"How dare you call me like this?" Peez snapped. "You're a fine one to talk about lies! I told you, it's all over between us. You used me! You pretended to love me, you led me to love you, and then you betrayed me! Maybe you think you can sweet talk your way back into my heart, play me for a fool again. Ha! I'd like to see you try, if only so I could have the satisfaction of telling you to go to hell all over again! All those years together meant nothing to you. All that time I thought you were devoted to me when you were really hers. Well, no more; she can have you. Get off my phone and get out of my life because we are through!"
Like her brother before her, Peez regretted that you couldn't slam the receiver of a cell phone, so she did the next best thing, throwing it to the ground and stamping down on it so viciously that it shattered.
Throughout the Cafe du Monde, every woman and a fair number of the men present broke into spontaneous applause as she stormed out, with Dov hurrying after, trailing little puffs of sugar as they ran.
Chapter Nineteen
"The way to a man's heart is through his stomach, but the way to Mom's heart is through the Internet," said Dov. He hunched over his laptop keyboard, his eyes alight with a zealot's wild devotion. From time to time he moved over to type in a few characters on Peez's laptop, which was set up right next to his own, attached by a tangled maze of wires, all of them glowing with the magic that the siblings had effectively used to double their electronic arsenal.
"How's it coming?" asked Peez from a short distance away. She sounded doubtful and with good cause:
The two of them had discussed potential strategies for hours on end, most of the way from New Orleans to Poughkeepsie, via airport limo and plane and train and taxi. They set aside all thought of using a rental car solely because they did not want the distraction of hands-on driving to eat into precious plotting time. They proposed and disposed and discarded unworkable portions of one scenario only to tack the useful leftovers onto the body of an altogether different scheme. They guzzled obscene amounts of coffee to keep themselves sharp, and the more coffee they drank, the more inspired every aspect of their conspiracy sounded.
But even the most potent of caffeine buzzes has a finite trajectory. By the time they actually set foot within the Poughkeepsie city limits, it was difficult to tell for sure whether their master plan was really as foolproof as it sounded, or if it only seemed foolproof because their brains were starting to turn into piles of played-out espresso grounds. Peez had come down off her mocha-java high just in time to realize this, and it was not the sort of epiphany that gave you confidence in the future.
"It's coming just fine," Dov called back to her. "The link's holding. We may not have as much magical power as she's got, but by taking our magic plus the stuff we're pulling in through the tapping spell and slaving the whole thing to our Net access, there won't be a firewall in existence that can keep us out of Edwina's system! It's just going to take a little time."
"You're sure she won't be able to tell we're doing this until we're ready to make our move?"
"Relax, Sis. We are golden. Say she does catch wise that someone's ferreting around in her system, the only way she can intervene is by locating the source. That would be child's play for her: Just slip a tracking spell into the wires. She can't do that to us the way
I've got this set up. No wires, no way to trace the connection."
"No wires, no electrical feed for the laptops," Peez said. "I've never tried anything like this before. What happens if we power down in the middle of it?"
"We won't," Dov reassured her. "Not as long as we've got good, solid battery backup. Not as long as you keep feeding our batteries."
"Yeah, but what happens when I run out of peanuts?"
As if to answer her question, a large gray squirrel not six inches away from Peez's feet sat up on its haunches and set off a long stream of loud, chittering complaints. Peez threw him another peanut and thought that this was one hell of a way to harness the earth- power.
It did look somewhat bizarre to the untrained eye. It even looked bizarre by the standards of some of E. Godz, Inc.'s more eccentric (pronounced "woo-woo") clients. Of course anything looks bizarre when it involves squirrels.
A nineteenth-century French painter might have made a pretty picture of the siblings' command center for Operation Bad Mommy, titling it Le Takeover Hostile Sur l'Herbe. While Dov delved deeply into Edwina's databanks, Peez sat on the grass under the outspread branches of a venerable sycamore tree on the campus of Vassar College, a giant economy-sized bag of peanuts in her lap. Every so often she tossed a handful to the coterie of about twenty squirrels surrounding her, making sure to keep them from losing interest and scampering away. The squirrels' plump bodies pulsed with waves of energy which was being siphoned away along threadlike conduits all leading to Dov's tandem laptops, giving him all the power he needed.
"By the time you run out of peanuts, we'll be done," he told his sister. "Then we'll go pay a little call on Edwina."
"I hope you're right," Peez said. "And I hope the creatures will be satisfied with what I gave them. I don't like the way that big bull squirrel's looking at me. I think he might be plotting something. Did we have to use squirrels? Even back in New York City, they gave me the creeps. They're always watching."
"Squirrels are nature's most compact and efficient gatherers of the earth-power," Dov said, sounding almost as dull as a tenured professor. "Have you ever seen how fast they can move? Pure energy. They press their little bodies right up against tree trunks for better power absorption, and they've perfected the method for extracting the potential energy of a full-grown oak, maple, pine, whatever kind of tree from the seeds, nuts, and acorns they ingest. You call them rodents: I call them fuzzy plutonium! And this place seems to have an infinite supply of the little buggers."
"If you say so," Peez said. She continued to dole out peanuts. The squirrels, much like a gaggle of junior faculty members, put up with any kind of public humiliation if it meant that they got to stick close to a source of free food.
At last Dov hit one final keystroke, slapped both laptops shut simultaneously, flopped over onto his back and triumphantly announced: "Finished!"
"What did you do?" Peez asked.
"Oh, nothing much." He rolled onto his stomach and sat up again. "I just isolated all of her assets, monetary as well as supernatural. She's down to the spare change level on all fronts. She may have more experience than we do when it comes to magic, but a fat lot of good that'll do her when she can't reach the stuff she needs to power her spells."
"Like owning a Mercedes but only having enough money to buy a teaspoonful of gas?" Peez liked the idea.
"Bingo." Dov tapped the tip of his nose. He stood up and offered Peez his hand. "Give the furry-tailed rats the rest of the peanuts and let's go pay a call on dear, dear Mamma."
Giggling, Peez tossed the remaining peanuts to the squirrels before allowing Dov to help her up. As they walked off, Dov flipped open his cell phone to call for a taxi. He was so engrossed in the call that he didn't notice the big male squirrel sitting right in his path until he almost trod on him. The two of them exchanged peevish stares.
"Shoo!" Dov commanded. "Scat! Get out of the way!"