Chapter 1
Once the threesome was alone, Baba gave a womanly chuckle and sent her fingertips like a bejeweled comb through her coppery locks. “They’re just coffee friends.And I wouldn’t want to have to arrange any accidents.”
“But they seemed really nice,” Martie sniffed, still putting herself together.
Now running a finger around the rim of her kombucha cup as if it were a Cellini salt cellar, Baba agreed in world-weary consolation, “And that’s all that matters, sweetheart.”
“No, it’s not,” said Bella.
After a protracted drag, Baba said, “But that’s why we’re here, Bella, dear,” her words gently rending the exhaling vapor.
“Because you’re a real friend,” concurred Martie, composed at last.
“And your friendship means so much to me,” said Bella with a patient smile.“As memory serves—”
“Memory?” asked Martie, plainly forgetting.
“You were out the day we learned that, sweetheart,” Baba explained.
“You don’t sound like a good friend, Charlotte.”
“Lily,” said Baba, remembering her dignity inherent as the eldest of this trio (by about five minutes), “you know I don’t like that name.”
“Sorry, Charlotte.”
During this contretemps, Bella had begun drumming her nails on the tabletop (gently, so as not to undo any recent renovations) and was about to interject her own bit of defiant spite when, in neat mechanical symmetry, Baba and Martie, with faces scrubbed of any brusquerie or bad manners, turned as one back to Bella.
Bella made up for lost seconds. "So, I’ve lost my man.”
Like a court stenographer playing prosecuting attorney, Martie held up her handheld and showed Bella desperate text message as evidence.
For her part, Baba said, “In about an hour I’m having a Skype consult with Helsingfors about my hyoid bone...”She gently rubbed her fingers against the undesirable underside of her chin. “…so, who exactly are we discussing?”
“Well,” said Bella flatly, “I don’t exactly remember his name.”
“The man of the hour,” giggled Martie.
“Or the half-hour,” as Baba branded the misplaced beau.
“Come on, I have way better taste than him,” spluttered Bella.(Admittedly, she had not had much of a look at him, so she might not know what she was missing, but right now she would stand on principle.)
“Maybe not,” said Martie. "We haven’t seen him.”
“And I bet we won’t,” Baba surmised, checking the time on her device. “But he’s missing and Bella feels pain.”
This catty chatter forced Bella to take the quick, if not painless, route. She drove in her spike. “He’s one of Dr. Lypotrope’s little helpers. And I’ve lost him.”
As if the Almighty had pulled the stopper at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, all girlish teasing drained away. Martie shut her sugary lips and Baba brought her lethally manicured hand to her own mouth.
“Does Sheena know?” she asked Bella sotto voce.
“No,” said Bella, happy to have some good news to report. She gave very spotty recapitulation of the last six hours or so. “Need I say more?”
“No,” said Baba, pushing away her kombucha as if it were a bad year. “Please, don’t. You know, Bella dear, there are better reasons to face a slow and, I would guess, painful death.”
“But I left I him tied up.”
Not wishing to dwell on this error in judgement, Baba steered the fact-finding back to the facts. "And this place you’re trying to find?”
Martie piped up. “Oh, I heard her. It’s called Orphis.”
“Gold star,” said Baba. “What are you supposed to do at this Orphis?”
“Find a guy—”
“Given your luck with men, dear…But, continue.”
“He’s called Dr. Phineas Fairfax.”
Another change came over Baba and Martie. Their eyes, usually the cynical recipients of so many Belgian cosmetics and regularly-scheduled Botox pokings, became fixed and uncertain and their faces seemed slathered with the cold crème of reality.
Unsure whether to gasp with hope or sigh with despair, Bella said, “So, you know who this joker is? "Another round of uninformative silence commenced, but unwilling to trek across another salt flat of silence, she blurted out, “Say something.”
As if trying to determine which end of the hydrogen bomb was the most touchy, Baba asked, “You say the Queen of the Night looking for Dr. Fairfax?”
“Sheena would like him found. Yes.”
Baba began to ask Martie, “Lily, dear, what do you...?” but Martie was looking over the room with as much discretion as security guard shouting, “Hey, you!” across a parking lot.
Finally, she reported, “I don’t see Sheena.”
Bella said, “Yet.”
“Give her nine hours,” Baba murmured. "I doubt she’s been above-ground since Obama left office, in which case, she’ll have to go through red-light treatment before she could take direct solar radiation.”
“So, we have a little time,” Martie said. "You know, I always thought that Dr. Lypotrope would be happier if she made more friends.”
“But if she had friends,” Baba speculated, “she’d have a fewer people to devour,” then ran her Pedicure-of-the-Year-Awards fingers protectively down her own swan-like neck. "Thank you, Bella dear, for involving us in all this.”
“Yeah,” said Martie, the porcelain sheen of her kewpie-doll face stained with the smear of looming extinction.
Bella counterpointed, “Well, it’s not like you had anything to do tonight.”
“Excuse me,” Martie started, poised to unroll the Wayfair rag-rug of her social calendar, only to remember that she really did not have anything coming up.
Even as she surrendered to the fickle ministrations of friendship, Baba reminded her, “Not only will I miss my chat with Dr. Helsingfors, but I was scheduled for a spell in the sensory deprivation chamber. "Suddenly, she was looking strategically past Bella. One of the wait staff, a young, unspoiled specimen, was moving directly toward their little cabal.
As she closed in, Bella hissed in a quick whisper, “Well, Sheena can deprive you of your senses, too.”
As the young lady arrived, each of them changed her face, to sweetly welcoming (Martie), detached but surprised (Bella), and oblivious and blasé (Baba).The newcomer was female, with light brown skin, dark brown eyes, short black Pixie hair (Joan Jett trying to pull off Audrey Hepburn), and a flat stomach, with a hand-held device slid into one pocket: all in all, Bella thought, a forerunner of the race of the future. Lifting her triplicate pad and poising her ballpoint pen, she said in a sing-song, “Hey, ladies, ’s everything all right today?”
With enough verbal sugar to induce early-onset diabetes, Martie said, “Yes, thank you.” (The toxic dollop came on the “thank you.”)
Bella gave a neutral shrug, but Baba, appearing to notice her at last, said, “We’ve already got what we need,” and took another e-drag from her e-cigarette.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “but there’s no smoking here at Come All.”
“Come again?” Baba asked, expecting the help to chuckle at the pun, all while she contributed another cloudlet of e-smoke to the immediate vicinity.
“You know, could you take that outside? Thanks. That would be amazing.”
Baba gave a theatrical cough. “This,” she explained with a nonchalant wave of the device, “is perfectly clean.”
“Well, I’d call it an addiction.”
“Well, it does keep me thin,” and announced not at all sotto voce to Bella, Martie, and the next table, “It wouldn’t kill some of the staff here to take it up.”
At this aspersion against the obvious success of months of eating clean and vegan, any and all cotton-candy dogma about customer service quickly burned away in dripping strings of black bile. “Listen,” began the server, verbally drawing forth a flaming sword. “I don’t care what you older models think…”
Blowing out another nebula of contempt, Baba said, “I guess we’re everywhere now.”After a smooth scan of the nearby tables and their trust-fund occupants, she asked the upstart, “Is there a back alley we can repair to, doll-face?”
It was the server’s turn to smirk. "It’s a bike path now.”
“Complete with bollards at each end to keep the hybrid cars out?”
“Petroleum is the slow murder of the earth,” prophesied the help.
“Then they can take you to the hospital in a rickshaw, little girl.”
At this point, one side cast aside her triplicate pad like a gauntlet and the other shifted from glamourite to gladiatrix, before each turned herself to the front door and marched through the huddling customers to do battle outside.
