E. Godz (3 page)

"I may be telling you something you already know. Perhaps you have been working
for E. Godz, Inc. solely out of family loyalty rather than real vocation. If you've spent the
last few years just pushing papers without a thought for the people behind them, this is
your chance to bow out gracefully and seek your true world-path. If one or the other of
you wishes to withdraw from the running, voluntarily, do so, and do it quickly. Lift the
burden of decision from my shoulders.

"Please.

"Love, Edwina."

The three pens capped themselves and retreated to their box. One copy of the letter
flew across the room to pop itself neatly into the phantom file cabinet, which promptly
vanished. Only the copies of the letter intended for Dov and Peez remained, along with
the two envelopes.

"On second thought," Edwina told the loitering stationery, "I believe I'll fax this." The
superfluous copy of the letter let out a low moan of despair and tore itself into a shower
of still-grieving confetti. The two envelopes slunk back into their desk drawer, muttering
darkly through their gummed flaps.

As the lone page fluttered away to run itself through the fax machine, Edwina headed
upstairs. If she was going to pose as the victim of a mysterious-but-fatal illness, it
wouldn't hurt to get into the spirit of things by taking to her bed. In fact, it might be more
than just a melodramatic necessity. Dov and Peez weren't exactly newly hatched chicks
when it came to matters of magic. Though Edwina had spied on them diligently ever
since they'd taken up their posts in the New York and Miami offices, she knew that even
the tightest espionage net could still let a fishie or two slip through the meshes.

For all she knew, someday they might try spying on her. The nerve!

Edwina's bedroom was as luxuriously Victorian as the rest of the mansion, its
centerpiece being a four-poster with creamy white brocade curtains, an avalanche of
plump pillows, and mattresses soft yet firm enough to demand a 911 call to the Paradox
Police. A big-screen TV with built-in DVD player was hidden in the armoire opposite,
with two large, well-stocked bookcases flanking it. A satisfactory selection of drinks and
snack foods were stowed in the refrigerator disguised as a hope chest that stood at the
foot of Edwina's bed. If she required anything more, she had only to invoke her powers
and it would be brought to her by invisible hands.

"Not a bad way to wait for Death," Edwina said, changing into an Egyptian cotton
nightgown. "A nice, long wait, but the kids won't need to know that."

She grabbed a pleasantly tawdry romance novel to keep her company, slipped under
the bedcovers, and settled comfortably back among her pillows to await developments.

The phone in Peez Godz's office rang while she was in the middle of giving dictation.
Her secretary, the formidable Wilma Pilut, answered it with the warm, welcoming tones
of a testy Doberman. One bark, two snarls, and a protracted growl into the mouthpiece
later, she turned to her employer and reported: "Chicago on line two, Ms. Godz."

"Not those idiots again," Peez grumbled, finagling a particularly tricky paper clip into
the chain she'd been working on since eight that morning. She looked up from her
mindless, endless task and gave the secretary her most engaging smile. "Tell them I'm not
in, please, Wilma."

Wilma refused to be engaged. "That would be a lie, Ms. Godz," she said brusquely.
"The Great Mother doesn't like lies."

"The Great Mother doesn't need to know," Peez replied, doing her best not to sound
like she was wheedling. "Besides, it's not like you're lying; you're just relaying a teensy,
weensy, miniscule li'l ol' fib of mine."

Wilma shook her blocky head ponderously. "The Great Mother would know. And
She wouldn't like it." When Edwina first had set up Peez in the New York City office of
E. Godz, Inc., she'd provided her daughter with everything needed to run the business
smoothly, including this short, stocky, monolithic secretary. There was something so
very, well, not earth-y so much as earth-en about the woman that Peez had spent most of
her first week at work on the phone to her mother making Edwina swear again and again,
on a stack of talismans, that Wilma was not actually a golem in disguise.

Now Peez stared at the impassive face of her recalcitrant secretary and gritted her
teeth in silent frustration. Too bad she's not a golem, she thought. At least a golem obeys
orders. With the sigh of the much put-upon she replied, "If it weren't for me, Wilma dear,
you'd never have discovered the Way of the Great Mother and you'd still be doing those
dreary covered-dish suppers at that former church of yours. I'm sure that if you do me this
one itsy-bitsy favor, She'll forgive you. She's good that way."

"She's not good, She's just Great." Again that slow, weighty, side-to-side turning of
Wilma's almost cubic head on her nigh-nonexistent neck. Peez found herself marveling at
the fact that her secretary's terra-cotta-colored hair shed real dandruff and not flakes of
dried clay. "You can't guarantee that She'll forgive me," Wilma intoned in a voice so
husky it spoke of a three-box-a-day cigar habit begun some time in kindergarten. "She
might even get angry. You know what happens when the Great Mother gets angry."

Peez sighed again, bringing this one all the way up from the soles of her plain black
ballet flats. Of course she knew what happened when the Great Mother got angry. So did
Wilma, having just achieved the rank of Junior High Priestess of the Sacred Grove, cum
laude. However, Peez reasoned, if she took the time to enumerate the various afflictions
that could ensue from the Great Mother's anger, perhaps her off-the-cuff filibustering
would take up so much time that those pests on the line from Chicago would get tired of
waiting for her to answer and would hang up.

One by one she uncurled her fingers, reckoning up the sum of divine displeasure:
"Floods, droughts, crop blights, cattle murrain, slowed download times, failure of the
cacao crop, plagues of feral hamsters, skyrocketing movie ticket prices—"

She could have gone on for a much longer time, ticking off all the ways that the Great
Mother had on tap to let mortals know that they'd pissed Her off, but Wilma cut in with
the last item on the list.

"—zits," Wilma said in a no-nonsense tone of voice that let Peez know that further
disaster-listing was unnecessary and would be punished to the full extent of a secretary's
considerable powers. "I know about all the rest and I can handle them just fine, but I'm
not going to risk zits. Not this weekend. I've got a date."

"You've ... got ... a ... what?"

A little while later, after she had sent Wilma off to do some filing and had dealt with
the call from Chicago (more whining about the whole human sacrifice squabble, which
somehow had managed to slip out of committee and turn into a full-blown flamewar on
the Net), Peez leaned back in her butter-soft leather desk chair with built-in footrest, CD
player, aromatherapy dispenser, heating and massage capabilities, and wished she were
dead.

"Brilliant," she told the ceiling. "I am just so brilliant. If I were any more brilliant, I'd
be a black hole. What was I thinking?"

"You were thinking that Wilma Pilut, the girl voted Most Likely to Date Mount
Rushmore, has romantic plans for this weekend and you don't."

The voice that responded to Peez's self-deprecating declaration was a little too thin
and a lot too sweet to be anything human. The sweetness, however, was all inherent in
the false-as-a-padded-bra tone of voice, not in the cold, cruel words it spoke.

"Then you thought that Wilma didn't notice how shocked you were to hear about her
upcoming date. But you know that she did notice; she's only built thick." The voice
skirled up into a trill of nerve-grating giggles. It was coming from one of Peez's desk
drawers and it showed no signs of shutting up any time soon. "Then you thought you
covered that little faux pas by pretending that you'd misheard her, that you thought she'd
said she had some bait this weekend, so you asked her where she was going fishing. Oh,
that was a brave effort! Remember how you never got cast in any of your school plays?
Ever wonder why? Well, if you can't figure it out after having given that lousy
performance for an audience of one very ticked-off secretary, maybe you're the one with
clay between your ears! And then do you want to know what you thought?" The desk
drawer rattled loudly. Something inside was trying to get out. "Do you? Do you? Huh,
huh, do you?"

Peez closed her eyes and tucked a limp strand of her long, dull black hair behind one
ear. "Tell me," she said wearily.

"Take me out first," said the thing in the desk.

"Why should I? I know you can let yourself out any time you like. And I also know
what I was thinking, and just how stupid it was, so I don't really need you to tell me that."

"But it's not the same unless you hear it from me, is it Peezie-pie?" The drawer shook
with a new attack of those high-pitched giggles.

"No." This time Peez's sigh seemed to come from somewhere beneath the continental
shelf. "It's not the same when I don't hear it from you, Teddy Tumtum." She bent over
and slid the desk drawer open.

The little stuffed bear grinned up at her, malice shining in his green glass eyes.

"And then," he said, picking up where he'd left off. "And then, last but not least, you
thought: 'Why me?' Or should I say: 'Why not me?' I couldn't say for sure. It all depends
on whether you were pondering the fact that you are so very, very, very much alone, the
undisputed queen of the Dateless Wonders, Wallflowers, and Social Rejects Chowder
and Marching Society, or whether you were instead dealing with the fact that even
Pavement-Puss Pilut has got herself a date this weekend while all you've got is me!" The
unholy bear ended his speech on a nasty note of triumph, then broke into a fresh batch of
giggles.

Peez's hand shot out and seized the demonic toy by his pink-beribboned neck. "Give
me one good reason not to run you through the shredder," she snarled.

"I'll go you one better and give you two," the bear replied, not even mildly flustered
by her threat. "One: Because the shredder only does paper. Two: Because if you could
shred me, who would you have left to talk to?" The bear's black-stitched mouth squirmed
into a horrible parody of a sincerely affectionate smile. "I is your ittoo Teddy Tumtum an'
I jes' wuuvs oo all to pieces, Peezie-pie."

"Well, I don't love you," Peez snapped, shaking the toy roughly.

"No fooling. Wow. Big surprise." The bear's smile was a sneer once more, and it
looked much more credible. "You might not love me, lady, but you do need me. A lot.
Any dumb floppy-eared beagle puppy with four paws too big for his body can be loved.
I'll settle for being indispensable."

"I don't need you," Peez shot back. "I've got plenty of—"

"—friends?" the bear finished for her. Then it laughed in her face—not giggles, full-
out guffaws of the purest scorn. "Yeah, sure, all of those wonderful, close friends you
made back in your hometown of— What was it called again? Oh right, I remember now:
Loserville. Brother, when you were in high school, you couldn't even get the chess club
nerds to hang out with you!"

Peez didn't deny Teddy Tumtum's words. She couldn't. She'd had the uncanny little
bear for as long as she could remember, a present from her mother. What Edwina hadn't
bothered to mention to her firstborn when she'd given her the bear was that there was
something ... special about Teddy Tumtum. She'd had only the best intentions, of
course—didn't she always?—when she'd enspelled the toy so that it would be more than a
simple, inanimate source of comfort for her lonely daughter. Using the powers she'd
acquired in her spiritual scavenger-hunt past, Edwina Godz had attached Teddy Tumtum
to Peez by an unbreakable (albeit glacially slow-acting) homing hex, plus she'd
empowered it with more than an ordinary teddy bear's ability merely to listen to a little
girl's private wishes, dreams, and sorrows.

Edwina thought she'd done a bang-up job of guaranteeing that her daughter need
never feel truly alone, but as far as Peez was concerned, Edwina's good intentions had
backfired beyond belief. Ordinary teddy bears might not be more than glorified throw
pillows, but at least they could keep all the secrets that their owners poured into their
raggedy fake fur ears. Teddy Tumtum not only listened to Peez's secrets, he remembered
them and could blab them to the whole wide world. Too bad Edwina hadn't stuck a
discretion spell on the bear while she was at it.

"Never mind what my social life was like in high school," she told him, making a
weak stab at rebuttal. "That was then." She set Teddy Tumtum down on her desk blotter.

"And this is now? Oooh, deep," said the bear. "I've got news for you, sugarpants, this
is now and as far as your social life goes, now sucks even worse than then. At least in the
olden days you had a few playmates who'd actually talk to you after class or even come
by the house during school breaks sometimes. So what if they only did it 'cause their
parents were trying to kiss up to your mother and her money?"

"My mother ..." In Peez's mouth the word did not reek of apple pie and chocolate
chip cookies, but of ice and gall. "Maybe if my dear mother hadn't been so damn wrapped
up in establishing the corporation, I could've had the chance to have a real childhood and
make some real friends. But no. Instead I was dragged along like an oversized piece of
baggage while she spent all those years knocking around the country with those dumb
hippie pals of hers. And then, as soon as she could, she dumped me on one nanny after
another. Where did she find them? Is there an employment agency that specializes in
placing the poster children for substance abuse?"

"Tsk. So ungrateful," Teddy Tumtum said, enjoying himself. "Your dear mamma got
rid of the nannies as soon as she saw that they weren't working out and found a much
better way to guarantee you'd get a good education. Think of all the money she spent on
sending you to the best day-care centers, the top prep schools! Nothing was too good for
her little Peez."

"Nothing," Peez repeated sourly. "That's the word for what she gave me. I had no
roots, no stability, no fixed abode, no permanent mailing address, no one to care what I
did with myself as long as it wasn't fatal or didn't impact the precious family business.
The one thing I did have was a name that was so bloody ridiculous that the regular school
bullies didn't even bother making fun of it. Too much like shooting fish in a barrel. But
there were plenty of juvenile improv sadists who weren't above dragging me into the
girls' room, dunking my head in the toilet, flushing, and telling me to visualize whirled
Peez. Good gods, it's just a wonder that I turned out as well as I did."

The teddy bear snickered spitefully. "Yeah, those were the days. Remember back in
the pre-nanny years, just before Edwina decided she'd better get you dear little tykes off
the road and settle down? Remember that town you stayed in for, what, four whole
months where your teacher told everyone to draw a picture of a house and you drew a
Volkswagon van? Boy, did the kids in your class laugh at you or what?"

Peez's pale, heart-shaped face turned bright red all the way up to her hairline. "At
least it was better than what happened in the town we moved to after that."

"Right, I remember," said Teddy Tumtum, who remembered much too much of
everything. "That was where you scored so badly on the standardized tests for your age
group that they stuck you back a year and you had to be in the same class with your little
brother."

"That was also the place where the teacher asked our class to draw a picture of our
daddies for Father's Day." Peez was bitter. It had all happened a long time ago, but the
sound of her classmates' rude laughter and ruder name-calling was still loud and clear in
her ears. It didn't take a rocket scientist to tell that the drawings produced by Peez and her
brother were of two radically different men.

"It wasn't so bad when the other kids just called us stupid," Peez said. "But then the
teacher stepped in and tried to make things aaall better. Better! She went into that big
song-and-dance about how some brothers and sisters from the same family can have
different daddies."

"Sometimes two at once," Teddy Tumtum put in.

"This was a little too close to the Pleistocene for a public school teacher to talk about
alternative life-style families," Peez reminded him. "Hell, she didn't even want to open
the whole widowhood can o' worms in front of the kiddies—death was a big no-no—but
she did mention divorce. That was when my genius baby brother had to go and ask,
'What's a divorce?' "