Murder, She Did Read online

  But of course it was not. It was all her handiwork. Nonetheless, because of Dad, Fairyland was getting patchy. When young men were sent to find what lived in the center of the deep dark woods, they had to spend years searching for a big enough stand, and then to squabble over which one of them could claim it.

  Unicorns, no longer able to hide or to wait for a virgin to spot them, were doing dray-work.

  And dare I mention what became of the poor elves and gremlins and trolls and fairies? Deep, dark woods were all they knew, and once displaced, left homeless, you found them sitting on the sidewalks holding awkwardly printed pleas. A once proud people, begging. It’s heartbreaking. The only time Dad ever raised his voice to us was after Flora and I picketed his logging firm.

  Dad thought Agnesa still more wonderful because she didn’t join us on the picket line. She said she was too fragile. Besides, she never joined anybody, anywhere. She was indolent and self-centered, and according to her, nobody was good enough for her. Besides, she would never question the source of the gold that maintained her lifestyle. And quite a style it was.

  She invented a self that was so sensitive that only the softest fabrics, the sweetest scents, the most exotic ornaments were bearable for her fair skin and delicate sensibilities. Agnesa was an expensive piece of work, but everybody wanted to please her if only to avoid open warfare, for when Sis wasn’t feeling properly and sufficiently attended to, the “frail” girl bellowed and trumpeted with rage. She wasn’t above throwing (other people’s) things or slapping and clawing, if she thought that would speed up getting what she wanted. A fishwife, a banshee, a shrew—whatever red-faced, howling, foul-mouthed image you favor. That was the baby of our family. Your heroine.

  Of course, when we speak of her profound flaws and deformities, we’re not talking externals. Those, her face and figure, were outstanding, if predictable, even stereotypical. Hair like spun gold, sapphire eyes, a perfect mouth and nose, long lashes, skin like—you know the rest. Plus a tidy body. All of which items were chemically, surgically or cosmetically enhanced. Silicone up top, liposuction down below (we have all of it, too, you know. Costs a fortune. Only difference is it’s administered without anesthesia in one second by a witch). Agnesa was the first person in the entire Kingdom of Fairyland to have a personal trainer. Outside, she was sheer perfection. If you like that prefabricated type, of course. It wasn’t until she considered competing in the Miss Parallel Universe Contest (something she didn’t get to do, thanks to the haste with which Prince Charming rushed into marriage) that she assembled the sanitation team. One of them must have clued her in to the idea that civility, even charm, could pay off, be worth the effort.

  Although she never included her family in the exercise of same, I still watched with wonderment as she practiced image improvement with the determination she used to work on her waistline and hips with the trainer. I caught her practicing smiles and working with a coach to modulate her voice so that it “sparkled” and “pleased.” And of course she succeeded. She became a professional twinkler. She dazzled and pleased like mad—when she wanted to, which was only when a person could be of use to her. When she didn’t consider a person relevant to her long-term plans, she shut off the power, as if her personality was a great fountain in the sunlight that could be stopped with the flick of a switch, and as if she needed to conserve the water. Within a second, there was nothing left but surly Agnesa, screaming at a maid who hadn’t picked up the clothing she’d just that second dropped.

  None of which is to imply that I felt particularly sorry for Charming, when he mistook a professional cutie for a real human being. Frankly, the man’s values were so warped he deserved whatever he got. Who uses a few dances as the basis of a betrothal? The invitations went out to every beautiful young girl in the Kingdom—and that in itself caused a lot of heartache to those who didn’t make the cut. But “beautiful” and “young” were it. End of qualifications. What ever happened to brains or kindness or wisdom or talent? Charming’s father picked his mother, a former showgirl and great dancer, via the same good ol’ have-a-ball method, and frankly, the Prince was a prime example of what happens when youth and beauty are the sole breeding requisites. Charming’s bulb was dim. His drawbridge ended a few feet short of the moat, if you catch my drift. And I say this not out of sour grapes—Flora and I were invited, as you know. We qualified as Queenly material.

  But what’s to become of a Kingdom when all the Queen needs is looks, the ability to follow klutzy Charming (that’s what we called him in grade school) without being tromped by him while you waltzed?

  Or maybe it had nothing to do with dancing, just with feet. If you ask me, he didn’t give a hoot about any of the above. What turned him on was feet. The man was a mentally deficient foot fetishist. A real catch, right? Don’t believe me? Consider, please, the lengths he went to, the community resources he employed in search of the foot that fit that shoe. Which brings us to the heart of the story. The shoe. Of course it wasn’t a glass slipper! Please! Use your common sense. Even Fairylanders like a bit of logic. I ask you, could a girl dance with anyone if she couldn’t bend her foot without shattering her shoe and lacerating herself? The same goes for the golden variation in other stories—you want a future princess to stomp around like one of your stiff-footed robots in shoes that don’t give? To suggest, as still others do, that the word mistranslated as glass really meant fur is to suggest that we are all idiots here. Fur shoes are for snow. They make the wearer look like a hairy forest creature—the last image Miss Fragility dreamed of projecting! And did you ever think of how hot such slippers would be, how sweaty-footed a woman would be at a ball held in mid-autumn when the nights were soft enough to hold an enormous party outside? Do you think the prince would have cherished such a soggy shoe? Would have searched for its wearer?

  Those slippers were silver threads encrusted with diamonds. You should have heard the carrying on after Agnesa became convinced she needed them. It all had to do with the PR guy’s thing about the need to sparkle but it also had to do with research. Agnesa knew a thing or two about Charming’s quirks and that made drop-dead shoes a necessity. How else would she—literally—stand out in a mass of beautiful women? The part of her sales pitch that convinced Dad was that diamonds were recyclable, and that they’d be worn over and over by all of us and earn their purchase.

  Do you wonder, then, that we were distraught when she left half our investment and her fashion statement behind her at a party? We’re talking considerable cash outlay here to coat her tootsies because her feet weren’t nearly as tiny as the spin docs made them out to be. We’re talking lots of diamonds. Flora and my shoes were linen, dyed to match our gowns. Not that we complained. Agnesa was the designated glitteree. Dad, whose resources were being drained by his younger daughter, tried to believe in the importance of the shoes. After all, if his daughter married into the royal family, it would be good for business, Agnesa said. He was heavily in debt because of the diamond-crusted slippers, so he figured that maybe they could also help him out of it.

  And then, after all that, Agnesa forgot she was wearing a goodly portion of the family capital on her feet. Are we to pretend that a woman running on one high heel and one foot isn’t aware of the missing shoe? Of course she knew she’d left it. And what dire event do you think would have happened if she’d turned around long enough to put the shoe back on? Nothing, that’s what. But leaving it behind and rushing off into the night was dramatic, eye-catching, headline-grabbing and enough to drive a fellow with a thing for feet mad with desire. All part of her plan.

  Midnight was Dad’s curfew, you see, not some imaginary Godmother’s. It was everybody’s curfew in the kingdom, an understood thing, the time decent girls went home. Only some of us didn’t make a grand fuss about it, and prepared to leave well ahead of time. Some of us weren’t so single-mindedly intent on snagging the stupid Charming as to waltz on beyond the last song until the Great Clock chimed. And even so, we all knew that Dad would
do no more than express sorrow and disappointment if we arrived home past his deadline.

  So the deliberately dropped and ignored slipper was like a smack in the face to the rest of us. I think she meant it to be just that.

  But by the time the story of the shoe and the royal search hit the news next morning, the footwear had undergone heavy-duty revisions. To our amazement, the slipper was described as glass. Diamond footwear was too elitist, the spin docs had decided. The people wouldn’t like it. The people liked humility, liked luck to be a surprise to its recipients. It wasn’t attractive to have planned and schemed and been given everything in order to get what you wanted. The people had to like her or they wouldn’t be contented to remain impoverished villagers vicariously enjoying the glories of her ascendancy.

  So glass it became.

  And worse. A lumber executive was neither royalty nor the deserving hardworking poor. Not sexy, the PR lady said. So out with that. Since Dad couldn’t suddenly acquire a title and be promoted, he was demoted to the more acceptable hardworking poor. A woodchopper. And a woodchopper couldn’t buy his daughter gowns of gold and slippers of diamonds—or even glass. Hence, the invention of The Fairy Godmother as magical provider. Dad, who was still paying for the diamonds in monthly installments plus plenty of interest, found this insulting. He even tried to have his balance transferred to the Fairy Godmother, but the credit company couldn’t find her address.

  Our house was a problem. They couldn’t shrink it down to the cottage they’d have preferred, so they did the next best thing and turned Agnesa into the abused, misused and pitiable resident of the otherwise comfy household.

  “Ella-by-the-fire,” Dad used to gently chide her when she indolently lolled by it, preening and lording it over us. He made the mistake of mentioning the phrase to a reporter, and damned if Agnesa, who was also there, along with her spin docs, didn’t immediately twist the meaning of what he’d said. “Ella-by-the-cinders,” she corrected the news copy to say. “Cinder Ella.” And she gave the reporters a wan, sad but forgiving smile I’d seen her practice in front of the hall mirror.

  The populace adored her. If Cinderella could literally rise from the ashes like a phoenix and become a Princess, then they could, too. They accepted every one of her lies, including the business about the pumpkin turning into a chariot! Tell a big enough lie and tell it often, and it’ll be believed. It’s true in every galaxy. I mean this one defied all common and uncommon sense—mice into horses? Lizards as footmen? Give me a break! But the headlines said it was so, the TV shows insisted it was true—and ultimately, it was. Sis even pointed at a half-rotted pumpkin she insisted was the actual one used that enchanted night. Then she had it cast in gold. Official “Cinderella’s Pumpkin” charms became a fad, and she got a percentage of each sale.

  We knew it was a pack of lies, but we were too trusting, too slow on the uptake. It took us much too long to catch on to the meaning of her maneuvers, to comprehend what her master plan meant to us.

  Very soon—the engagement was announced as soon as the shoe fit, and they married a few weeks later—little Agnesa was no longer a Princess in training, but the real thing. She took her diamond slippers with her, insisting they were now an “historic artifact.” I have no idea what that could mean. It’s a foreign term. We don’t have history. It’s pretty much always now here, except for the “once upon a time,” which means anytime not exactly now, which is what all time becomes by the time you mention it. What I did understand was that she took the diamonds, all that we had left.

  We lived quietly, almost as humbly as our sister’s PR men would have had people believe, although not by choice. Things kept going downhill for Dad, and Agnesa’s ascendancy to the throne did not increase his business. The Princess said it “wouldn’t look good” (to whom? This is an absolute monarchy) if Charming pushed business in Dad’s direction.

  And it was worse than that, because as Cinderella gave more and more interviews, her horrible lies about her past ruined whatever was left of our reputations. Dad’s ethics were called into question and his business fell off even more. Mother noticed an absence of callers and invitations and Flora’s and my social life dwindled to nothingness. Men we’d been seeing backed off and disappeared. People were afraid to associate with us, to be tarred by the same brush. Our house became a target for vandals. Paint was tossed onto it, and windows broken by rocks, and nobody cared.

  We weren’t even invited to the christenings when each of the two royal sons were born. I actually thought of hiring a woman who lived deep in one of the only surviving woods. She was known for the excellence and efficiency of her curses. But she was terribly expensive and we had no money. Besides, I didn’t want to sink to that level.

  Our situation became intolerable. We thought of leaving, crossing the Sea of No End and braving dragons and whirlwinds and the edge of everything simply to get away. But I hated giving up without trying a different route first, a last ditch attempt to regain the dignity and reputation that was rightfully ours.

  I took the first steps in suing the Princess formerly known as Agnesa for libel and slander.

  Now I must say that as time had gone on, although the people of Charming’s Kingdom adored their fair Queen, Charming himself seemed less entranced with every passing day. I’m not sure what precisely provoked it—the new crop of young and beautiful girls, Ella’s ever-more-expensive wardrobe, including her fondness now for gem-studded slippers, her mean-spiritedness, which rumor has slipping out more every day, or perhaps it was that talk of her dalliances with a wandering minstrel in a vacant spinning room.

  Or maybe Charming had found a fabulous new foot. In any case, the rumbles and creaks of a marriage with dry rot were increasingly heard.

  Agnesa was sufficiently distressed to pay her parents her first visit in years. She didn’t precisely ask for advice or help, but she did say, with a great show of sniffles, that she and Charming were having difficulties, that she feared he had strayed and that she didn’t know what to do about it all, how to be a happy girl again. “Of course,” she said, “I should be glad I’m safe economically. Royal families stay together. The mother of the future King is not to be tossed aside.”

  Well, we hadn’t had a whole lot to do, impoverished and friendless as we were, so we’d been watching your planet’s “soap stories,” I think you call them—or is the term “the news”?—a whole lot more than was healthy. But they’d taught us a great deal, so that I was able to explain that indeed, Princesses, even those who were the mother of future Kings, did get put aside and did lose their royal status. In fact, it seemed almost as much of a fad on earth as the pumpkin necklaces were in our neck of the universe.

  “Oh, that’s on earth,” HRH Cinderella said. “Who cares what those dullards do?”

  I thought she should care. “You’re right,” I said. “We don’t divorce Here. Our ways of removing someone wearisome are more creative. The undesired—that’d be you, Sis,” I went on, “could be turned to stone, or have toads come out of your mouth when you spoke, or turned into a warty crone or a flounder. Or sent to wander as a beggar for a thousand years. Or—well, why go on? We are an imaginative people, so there’s an infinite list of possibilities, all much more fun than earth’s dry way of dividing up assets and making settlements and such.”

  I must confess, I did get a nasty pleasure out of seeing Agnesa face a future as bleak and destroyed as the one she’d crafted for us.

  For reasons of her own, Flora found that moment of silence an apt time to inform our younger sister of the lawsuit I had initiated against her. Flora spoke calmly, but made it clear that all the soon-to-be former Princess’ dirty secrets and dreadful lies were about to be exposed. Maybe even photos of her pre-surgery self. Maybe enough ammunition to make the Prince put her under the worst spell ever devised. Flora commented further on how interesting it would be when we ultimately were all equals once again.

  When Agnesa left, she was pale with shock. For once, Cindere
lla had listened to what we said. Perhaps she’d even cared.

  Now that was the part of the story you thought you knew, but didn’t. This is the part of the story you’ve never heard. But it’s all true. It’s what happened after happily ever.

  I should have realized that Agnesa’s cunning and my naïveté would make me a loser in any encounter, but I didn’t think twice when shortly after the day at our house, she sent a messenger requesting that I come to the palace so that we could “talk our problems through.” She said she had a solution to all our woes.

  Filled with images of familial peace at last, daring even to daydream about a contrite Princess admitting to the world that she had fabricated an oppressed past, a Princess newly dedicated to protecting her family and introducing her kind and generous and upright family—to her subjects, I set out for the Palace in the family carriage, the one she claimed had sprung from a pumpkin shell. I was admittedly eager to see the royal dwelling, the parts of the castle which tours didn’t include, and to meet my nephews. I made my heart happy and expectant, made my eyes look toward the future rather than give in to the bitterness that wondered why it had taken years to gain entry to my own sister’s world.