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Sixteen

The malevolent glare of the toad would have been enough to convince the most dedicated skeptic that other than an amphibian soul lived inside the green and warty skin. It was also extremely silent for a toad, and watchful, its bug eyes daring the foolhardy to make toad jokes.

Rose stared at the creature in Felicity's bathtub with fascination and repugnance, although she normally didn't mind toads, and actually enjoyed listening to them singing around the pools and puddles near her house.

"Don't be rude, Bobby," Felicity told the toad sternly. "And stop sulking. Had I transformed you into something worthy of your human nature, you'd be something much nastier and far lower on the food chain."

Felicity had cheerfully agreed to pick her up at the courthouse and bring her back to her own place. Rose was still reeling from walking through a wall onto a hotel floor that wasn't there and entering the suite Felicity occupied, which looked like all of the other hotel suites except for the high-tech equipment and the crystal ball and the fact that it, also, technically wasn't there. She had carefully ducked Felicity's probing questions about the "friend" from the Courthouse. She wasn't going to talk to anybody about Fred until she (a) was sure what was going on and (b) sorted out her feelings, fears, and expectations and (c) knew him better, not necessarily in that order. In the meantime, he had a few kids to find and she needed some sleep. It didn't look like it would be forthcoming soon. Felicity had showed her around the suite, proudly pointing out some high-tech equipment Rose was surprised to see there.

"What's the computer for?" she had asked.

"That's our communications network and also the GDB, or Godmother Data Base. We've put our collective memory on hard disk including a list of good deeds done, to whom, when, and where et cetera et cetera et cetera. I've got a fax modem hooked up to it but I miss my fax machine. So much faster and handier for sending photographs and such."

After the grand tour, Felicity had deigned to answer Rose's inquiry and had taken her into the bathroom to introduce her to the toad. "The man in the mug shot was named Robert Hunter. Is that why you call this toad Bobby?"

"Of course," Felicity said. "That's his name. Robert, Robin, Bobby the Henchman he has been throughout time, and he's one of those stubborn souls who never ever learns from their experience and thus is destined to remain a malignant cardboard spear-carrying figure."

"Well," Rose said, sitting on the edge of the tub and scratching her head, attempting to stimulate her brain cells, which had already received so much stimulation tonight they were getting numb with overload. "There isn't much job security these days. At least he's been reliable."

"How amusing."

"Of course it's not," Rose admitted. "Especially not now that you've interfered. We have a man who thinks he's a toad at Harborview with evidence on him that could help us find Sno, if only he could talk to us, and we have a toad who thinks he's a thug and evidently wants nothing more than to give us both a fatal case of warts. Please, Felicity, tell me, what is wrong with this picture?"

"I assure you that I had no way of knowing he was currently a murder suspect, at least, that he was suspected of murdering anyone you know. You refused to tell me what was going on in the name of confidentiality. So I was simply following my age-old practices and trolling for good to reward when who should I encounter but Bobby here. Well, he may have changed his looks, his age, his race, from one lifetime to another but I can see right through him. He was going to stab me. Now, while it is true that I am far too busy and my magical allowance is far too meager to waste it on punishment when as we both know, positive reinforcement is so much more effective, I am allowed to defend myself and remove menaces from—er—menacing."

"So you turned him into a toad?"

"Oh, no, of course not. I'm thriftier than that. It takes a great deal of magical force to compress matter from a large size into a much smaller size. The transformee is apt to be severely damaged or else, once condensed, explode in an alarming and unpredictable manner. And I couldn't very well make Bobby into a toad as large as the man he was. He'd be like something in a made-for-video horror movie and probably leap people to death or some such, left to his own inclinations. Energy is rather easier to swap around. As I've mentioned, his consciousness has already inhabited people of various shapes, sizes and colors and that sort of thing condenses quite handily, within certain limits. So I simply switched the toad's for the man's. Brilliant, eh?"

"Sure. If you can get Bobby here to tell us what he did with Sno." What am I saying? Rose asked herself. I'm trying to get this woman to have a toad help me find a missing client! Okay, I've gone and done it now. Either this is a nightmare, or it's real and she's nuts and it's catching or it's not a dream and it's real and—it's real? The toad was real, that was true, and the patient had been real. And walking into a hotel suite that wasn't there was real too. Maybe she'd just better continue to suspend judgment until she saw something she'd have to be committed for if she admitted she saw it.

"Oh. Hmm. That's a bit difficult," Felicity said. "Normally I could just give it a voice or, more usefully, give you the gift of animal languages. But I did rather squander that particular gift already."

"So much for thriftiness."

"Well, you were being so stubborn. I did it to impress you, I'm afraid. I was trying to make you believe me in some short, easy way, as you wanted. That never does work in the long run, but it seemed worth a try, so I did it."

"What?"

"Activating Puss."

"Excuse me? Activating what?"

"Puss. The cat I assigned to your friend, the street urchin, what did you call him?"

"Dico. Dico Miller," Rose replied and then asked, "What about the cat? Oh, come on now. You aren't going to claim it was—naaah."

But Felicity was nodding. "Puss. Sort of. Not the same body as the original, of course, but cats are natural nomads, spiritually, what with nine lives to live. The essence of Puss—intelligent, resourceful and street-smart, not to mention multilingual, creature that she is—fits well into the lives and personalities of many existing felines. In that way, dear Puss has been granted far more incarnations than the standard nine by Our Founder."

"The Queen of Fairy? Right?" Rose asked sarcastically.

"Brilliant! You're catching on. So anyhow, now and then, if Puss is not previously incarnated, one of us will activate her to help out a particularly hapless case, since she's quite capable of taking care of herself and a new friend. The spell invoking her is a little limited, but . . ."

Rose opened her mouth to say how ridiculous it was, and then she looked back at the toad, and saw it sneering at her with an expression that was never intended for an amphibian face.

"I've been working harder than I thought," she said, feeling a little dizzy.

"Yes, you have. And you need to let me help."

"You've already helped enough, I think," Rose said. "What am I supposed to do with all this great inside information you've given me? Call Fred Moran and tell him to come over and bring his rubber hose—if he squirts the perpetrator with it, maybe Bobby the toad will be so pleased he'll croak his guts out? If you hadn't been so damned helpful, the cops could question Bobby now and find out what he'd done with Sno."

"Tsk tsk, dear, you really are tired. I thought you people were trained not to assign blame. You're talking nonsense. If it weren't for me, Bobby would be back in his own body and many miles away from here and you'd never know he was involved. He'd also be free to hurt other people. As it is, the only problem really is to get him to talk, and that will be easy enough once we find Dico and Puss."

"Then what?"

"We'll have Puss interrogate Bobby," Felicity said, grabbing the toad and tucking it back into one of the pockets in her layers of silver-gray clothing.

"Sure. Why didn't I think of that? You say she speaks to humans; why shouldn't she talk to frogs?"

"Toads, dear. He's a toad. We must allow him the little dignity remaining him. As to your question, it's a mental thing, dear. If you use that kind of magic to open someone up to understanding one other species, they're more receptive to others. I have no doubt that Puss will, if she applies herself, be perfectly able to understand Bobby." She glared meaningfully at the toad. "Nor do I have any doubt whatsoever that she will be able to make Bobby understand that he had bloody well better tell her what he knows."

"Wouldn't it be easier to just switch them back again? You know, make froggy—'scuse me, toady—a normal toad again and make Bobby a normal, human-speaking psycho instead of a large economy-size Kermit?"

"I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. The spell, being a spell, lasts seven years, or until Bobby himself finds the antidote."

"Being kissed by a princess?"

"A little more complicated, but something like that."

"So now what?"

"Why, now we go find Dico and Puss. Come along, on with your coat and off we go," Felicity prodded with nannylike cheery briskness.

"You have any spells or potions for staying awake for someone who's worked all day, has to stay up all night and has to work tomorrow as well?" Rose asked. It wasn't even that she was tired so much as just that the weirdness of the situation was getting to her. The constant feeling that she had to be dreaming made her feel sleepy.

"Certainly," Felicity said. "The espresso machine just finished cycling. Help yourself."

Rose poured herself a cup of the strong, hot brew, took two sips, set it down, pulled on her coat and wrapped her hands around the mug. "Oh, I forgot to say thanks for the book," she said to Felicity as they stepped outside the hotel, bracing themselves against the chill of the night.

"I trust you found it instructive," Felicity said without missing a beat.

"I found it—disturbing," Rose answered truthfully.

"Aha!" Felicity said with a triumphant bark worthy of Holmes himself. "I thought as much."

They walked briskly to Felicity's silverish generic oxygen-emitting automobile and settled themselves inside.

"Where are we going?" Rose asked.

"To find Puss and Dico. I have reason to believe that they'll be in the University District tonight."

"What reason is that?"

"Oh, I did a little networking and had one of our trainees suggest it to Dico. It's a possible way to get him off the streets and into something he can enjoy and make a living doing. But we'll see about that in a bit. You were saying you found the tales in the Grimms' book disturbing. I'd be interested to know why that is. Do you find them too violent?"

"Not really. Kids love that stuff. I know six-year-olds who are crazy about Jason and Freddie Krueger in the slasher movies."

"Is it the sexual content, then? That's what always seems to bother the churchy people."

"No. Kids who haven't been exposed to a lot of the same thing on TV or, God forbid, at home, won't understand it. The kids who've been abused could be helped by finding fairy-tale characters with the same problems. No, actually, what bothers me is something else altogether. You may think I'm being petty."

"Try me."

"It's the absoluteness of everything and all of that judgmental generalization that puts me off. I mean, everybody is either good and beautiful and industrious or lazy and ugly and bad, and people aren't ever mixtures of qualities—good sometimes and not so good at others, lazy when they're doing jobs in which they have no interest, industrious when they're properly motivated and . . ."

"But you're reading them as an adult, with adult perceptions," Felicity pointed out.

"I hated them when I was a kid too! I was seven years old when I got my first book of fairy tales, and it ruined my life. It's taken me years and years to get over it and . . ."

"You don't sound to me as if you're over it yet," Felicity said. "What on earth can have happened to make you feel that way? Or were you just an extremely critical reader as a child?"

"No. My aunt Zelda gave me an illustrated fairy-tale book for my seventh birthday. I had just learned to read and wasn't a very fast reader, and Zelda was trying to encourage me. She never approved of the books written in simple language with big print and not much text that were supposed to start kids out. She was reading The Count of Monte Cristo when she was ten and she thought I should too. Aunt Zelda thought I was a genius. Actually, I wanted someone to read to me about the pictures in the book."

"Why didn't your aunt read with you herself?" Felicity asked.

"She lived in New York and we lived in Idaho," Rose said. "Not much help. I could have used her then. I could have used almost anybody. My folks were splitting up. Dad was still living at the house, but he and Mother weren't talking to each other unless they yelled or talked in those overcivilized brittle little voices that are so full of tension I wanted to throw up."

"It's hardly fair to blame fairy tales for your parents' domestic problems, Rose," Felicity said.

"Oh, I know that, and I guess a lot of my attitude toward them is from my dad. He was a psychologist too, except he was world-famous and highly paid and had umpty-ump degrees. He didn't know much about kids, though. Not that he wasn't correct about everything! He was careful to explain to me that their breakup wasn't my fault and I was not to blame myself. Of course, any time I wanted attention from him, you know how kids will do, breaking something just to get him to fix it, even trying to get him to admire the Valentine I'd made for him in school, he couldn't be bothered. He'd just look away from me like he couldn't stand the sight of me."

"I'm sure he was preoccupied, dear."

"Yeah, you bet he was. With Giselle, his gorgeous blonde secretary who happened to look like all the princesses in the fairy tales."

"Oh, I see. But that's not what they mean. She would have been more like a wicked stepmother, surely?"

Rose shrugged. She didn't know why she was telling all of this to this dingy lady, but Felicity wasn't a client and Rose didn't feel that she had any particular secrets about a situation that was all too common among children these days—it was just that in this instance, the child had been herself and the memories still hurt. But she did believe in being open and honest about her feelings and believed in putting opinions in the context of the experiences that had formed them. It was all very rational when you thought about it. Probably her depth of emotion on the subject of fairy tales was making this whole strange situation with Felicity and toads and talking cats and such more powerful than it really was.

"Anyway, it didn't matter what he said or did because, like kids always tend to do, I knew the divorce was my fault, and he was leaving Mom and me because of something I'd done to make him mad. Then of course, I decided that the birthday party he and Mother gave me was some big symbol that we were a quote unquote real family again. All was forgiven, won't you stay home, Bill Bailey, and like that.

"If I were running things, that's exactly what it would have meant," Felicity said with what amounted to a growl. "I hope it was at least a nice party."

"It was, really. There was a store-bought cake, but it did have my name on it. I got a doll, though not the one I'd asked for, and a lot of clothes from Nana and Papa Samson. It was great. My parents even tried to be nice to each other.

"My father actually held me up to blow out my candles and called me 'Princess' like he had when I was little . . ." Her voice broke, embarrassingly, and she was afraid she was going to start crying, so she babbled blindly on. "I know it sounds dumb, but it was like in one of those stories when where the people get turned to stone and all of a sudden a kiss or a magic word turns them back again. Just that little bit of relaxation on his part, and I felt like he loved me all over again and I thought that's what being a princess was, being special, having your birthday every day. But as soon as the candles were blown out, we ate the cake and ate the ice cream, Mom threw the wrappings from my presents in the trash, it was all over. I wanted it to go on all the rest of the day . . ."

"Well, of course you did! And it bloody well should have."

"But it was like all of a sudden nobody was there, and I went from being a princess back into being a rock again. Finally, I found Dad in his recliner and I tried to climb into his lap with Aunt Zelda's book."

She sat quietly in the dark for a moment, watching the street lamps approach as the car rolled down the highway, the lights of the Space Needle, then the lights of the houses silhouetting the boats and gleaming on the waters of Lake Union. She had all the intellectual explanations of the effects of divorce on kids, knew all the therapeutic answers, but to her embarrassment, talking about that time still hurt. It sounded so dumb when she thought of all the little girls—and boys—who would have been so relieved if only their fathers would leave them alone. She knew, knew, that her reaction was perfectly normal, that the whole Electra thing was a process of childhood, that the children who were abused were in dysfunctional situations, but still . . .

"He wouldn't read to you, I suppose?" Felicity prompted quietly, her low voice softened by the rumbling of the tires and the rush of other cars all around them on the shiny black freeway.

"No. I thought he would for a moment. He took the book out of my hands and looked at the title as if he'd never seen it before, although he'd agreed when I unwrapped it that it was a great gift, then he said in that very logical, detached way he had, 'Rosalie, you're seven years old today. Too old for this make-believe stuff.' And he went back to watching the news."

"Well, it's bloody little wonder he couldn't get along with your mother! I certainly wouldn't have put up with such coldness."

"Oh, but he hadn't always been so cold. There was a time when he loved us and showed it, must have been, or I wouldn't have noticed the difference so much. And Mom had her share of problems too . . .she was drinking by then.

"I remember taking the book in to her that night too, and she already reeked of booze—the smell came out of her skin. She had this sleazy blue bathrobe with molting chenille flowers tufted all over it and she had changed back into it after the party. I can't stand chenille to this day. Before my father left us, she used to be kind of pretty when she fixed up, but later it was like she turned into something out of an old Betty Crawford movie, not one of the early ones, the ones where she was old. She forgot to wash off her makeup and had eyeliner and lipstick smeared on her face and her hair looked dead. When I was little it was sort of red-brown and curly, like mine, but sometime before the divorce she had it bleached and it grew out two colors, both of them ugly.

"But that night, on my birthday, she had been sober all day and had only just started drinking when I went into her room with the book. Except for the robe, she still looked nice and she smelled only slightly of booze and that was mixed with Emeraude perfume, which always made me think of the candy we used to make because it smelled like vanilla.

"I don't think she'd have read to me either, except that I told her I'd asked Father and he wouldn't, and that made her eager to show him up as a better parent, I suppose. She still cared about that, and about me, then. She pulled me up beside her on the bed and opened the book. She read the first story, and that was Cinderella, if I remember right, followed by Rapunzel and the one about the toads and pearls. But when we got to the fourth story Mama threw the book across the room."

"Whatever for?"

Rose shrugged. "Well, think about it. In every single one of those stories, it's the blonde who not only has more fun but is also supposed to be morally superior and probably, these days, they'd say she had greater earning power and was better in bed as well. The mean, lazy, rude sister is dark and therefore ugly. My Dad was Jewish and my mother was half Italian. Neither my mother nor I fit the description of anyone who ever comes out on top in those stories, with the possible exception of the Disney version of 'Snow White,' which was not in my book. In fact, one story, 'The Jew in the Brambles,' is downright anti-Semitic and between that and all of those damned heroines, Hitler could have easily used that book as an argument for blond Aryan superiority."

"That's a very political argument for a seven-year-old girl," Felicity said.

"Oh, that just occurred to me the other night. What struck me at the time was that since neither Mother nor I was beautiful and blonde, we must not be good or hardworking or any of the other things heroines were supposed to be. Maybe that was why Daddy was leaving us for Giselle the Gorgeous. God, I used to hate her guts!"

"Was she very unkind to you, then?"

"Oh, no. She was a living doll. Nice, funny, smart, always trying to do things for me. Much kinder than my Mother, who called her 'that whore' till the day she died. I mean, Giselle was so nice, better to me than my own mother as time went on, and I still couldn't forgive her, still hated her, still imagined gruesome ways to kill her and liked to torment her just to make her life miserable because she couldn't please me. I was a truly rotten kid where she was concerned, just like the ugly stepsisters in the stories."

"You just forget that. The ugly stepsisters hated Cinderella for no reason at all and, to you at least, your stepmother had taken your father away from you. It's not the same thing at all. Don't you know by now that villainesses don't have fairy godmothers?"

"No, really. I was a major brat. I mean, if it hadn't been for Giselle, I'd have had nobody. Father was still cold to me and Mom—well, she was much worse. Classic alcoholic split personality, so unpredictable I could never tell if she was going to cry all over me or slap me. Later, I used to come in the house and stand at the door and wait, trying to sense what kind of mood she'd be in so I'd know how to act to stay out of her way. One day she hauled off and gave me a black eye, which was just the ammunition my father had been waiting for to get me away from her. Not that he wanted me. He just didn't want her to have me—typical there, too, I guess. Fortunately for him and Giselle, they didn't have to put up with me for long."

"Now, now . . ."

"No, really, I was horrible. That's one reason I was attracted to working with disturbed kids."

"You've turned out pretty well, it seems to me."

"Thanks. I don't deserve the credit for it, so much as the school father and Giselle put me in while he went lecturing around the world about his work on Freudian motivations in militaristic government systems. The school was terrific. The women who taught there were what you might call free thinkers, very creative and really committed to getting to know every girl and getting through to her. Knowing who my father was, they nudged me into psych and sociology classes, and I studied hard to see what made my father behave like such a jerk and so—here I am. Of course, I'm not famous or important like my father was and I haven't exactly changed the world, which he did, really, but . . ."

"I'm sure he's very proud of you."

Rose shrugged. "Maybe he would have been. Maybe not. He and Giselle were killed in a skiing accident in Switzerland just before I graduated. I just kept thinking, 'Well, he managed to avoid seeing me do this too.'"

"I rather doubt that was what was in his mind when he died, but I can see how you'd feel that way," Felicity said. Then, to Rose's relief, she turned the topic toward a less personal vein. "As for the stories in Grimm's, you must realize, my dear, that they and those by Hans Christian Andersen, who was a Dane, after all, did come from lands where blondness was the norm and the national stereo-type. I'm sure if they'd been written by a Chinese or an American Indian, they would have been rather different. In fact, they are, if you look at similar folk tales in those cultures."

"Oh, I know that, but . . ."

"Also, they were rewritten and interpreted primarily by the sort of dreamers who imagine that all beauty is contained in facial structure and the lines of the body, vast amounts of evidence to the contrary. I'm sure if you think about it, you'll realize that all of the good and kind and hardworking women you know are not beautiful and all of the beauties are not especially good."

"Well, of course not. Though some of them are," she said, her therapist's objectivity coming back into play.

The car rolled past the University of Washington and turned the corner, and suddenly Rose spotted a familiar figure running down University Avenue and a striped cat with white socks running along beside him. Rose rolled down the window and hollered, "Dico, wait!" as Dico and Puss ducked behind a building and a spray of machine-gun fire spattered the side of the car.

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