Still calm and collected, Greta Marie gave him one short, sharp, effective slap across the face, and it wasn't a figurative one either, no sirree. And with the echoes of flesh-to-flesh impact still hanging on the air she said, "The only stupid choice I made was loving you."

The incredible happened: The denizens of the coffee shop, to a man, rose to their feet and gave that slap a standing ovation. Bobo Riley from the hardware store was even heard to let out an exultant Yankee whoop that would have put a Rebel yell to shame.

That should have been Wellcome's cue to leave, making as gracious an exit as he might hope for in the circ.u.mstances. Alas, Wellcome had never been a man to read the signs or take the hint. If you told him his writing clunked like a freight train off the rails, he took this to mean that it had the power of a runaway freight instead.

He seized Greta Marie's hands. "So you do love me," he exclaimed triumphantly.

"Ah, I see your little scheme: You're playing hard to get. You've read far too many of the shoddier sort of Romance novels, those dreadful bodice-rippers -- "

(Here he looked meaningfully in my direction.) " -- and you want a rough wooing.

So be it!"

He was more athletic than his nascent paunch and pasty skin might lead you to believe, fully capable of sweeping a grown woman of Greta Marie's size off her feet and out the door before any of us could react. She shrieked in shock, not fear, but she didn't struggle as he made off with her. Maybe she thought she'd already made enough of a scene in the coffee shop to last Bowman's Ridge well into the next century.

I was the first to address the situation. "Hey! Aren't we going to do something?" I demanded of my fellow townsmen.

No one answered. Most of them went back to eating lunch. Bobo Riley looked as if he wanted to take action, but something was holding him back.

"Babs..." Muriel jerked her head, indicating I was to sit back down at the counter. Dumbly I obeyed in time to hear her whisper, "It's not our place to interfere in other folks' domestic quarrels."

"This is an abduction, not a family spat," I hissed. "If I know Wellcome, he won't stop until he's stuffed Greta Marie into his rental car and driven her all the way to Tampa! And then what? She hasn't got enough cash to come back on her own hook, and would she ever dream of calling anyone up here to send her the busfare home?"

Muriel didn't say a word. We both knew the answer: Greta Marie would sooner become a beachcomber or -- the horror! -- give Wellcome his wicked way with her before she'd ask a fellow Native to lend her some money. On the other hand, her fellow Natives would sooner allow a thrice-cursed outlander like Wellcome Fisher to make off with the last living Bowman than they'd ever dream of interfering directly in someone else's personal matters.

"Well, I don't care what the rest of you do, I'm not going to put up with this!"

I announced and started for the door. A large, work-hardened hand darted in front of me to hold it open. I looked up into Bobo Riley's kind blue eyes.

"Mind if I walk with you down street a bit, Mrs. Barclay?" he asked. "I just happen to be going your way."

Within two minutes I found myself transformed into the most popular woman in Bowman's Ridge. Simply everyone in the coffee shop was suddenly seized with the simultaneous urge to pay their checks and join me for a little stroll down Main Street. Even Hal abandoned his kitchen and Muriel her place behind the counter, leaving the waitresses and a few stragglers behind to hold down the fort. We weren't going to deliberately interfere in anything, perish forbid. We were just going to exercise our Const.i.tutional right to take, well, a const.i.tutional.

We followed the faint sound of Greta Marie's fists beating a m.u.f.fled tattoo on Wellcome's chest. They hadn't gotten far. Wellcome had parked his rental about a block away, down by the old war memorial on the green. Our itinerant Town Meeting caught up with him as he was trying to dig out the car keys without letting go of his prize.

When he saw us coming his eyes went wide as a constipated owl's. He forgot all about the "rough wooing" underway and dropped Greta Marie smack on the town green, then took to his heels. At first I thought that he was running away in fear for his life, that he intended to beat feet all the way to Montpelier, but it turned out that I underestimated him. He fled only as far as the war memorial -- a truncated obelisk, its sides inscribed with the names of the Bowman's Ridge men who'd died in both World Wars, Korea, and Viet Nam, its flat top crowned with an urn that the Women's Club filled with flowers on appropriate occasions.

Spry as a springtime c.o.c.kroach, he clambered up the monument and perched there, holding onto the lip of the empty urn.

"A lynch mob," he sneered down at us from his perch. "How typical of the rustic mind. Haven't you forgotten something? Pitchforks? Torches? You crackerbarrel cretins, how dare you hara.s.s me? A plague on your pitiful frog-fart of a town!

And you -- !"

His glittering eyes zeroed in on Greta Marie. Bobo Riley had fallen behind the rest of us in order to help the lady up and now squired her on his arm. "This is all your fault, you squalid excuse for a hicktown Hypatia! You pathetic p.r.i.c.ktease, I'll wager you fancy yourself quite the bargain bas.e.m.e.nt Mata Hari, don't you? Don't you?"

"Oh!" Greta Marie covered her face with her hands and shuddered. Wellcome's sharp tongue had finally drawn blood. She was crying, and in public, too! Bobo Riley folded his big arms protectively around her and glowered up at the treed critic, growling threats that failed to stem Wellcome's spate of vengeful poison.

"Don't cry, darling," Wellcome crooned sarcastically. "There's nothing wrong with you that a good upcountry rogering wouldn't cure. So sad that you'll never get it now. Thank G.o.d I came to my senses in time. You contemptible dirtfarm Delilah, how a man of my breeding could have ever been mad enough even to consider the sensual enrichment of your dusty, backshelf, remaindered life--!"

Greta Marie threw her head back and howled her misery to the skies.

They were on him in the time it takes to blink. We never saw them come; they were simply there, all three of them, eyes hollyberry bright, horns blazing in the thin winter sunlight. The largest of the three, the one I'd comforted earlier that same day, was the first to reach him. It set its forefeet on the pediment of the war memorial, paused for an instant to look Wellcome in the eye, then jabbed him straight through the center of the chest with its horn. He fell to the snow-covered green and lay there unmoving.

The other two unicorns took it in turns to sniff the body and to snort their disdain. They did not depart as abruptly as they had arrived. The three of them turned as one and trotted up Main Street, tails swis.h.i.+ng, in the direction of the town library. One of them paused to munch on a swag of Christmas greenery decking the front of the florist's. No one made the slightest move to stay them, and Greta Marie, still weeping in Bobo Riley's arms, never once tried to call them back.

Wellcome Fisher was dead. We had no illusions of anyone being able to survive a direct thrust to the heart with something as sharp and pointed and long as a unicorn's horn, but we only thought we had all the answers until Hal bent over the body and exclaimed, "Hey! There's no hole."

Everyone swarmed around. Hal was right: There was no hole. Not a puncture, not a piercing, not a scratch. No blood stained the snow. There wasn't even the teensiest rip in Wellcome's clothing. The crowd buzzed.

I stood apart. I knew what had happened, but darned if I was going to tell my neighbors. They already thought I was weird enough, and if I started explaining about the rules that govern unicorns --!

The unicorn is not a monstrous beast, it doesn't kill for sport or spite, it lives to heal, not harm. It bears upon its brow a horn whose touch has the power to purge all poisons and make what is polluted sweet and wholesome once more.

The unicorn hadn't been trying to kill Wellcome, merely to cure him. It had touched his heart with its magical horn, intending to remove only the taint of malice and envy, leaving behind all that was good and selfless and decent in the man. No one was more surprised than the unicorn by what actually happened.

Let's just put it this way: It was going to be one h.e.l.l of an autopsy, one of the starring organs gone without an external clue to explain its vanishment. Oh well, the medical examiner would probably call it a coronary anyway, heart or no heart. Old Doc Barnett hates to make waves.

It took a goodly while to sort things out on the green. By the time Chief Dowd and the rest of the local authorities finished taking statements ("Dunno. He just sorta keeled over. Not a mark on him, see?") and viewing the body, it was getting dark. I looked around for Greta Marie. I figured she shouldn't try to drive herself home after all she'd been through today.

I'd been antic.i.p.ated. When I found her, she told me that Bobo Riley had already offered to drive her home and she'd accepted. Despite the fact that several other Natives were within earshot, Bobo went on to say that he'd pick her up at her place come morning and take her back to town so she could recover her car next day. Then he asked her if she'd like to help him clown at the hardware store by dressing up as Mrs. Claus and giving the kids candy. This was the Bowman's Ridge equivalent of him clasping her to his manly chest, raining kisses upon her upturned face, and telling her that he desired her above all women with a raw, unbridled pa.s.sion that knew no bounds. I don't know if Greta Marie felt all the earth-heaving thrills and collywobbles I put into my books, but her eyes were s.h.i.+ning with that special To Be Continued light.

I went home. Rachel was waiting for me by the front gate. Something was clearly wrong. Instead of her usual air of carefully cultivated angst and ennui, she was bouncing like a Labrador puppy.

"Mom! Mom! This is so cool, you've got to see this! I don't think he belongs to anyone, and he is soooo gorgeous. I'll take care of him myself, I promise, and if there's some kind of problem with the zoning geeks I'll pay for his board out of my own allowance, honest. Can I keep him? Can I? Can I? Pleeeeease?"

"Keep--?"

The unicom stepped out of the lengthening shadows, rested his heavy head on my daughter's shoulder, and -- one Transient to another -grinned.

This story is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Clifton Webb.