A perky reporter appeared on the screen in front of what looked like a very large but strangely rural airfield.
“We’re here in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, home of the Experimental Aircraft Association Airfield and Museum, which every August becomes the busiest airport in the world during the annual EAA Fly-In,” she was chirping. “So why are we here in June? Because the EAA is home to many vintage aircraft including, over there on the flight line about a hundred yards behind me, a very early Sikorsky Whirly-Bird, one of the first choppers to be used by the U.S. military. Don’t worry, we’re about to get a closer look. Word is that producer Aaron Eastman has more than a cameo role for this baby in mind in his current incubating pet project about the Berlin airlift, Every Sixteen Minutes. Aaron is joining us—”
Aaron had in fact moved into the frame, but Rep scarcely noticed. Distracting him was a bright orange and black fireball that suddenly engulfed the Sikorsky chopper. The accompanying explosion drowned out several of Ms. Goldman’s next words, and ET!’s censor had by now taken care of several more.
“Holy BLEEP what the BLEEP is this BLEEP?” she was shrieking—not at all perkily—by the time she was audible again. She was still shrieking, from pretty much a prone position, when ET! cut the tape and went back to the anchor.
In the last half-second before he started moving very fast, Rep simultaneously heard something about PETN and finished reading Buchanan’s e-mail.
He clicked off the television. Charlotte Buchanan is supposed to be trapped in Indianapolis ’til Tuesday! What’s with the weekend jetset number? Clumsy with haste, he fumbled once before clicking FILE and pointing his mouse at EXIT AND LOG OFF. NO! I have to disconnect the phone line first! He brought up the icon of two computers talking to each other and clicked DISCONNECT. PETN in Oshkosh! How far is Oshkosh from Kohler? Back to FILE, back to EXIT AND LOG OFF. Where’s Melissa? Why does LOG OFF take so bloody long? Where did ‘where’s Melissa?’ come from, Melissa’s in the shower. Click on SHUT DOWN THE COMPUTER. Sit and wait fretfully while his laptop took its time obeying the command, like a truculent toddler reluctant to go to bed. PLEASE WAIT WHILE THE COMPUTER SHUTS DOWN. Like I have a choice.
Finally a blessedly blank screen. Shut the computer. Unplug the computer. Detach the modem cord. Roll them up any which way. Do I have the room key? Who cares? Scoot toward the door cradling legal papers and miscellaneous electronics, like a high-tech vagabond. Am I forgetting anything? No. YES! My phone! Retrace his steps. Stuff the phone and charging cord into the ungainly bundle under his arm.
Out of the room at last. Wait, should I go back and try Melissa one more time? No, I’ll call her from the road, if I still have enough juice on this thing. Elevator might take forever, hoofing it down the stairs instead. Front desk, lobby empty except for a couple of weary stewardesses and one other guy, presumably a passenger on whatever flight they’d serviced.
“Change of plans,” Rep stammered to a desk clerk who couldn’t have cared less. “Checking out of two-oh-nine.”
He scribbled his name across the bill and, when the clerk fumbled while separating copies, impatiently took the thing from the man’s hands and ripped the leaves apart himself. Then he hurried out of the Day’s Inn and started stumbling toward Budget Rent-a-Car. Across dark pavement, gravel, verge, mud, and all but invisible car bumps, it seemed a lot longer than a hundred yards. While the clerk waited for an antique printer to spew out his rental contract, Rep turned his phone on to try Melissa again.
He saw in the tiny screen’s green glow that he had a voice-mail message. He decided to check that first. BLIP-TALK. The message was from hours ago.
“Rep, this is Melissa. I think you were right about Charlotte and I was wrong. We need to talk right away. Call me as soon—”
The voice stopped. The screen went blank. His battery was dead.
“All right,” the clerk said. “Initial here, here, here, here, and here, and sign here and here. That’s one mid-size sedan, slot B-four. Will you be needing anything else?”
“Yes,” Rep said. “A pay phone. And directions—” He stopped himself before he could say “directions to Oshkosh, Wisconsin,” amending this to “and Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois highway maps.”
Clutching maps, now, along with everything else, he waddled toward the pay phone that the clerk pointed out in the corner. He called home and got the answering machine again. His wife liked long showers, but not this long. Hammering in his head as he made his way toward slot B-4 was Where’s Melissa?
Chapter 12
Melissa figured she might as well have a neon sign on her back flashing FAKE when she checked into the Doubletree Suites on Wabash Street in Chicago around eleven Friday night. Her wardrobe didn’t include the kind of exotica that she assumed would be de rigeur in the arcane demimonde she was about to enter. Not a single leather teddy, latex camisole, or black rubber hood to her name. Her most promising improvisational effort involved a suede vest with cross-bodice laces over a dark green satin blouse, but she concluded sadly that looking like a game show host in drag wouldn’t fool anyone at the Chicagoland Scene Party. She ended up in an eggshell blouse and basic black skirt. It struck her as something you’d wear to teach phonics to the Brady Bunch, but it was the best she could do.
The Doubletree’s lobby directory was discreetly silent about the Chicagoland Scene Party. This nonplussed Melissa, who wasn’t sure she could get up the nerve to ask the desk clerk where in the Pentagon-sized hotel she should go to find the event. As it turned out she didn’t have to.
“There is a special, limited-interest, invitation-only event being held in the southeast corner of the second floor,” he said with studied neutrality after handing her a cardboard folder with a plastic key-card inside. “If you aren’t pre-registered for it, you may find it more convenient to avoid that area.”
“Um, whereabouts in the southeast corner?” Melissa asked.
“The Wilmot Proviso Salon and the Ostend Manifesto Ballroom,” he answered, explaining further that naming function rooms after nineteenth-century documents generated during the debate over slavery reflected the Doubletree’s commitment to promoting education in American history.
After stashing her modest luggage in her room and trying (again) without success (again) to reach Rep on his digital phone, Melissa went down to the second floor for what she expected to be a low-key, risk-free reconnaissance. Whatever the Scene Party had on its schedule for tonight must surely be over by now, she reasoned. She could get the lay of the land, find her bearings, and then count on a good night’s sleep to give her the courage for a full-scale assault Saturday morning.
This Doubletree didn’t have corners, strictly speaking, and Melissa didn’t have a compass, so it took a long and circuitous walk to bring her to the vicinity of the Wilmot Proviso Salon. She realized she was finally there when she spotted a long, skirted table with a banner that read “STOP Here for CSP Registration” hanging from the curtain behind it. An oversized rendering of an open hand with black fingers and a bright-red palm surrounded by throb marks emphasized the verb.
Melissa hesitated. It didn’t look—or sound—as if the night’s events were over after all.
Three people waited behind the table. The nearest was a woman who leaned over it while she talked with her two seated colleagues. She looked eight to ten years older than Melissa. Her full-skirted, navy blue dress seemed at least as matronly and plain vanilla as Melissa’s outfit. What Melissa could see of the clothes worn by the other two attendants seemed equally unremarkable. So far this was about as exotic as an assistant librarians’ convention—and Melissa was still scared out of her wits. The leaning woman turned toward Melissa with a warily curious smile.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Er, yeah, I guess,” Melissa said. Freezing for an awful moment, she took a breath and decided to plunge ahead. “I guess I need to register, don’t I?”
“Name?” the woman asked politely,
moving to seat herself behind two low-cut cardboard boxes marked A-L and M-Z respectively.
“Pennywor—” Melissa began before she remembered her assumed identity and caught herself. “Er, that is, Aunt Stern.”
“Oh, I like that,” the woman said. “Yes, here you are. You’re a top, I’m guessing.”
Melissa guessed the same thing. The woman pulled out a completed form and a plastic-encased, pin-on name tag. Next to AUNT STERN on the name tag she put a sticker that matched the throbbing hand from the registration banner. As soon as Melissa had affixed the name tag, the woman held out her hand.
“I’m Margaret Keane,” she said, pronouncing the name “cane.” “Welcome to the Chicagoland Scene Party.”
“Thank you,” Melissa said, shyly shaking the proffered hand.
“And since you clearly are a woman and have now registered, you’re entitled to a seventy percent rebate on your fee. May I just have your Mastercard for a moment so I can do an imprint on the credit voucher?”
Only for a second or so did Melissa consider the possibility of shrugging off $210 so that she wouldn’t have to produce a credit card with MELISSA PENNYWORTH stamped on it. Whatever credibility she had—and she didn’t think she had much—would evaporate instantly if she pulled a stunt like that. Besides, she’d already given them her credit card number and the name that went with it over the computer. She produced the requested piece of plastic, followed by a driver’s license with her photograph. A minute later she got them back with a customer copy of a credit slip, as if she’d just returned a Coach handbag to Marshall Field’s.
“Now,” Keane said. “You seem a bit new to our little group. Would you like me to show you around a bit while you get your feet wet?”
“That would be wonderful,” Melissa said, heartily meaning every syllable.
“Excellent,” Keane said. “Why don’t we start in the dealer room?”
Melissa followed her new-found guide through the Freeport Doctrine Foyer into the Wilmot Proviso Salon. Still half expecting something out of Fellini, Melissa was again surprised to find ordinary looking people milling about in dress no more unconventional in general than that sported at the typical Reed University Faculty Tea—rather less so, if anything. There were, to be sure, a few nurses in starched, white uniforms, a pre-Vatican nun or two, and one tall, severe lady who looked like Mary Poppins in need of Preparation H. On the whole, though, the women strolling along the aisles between the dealers’ booths looked pretty much like Melissa; and the men looked like—well, like Rep would probably have looked if he’d been here.
For a gut-chilling moment, in fact, Melissa wondered if Rep actually were here. A glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye made her think of him, and she asked herself if he’d come here after all; if that explained the “flight delay” he’d reported this afternoon, and her inability to reach him since; if he’d been lying to her so that he could sneak off to this thing. A closer look erased this suspicion, for the face she’d spotted belonged to a woman of stately gravitas, near or past fifty, in a goldenrod blouse and midnight blue skirt that might have dressed a British prison matron or an American cub scout den mother.
The wares offered by the dealers, on the other hand, did markedly distinguish the Chicagoland Scene Party from your run-of-the-mill convention of hardware distributors or systems management executives. They offered videos—Training Mark and Lisa and The Best of British Spanking, Vols. I to VI were some of the titles that Melissa noticed; books like The Compleat Spanker and Disciplined Husbands, Satisfied Wives; and pamphlets addressing such catchy topics as The Spencer Spanking Plan, How to Keep a Permanent Record, The Definitive List of Spanking Scenes in Movies and Television, and Friday Night Conduct and Deportment Review. Audiotapes that Melissa saw in passing promised Interview with Pam, a Disciplinarian and Jennifer’s First Session (Live Recording). You could drop anywhere from six to eighty dollars on these items.
Then came the implements. Fortnum and Mason hairbrushes from London—“Genuine $55.00” according to the sign next to them. Long, rectangular, wooden paddles with tapered handles like those that Melissa’s mother assured her had been used in grade schools and high schools in the sixties. Larger versions of these with holes drilled in them, identified as “Spencer Paddles.” Unusual scourges consisting of round wooden handles with six thin, flat, wooden strips attached to them, certified by accompanying placards as “Canadian Birch GUARANTEED.” Razor strops, riding crops and quirts. Forked strips of leather twenty-six inches long and identified as “Actual Scottish School Tawses.” These ran $60 each. Oval paddles in black and red leather that looked like vaguely sinister, oversized Ping-Pong bats—bargains, these, at $39.95. More rectangular paddles, except that these were leather instead of wood. Most of them were $65, but some had fur-like padding over the leather on one side, which jacked their price up to $75. One dealer seemed the envy of his neighbors because he offered a limited selection of oval paddles made of wedding gown white kangaroo leather. While Melissa was watching he sold one of them to a middle-aged man for $225.
By the time Keane had led Melissa down two full rows, the displays’ shock value had declined dramatically for her. She began to wonder, in fact, if perhaps she had gotten a bit too used to the surroundings. Snatches of chat between dealers and buyers that would have floored her twenty-four hours ago—“a nice, crisp pain,” “very even distribution over the entire lower half of the buttocks with each stroke”—didn’t have much more effect on her now than would sales patter for a filing system.
“That red leather hand paddle is one I’ve had particularly good luck with,” Keane commented as they finished up the last aisle and headed for the Ostend Manifesto Ballroom. “You simply can’t wear it out, and it produces dramatic coloration without ever breaking the skin.”
“Maybe I should try one,” Melissa said.
“Let me know if you decide to. I can get you a discount.”
“You’re being awfully nice to me,” Melissa said. “I mean, it looks like you have nearly two hundred people here, and I’m just someone who signed up at the last minute. I really appreciate it.”
“When you inflict pain for a living I think it’s a good idea to be nice whenever you have the chance,” Keane said. “But that’s not my only motive. Do you mind if we step over here out of the traffic? I’m dying for a cigarette.”
“No, please, go ahead.”
The Ostend Manifesto Ballroom was far less crowded than the dealer room. On a platform at the far end, a tall, amply bosomed woman was demonstrating, as a poster on a nearby easel promised, “How to Administer a Proper Caning.” Her measured rattan strokes were at the moment falling on a sofa cushion but were nevertheless evoking considerable interest. A number of presumed tyros lined up at the platform stairs, waiting to try their own technique under the woman’s tutelage—one more manifestation, Melissa thought, of Americans’ fascination with self-improvement. In the far corner, a tripod-mounted video camera pointed at a red velvet backdrop also attracted a modest crowd, presumably interested in watching or making what the sign over the backdrop called “Video Personals.” Dotted around the rest of the ample floor were knots of people sharing drinks and conversation, and showing off new wares they had bought in the dealer room next door.
“What’s your other motive for being nice to me, if you don’t mind my asking?” Melissa asked after Keane had ingested two restorative lungfuls of Virginia Slim Menthol smoke.
“Don’t you see it?” Keane demanded, sweeping the room with her left hand. “Look around. At least four men for every woman. Maybe five. A woman who’s genuinely into the scene is a pearl of great price. Your value is greater than rubies—and Ruby don’t come cheap, badda-bing. Seriously, you’re worth your weight in gold.”
“I see,” Melissa said. “Well, if I’m all that valuable, there’s something really big you might be able to help me with. One of the main reasons I came here was to meet Jennifer Payne. Do y
ou know her?”
“You really are new, aren’t you?” Keane asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Jennifer Payne is a legend in the scene. She was there before Shadow Lane, before Blue Moon, before we had any respect at all.”
Melissa wondered if this was a very long time ago. She had had time to give only cursory thought to this question when the prison matron/den mother in the goldenrod blouse and blue skirt approached.
“Hi, Maggie,” the newcomer said, wiggling her index and second fingers at Keane. “Share. Please. I’m about to go into severe withdrawal.”
Keane shook a cigarette loose. The den mother gratefully took it and accepted a light. She was wearing what Melissa could tell up close was a very expensive blond wig, pulled back into a petite French roll off the back of her neck. Melissa’s upclose view confirmed that the woman had to be over fifty but nothing sagged much, even though the corners of her eyes and the top of her forehead said she had no face-lifts in her past.
“Who’s your new friend?” she asked as blue-gray smoke dribbled out of her mouth.
“This is Melissa Pennyworth,” Keane said as Melissa’s jaw bounced off the 100% Herculon deep-pile carpet covering the floor of the Ostend Manifesto Ballroom. “Her nom de jeu is Aunt Stern, which I think is just as clever as it can be.”
“You sound like you’ve checked her out pretty thoroughly.”
“Credit card, driver’s license and a half-hour of casual talk,” Keane shrugged.
Shifting her cigarette to her left hand, the newcomer turned to Melissa.
“You’d be Rep Pennyworth’s wife, then,” she said. “I’m Jennifer Payne.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Melissa managed as she shook Payne’s hand.
“Well, it’s pretty much up to you,” Payne said. “But what it comes down to is that you’re buying and I’m selling. So if I were you what I’d say is why your husband needs the information he went public on the net in order to get. I’d tell the truth and I’d make it as complete as possible.”
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