hal abandoned his kitchen and Muriel her place behind the counter, leaving the waitresses and a few stragglers behind to hold down the fort. We weren’t going to deliberately interfere in anything, perish forbid. We were just going to exercise our constitutional right to take, well, a constitutional.
We followed the faint sound of Greta Marie’s fists beating a muffled tattoo on Wellcome’s chest. They hadn’t gotten far. Wellcome had parked his rental about a block away, down by the old war memorial on the green. Our itinerant Town Meeting caught up with him as he was trying to dig out the car keys without letting go of his prize.
When he saw us coming his eyes went wide as a constipated owl’s. He forgot all about the “rough wooing” under way and dropped Greta Marie smack on the town green, then took to his heels. At first I thought that he was running away in fear for his life, that he intended to beat feet all the way to Montpelier, but it turned out that I underestimated him. He fled only as far as the war memorial—a truncated obelisk, its sides inscribed with the names of the Bowman’s Ridge men who’d died in both World Wars, Korea, and Viet Nam, its flat top crowned with an urn that the Women’s Club filled with flowers on appropriate occasions. Spry as a springtime cockroach, he clambered up the monument and perched there, holding onto the lip of the empty urn.
“A lynch mob,” he sneered down at us from his perch. “How typical of the rustic mind. Haven’t you forgotten something? Pitchforks? Torches? You crackerbarrel cretins, how dare you harass me? A plague on your pitiful frog-fart of a town! And you—!”
His glittering eyes zeroed in on Greta Marie. Bobo Riley had fallen behind the rest of us in order to help the lady up and now squired her on his arm. “This is all your fault, you squalid excuse for a hicktown Hypatia! You pathetic pricktease, I’ll wager you fancy yourself quite the bargain basement Mata Hari, don’t you? Don’t you?”
“Oh!” Greta Marie covered her face with her hands and shuddered. Wellcome’s sharp tongue had finally drawn blood. She was crying, and in public, too! Bobo Riley folded his big arms protectively around her and glowered up at the treed critic, growling threats that failed to stem Wellcome’s spate of vengeful poison.
“Don’t cry, darling,” Wellcome crooned sarcastically. “There’s nothing wrong with you that a good upcountry rogering wouldn’t cure. So sad that you’ll never get it now. Thank God I came to my senses in time. You contemptible dirtfarm Delilah, how
a man of my breeding could have ever been mad enough even to consider the sensual enrichment of your dusty, backshelf, remaindered life—!”
Greta Marie threw her head back and howled her misery to the skies.
They were on him in the time it takes to blink. We never saw them come; they were simply there, all three of them, eyes holly-berry bright, horns blazing in the thin winter sunlight. The largest of the three, the one I’d comforted earlier that same day, was the first to reach him. It set its forefeet on the pediment of the war memorial, paused for an instant to look Wellcome in the eye, then jabbed him straight through the center of the chest with its horn. He fell to the snow-covered green and lay there unmoving.
The other two unicorns took it in turns to sniff the body and to snort their disdain. They did not depart as abruptly as they had arrived. The three of them turned as one and trotted up Main Street, tails swishing, in the direction of the town library. One of them paused to munch on a swag of Christmas greenery decking the front of the florist’s. No one made the slightest move to stay them, and Greta Marie, still weeping in Bobo Riley’s arms, never once tried to call them back.
Wellcome Fisher was dead. We had no illusions of anyone being able to survive a direct thrust to the heart with something as sharp and pointed and long as a unicorn’s horn, but we only thought we had all the answers until Hal bent over the body and exclaimed, “Hey! There’s no hole.”
Everyone swarmed around. Hal was right: There was no hole. Not a puncture, not a piercing, not a scratch. No blood stained the snow. There wasn’t even the teensiest rip in Wellcome’s clothing. The crowd buzzed.
I stood apart. I knew what had happened, but darned if I was going to tell my neighbors. They already thought I was weird enough, and if I started explaining about the rules that govern unicorns—!
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