Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel Page 6

  “The who?” said Freddie.

  During the limited run of The Vampyre, I had been threatened, mobbed, tackled, harassed, punched, pummeled, and nearly suffocated by the crowds of crazed vampire fanatics and paparazzi who hung around the theater every night. I had also nearly been murdered by a vampire. And if asked whether I felt more haunted by my memories of that homicidal vampire or of the vamparazzi, I’d need to think long and hard about my answer.

  Therefore, learning that one of the vamparazzi was here at Fenster’s—indeed, was a Fenster . . . Oh, it was too infamous for words! I gaped at Elspeth in appalled shock, keenly aware of her fingers still digging into my shoulders.

  “Yes, who is Jane Aubrey?” Preston asked.

  “I can’t believe you’re here!” Elspeth cried again, the fanaticism in her face frightening me. She told her puzzled family, “Jane Aubrey is the woman Lord Ruthven loves!”

  I blinked. Oh, please. That does it.

  I tried to pull out of her grip; she tightened it.

  Preston asked, “Who the hell is Lord Ruthven?”

  “I think I met him . . .” Freddie said.

  I regained full control of my motor skills and gave Elspeth such a hard shove that she let go of me and staggered backward into the timid Arthur.

  “Stop right there!” I said sharply, pointing a warning finger at the goth girl. “I am not Jane Aubrey. I played Jane Aubrey in The Vampyre. And Lord Ruthven didn’t love her, he murdered her.”

  Freddie said, “Hey, love hurts, baby.”

  “Shut up, Freddie,” I snapped.

  “You played . . .” Preston’s expression cleared as he realized what I was saying. “Oh, you’re an actress?”

  “Yes.”

  Helen reminded him, “Quite a few of the seasonal employees are actors.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Preston. “The Vampyre? Oh, good God, Elspeth! Wasn’t that the stupid thing downtown that you were at night after night for weeks before Thanksgiving?”

  “It wasn’t stupid,” she said sulkily. “It was brilliant! But you wouldn’t understand.” She returned her attention to me and asked, with exactly the sort of feverish obsession that had nearly led to my demise once or twice during the run of that play, “What’s it like to be held in Daemon Ravel’s arms?”

  “Who’s he?” Freddie asked me.

  “The actor who played Lord Ruthven, the vampyre.” I said to Elspeth, “I have no idea what it’s like to be held by Daemon Ravel. I only know what it’s like to be held by Lord Ruthven, who embraced me eight shows per week while I was playing Jane.”

  “Well, what was that like?” she demanded impatiently.

  “Yes, tell us,” Freddie said with interest.

  “It was chilly,” I said tersely. “That theater was drafty and my neckline was practically down to my navel.”

  “Oh, I wish I’d seen that,” said Freddie.

  I concluded, “Daemon Ravel and I were short-term colleagues who barely knew each other, and we’ve had no contact since the show ended.”

  And because life was intrinsically unfair, Daemon was now prepping for his upcoming lead role in a cable-TV movie, while I was working as an elf at Fenster’s.

  Elspeth said sulkily, “Fine. Whatever.” Evidently thinking she was delivering a stinging insult, she added, “You’re really not Jane, are you? You’re nothing like her.”

  “Nope.”

  “Is Jane still coming, though?” Freddie asked in confusion. “We could order in some food or something.”

  “Jesus, Freddie,” said his cousin, clearly in a sour temper now. “Sometimes I’m amazed you can find your own dick with both hands.”

  “Luckily,” he replied, “I don’t often need to find it by myself.”

  “That’s enough, children,” said Helen.

  They were like children, I realized. Both of them. Freddie was older and Elspeth was younger, but they were each within a few years of my age. Yet they both seemed like teens to me—immature teens, struggling with too much privilege, too little responsibility, and no real guidance.

  What a family.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Preston said to me, “not that I care . . . But if you were in a sold-out Off-Broadway play last month, where tickets were going for astronomical prices on the street—which I have good reason to know, since my daughter burned through a small fortune to see that play as many times as she could . . . What the hell are you doing here, playing an elf?”

  Now that did sting. “I’m out of work.”

  “Bummer,” said Freddie.

  “That’s life upon the wicked stage,” I said. “Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. And, up or down, I have to pay my rent, after all.”

  “Hey! You see that? Right there?” Preston pointed at me while speaking to his daughter. “That’s a work ethic. Why can’t you be more like this elf?”

  “Because she’s an elf, Dad,” Elspeth said with disdain. “Is that really what you want for me?”

  That stung, too. I decided it was time to resurrect my plan to get away from these people.

  “I’ve really enjoyed meeting you all,” I lied, “but now I have to take Drag Queen Santa’s costume to the shop for repairs. Or maybe for burial at sea.”

  “We have a drag queen in Solsticeland?” shouted Preston, his ire renewed. “What the hell is going on down there? That’s it, I tell you, Helen. That’s it! This is Solsticeland’s final year!”

  “Oh?” said Freddie. “Are you sure? I mean, doesn’t it sort of depend how I vote when the time comes?”

  “Yes, Freddie, it does,” said Helen, turning on a dime and warming up to her loathed nephew with a lightning-quick change of attitude. “You’re absolutely right, dear. But I suggest that we discuss the future of Solsticeland—”

  “It has no future!” Preston insisted.

  “—in the board room rather than continue to scream about it here in the hallway.”

  “Oh. Yes. Let’s do that.”

  To my relief, the Fensters all moved off in the opposite direction from where I was headed. Preston, who was muttering angrily, paused long enough to bark at his brother, “Come on, Arthur! You can’t attend the meeting from the doorway of your office!”

  Looking small in comparison to his relations, Arthur trotted down the hall after them. I picked up my garbage bag, then turned and went in the other direction, heading for the costume shop. The voices of the bickering Fensters floated down the hallway to me until after I turned the corner and started following that corridor to the other side of the building.

  The exact distribution of Fenster stock was kept private, but it was known that Freddie Junior had inherited shares from his father, of which he’d gained control when he’d turned eighteen, and that he had inherited more stock from his grandmother, Constance, upon her recent death. His mother tended to leave him in charge of her shares in the company, too, as well as her voting rights. So now that the Iron Matriarch was dead, Freddie—feckless, reckless, and not exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier—reputedly had more control of Fenster & Co. than anyone else in the family. This undoubtedly drove the rest of them nuts.

  I assumed it was also why no one got rid of Naughty and Nice, though the whole family obviously disapproved of having Freddie’s bimbo elves on the payroll. Realistically, Freddie Junior was in a position to do almost anything he wanted, regardless of how his uncle screamed and raged at him.

  All things considered, I suddenly wondered if Fenster’s itself had much of a future, never mind Solsticeland.

  On the way to the costume shop, I passed what always struck me as the strangest thing in the whole building: the holding cell. Fenster’s had its very own jail cell, where it locked up shoplifters until NYPD came to get them. I found it weird—and a little unnerving—that I worked for a company that had its own private prison.

  The cell was empty and no one was around. Security guards only got posted here if there was a prisoner.

  When I g
ot to the costume shop and pulled Satsy’s ruined Santa outfit out of the bag, the costumer was appalled by the extent of the damage. After a few minutes of muttering and head shaking, she stuffed it back in the plastic bag and dumped it in the garbage can.

  “He’ll need another costume for the rest of the season.” She snorted and added, “All three and a half days of it.”

  She took me down the hall to another room. When we entered it, I realized this was the storage area that Preston had mentioned, full of Christmas costumes that weren’t being used. It was a large room containing half-a-dozen racks of garments (mostly red and green), boots, bells, caps, beards, antlers, and wings. (“We tried sugarplum fairies one year,” the costumer told me, “but the wings were so fragile they needed constant repairs.”)

  We sifted through a rack of Santa costumes and soon found one that looked the right size for Saturated Fats.

  “It’s a few years old,” said the costume mistress. “A little different than the style we use now. See how broad the cuffs and collar are? But Santa’s look is always pretty much your basic red suit with white trim, so this will work.” She tugged and twitched the fabric, checking for stains or weak seams. “If this were the start of the season, I’d have him come upstairs for a proper fitting. But since he only needs to get through a few shifts, it’ll have to do.”

  “I think it’ll be fine,” I said, hefting the suit in my arms.

  She asked, “What the hell happened, anyhow?”

  “He had an accident,” I said vaguely. “I’m fuzzy on the details.”

  After we exited the storage room, I realized there was something else I needed to do before returning to the floor. I asked, “Where’s the nearest bathroom?”

  She pointed further down the hall, past her workshop. Then she leaned forward and whispered, “It was Mr. Powell’s private bathroom.”

  I didn’t immediately understand the significance of this. “Who was Mr . . . Oh! That Mr. Pow—”

  “Shh! We don’t say the name out loud around here.”

  I nodded. This was one of the unwritten but well-known rules of Fenster & Co. It had slipped my mind, having no real relevance to my sojourn at the store, but Jingle had taught me the rule and explained its origin.

  For decades, this company had been known as Fenster & Powell. When Constance, a pretty society debutante, had married into the Fenster family some sixty years ago, the profits and the power were shared equally by the company’s two founders, one of whom was Constance’s father-in-law. Mr. Fenster died a few years later, and Constance’s husband took over his family’s half of the business. A few years after that, he died, too—in a hotel room in Atlantic City. There was quite a whiff of scandal about it, but the family managed to ensure that very few facts were ever known.

  Then Constance, a widow in her thirties with four young children, surprised everyone by taking her husband’s place in the family business. She also disappointed the dismissive predictions that she’d soon wind up either selling out to the Powells or else bankrupting the company. Constance proved to be a dedicated, talented, and ruthless businesswoman. The founding Powell’s immediate successor butted heads with her for about a decade before selling his shares to his nephew and leaving the company. Several more Powell men took his place over the years, but Constance increasingly became the captain of the ship and the driving force behind the retail empire’s expanding success.

  As I headed to the bathroom, I recalled that Helen’s second husband had been a Powell. “And the less said about that, the better,” Jingle had told me—before proceeding to say quite a bit about it. The Fenster-Powell marriage, which had been encouraged (or, rather, engineered) by Constance, soon spiraled into notorious public quarrels, private mutual loathing, and blatant infidelities.

  It was through that hellacious marriage, followed by the divorce settlement a few years later, that Constance changed the balance of power by acquiring company stock that had always belonged to the Powells. That gave her the foothold she needed to start gradually squeezing them out of the business. Her strategy included taking their name off the company, which she reorganized as Fenster & Co. It took years of additional maneuvering to achieve her goal; but finally, the Iron Matriarch, who was by then in her seventies, ejected the Powells completely from the retail company which their family had co-founded and helped build into a business empire.

  Ever since then, according to Jingle, “Around here, it’s not a good idea to say a word that even rhymes with Powell.”

  Predictably, Constance’s coup led to years of legal battles between the two families. But the Iron Matriarch fought the Powells so shrewdly that all their efforts eventually floundered. In the final years of her life, Jingle said, Constance seemed to have beaten them.

  However, the Powells may have been biding their time rather than accepting defeat. They were reputedly planning a new legal assault on the Fensters, now that the Iron Matriarch was safely in her grave and the company was in the hands of her bickering heirs, none of whom had inherited her cool-headed business acumen (though I thought some of them had probably inherited her highly flexible morality). I suddenly realized, based on something he had said earlier, that Preston considered a new lawsuit a serious possibility.

  But I wondered why the Powells would bother? It had all occurred years ago, and the woman behind those events was dead now. Why not just let the past go and move on? What could the Powells hope to gain from yet another legal battle after all this time?

  Money and power, said a killer’s voice in my head. It’s always about money and power.

  That was probably an accurate assessment of the bitter Powell-Fenster feud in all its permutations; but I recognized that voice and didn’t like hearing it in my imagination. So I gave myself a hard mental shake and tried to think of something else. Nothing else came to mind, though.

  Months after she had tried to kill me on a storm-swept promontory in Harlem, that awful woman was still haunting me, I realized. She had murdered three men, and she came far too close to killing the man I . . . Well, she came far too close to killing him, too. Because of me.

  “Be honest with yourself, Esther,” she said. “Would he be lying in agonized paralysis awaiting his death now if not for you?”

  “He’s still alive, and you’re not,” I muttered aloud to my private demon. “So get out of my head already, would you?”

  Feeling a little shaky, I splashed cold water on my face in what had once been the private Powell bathroom. I supposed the stress of this weird day was getting to me, and the result was that she crept into my head again. Or maybe I’d opened the door to her by thinking about Constance Fenster, who was a similarly merciless woman (though presumably not a similarly homicidal one).

  As I washed my hands in what had been the private bathroom of the last Powell who’d been a partner of the Fensters, I reflected that I wasn’t sorry that the Iron Matriarch had died a few months before I ever came to work here. Jingle said she succumbed to pneumonia, a complication that arose after she’d undergone surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. I suspected that, although very ill and in her eighties by then, she had been a formidably ruthless employer, enemy, and mother right up until her dying breath.

  5

  I took Satsy’s new costume back down to the men’s locker room on the fourth floor, where I tapped on the door and called hello before letting myself in. Life in the performing arts forces you to shed conventional physical modesty pretty quickly, so I didn’t think any of the guys would be upset if I caught them in their briefs; but I wanted to give anyone who was naked a chance to cover up.

  “I’m the only one here, and I’m perfectly decent,” was the friendly reply to my warning. I recognized Super Santa’s voice.

  “Hi, Rick.” I pushed open the door, entered the room, and went to hang up Satsy’s replacement costume in his locker. Rick had evidently just arrived, since he was still in his street clothes. I said, “I see Miles tracked you down.”

  “H
i, Esther.” He hung up his winter jacket in his locker. “It sounds like you guys had quite a morning.”

  “You heard what happened?”

  “I was just in the break room. Twinkle and Satsy told me about it.” He paused. “Their story was a little confusing. I’m still not really sure what happened.”

  “I feel the same way, and I was there.”

  Rick smiled at that. He had a solid, amiable face; nothing handsome or remarkable, but pleasant. Though still in his twenties, his hairline was receding, and it was easy to guess what he’d look like in middle age. He was a few inches under six feet tall, with a square, stocky build. What people mostly noticed about Rick, though, was his calm, reassuring manner.

  “Actually,” I said, “I told Satsy I’d check out the freight elevator. His story is so disturbing that . . . Well, it really seems like someone should take a look. And experience suggests we can’t rely on Fenster’s to do it.”

  Rick looked at his watch. “Jeff hasn’t been on the floor that long, and I haven’t clocked in yet—so, officially, I’m not even here. Why don’t I come with you?”

  “I was kind of hoping you’d offer,” I admitted. The experience Satsy had described made me anxious about investigating the elevator on my own.

  “Then let’s go take a look,” Rick said. “You’re right about both things: Someone needs to do this, and Fenster’s won’t bother until someone actually gets hurt.”

  The store was keen on profits, obsessed with shoplifters, rigid about rules and punctuality . . . and very slack about safety.

  I said, “Yeah, I’ll bet you that despite Miles’ promise to Jonathan’s mother to have security ‘scour’ this floor, they never even showed up.”

  “Who’s Jonathan?”

  “Oh. I guess Satsy didn’t tell you that part of the story? Come on, I’ll tell you on the way to the elevator.”

  Following the route which Satsy had mentioned to me earlier, we cut behind the solstice mural and then proceeded across the fourth floor, finally going through the “Employees Only” doors at the other end of Solsticeland and coming to a halt at the freight elevator. I pressed the button to call it—and saw from the numbers that lit up on the panel that it was currently down on the same level as the docks. So it had evidently been used since Satsy’s scary experience. I wondered if anyone else had been terrorized inside its confines.