(It was always the same.)

Forget the building: Mama was on the case. She knew people all over the world, important and scary people, and had buckets of money to boot. Mama would come up with something.

Or someone.

Madison Fehr limped toward the Marriott. She couldn’t go home; they had her clutch, which meant they had her driver’s license. They were welcome to the cash, and her credit cards would be cancelled within the next half hour. Mama was even now calling to book her a hotel room where she could—

(cower)

—lay low and—

(creep away and cower)

—stay off the radar for the next few hours.

Whatever Mama did or whoever she sent, Madison would (finally) be her mother’s daughter and have the courage to face it/them. Be brave and hang tough and probably things aren’t that bad. Be brave and hang tough and probably things aren’t that bad.

It didn’t work. It hadn’t for two days.

CHAPTER ONE

Fredrika Bimm, grumpy mermaid and former future queen of the Undersea Folk, stalked across the cobblestones past the Marriott Long Wharf, zeroing in on the pit of all evil and despair, the loathsome housing for malice that was the New England Aquarium. The sky was overcast, gray, and threatening to spit chilly rain. Her mood had never been so foul on a day she didn’t have to go to a bridal/baby/housewarming/new pet shower. And that was foul indeed.

What has Fehr done? And why call me? If her former boss, Dr. Barb, hadn’t been so insistent . . . but she had been, which sucked Jonas in, and then he got insistent . . . which meant she was in Boston, the very last place she wanted to be.

It was all that wedding stuff. Correction: weddings stuff. Plural. Bad enough she was Jonas’s Bitch of Honor. But the other wedding was worse: her own. She was the bridezilla. (“A bridezilla,” Jonas had said, his voice faux trembling, “to fear above all other bridezillas, a bridezilla the likes of which the world has never seen and pray God will never see again!” It hadn’t helped one bit that he’d been right.)

Ugh.

Tedious shopping trips spent tediously trying on tedious wedding finery. Tedious visits to florists and their tedious inventory. Bakeries: major, major tedium, not to mention sugar highs followed by sugar lows. Places that rented tedious tables and tedious tablecloths and tedious tuxes.

All that. Times two.

She was gnashing her teeth so hard she wondered if she’d crack a molar. But that might not be a bad thing. An emergency trip to the dentist would get her out of all sorts of tediousness. Yes, an after-hours dental visit would solve so many problems. Fred cursed her never-so-much-as-a-cavity teeth. Why couldn’t she have inherited her traitorous (dead) father’s fangs? But noooo, she got her mom’s flat grinders instead. Her father had been a predator in every sense of the word and, as with all his kind, went around with a mouth full of sewing needles; her mother was a gentle hippie whose idea of a naughty meal was putting store-bought ranch dressing on her (organic) salads. Fred got the hippie’s teeth.

Fred sighed. Ah, it was all a simple daydream, but no matter how much she fantasized, a dentist in shining armor wasn’t going to rescue her. And if one had, she’d be so thrilled to have wiggled out of her responsibilities (if that’s what they even were), she wouldn’t have needed the nitrous oxide. She’d giggle like a hyena while the dentist advanced on her with pliers or, worse, refused to validate her parking.

Gnashing her hippie grinders, Fred momentarily regretted she hadn’t been lurking on the bottom of the Caspian Sea when Madison Fehr got up to her shenanigans du jour.

Whatever you’ve done, Madison Fehr, whoever you’re afraid of, you are absolutely afraid of The Wrong Person.

CHAPTER TWO

It was strange that Fred noticed them at all. But she was a natural procrastinator, and often when she was trying to avoid a problem, she’d let her attention get caught by just about anything.

It was a slow evening at the NEA; Tuesdays often were. School had let out, and it was the dinner hour, so all the buses full of children were long gone, as were the people who wanted to swing over to Faneuil Hall to suck down a lobster roll and/or cup of chowder and/or a brownie and/or fried rice for the trip home.

And because there weren’t a hundred people milling about the entrance, her attention was caught by a tall dark-haired man who was standing perfectly still. That was unusual; Boston was lousy with people hurrying, always hurrying to get from Point A to Point Q (the roads did not go in straight lines, ever).

If I had access to a time machine, she mentally grouched for the hundredth time, I’d go back and tell the FFs, “Great job finding the place, O mightily clever Founding Fathers, and, yes, I understand why you feel finders keepers is a legitimate reason for genocide and territorial conquest. I won’t judge: it was a different time.

“And thank you also for the Constitution: great job! Quite enlightened. And don’t feel too bad about the parts you missed; later generations did eventually get around to acknowledging that freedom only for white men isn’t exactly freedom. In fact, by definition, it’s the opposite. Again: different time. Not judging.

“But perhaps deciding to pave the cow paths—that is, paths trampled by bovines whose only concern was finding the tenderest of grass and alfalfa as opposed to the most efficient way to go from A to B—was utterly, utterly stupid.”

“. . . stupid.”

She glanced over and saw him, a man who would have been striking under any circumstances. His sheer height, breadth of shoulders, and impeccably tailored navy suit demanded respectful attention. But what was odd was how he stood in the middle of the cement apron, arms stretched out and face tilted toward the (cloudy, sullen, threatening-to-rain) sky, smiling. Almost like he was . . . all right, it was silly, but she was a marine biologist, so she knew what a stranded mammal caught under open sky looked like. She was looking at a male Homo sapien, basking like a leopard seal, one decked out in a terrific suit about to snack on a dozen penguins.

(Later, when she knew what he was, she thought it was interesting that she would have instantly compared him to a predatory species; he and the woman were, in fact, apex predators.)

All that, still, might have escaped her notice—or at least only captured her attention for a second—but then the shrill woman said it again, echoing her thoughts: “Stupid!”

“Sticks and stones, my love,” the man replied in a cheerful baritone. He was turning in a slow circle while still staring at the sky, so blissed out she wondered if he was high on something. (She found out later he had been: high on the great outdoors, high on the color of the sky, high on how the air smelled before a spring rain, high on being in the company of his queen. Thus: no accounting for taste.)

“Sinclair!” she cried in the tone of a woman annoyed beyond her capacity to bear such things, but the fond smile made her tone a lie. “Will you please get a grip? Stop staring up and spinning around like friggin’ Mary Tyler Moore on Nicollet Mall, okay?”

“Shush,” he said, still basking, eyes still closed, arms still stretched out, still blissed out despite (because of? No . . . impossible) the shrill blonde. “Do you know how long it has been since I was outside—”

“Twenty minutes.”

“—in a coastal city—”

“Year and a half ago, on the Cape with Marky Mark and the Fuzzy Bunch.”

“—during daylight? And you must promise never to call Michael that to his face.”

“I’m not promising anything, and okay, that thing about daylight, that’s a fair point. Also: Who can turn the world on with his big weird smiiiiile? Who can take a sucky day, and suddenly make it all seem super lame?” she sang, horribly off-key while (worse!) butchering the lyrics to the Mary Tyler Moore jingle. “Well, it’s you, Sink Lair, and you should know it! Each day you really, really blow it! Schmucks are all around and you’re driving me crazy, stop spinning around like you’re in a daze-ey . . .”

“We’re gonna stake it after all,” was his (tuneful!) response, at which point the blonde shuddered and said the most puzzling thing yet: “No matter what I do to make things right, this timeline gets worse and worse.”

Tourists, thought Fred, annoyed they’d caught her interest for even a few seconds. Proof I’d rather think about anything else except whatever mess Fehr’s in. What’s the actual line from the jingle? Ah: How will you make it on your own?

The man put his arms down and snapped his long fingers: crack! “The phone! I need to call them.”

“Again?”

“What, again?” he replied easily, reaching into his suit jacket pocket to pull out an iPhone, sliding his fingers across it, then holding it to his ear. “It’s been hours, long lonely hours, and I—hello? Yes, may I speak with them? Yes, again.”

“You’re gonna drive the poor guy to suicide! Also again.”

“It’s me!” the tall, handsome, dignified man said, in a tone that was not at all dignified. “Who else would it be? I must speak to the babies. Put them on at once, Marc.”

“Aw, God.” The blonde sighed, shaking her head and staring at her shoes. Which were striking, Fred noticed. She herself had been known to wear flip-flops to a fund-raiser, but recognized beautiful foot gear when she saw it. These were high heels—spike heels?—with a black base, and beautiful bright flowers had been painted over them in vivid reds, greens, yellows.¶

As the blonde began to pace, Fred saw she had no trouble walking in the teetery heels. They could have been last year’s ratty tennis shoes, they seemed to fit her so well.

“. . . yes, well, Elizabeth is on her way to meet the young lady in question, and I have more shopping to do for the babies. So would you please put Fur on for Daddy. And then Burr. And then both!”

“Cannot believe, cannot believe you’re turning into one of those guys, Sinclair. I might not ever save you again if you keep this up.”

“. . . that’s all right; I shall wait . . . Hello? Marc?” He glanced at his companion, who was rubbing her temples. “Are you having trouble hearing me . . . ? Perhaps this is a poor area for . . . Hello? Marc?” He began shouting into the phone. Perhaps Marc was trapped in a blizzard with a dying cell. “Tell my babies Daddy is calling and I have bought them all kinds of snacks and shall buy still more! Fish snacks! From Boston!”