Damsels in Distress (6 page)

“I believe he did,” I said. “Did anything happen at the bookstore after I left?”

“Not really. The knights declared the bout to be a draw, took off their armor, and drove away. Miss Thackery started passing out fliers and selling tickets. She was dressed in a really fancy lavender gown with long sleeves and all kinds of lace and beads. It was cut so low in front that I kept hoping somebody would bump her in the back and she’d…pop out.” Caron popped open the soda can to emphasize her comment. “Some nerdy man and the jester person moved all the amps inside and stashed them in a corner. As soon as they were done, we locked up and went to get the car.”

“Did you redo the window display?”

“Partway,” she said as she finished her soda and set the can on the rail. After a glance at me, she hastily picked it up. “Can I use the phone? Emily told Carrie that Rhonda and her little clique had to go to a dance session this afternoon. According to the reports, they are not happy fairies. I’m absolutely frantic to hear about it.”

I remembered the odd music I’d heard while walking home. “Do you know where they went?”

Caron started for the apartment door, then hesitated. “No, but I can ask if it matters, as long as you swear you’re not going to start prancing around in a green leotard. You’ve already got a reputation for being weird. Inez’s father says your name’s in the newspaper more often than the mayor’s. If you want me to graduate, I have to show up at the high school for two more years. Once I’ve gone away to college, feel free to put on a feather boa and pirouette on the sidewalk.”

“Do you think I’m weird?”

“Let’s just say you seem to know more murderers than other people’s mothers.”

“I suppose I do,” I murmured.

“Oh, and Miss Thackery wants you to go to an ARSE meeting tomorrow at six thirty. It’s out at the farm where the fair’s going to be. It’s a potluck picnic, but you don’t need to bring anything.”

“I don’t go to meetings.”

Caron’s lower lip began to quiver. “You have to go, Mother. AP history is rumored to be harder than Brain Surgery 101.1 don’t need to start the semester with Miss Thackery pissed at me. There will just be a few people, since most of the members are gone for the summer. All you have to do is eat their potato salad and nod every now and then. It’s not like there’s going to be jousting after dessert.”

As appalled as I was at the idea of a meeting, much less a potluck, it would mean that I wouldn’t be home in the evening. With luck, Peter would be too busy during the day to call, and I would have a legitimate excuse for not being available should he try to call later. On the other hand, it was likely that Edward Cobbinwood would be there. “I’ll think about it,” I finally said. “Didn’t you and Inez go out there earlier today?”

“Yeah, we had to meet with the woman who’s helping us organize the concessions. She’s okay, if you like that sort.”

“What sort?” I asked, remembering the flicker of hostility that I’d heard in the Duke of Glenbarren’s voice when his faithful knight, Sir Kenneth of Gweek, had mentioned her.

“One of those seventies earth mothers, all Woodstock and Birkenstock. Thick build, with a big butt, dingy brown hair in a braid, worn sandals, and a long skirt straight from a yard sale.

Four children—a petulant preadolescent girl, a snotty-nosed eight- year-old boy, and bratty six-year-old twin boys. She has dogs, cats, bees, chickens, and an herb garden, and makes her own soap. The farmhouse is old and messy, and smells funny. She offered us tea, but we were afraid to drink it.”

Caron’s description hardly fit my image of a seductive Guinevere. However, I’d already decided that at least some of the ARSE members were less than grounded in reality. As were Caron and Inez, on occasion. “She’s a duchess,” I said, “so she’s entitled to her eccentricities. Was she helpful?”

“She’s already arranged for the food and drink. All we have to do is pick up a few things the day before, and then make sure all our workers show up for their shifts. Can I please call Emily?”

“Go on, but if anyone calls for me, say I’ve gone to bed.”

“Including Peter? Is there something going on that I should know about?”

I held up my glass of scotch. “Alas, poor Cutty Sark, I knew him well.”

She started to say something, then sighed loudly and went inside. Within a minute, I heard her on the phone, cackling with malicious glee.

The next morning I was arranging a display of bestsellers from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries when a short figure in a hooded black cape came into the store. It was already getting to be too much, I thought wearily, and the Renaissance Fair was still ten days away. Before too long, Fiona Thackery would ask if she might tether a dragon outside the store on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Celtic warriors would besiege the beer garden across the street during happy hour.

The hood was brushed back, exposing Sally Fromberger’s rosy cheeks and daffodil-yellow hair. I could tell from the brightness of her eyes that she’d already been indulging in her daily regime of bran fiber, raw oats, and tofu kibble.

“Guess who I am?” she demanded.

“A cheerleader at the Spanish Inquisition.”

“Claire, you are so droll! I’m a prioress.” She twirled so I could appreciate the fullness of her cape and the scarlet lining. “You may address me as Madam Marsilia d’Anjou. I don’t know how to go about finding a habit. It’s not as if I could call a Catholic church to rent one. They would think it was for a frivolous prank or a costume party. You don’t happen to know any nuns, do you?”

“I’ll check my address book. May I presume this has something to do with the Renaissance Fair?” I dearly hoped I was right, because otherwise one of us was drinking from the wrong tap.

Sally giggled. “Well, of course. As members of the Thurber Street Merchants Association, we all have an obligation to support the fair so that it will become an annual affair that draws people from all across the country. I’ve already talked with Fiona about staging some events in this area. You had quite a crowd in front of the Book Depot yesterday, and that was without any advance publicity.” She gave me a disgruntled look. “Had the rest of us been informed, we would have taken advantage of the situation. Tomorrow many of us will have display tables on the sidewalks in front of our establishments. I thought I’d sell cups of cold herbal tea, cider, and carob cookies. The pottery shop, the art gallery, the boutique—all of those merchants are already making plans. I’m sure Luanne will want to display some of her beaded belts and purses.”

I was clearly guilty of betraying my fellow merchants, but I was hardly overwhelmed with remorse. “I didn’t have much warning,” I said in my defense.

Madam Marsilia d’Anjou graciously accepted my apology with a nod. “Tomorrow there will be a more genteel demonstration of medieval and Renaissance music. Several members of the college orchestra, along with a few high school students, will play lutes, piccolos, recorders, mandolins, tambourines, and so forth. A group will sing madrigals. A pleasant change from that crude sword fight, don’t you think?”

“Indeed,” I said, thinking of the hours I’d spent earlier in the day reshelving paperbacks. I doubted madrigal singers and piccolo players were inclined to wrestle on the floor, although I’d never actually met any.

I resumed arranging books in the window, hoping Sally might take the hint and leave. However, she was much too enthusiastic to be sidetracked by subtlety.

“I hear Caron and Inez are involved in concessions at the fair,” she said. “Such a big responsibility for girls their age.”

“If it is, they’re holding up well. The duchess—I can’t remember her mundane name—is making all the arrangements. Caron and Inez are merely in charge of peasant labor.”

“Oh,” Sally said, her smile wavering. “I was hoping to be invited to sell hot cross buns and little loaves of oat bread. Fiona will know this woman’s name, don’t you think?”

Before I could respond, my science fiction hippie slinked through the door. He drops by almost every day, ostensibly to browse. Luckily for me, he’s an inept shoplifter, and rarely makes it out with anything. He’s done a few favors for me in the past, so I tend to regard him with guarded benevolence. I also frisk him.

“Wow,” he said, gaping at Sally, “are you a sorceress? Cool.”

“You know precisely who I am,” Sally said. “Don’t I give you a discount on day-old bread several times a week?”

He winked at her. “Yeah, great cover. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody.” He drifted behind a rack of paperbacks. “A sorceress. Like, very cool.”

Madam Marsilia d’Anjou looked very much as though she’d like to punch him in the nose, assuming she could find it under his matted beard and mustache, but settled for a sniff and swept out the door. I doubted my hippie would be munching any day-old hot cross buns in his immediate future.

I waited until the middle of the afternoon to call Luanne. Skipping preliminaries, I said, “Do you want to go to a gourmet dinner and ARSE meeting with me this evening?”

“I’m sorry—did you ask me if I wanted to have my leg amputated? I’m too busy these days, but maybe next year.”

“If I have to go, I don’t see why you shouldn’t, too. We’re both members of the Thurber Street Merchants Association.”

Luanne chuckled. “I heard about the sword fight yesterday. For that matter, I could hear it from the doorway of my shop, but it sounded entirely too violent for me.” She hesitated. “I tried to call you last night to hear the gory details, but no one answered Were you the trophy swept off by the victorious knight for purposes of debauchery and wantonness? Peter’s not going to like it if he has to do battle to win back your hand.”

My throat tightened, but I managed a halfhearted laugh. “The peril of leaving a lady in waiting. If you’ll go to this meeting, I’ll owe you. Surely it won’t last more than an hour or two. All we’ll have to do is eat their potato salad and nod.”

“Nod—or nod off?”

I took my last shot. “I met the knights before the demonstration. They’re both sexy guys, Luanne. I can’t attest to their manhood, since they were in full stainless steel drag, but I’m fairly certain one of them is single.”

“Nice try,” she said dryly, “but I’ve already suffered through one textbook case of arrested adolescence. His suits were handmade rather than forged, but the end result was the same.”

“A pox upon your house,” I said as I hung up. I had two hours in which to develop an acute appendicitis or malaria. Since my appendix had been removed twenty years ago and we were quite a distance from the nearest swamp, my chances were not good. I went to the nonfiction shelf and began to look for books on early symptoms of infectious diseases.

The realm of the Duke and Duchess of Glenbarrens was a few miles west of Farberville, no more than a twenty-minute drive from my apartment. I dawdled, dragging it out to half an hour, but eventually turned by a mailbox with the names of Anderson and Lanya Peru painted in Gothic script on one side. The house was as unappealing as Caron had said, and a few outbuildings looked as though they could topple on a whim. There were flower beds in front of the house; a large vegetable garden was partially visible in the backyard. Toys were scattered in the grass, and several bicycles lay about like rusting fossils. On one side of the house, clotheslines sagged under the weight of jeans, socks, and towels. The pasture was rutted and weedy, hardly conducive to trampling about after a cup of mead or ale. The structures and property were protected not by a moat, but by woods and steep hills.

“Beyond this place be dragons,” I muttered as I parked among dusty cars and trucks. As I walked up the steps to the porch, children came whooping out the front door and headed in the direction of the pasture. Caron had mentioned four children, but I felt as though there were at least twice that many. I closed my eyes for a moment, then took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

Fiona Thackery appeared almost immediately. “Mrs. Malloy,” she said as she held open the door, “we are delighted that you decided to come so we can express our appreciation for your generosity. Caron was afraid you might have had other plans. Come in, please. The others are in the back room. Would you like something to drink? The mead is homemade. Lanya collects the honey from her apiary and ferments it in jars in the basement. It’s…ah, potent. We also have wine, sodas, and beer.”

I glanced at the living room as she herded me along. It smelled of mold, dirty socks, and patchouli oil (a fad that fortunately had faded from favor decades ago). Amateurish tapestries did not quite cover peeling wallpaper and water stains. The upholstered furniture was worn, the cushions lumpy and uninviting. Lanya’s interests seemed to lie in areas of procreation and mead, rather than interior decoration.

“Yesterday went very well,” continued Fiona. “I was sorry to hear that you had to leave early because of a headache.”

I felt as though I needed a written excuse from a doctor. “I had some errands to do, and Caron and Inez were eager to stay and watch the demonstration. They were very impressed with the authenticity of the armor.”

She gave me a wry smile. “Yes, so they told me several times.”

We went into the kitchen. It had the ambience of a Depressionera farmhouse, with ancient appliances and open shelves cluttered with oddments of plates, bowls, glasses, jars, and bottles of spices. A cast-iron skillet on the stove held an inch-thick layer of congealed grease, and a saucepan next to it was splattered with what appeared to be dried tomato soup or spaghetti sauce. A rickety table was cluttered with bottles of wine, gallon jars of what I assumed was mead, paper cups, and empty aluminum cans. A cooler on the floor was filled with ice, beer, and sodas. I could hear voices and laughter from the room beyond, mostly male. I wondered, albeit briefly, which of the battling knights had been obliged to supply the wine the previous evening.

Fiona’s nose was slightly wrinkled, but she forced a smile and said, “Lanya must have her hands full with all those children and animals. It’s no wonder that Anderson prefers to work late at his office rather than come home to this. There’s something to be said for population control, even if it means putting up with a smallpox epidemic or a plague every fifty years. What would you like to drink, Mrs. Malloy?”