After a tour of the sumptuous living quarters and a brief visit with the two young princes who seemed, not too surprisingly, vacant-eyed and appearing to be having grave difficulties with their schoolwork, Agnesa showed me to a special pavilion where she enjoyed spending time. It was up high, atop a turret, peaceful and private as befits royalty, with only the distant sound of waterfalls and the nearby songs of birds, with blue and white striped awnings providing shade, and great tubs of flowers that must have been tended by a wizard for I had never seen rainbow hued blossoms such as these.
A young girl brought us cakes and sweet chilled drinks then seated herself by the pavilion ledge to wait for further orders. I sat in airy comfort, and when Agnesa spoke, her voice sounded distant and disembodied, another melody for this magical spot.
“I am troubled, as you might understand,” she said in a voice so sweet, I would have taken it to be from a stranger, were the servant girl not now asleep and Agnesa not the only other person present. “I fear the lawsuit almost as much as I fear being banished, stripped of my possessions and my sons and sent to wander.”
Cinderella was about to become what she’d said she’d been, to experience the unpleasantries she claimed to have already experienced. Interesting, I thought as I sipped the drink that tasted of peach and green flashes. Painfully ironic.
“I believe we are what we decide to be.” She paced back and forth along the side of the terrace. She apparently had no fear of tumbling over, although the wall was barely as high as her ankle. Well, I thought, she’s used to it up here. Ordinary people like me never had the chance to sit in the sky this way. I felt relaxed, comfortable and removed from all I had known in my prior life. For a moment, I wondered if there weren’t a potion in my peach drink, but it seemed a silly idea, so I let it drift away along with the breeze coming off the far hills, the gentle sweep of the princess’ gown as she paced back and forth and the quiet rumbles of the snoring servant.
“I believe that if you can imagine something, you can make it happen,” Agnesa said. “I am what I believe I am, and I believe I am a royal Princess, the once and future Princess.”
I closed my eyes and let her words roll over me, as I waited for the significant ones, the ones that would tell me how we were going to untangle our various messes. Anyway, I’d heard variations of this speech from her before. But of what use is New Age wisdom in a place where it’s always the same age, always long ago and far away or once upon a time, a combination of then and now where new is nothing special.
“I cannot believe that I am destined to leave this behind, to be shamed by my family for harmless exaggerations that elevated all of our status by getting me this position.”
I opened one eye at that, to see if she was, perhaps, joking. None of us at the bedraggled, besieged homestead had noticed any elevated status these past few years. But she wasn’t kidding. Her expression was tense as she paced. She stopped only when she heard a blare of trumpets. “That means he’s on his way,” she said. “They do that sort of thing when either of us is about to appear. I find it quite satisfying.” Then she resumed her pacing and whatever her monologue was. A plea? An explanation? An apology? I waited, only half listening.
Which is why I missed most of what preceded “…only solution I could figure out, and frankly, this will solve all my problems, all at once.” I opened both eyes wide. Wasn’t it supposed to be our problems we were solving? Was this going to be the diamond slippers all over again?
I began to grasp what she meant and what was happening after I heard another blare of trumpets, saw her look down and then in about three quick movements, roll forward one of the enormous planters that must have been on a platform and when it was at the edge, push, hard against the rim of the planter.
Those small motions from the buffed Princess were enough to tilt the planter off its platform.
“No!” I screamed as I ran to where she was. But it was too late. The clay and dirt and porcelain mass plummeted down, directly onto the royal head of Charming himself.
“Agnesa,” I gasped. “You—on purpose, you—how could—”
At which point she screamed with all the force I remembered from her childhood tantrums. Screamed and screamed and screamed.
The pathetic servant girl awoke and leaped to her feet, rubbed at her eye and said “Your highness?” over and over.
“She killed him!” Agnesa screamed, pointing at me.
“Me? I tried to stop you from—”
Half the palace’s underlings rushed up the stairs to the screaming princess. The other half were audible below, keening over the late Prince Charming.
“She was jealous of us!” Cinderella screamed between sobs. “Hated me! Consumed with bitterness because nobody wanted her. So she—look what she did to my Prince!”
Need we go into further detail? Do you think her subjects said, “We believe that your vile step-sister is telling the truth when she protests her innocence”?
Of course they didn’t. As always, they believed their golden, shining princess, widowed at such a young and tragic age. They cherished her, protected her, made her absolute ruler until such time one of her sons would be ready, if either boy could ever pass their exams.
Of course the libel suit was forgotten. The remainder of the family was too terrified of the new Queen’s power and wrath to do anything but leave quietly in the middle of the night, and I cannot blame them.
I couldn’t leave with them. Instead, I sit in this dungeon to which I am eternally condemned. Cinderella was lenient, granting me life instead of an instant beheading. I am supposed to be grateful as I grow to understand what “ever after” truly means.
But still, with some hope, I ask every set of eyes that peeks into my cell to listen to this story and right the wrongs that have befallen me. If they look dubious, I’ve asked them to test me—to find wizards or truth potions, to loose spirits who will determine the truth.
I’ve asked for donations so that I could hire her PR firm and get a little spin for my side this time.
All they do is laugh. I’m a joke, an easy amusement for the bored, a one-woman sideshow. Jesters do imitations of me at court for after-dinner amusement. In imitation of you, there’s a reality TV show planned—reality TV in a land where there is no reality! It’s called “Evil Step-Sisters.”
Up there in all her splendor Cinderella is surrounded by adoring crowds, and down here with spiders and lizards for company, and now and then a TV cameraman, just to make sure I’m still miserable, I continue as I have through the millennia, unhappily ever after. Still, I tell everyone the story.
Now I’ve told you.
Are you going to laugh, too?
Fury Duty
It wasn’t my favorite night even before Celia became the bearer of bad news.
I was already failing to cope with several other problems.
Item: all the sinks in the house were backed up and the plumber’s estimate was twice my bank balance.
Item: my dog had impregnated a hapless bitch whose owner demanded that I harvest Fido’s wild oats.
Major item: the manuscript my editor expected in two days had no ending. Actually, there was an obligatory final scene. All impediments removed, my couple would marry. That is generally considered a happy ending, although I can’t imagine why. Nonetheless, my problem was how to get my characters to the altar without retracing paths taken in my earlier books.
I write both romance and horror novels. They aren’t all that different, when you think about it, so I considered solving my problem by switching genres. My hero could become a werewolf. I’d make him look like my passionate dog and then I’d kill him off. My women’s group was due in a matter of minutes, and I slapped icing on a mess of cake that I’d been too rushed to leave in the oven long enough. I decided that Sweet Savage Steppes shouldn’t be about werewolves. Maybe its brooding Slavic hero was sufficiently unique. Mikhail could say and do the exact same thing an Iowa farmer did in my last book and nobody
would notice.
The cake looked like a relief map of Switzerland. Once upon a time, when cooking was still a female form of arm wrestling, this would have caused an anxiety attack. But my women’s group had been around too long to have its members lose face through mediocre handling of flour and sugar.
The group started at the dawn of time, the era before the ERA, to coin a phrase. We were all married then, and if we wanted to get out at night without husbands, it was cooking lessons, a Tupperware party, or a book club. We chose books—with a little food on the side.
When we first began, we ate fruit suspended in Jell-O and talked about best-sellers, babies, color schemes and couples. Later, we ate whole grains, read feminist tracts and talked about ourselves. Most recently, everybody went on her own special diet, read only business and professional articles (or in my case, my alter ego, Alexa Fury’s romantic gush) and talked about disappointments—children, jobs, sex and husbands, our own exes and the recycled ones we dated.
In just a few minutes, we were going to eat undercooked cake and discuss an obscure South American novel I hadn’t had time to open, thanks to the miseries of Mikhail and Ariel. I began cleaning up, but before I’d made a dent, the doorbell rang. My premature guest was Celia Arnold, toting the veggies and low-cal dip she always brings. Celia has spent the last twenty-five years trying to lose ten, then twenty, now thirty pounds.
“Something horrible’s happened, Dee,” she said, plunking her vegetables onto the kitchen table. “I saw the arch-fornicator.”
“Who?” Hard to believe, but I thought she meant a guy—an intriguing-sounding one at that.
“The netsuke—Laurel’s netsuke! The one with the woman and three men. You always talked about it!”
Automatically, I looked out the kitchen window toward the charred remains of the house where Laurel Tobias once lived. It’s been on the market for two years now. Nobody wants the half-burned scene of a murder.
Maybe you’ve read about Jackson Tobias, the man who shot his estranged wife so he could get their valuable collection of Japanese carvings. He’d bashed in a cabinet to get the figures, and he tried to hide the fact by burning the house and the cabinet to cinders, but I saw the fire and reported it in time for the evidence of his crime to still be intact. They only found one netsuke, and that one was in his apartment. He insisted Laurel had given it to him a week earlier, the same night he’d given her his gun to ease her fears.
Everybody knew he’d taken all the netsukes and hidden them.
Except now, two years later, Celia had apparently found a second netsuke.
“Jackson’s in prison,” I said. “He must have an accomplice selling off the pieces. Maybe that redheaded tramp he was seeing?”
Celia sat down on a kitchen chair, sighing histrionically. “Wrong,” she whispered, all but clutching her heart.
“Cut the drama, would you?” I heard a wet plop as icing slopped off my ski slope of a cake. Why we served desserts when everybody wanted to lose weight escaped me. I glared at the cake, but it did no good, so I scowled instead at Celia.
“I saw it last week,” she said. “At an Open Spaces meeting. The hostess heard me gasp and thought I was a prude. She rushed to explain that netsukes were used by the Japanese to close their money bags, that this one was centuries old, ivory and very finely carved. Actually, we had a lot of fun checking exactly what each of the three men was doing to that woman. Did you ever realize that one of them was—”
“Celia, get to the point!”
“Okay. The fornicator was a fiftieth birthday gift to her husband. From a cousin, a year ago. I couldn’t figure out how. I mean Jackson was arrested two years ago, the morning after he—the morning after the fire.”
I kept my hands steady spooning decaf into the coffee maker. Celia twiddled a carrot stick. “It made me sick to think of him making a profit from murder. Besides, any netsuke money belongs to Laurel’s estate, not his.”
Maybe. The dispute had never been settled. Laurel had claimed that her father, a merchant seaman, collected the netsukes years earlier. Jackson insisted he’d bought them on his own travels. Whatever.
“I told this woman I was a collector and I’d never seen one like this.”
Next to my ex-husband, Celia is the worst storyteller I know. “Yes, yes,” I prompted. “Did she know where the cousin found the figure? Maybe pornographic money-bag closers had been a Japanese fad two hundred years ago. Maybe there are thousands of teeny tiny orgy carvings. Maybe that woman owned somebody else’s fornicator.”
Celia pouted. I was spoiling all her fun.
“The group’ll be here any minute,” I said, to placate her.
She sighed loudly. “I called the cousin and finally, he gave me the name of a dealer. I think maybe this guy is not completely on the up-and-up.”
“The cousin?”
“The art dealer. How would I know about the cousin? I never even met—”
“Celia!”
“I left twelve messages in four days before the dealer returned my call. He gave me the name of an auction house. Where I again left message after message.”
“You should have called me. I would have found ways to speed things up.”
“You always take charge. I wanted to do this myself.”
The coffee maker made the bubbling digestive noises I generally find comforting, but this time they weren’t enough.
“The auction house was in Chicago, Dee. Chicago. Why? There are places here in town.” She leaned closer. “I drove there today because they wouldn’t talk on the phone. But when I marched in and said I had questions to do with a dead friend and that maybe I’d call the police, they came around. I was so scared! What if they’d really made me call the cops!”
“Celia? The records?”
“They told me who’d brought in the figures. Figures, Dee, not just one. Two dozen netsukes.” She leaned back and smiled smugly.
“You’re driving me crazy.”
“Okay. They were brought in two years ago. In October. One entire month before Laurel died. And they were brought in by a woman.” Her smile faded. “I’ve been sick since I heard. We’ve done a terrible thing! Jackson didn’t steal anything that night, and if Jackson didn’t steal anything, then maybe he didn’t—”
I stood up, too charged to stay in place. “Don’t rush to conclusions. First of all, you said two dozen pieces, but Laurel had over thirty. What about the rest?”
“Maybe she placed her figures at more than one auction house.”
“Second, we could be talking about somebody else altogether, not Laurel. Somebody else could have owned an arch-fornicator as part of a collection. Did the auctioneer tell you the name of the woman who sold them?”
Celia nodded.
“Yes? Well?”
“You’ll never guess.”
I resisted the urge to bang her infuriating head against the wall.
“It wasn’t Laurel Tobias,” Celia finally said.
“Then this whole thing is a tempest in a—”
“Erin S. Tisiphone brought them in.”
I gasped. It had been a joke among the three of us. Way back, when our consciousnesses were rising, husbands fled. Mine packed and departed first. Celia’s waited, then took off with their baby-sitter, who, he claimed, was still “a real woman.” Jackson seemed to believe this was a phase we were going through, and he didn’t budge. Instead, he labeled us “The Three Furies.” In fact, that’s how I acquired my pen name. Deedee Blatt is neither romantic nor horrifying—well, perhaps a bit horrifying, but not authorial—so I became Alexa—as close as I could come to Alecto the Implacable—Fury. In the wake of the womanly baby-sitter, Celia picked Megaera, the Jealous One, and meek Laurel accepted third and last choice, Tisiphone, the Avenger of Blood. But it was a mouthful, so she played with the Greek name for the Furies, Erinyes, and became Erin S.
“What’ll we do?” Celia wailed. “We testified that the netsukes were in her house, which meant that Jacks
on stole them. We convicted him.”
“The cabinet, remember? It was smashed.”
Celia shrugged. “Maybe she did it. Maybe she was angry, or it was a coincidence, an accident, or somebody else altogether murdered her.”
“With Jackson’s gun?” I shook my head. “And who else had a key? There wasn’t any break-in, and the door was locked.”
“She killed herself,” Celia said. “He probably really did give his gun to her, like he said. We thought she told us everything, but she didn’t. We didn’t know she’d sold the netsukes. Why didn’t she tell us she needed money instead of going all the way to Chicago out of shame?”
“Maybe that wasn’t why she went.” I spoke slowly and deliberately. “Everything makes sense if Laurel wanted to frame Jackson. Make her suicide look like murder. And maybe Erin S. Tisiphone was a message for us if we ever found out—to remember friends and Furies and not go soft.”
Celia’s normally pink skin blanched. “But even so, if Jackson didn’t do it—what did we do?”
We had done plenty. Celia and I had testified on behalf of Laurel. And the entire book group had taken off from work and gone to court every single day to sit like a second, silent jury, condemning Jackson Tobias. The fact is, we convicted the man. The other fact is: he deserved it.
But now Celia seemed ready to run to the police and recant. I had to talk her out of making a terrible mistake, but there was no time or opportunity, because the bell rang.
“The women!” Celia said. “They’ll know what to do. After all,” she asked plaintively, “what are friends for?”
Typically, Celia took forever retelling her story, but for once, I was grateful, because it gave me time to think. By the time she was near the close, we were deeply into the evening, finished with lasagna and salad, through everybody’s decision to cheat on their diets “just this once” and into friendly reassurances that my cake was okay. “Pudding-ish, but more delicious than it looks—like us,” someone quipped. Women of a certain age make jokes.
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