Rudolph! (24 page)

Everyone sat, and Cordelia planted herself across the table from me. She kicked me twice in the shins as she fussed with her napkin, and I waited until she was done squirming before I launched a swift kick at her kneecap. The table bounced slightly and she squealed. "Dad!"

"Stuff it, Cor," her father said. He still looked a little green. "Whatever is going on, you probably deserved it." He tried to wink at me, but he was out of practice, and he nearly turned his eyelid inside out.

Nancy saw him jerk his head, and she immediately leaned over to stroke the side of his face. "Are you all right, darling?" she asked. Jack smiled and let her stroke his cheek.

Cordelia gave me the finger. I smiled back and asked her to pass the butter. My grip on my knife was solid.

Barb interrupted further family drama with the soup. Nancy clapped excitedly as our host brought bowls around to each of us. "I got this recipe from the cooking channel last week," she said proudly, directing her comment at Sylvia, who merely raised an eyebrow and cautiously dipped a spoon in the bowl Barb placed before her.

I'm not a big fan of soup—it's the way things float to the surface that unsettles me—but Nancy's soup was pretty good. It had a variety of mushrooms in it, along with some vegetables for color, hazelnuts, and tiny flecks of orange peel.

As my spoon started to scrape on the bottom of the bowl, I noticed there was something red down there. Not in the soup itself, but printed on the bottom of the bowl. I slurped a few more mouthfuls of soup as I checked to see if I was the only one with a mysterious message in my soup.

Apparently not. The others were slurping and scraping too.

"They were so adorable," Nancy cooed. She bounced in her seat, unable to keep a secret. "I just couldn't resist them. I found them at Pottery Barn down in the Village. You can get whole place settings."

Sylvia, for all her disdain for soup and surprises, cleared her bowl first. "I've got Dasher," she said. Edger finished next and held up his bowl for all to see the fat reindeer image in the bottom of his bowl. It didn't look like anyone I knew, but large cartoon letters spelled out COMET beneath the prancing figure.

My spoon was suddenly very heavy in my hand as everyone started calling out reindeer names. Soon I was the only one left, and they were all looking at me. I lifted my bowl, tilting it so that the thin film of soup still in the bowl pooled near the rim. There were red splotches in my bowl, which turned out to be sparkly dance shoes on a reindeer. "You got Prancer," Cordelia sneered.

"They're just
so
funny," Nancy said, showing us a picture of Blitzen that characterized him as half-soused.

I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and barfed up all the soup I had just eaten.

A tiny sparrow tapped at the bathroom door. "Are you okay?" Barb asked.

"Yeah," I replied. I was sitting on the edge of the tub, resting my elbows on my knees. Barb opened the door cautiously, and when she saw that I didn't have my pants around my ankles or wasn't trying to hang myself from the shower curtain rod with my tie, she came in and sat down on the closed toilet.

I had been crying a little, and I wiped at my face as she looked at me. "I knew him," I said. "There was nothing funny about the way he died."

She didn't say anything, which was considerate because that sentence probably made me sound like a nut-job, and we sat quietly awhile. Distantly, I heard the chatter of voices from the dining room, punctuated by a squeal from Cordelia.

"One of her siblings probably touched the butter dish at the same time she did," I noted.

"Or ate a green bean funny," Barb suggested.

"She is bound and determined not to have a good time, isn't she?" I asked.

Barb nodded. "Yes, she certainly wants to be heard."

I flashed on the script. "Is that all it is, then?" I wondered. "Just wanting to be heard?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"The musical," I said. "It's so angry. So much frustration and rage. Is that just someone wanting to be heard?"

"It's what we do, Bernie," she said, looking at me like I should know this. "It's a way to cope with pain. I felt that way when Daniel was injured. For months. I drove away half my friends being an utter spiteful bitch. But it didn't fix anything. It didn't fix him, that's for sure. It just made me more isolated, more lonely. It eats at you, Bernie, if you let it. It eats you up and leaves you hollow."

I thought of Rudolph, who had been angry since '64. So driven, so determined to be the best reindeer to ever pull the sleigh. And it wasn't even a contest. The accident had left him so changed that he wasn't even truly a reindeer anymore. He was like those kids in the comics: an X-deer. He didn't sleep, he could fly for days, and his constitution was so strong that he could probably pull the red sled full of toys all by himself. Yet he pushed himself farther. He came back from purgatory, alone against the entire holy host. He would have gone to hell without us. And what had all that determination gotten him? At what point was he trying so hard to make happiness that he lost sight of what happiness was? Was that what had happened in Boston? I had never seen him so angry, so willing and ready to hurt someone because they threatened to speak ill of Christmas.

And now the show. It had a grip on me, like some demonic worm gnawing its way deeper and deeper into my gut. There was a part of me that wanted to pull out. Just walk away and let this show fall apart before anyone saw it.

"Why are you doing this show?" I asked Barb.

She took a moment to change gears mentally. "Originally, I needed to get out of the house," she said. "I needed to work again. I hadn't done any theater work in a long time. Daniel and I had been trying"—she shook her head—"His firm was very successful. I hadn't needed to work, and there were other things to do."

"But there's a different reason now, isn't there?"

She tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear and sat up a little straighter. "It happened at Halloween," she said. "Two years ago. We were at a party thrown by one of the partners in the firm. It was . . . we were walking back to the car. I had had more to drink than him and"—she shook her head again—"It had been a tough week for me, and normally I'm the one who drives, but that night, I'd had a few more. I hadn't been drinking for a few months, and there was no reason not to anymore, and so I had a few. Daniel was going to drive and . . ." She trailed off, her gaze on her fingers, which had gotten all tangled up in her lap. "There were some kids who were pranking the neighborhood. Egging cars. They were wearing marks, trying to pretend it was all in the spirit of Halloween. Daniel said something—I don't remember what he said, but he was like that: he would always say something—and they started throwing eggs at us. I got hit. Had egg in my hair and all over my coat. Daniel lost it. He charged them, and most of them took off running. But one kid stood his ground.

"There were patches of ice on the sidewalk. It was one of those nights that we get infrequently here, when it actually gets cold enough to freeze. There isn't much ice, and it's usually clear and slick. Daniel was running at this kid, who was throwing eggs as fast as he could at Daniel, as if that would stop him. Daniel was waving his arms and shouting, and I was crying at him to stop—just leave the kid alone—and then he slipped. One minute he was up, and the next, he was lying on the ground."

She paused, and her eyes were bright. "He hit his head on the edge of a brick wall. It wasn't much of a wall. Lawn ornamentation. But it had an edge to it, and he came down on it wrong, and it just . . . "

I reached out and took her hand, squeezing her fingers. She didn't look finished, and I didn't dare interrupt her.

"You know the story about Santa Claus, don't you?" she said after a long moment. "That urban legend about Santa Claus going to heaven and bringing back the spirit of a little girl's dead father?"

I swallowed heavily and nodded. I wasn't sure my voice would have worked even if I had tried to say anything.

"It was all over the Internet, of course. Even though the Portland newspaper made a big deal about retracting the story it had written. It only made it worse. The Internet had it, and every time someone passed it along to me, it was wilder and stranger. It was a stupid story, really, and I didn't want to believe it, but shortly after the next Halloween, the doctors told me they didn't know if Daniel was going to wake up. Ever. And I had spent the whole year hoping that he would, praying every night that I'd find him awake when I went to visit him the next day. I couldn't deal with it anymore. I needed something. I needed some way to keep my hope alive.

"I wrote Santa a letter. Just like I did when I was a kid. I wrote it out longhand, put a stamp on it, and dropped it off at the post office myself. Do you know what I asked Santa for? I asked him to bring Daniel some peace. The brick wall had fractured Daniel's skull, and some pieces had been driven into his brain. Even if he woke up, the doctors told me, it was very likely that he'd be . . . he wouldn't recognize me. He might not recognize anything. And so I asked Santa to let Daniel die."

She wiped at her face with one hand, her other hand locked around mine. "You know what?" she said. "I didn't get what I wanted that Christmas." She squeezed my fingers really tightly.

"I'm sorry," I said.

She looked at me, her eyes shining with tears. "Why?" she asked. "It's not your fault."

Well, that was probably true. Last year I hadn't been in charge. Who knows what the NPC had done about Christmas wishes like Barb's. But still . . . I was Mrs. C's special envoy, after all.

She let go of my hand finally. "You wanted to know why I took this job," she said. "Why I'm still here even though this musical is . . . is what it is. I took this job because I needed something to distract me from the daily emptiness that is Daniel's condition. I took the job because the script was everything that I was feeling at the time. All the rage and hate that is coming out of Rudolph on that stage? I know where that comes from. Those are my feelings. Not his. It was all so senselessness, this life I had been given, like a cruel fucking joke. And I was angry about living a life that was void of any hope for happiness.

"You know what the funny thing is? That's my best work up there on the stage. Out of all that bile and frustration and anger, I created something amazing. I created something that has never been seen before. I made something new. And that is why I'm still here, why I'm still working on this show. Because it is about making something new. As bleak as it is, there's still hope in it."

December 7th

S
ince I had nothing else to do while tied to the chair in the
base
ment, I was making my list, and checking it . . . a couple hundred times.

1. Erma. Definitely. I had seen her face.
   
2. Henrik. It had taken me awhile to figure out he was the meek-voiced one, mainly because it was so unlike the persona he adopted during rehearsals. But there were clues, and I put them together eventually.
   
3. Ted. At the very least, he had to know what was going on. He was only one I had told about the amount of money in the Swiss account. If my kidnappers knew, it was because Ted had told them.
   

Which left the one with the hand-rolled cigarettes and the dinner theater experience.
Slapper
. I had an idea who that was. There were only so many bitter thespians in the troupe. What I didn't know and what cramped my brain during the nearly sleepless nights I had spent in the basement so far was whether or not Barb was involved. What she had said in the bathroom on Thanksgiving kept coming back to me. Was she a better actor than any of them? Was it a carefully constructed lie for my benefit? Did she really believe that there was something extraordinary that could come out of this production?

I believed her; rather, I believed her words, because I needed something to hang on to myself. I was having trouble remembering all the lyrics to "Jingle Bells," and I was starting to worry that I was losing the Spirit.

Rudolph and I both had it. We had brought the Spirit of Christmas back from hell, and in the two years since, it had always been there in my belly. That warm-extra-brandy-in-your-eggnog sort of feeling.

But it can fade. I tell you now: it can fade. Santa was losing it. Satan had yanked hard and pulled all of it out of Fat Boy once, and he had nearly done the same with Mrs. C. We had brought it back, but the connection wasn't as concrete as it had been in the past. You can repair the damage, but you can never truly weld the desire back the way it was. And if the world is hard enough on you, if there is nothing but despair and bleakness all day long, the Spirit does lose some of its luster.

I didn't have much strength left. How long had I been down here? Four days? Five? Thanksgiving had been late this year, and I had stayed in my hotel during the mad shopping frenzy that had followed. How many rehearsals had I seen? Three? Four?

I had been working late in the office, trying to figure out what the deal was with the seats. I had cracked the spreadsheets, and had started to see some holes in the expenses. Money was going out faster than debts were accruing. I was starting to wonder about Ted's ability to do math.

They had been waiting for me that night. I remember leaving the office and standing by the elevator. The bell rang, and the doors opened, and then there had been a rush of sound behind me. Heavy footsteps coming at a run. I had turned just as something heavy slammed into my back. I bounced off the elevator door and fell on my back, staring up at the polished light of the elevator car. And then everything had gone dark.

Someone had hit me with the ornate garbage can next to the elevator, and after I passed out, they dragged me like a fifty-pound sack of dog food down to the basement, where I was incarcerated. Tied up, blindfolded, and left to go five rounds with the pounding headache waiting for me when I woke up. Eventually, they showed up and started asking questions about the money.

It was a long con. Erma had said as much. The production was never meant to succeed. They set up the company, found a script that had enough promise to be seen as avant-garde and daring to a couple of investors, and set up shop. The show might open, but the reviews would be so awful that no one would come. Tickets would go unsold, and the principals would vanish with the money they had siphoned off the accounts. And I had finally realized what the disconnect was in the spreadsheets. It wasn't that Ted couldn't do math; he was screwing up the buckets. The one that all the bills went into was marked Net 60, and there was another one marked "Paid" and it contained everything that was in the Net 60 bucket. Everything was being marked as paid—in cash, no less—but that wasn't actually true. All those accounts were going to be due in mid-December, just about the time the show shut down. All the investment money that should have gone to these debts would be missing, and the collectors would be calling, looking for their payments. Without decent ticket sales, there wasn't going to be any money to pay them off with.

They were playing a tricky game, but they had placed themselves well enough to play it out. When I showed up, the pot suddenly got a lot bigger, but the trick was getting me to cough up the money. And when that hadn't happened outright, they had decided to sweat the account info out of me instead.

And they might actually get it. It had been five days since I had eaten anything. I was past woozy. I was starting to have trouble with my vision. I had given up on worrying about dehydration. It took too much strength. What was I doing down here? Who got hurt if I gave them the money?

Who got hurt if I
didn't
give them the money?

Slapper was Franklin Donovan King. He was the show's leading man as well as the director of record. Over the past few days, I had gone back over everything that had happened since I had arrived at the Heritage about six hundred million times, and every time some other little detail poked out. I hadn't actually ever met Franklin, which was somewhat odd, given our respective roles in the company. Erma had always deflected my questions about the whereabouts of the man playing Rudolph; she had even told me some wild story about a family tragedy back in Illinois that had required Mr. King's sudden presence over Thanksgiving. Rehearsals were still going on with Bucky Dowminster—the ersatz understudy—standing in for King. Everything seemed to be moving along, progressing as it should. No one had seemed terribly concerned about the lack of the leading man/director, and I—who had never seen a live musical, much less produced one—had figured my confusion in this regard was merely my theater production inexperience.

Franklin came to visit again, and when he saw that I wasn't wearing the blindfold, he hovered on the periphery of my vision—hiding in the shadows, smoking his noxious cigarettes. Occasionally, I'd get a glimmer of light bouncing off his shaved head. He smoked two cigarettes in rapid succession, as if his tactic this time around was to poison all the air in the small room until I talked.

I figured there wasn't much reason to wait that long.

"You don't have much faith in Bucky, do you?" I whispered.

He exhaled a long stream of smoke. "Why do you say that?" he asked in return. "He's getting a lot of practice."

"But not much direction. I may not know much about theater, but I know what happens when you let someone think they know what they are doing. He's got the lines down, but that doesn't mean much, does it? Not that you care, I suppose."

"Not really," he said. "Reviewers will see it during the preview shows. By the time it actually opens, it'll be all over." He flicked his cigarette at me, and it bounced off my lap, scattering a spray of sparks. I was so tired I didn't even bother flinching. "Bucky's only experience is regional theater. He's never done Shakespeare. He's never sung anything more demanding than a chorus role in
The Music Man
. But he has the right combination of arrogance and stupidity that will allow him to think he
can
pull this off."

"Whereas your combination of arrogance and stupidity means you can actually do it?"

"I've done Shakespeare. I've done Hamlet. And not in some backwater Canadian production like Keanu Reeves. I played MacBeth in Los Angeles, Caesar in Boston, Shylock in Virginia."

"They why the con? Why bother when you've obviously got some talent."

Franklin grimaced slightly. "There's no money in talent."

"Back to that Keanu thing again?"

Speaking of arrogance and stupidity, here I was smart-talking the one guy who might have it in him to actually hurt me. I suppose some part of me thought riling him up was a clever plan.

Franklin shrugged as he dug into a coat pocket for his tobacco pouch. He was playing it cool, but I could tell that I was getting on his nerves.

All I needed to do was figure out how to capitalize on this before I crossed the line and he started torturing me again.

"Who wrote the musical?" I asked, buying some time while I tried to rub enough brain cells together to start a mental fire. "The only thing I saw was a copyright notice by someone named Dread Caspian, which isn't a very good pseudonym. Did you write it?"

Franklin shook his head as he grabbed a large pinch of tobacco and dropped it in the center of a cigarette paper. "Dunno. Who cares really?"

"It just landed in your lap?" I asked.

"Not my department," he said. He rolled the cigarette back and forth between his fingers. "I'm just the talent."

I wondered if that meant there was someone else involved. A producer-type like me. Someone who had gotten them started. "I was just curious," I said.

"I guess it gives you something to do while you're down here," he said. He raised the cigarette to his mouth and ran his tongue along the paper, and then rolled it a final time between his fingers. "Are you bored yet?" he asked. "Of being
curious
?"

I licked my lips carefully. "I suppose I should be thinking about something else, shouldn't I?"

He nodded as he flicked open his lighter and lit his cigarette. I flinched slightly when I heard the crackling sound of the tobacco lighting up, remembering the hot touch against my earlobe. He puffed once or twice, watching me through a haze of smoke, and after he snapped his lighter shut and put it away, he blew a lazy smoke ring. "‘How long a time lies in one little word!'" he said, evidently quoting one of Shakespeare's historical plays. My brain couldn't keep them straight at this point. "‘Four lagging winters and four wanton springs end in a word; such is the breath of kings.'"

It was only money
, I thought. It wasn't like I couldn't get more. If not from Mrs. C, then from somewhere—there were other ways. Not entirely legal ways, but I could raise the capital myself if I needed to. I could even pay Mrs. C back, if it came down to it. In which case, was the money worth dying over?

Was that my price? One million dollars.

There was a bustle of voices from the next room then, a rattling cacophony as if a Greek Chorus had been infected mid-prologue with Tourette's Syndrome. Someone bumped into the storeroom door, fumbling with the doorknob.

Franklin hurried toward the door, the expression on his face tight and grim. This wasn't part of the plan, I realized. He reached the door as it opened, and Henrik rushed in.

"We've got a problem," Henrik said. "A really serious problem."

Franklin pushed Henrik back toward the door. "Not here," he growled. "Not where he can hear us."

Henrik backed up against the door, which clicked shut behind him. "No," he said, fumbling for the lock behind his back. "This may be our only chance."

"What are you talking about?" Franklin snapped.

The door secured, Henrik fumbled with something in his pocket. He raised his hand, some of his elegant grace coming back, and proudly displayed what he had brought with him. As if he were an advertising model, showing off the latest fashion.

Except what he had in his hand was an old German Luger.

"We stay here. He's our hostage."

Franklin glared at the gun in Henrik's hand. "Is it the cops?" he asked, his voice low.

"Worse," Henrik said. He pushed past Franklin and glided over to me, the gun pointing right at my face. "It's friends of his."

"What are you talking about?" Franklin demanded. "He doesn't have any friends."

"He does," Henrik said. "I've seen them. They're looking for him."

"This isn't the time, Henrik. This isn't the time to lose your cool." Franklin gestured at me. "He was about to tell me the code. We were almost there. Are you out of your fucking mind?"

"We should have left, Franklin. We should have been satisfied. And now? It's all falling apart."

"Nothing's falling apart, Henrik. Nothing's going to happen." Franklin's voice was calm and soothing, like he was trying to coax a wild dog to let go of his sneaker.

It didn't work on Henrik. "There are reindeer out there!" he shouted. He started waving the gun around, causing Franklin to duck. I wanted to duck, but all the ropes were still holding me to the chair. "They're looking for Rosewood, and they're very angry."

"Reindeer don't do anger," Franklin said. "Listen to yourself. You're talking stupid animals with antlers. They're just horses. They're—"

"They're not horses," I croaked, interrupting him. "They're a species of deer."

They both stared at me.

"Horses are domesticated," I explained. "Reindeer aren't. That's the first difference. The second—"

"I don't give a shit whether they're domesticated or not," Franklin snapped. "They've got four legs and they—they don't talk. They don't do anger. They don't come looking for people. They're just fucking animals."