Higher Mythology (24 page)

***

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

The morning papers were also full of eloquent letters complaining about Gilbreth Feed and Fertilizer. None of them was signed H. Doyle, but they voiced similar questions and concerns. Some were written to provoke the most severe reactions in their readers. The Folk felt their flyer had met with wonderful success, and it was only a matter of time before responses appeared in print, provoking an outcry from the ostensibly wounded party.

Holl was clutching the editorial section in one hand and drinking his morning tea when the telephone rang. He put the cup down to pick up the handset.

“Back off!” Mona Gilbreth’s voice blasted from the receiver. Holl held the handset at nearly arm’s length to save his ears. The echo bounded off the kitchen walls. “You promised no more letters to the press. You know what I could do if you’re trying to thwart me. The girl’s all right, and she’ll remain all right, but get off my back!”

“It was not I,” Holl said, drawing the mouthpiece close enough to speak. “I gave you my word, and I am keeping it. Not one of those letters was written by me.”

He thrust it away, wincing, when she began to shout again. All the Little Folk in the room could hear her next demand perfectly. “What about the rest of the people who work at Hollow Tree Industries? Did they write them?”

“I swear that no one who works for Hollow Tree sent a single letter to the editor,” Holl said carefully. “Call any of the people who signed the letters. Would I endanger my own flesh and blood?”

“If you’re smart you won’t,” Gilbreth snarled.

“You can’t keep her forever,” Holl reminded her. There was a very long pause.

“If you don’t back off and leave me alone,” the woman at the other end said in a careful, deliberate voice, “I will tell the National Informer that your little girl is really a pixie, and you’ll never get her back. She’ll spend the rest of her life in freak shows or laboratories.”

“No!” Holl exclaimed involuntarily. He stared up at the others, knowing that they had heard every word.

Tay looked shocked. Holl knew his face only echoed his nephew’s expression of horror. It was the nightmare that had haunted them from the time they set foot onto the Midwestern campus more than four decades ago: freak shows, experiments, the end of privacy and integrity. The last year and a half in comparative safety on their own lands only made the force of Gilbreth’s threat that much more terrifying. Such an outcome had to be prevented at any cost. Tay backed away from the phone and began to converse in low voices with the others. There were startled exclamations, and Siobhan began to cry. Maura broke away from the crowd and came to him, twisting at the ring on her finger. She offered it to him in both hands. Holl looked from the winking blue stone to his lifemate’s eyes, and she gave him a helpless but brave smile. Regretfully, he nodded. It was the only really valuable thing they owned. A love token to redeem a loved one seemed only right.

“No,” he repeated into the phone, in a quieter voice. “We’ll send you a token of our good faith to prove that we will stand by your conditions.”

“All right,” Gilbreth said. “I’ll wait for it.”

Mona sat with her hand on the phone for a moment, feeling strangely triumphant.

“Inspiration?” Jake wanted to know.

“No,” Mona said tiredly. “I got the idea from Grant. He’s still going on about those deformed ears the girl has—he thinks it means that she’s the will o’ the wisp or Tinkerbell. Sounds like they’ve heard something like it before. It got one hell of a strong response, didn’t it?”

“Sure did.” Jake stretched back in his chair with his hands behind his head. “I wonder what this token’ll be like.”

“They must be illegal aliens,” Mona said, looking thoughtful. “That H. Doyle has got to be an illegal, or else why would they stay so cagey even while I’m threatening to give his niece away to the circus? That has got to be why they’re always hiding. Hmm. His name sounds Irish.”

“So what?” Jake asked. “So does Gilbreth.”

“Yes, but I was born here. I bet he wasn’t, him or his family. Maybe I can get them deported,” she said, picking up a pencil and tapping it against her teeth. The thought made her happy. “After he pays the ransom and I give him back his kid.”

“How could she know?” Tay asked, wringing his hands.

“I don’t know if she does,” Holl said. “It could have been a shot in the dark. In any case, we’ve stooped to bribery to insure Dola’s safety. Keith Doyle will not be pleased, nor will the Master, but what else could we do?” He held up the ring and drew his small carving knife from the sheath on his belt. “I swear I’ll replace this with something as good or better one day,” he said to Maura.

“Never mind,” she replied, shaking her head ruefully. “If it will save Dola from the Big Folk you could take my finger with it.”

With a deft motion, Holl prized the sapphire from the setting and handed the ring back to Maura. “We’ll mail this stone today. She must soon set a time and place for the exchange of ransom. We’ll be ready for it when the time comes.”

Wednesday morning, Paul Meier had assigned his interns to work together on a series of ads for a regional cleaning service, but inspiration was not coming easily. “Come To Dust” should have provoked something clever out of the students, and Paul was showing his disappointment. He was particularly unhappy with his star “ideator.” Keith’s mind seemed to be everywhere except right there with him in the conference room.

“Come on,” Meier urged them. “It’s Shakespeare. Shakespeare?” He leaned over his cup half-full of dilute coffee and congealing non-dairy creamer, and appealed to the four interns. Dorothy was deep in her inner world, making little sketches of faces and fashion designs. Sean was earnest but empty. Brendan was bored, and didn’t care who knew. Meier slammed his hands down on the table and rose behind it. “All right. Give it a rest. Someone go read
Cymbeline
and meet me back here after lunch.” He headed for the door, and Sean and Brendan trailed listlessly behind him.

The bang of the door closing behind them seemed to have aroused Keith out of his reverie. He looked around for the others, and ended up meeting Dorothy’s gaze.

“
Cymbeline
?” Dorothy asked.

“Shakespeare play,” he said, forcing a worried grin. “What about it?”

“‘Come to dust’ is a quote from Shakespeare,” she said patiently. “That’s the name of our product line here. Got no images for the ads. That’s what we’ve been doing all morning. Where’s your brain, the moon?”

“Maybe,” Keith said apologetically. He picked up the data sheet PDQ had received from the parent company. “Uh, it’s a clever line, like it was meant to mean something about cleaning. You have any idea what
Cymbeline
is about?” Dorothy shook her head. “Me, neither. Well, how about young men and women in Midsummer Night’s Dream costumes pirouetting around a living room dusting and vacuuming?”

“Yes, why not? I can do that.” Dorothy said. The lines flew out from under her pencil. With a few deft touches, she created lively figures in floating draperies wielding feather dusters and mops.

“Cute,” Keith said, watching her enviously. “I wish I could do that.”

“All it takes is practice,” Dorothy said self-deprecatingly. “I bet you’d be good.”

“My, my, what have we here?” Brendan asked, coming in and looking over Dorothy’s shoulder. “Very nice.”

“Good enough to steal?” Keith asked. Dorothy’s eyes widened, but she said nothing.

“Temper, Keith,” Brendan said, wagging a finger at him. “See you after lunch.”

“What’s he done?” Dorothy asked as their
bête noire
disappeared out the door again.

“Nothing much,” Keith mumbled. “Forget it.”

“Well, why don’t you tell Paul about it?”

“I don’t want to bring him into it,” Keith said. “It’s personal.”

“Uh-huh,” Dorothy said. “Everything gets personal with Mr. Smug out there. Sorry I asked. Want to get something to eat?”

“I’m not really hungry.”

“Hey, come and watch me eat, then,” she said.

“Sure,” Keith said, forcing a modicum of good humor into his voice. With an effort, he stood up and followed her. His legs and arms, as well as his brain, seemed to have been encased in lead. Nothing was moving today.

“Keith?” the secretary called as they appeared in the reception hall.

“Yes?”

“Telephone call for you. I can put it through to the conference room if you don’t want to take it out here.”

Keith hoped it was Diane. “I’ll take it back there. Thanks.” He shrugged regret at Dorothy. “Sorry. It’s important.”

“Win some, lose some,” she said. “See you later.”

Keith dashed back to the room and punched the blinking light on the telephone. “Hello?”

“Keith Doyle?”

“Holl? What’s wrong?” Keith suddenly had a mental picture of the elves besieged, and remembered what he was supposed to have been doing before he became so preoccupied.

“Nothing more, be reassured. We’ve had an interesting conversation with the woman, and I wanted to bring you up to date.” Holl repeated the exchange he had had that morning with Mona Gilbreth, and what they planned to do.

“You shouldn’t send her anything, Holl,” Keith said, pacing up and down in the empty conference room. “She’s kidnapped your baby, killed a being we hardly knew anything about, and she’s still refusing to say when she’ll let your other kid come home. You’ll have her on your back forever if she can get you to start paying blackmail because you think she knows you’re elves.”

“We’re not,” Holl said firmly, “and it ends the moment we have Dola back,” he promised.

“Well, yeah, she’s what’s important,” Keith agreed. “What are you sending to Kill-breath as this token?”

“The stone from Maura’s ring,” Holl said. “It’s a small thing, truly.”

“Oh, Holl,” Keith said sympathetically, then suddenly stopped pacing. “Oh, God, where are you going to get anything like that for the rest of the ransom?”

“We will not. The rest need not resemble the first offering. We will substitute something appropriate.”

“You keeping up with orders? Is there anything coming in?”

“Now that we have come to terms with shock, loss, and violation, we are functioning. All is well on that end.”

“Well, you can’t miss the house payment,” Keith said practically, walking around and around the conference table and playing out the phone cord between his fingers as he thought. “We’ll find a way to raise it.” He wished once again they could call in some kind of authority. It would solve the problem long before it got to the ransom stage. He started to plan out loud a lightning raid on the gift shops in the Midwestern area to collect orders, but none of it really added up to the amount Gilbreth’s henchman had demanded. “I don’t think even Ms. Voordman would have an order that would amount to more than a fortieth.…” Holl stopped him in midsentence.

“We’ll manage,” the elf said in a soothing tone. “The solution needn’t be thought of in this same minute.”

Keith stopped pacing and leaned his head against a wall. “Sorry. I’m under pressure. One of my fellow interns is making a total pest of himself. He follows me all over the place. He poured coffee on one of my layouts. It took forever to reproduce.” Holl murmured sympathy. “Thanks, but that’s not the worst of it. He fielded a call from Diane and told her I was out with Dorothy, one of the other interns. We were only having lunch, but he made it sound like we were having a quickie affair. Now Diane’s not speaking to me. I called her back, and she kept hanging up on me. He convinced her that within one month out of her sight I’ve turned into a Casanova with my coworkers. I wish I had something to rub his face in, say wet concrete studded with live scorpions. I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything all day long. Dorothy warned me Gilbreth had sicced him on me, but I never imagined he’d stoop to sabotaging my love life.”

Holl sounded sympathetic but amused. “You sound as if you’re under siege in that great fastness where you work. All will be resolved in time.”

“Yeah,” Keith said. “I know. We just have to live through it. There are more important things to worry about, like Dola.”

“Aye. But for pity’s sake, Keith Doyle, if you want to assuage Diane’s concerns, why do you not declare yourself to her?”

“Aw, come on, Holl … Gotta go,” Keith said suddenly, hearing the doorknob turning and seeing an unwelcome face appear. “Brendan’s coming,” he whispered in a breath that only an elf would be able to hear.

“Ready for the next round, Keith?” Martwick asked brightly, slapping his briefcase on the tabletop.

“Looking forward to it, Brendan,” Keith said, hanging up the phone. Sean came in and put his jacket into the closet.

“Have a good lunch?” he asked them. They glared at each other and smiled at him.

Dorothy came in with Paul Meier. “So where is it, Keith?” Paul asked, slapping his hands together and rubbing them. “Dorothy tells me you got something together on “Come To Dust” just before lunch time. Let’s see.”

Keith sifted through the papers on the tabletop, growing more frantic as he reached successive layers without seeing the sketch.

“What’s the matter?” Meier asked.

“The sketch isn’t here,” Keith said.

“Did you take it somewhere?” Dorothy asked.

“No. I was only out of the room for a minute,” Keith said.

“I’ve been in here on the phone almost the whole time.” He looked at Brendan, who raised his hands innocently.

“I didn’t see it. I left before you guys, remember?”

It didn’t mean he hadn’t come back. Keith opened his mouth, planning to deliver a sour retort when Paul interrupted him.

“Well, come on, kids. If it’s a good idea, I want to see it. If the sketch is missing, do another one.”

Keith turned appealing eyes toward Dorothy. The artist hated to do things over again, but she reproduced the drawing with admirable skill, and showed it to Paul. He nodded over it and stroked his chin.

“Kind of predictable, but I bet the client had an idea like that anyway. I don’t know why they didn’t just suggest it when we first met with them. Not bad.”

“I’d rather you said it stunk than you thought it was
predictable
,” Keith said, feeling discontented.