When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae (2 page)

Not a soul in sight.

To the south—the visibility was not so good. Forest. Owned by the posted sign person, presumably. She twisted her neck to look. Mass of tree trunks, gray and purple and algae-green.

Nothing else. Not even a chickadee.

The dog had finished sniffing and now sat, a perfect tucked sit at the base of the tree.

He didn’t look like he was planning to go anywhere, soon.

Libby took a deep breath. She had only one choice. She needed to reach out to the creature. Negotiate a settlement.

“Hey, Mister. Doggy. Doggy, doggy.”

Ah, progress. This time he didn’t bark. Just looked up at her, ears perked forward. And his brow wasn’t quite as furled.

“What’s your name? Huh? King? Fido? Killer?”

He twitched an eyebrow.

Libby got another idea.

“Go HOME. You! Go home! Right now!”

WOOF!

Epic fail. Not only did he respond with masterful defiance, he didn’t even get up to say it.

Libby sighed and shifted her weight. Something pulled her hair and when she reached up to loosen it she discovered a clump was caught in a dollop of pine pitch oozing from the tree trunk. Great. Also her hands were stiffening from the cold. She pulled her head away from the tree trunk to free her hair, and touched the place that had gotten stuck. Her fingers came away tacky and fragrant with pitch.

“Look, I gotta get down. Are you going to let me down?”

He didn’t look at her this time. Getting used to her voice. As long as she didn’t, you know, try to order him around.

She sighed again.

“By the way, is it you who put up the posted signs?”

No answer.

She was starting to lose her patience and, logical next step, felt the tears coming on. It’s not like she hadn’t been under a bit of stress lately. But then she happened to scan the surrounding countryside again—and happy day. Someone was coming. Well, someone was within earshot, anyway. Standing on the other side of the stone wall to the east, a man, motionless in the trees.

“Hey!” she yelled. “Hey!”

WOOF.

“Is this your dog? Come and get your dog!”

Guy didn’t move.

Libby stared. Was he deaf?

“HEY!” She waved maniacally with one hand, gripping the tree trunk with the other. “HEY, I need some HELP here!”

He was looking at her. No question about it. Why wasn’t he coming over?

Maybe this wasn’t his dog. Good chance. Lots of dogs wandering around on their own, once you get out into the country. Still, that didn’t explain why he wasn’t coming to the aid of a damsel in distress. Only then it struck her. Of course. This was the hostile sign poster. And what better way to up the hostility ante than leave her stranded, treed by a humongous dog?

No more Ms. Nice Neighbor. Libby lost it. Began swearing at the top of her lungs.

“Gahdammit!!! Get over here and get me the hell down!”

He was too far away for Libby to tell if he was laughing. But there was something on his face when he got closer, some shred of a smirk, or maybe it was just that his lack of expression was a little too perfect, that raised her suspicions.

Yeah. She was pretty sure he had been. Laughing. On the inside, anyway. Laughing his butt off.

3

“’Mere, Bo.”

So. It
was
his dog.

Libby waited until the man had a firm grip on the dog’s collar before she climbed down.

“He should be leashed.” She was irritated and sounded it.

The man didn’t let her pique perturb him. “Bo won’t hurt you if you haven’t done anything wrong.”

Libby rolled her eyes. When you have a sciences background, few things are more exasperating than people who project human thinking processes onto animals. “He’s a dog,” she said flatly. “He’s incapable of distinguishing ‘right’ from ‘wrong.’”

Something flicked over the man’s face, but too quickly for her to read it.

“Humans, on the other hand,” she continued, “do know right from wrong, and it’s most definitely wrong to let your dog terrorize people.”

He let the dog go.

Libby braced herself, but this time she stood her ground. Partly for practical reasons—she didn’t have a big enough head start to get back up the tree. There was also the little matter of her dignity. Scrambling up a tree while you’re alone is one thing. No way was she going to let this man witness a repeat at close range.

Bo loped up to her and pushed his muzzle into her hand.

“This changes nothing,” she said, pulling her hand back. “Are you the person who’s been hanging these posted signs?”

“Are you the person who’s been pulling down these posted signs?” He snapped his fingers, and Bo returned to him. Libby pushed aside a twinge of guilt. She liked dogs, she could have petted the dog. It wasn’t Bo’s fault. It was this rude person, here—this person who was, apparently, also her neighbor.

“You can’t post signs on someone else’s property.” She gestured at the pine tree in which she’d recently taken refuge. “This tree is on my side of the line. You’ve no business nailing things to it.”

“You might have said something to me, rather than just yank them all down,” he said. “I’m right next door.”

Next door. Next door, country style.

“The place with the long driveway? How was I supposed to know that? I couldn’t even read your signature; your handwriting happens to be appalling. And anyway, I left you a note.”

“A note?”

“I left a note on top of the signs. The first time I took them down.”

“You talking about that piece of cardboard? That sat outside for a week in the rain? If there was a note on that, it was long gone by the time I saw it, lady.”

Lady. “Bet it was easier to read than your handwriting,” Libby muttered.

He didn’t answer. An impasse. She shivered. The drizzle had switched to light rain and if she’d missed her gloves and her hat before, she missed them ten times more now. Still. They’d gotten this far, and Libby wasn’t about to let her new life there get off to a wrong start. “Look.” She made firm eye contact again. “You are in the wrong here. You’re posting ‘no trespassing’ signs, but the only one trespassing is you.”

His face was unreadable. Obviously a man who didn’t like people very much.

“All you had to do was stop by and ask me to move them. That’s what neighbors do.”

Libby had no answer to that one. Well. She had an answer. But it would have meant admitting something she wasn’t going to admit. Not out loud. That, being familiar with the fate of Little Red Riding Hood, she wasn’t too keen on venturing into the dark, dark forest on her own. Even if this wolf was, most likely, just a garden variety misanthrope woodchuck. Living in a shack with his collection of torn tee shirts and piles of Genny empties and baby pot plants growing in drywall buckets. Harmless enough if you overlook his vast assortment of firearms. Yeah. Libby knew the type.

She turned toward her house. “Look. I’m cold. Please just move the signs onto your property. If you really think you need them.”

Enough of this.

But then Bo’s muzzle touched her hand again, and suddenly she felt the man’s Carhartt drop over her shoulders.

“Hey. I didn’t—”

“Your lips are blue.”

“I don’t—”

“I’ll pick it up in fifteen minutes.”

He snapped his fingers for Bo.

She decided not to argue. It seemed wisest to just accept the coat. She really wanted this encounter to be over, and besides, the warmth had already gentled her shivering.

On the other hand, speaking of misanthropes, she didn’t really want to have to talk to the guy again, either. So, on the spot, she decided it would be inconvenient for her to be home in fifteen minutes for coat pick-up time. “Fine. But I have to be somewhere in . . . a little while. I’ll leave the coat on my doorknob.”

The man nodded, pulled a screwdriver from his pocket, and waved it at her to make sure she saw it. Then he turned to the sign on the pine tree.

So he’d conceded defeat on the sign argument. He was going to take them down. Or move them anyway.

When Libby got far enough away that he wouldn’t see, she thrust her arms through the jacket’s sleeves so she could get her stiffened hands into its pockets.

♦ ♦ ♦

Libby’s side door was locked and she hadn’t brought a key with her, so she circled round to go in the front.

There was a battered old Ford Escort parked in her driveway.

Libby didn’t own a battered old Ford Escort. She drove a not-so-battered old Toyota Corolla.

The front door on the driver’s side of the Escort flew open, and a jeans-and-tee shirt-clad woman skipped up toward her. “Auntie Em! Auntie Em! I’m home, Auntie Em!”

“Maisey?”

The teenager grabbed Libby in a hug. “Wow, I bummed when I knocked and you weren’t home! I fit all my stuff in my car, do you believe it? Did you get my message? Did you talk to Mom? What’s with that jacket? What happened to your hair?”

“What? What message?”

“Don’t you answer your cell phone?”

Uh oh. Truth was, Libby had been leaving her cell phone turned off. On purpose. She had no land line phone right now, being between houses. And it had been nice, skulking along beneath the radar.

Only now she was getting the sinking feeling that her skulking had backfired.

“How does Paul reach you, if he can’t get you on your cell?” Maisey hadn’t let up her string of questions.

“I call him.” No business of hers that sometimes Libby took little breaks from Paul. “What are you doing here?”

“You’ve got room, right?” Her eyes were on the house, now, sizing it up. Farmhouse, circa 1870, obviously at least three or four bedrooms.

“Oh no. Nobody said anything to me about you moving in.”

“I gotta. Mom’s gone to Hawaii. And we did tell you, only you weren’t picking up.”

Libby groaned. “Hawaii?”

“Uh huh. With her new boy toy.”

Libby groaned again.

“Lemme get my stuff,” Maisey was calling over her shoulder.

Libby looked up at her new house. It was shrinking. Right there before her eyes.

♦ ♦ ♦

Libby didn’t know what her niece was doing but it sounded like she was throwing sneakers onto her bedroom floor from somewhere up high. Top of a ladder, maybe.

Moving in.

Libby looked up at the ceiling toward the noise, then turned her attention back to her cell phone, punching in the code that would let her retrieve her messages.

Eight of them.

Five from her sister. They all pretty much repeated themselves, so she stopped listening to them all the way through after #2. Works of art, really. Breathtaking blend of wheedling, carelessness, and whining, with an occasional shot of blatantly insincere concern for Libby’s state of mind thrown in. It was Libby, after all, who had found herself suddenly divorced, out of a job, and about-to-be homeless. But her sister had always been indifferent about Libby’s marriage. Maybe she assumed Libby could take anything. Which would be partly Libby’s fault. For cultivating an image of firm stability. But does that absolve the rest of her family from indulging in a bit of empathy from time to time?

Hardly.

Extracting actual information from the messages, on the other hand, wasn’t so easy. Maisey had related pretty much everything that the messages did. Gina was moving to Hawaii. Was already there, by now. She had a new boyfriend who was planning some sort of business venture. A bit about how sexy the new boyfriend was, something about him being a Tantric sex coach. File that under “too much information.” And then, of course, the admonition that Libby babysit Maisey.

She didn’t call it babysitting, of course. Maisey was nineteen.

One last message from Maisey, who prattled on every bit as goofily as her mother, letting Libby know she was going to be here yesterday. Well, Maise, you hit your target within 24 hours, not bad.

Message #3 was from Paul, left last Thursday. His voice was a rock of calm in the swirling chaos of her sister’s nutsiness. “Hey, babe. Guess you have your phone off. I’ll stop by the house at 5:45.”

He meant the house in Pittsford. While Libby was still sleeping there, he’d always come by at 5:45, hitting that target within five minutes plus or minus, depending on traffic. And then he’d take Libby out to eat, him driving, either to a restaurant or his place. They never ate at the Pittsford house. Paul was like that, about the Pittsford house. “Wallace’s territory,” he said. And so it was, even though Wallace had long since moved out.

Libby walked upstairs. And found Maisey in the wrong room—the one Libby was planning to turn into her office.

She braced herself against the door frame and took a deep breath. “Maisey, you’re in the wrong room. I said the bedroom on the left.”

“But . . . I like this room. And it was empty.”