"What's your name?" she repeated.
On the other hand, I was just a seasonal employee, one whom they'd all forget (except possibly the outraged Preston) as soon as I left the sixth floor. So I said, "Esther Diamond."
"Esther Dia . . . Oh, my God!"
I flinched and dropped my garbage bag when Elspeth grabbed my shoulders and squeezed with excitement.
"It's you! Oh, my God! It's you!" she cried.
"Who the hell is she?" Preston asked.
"Yes, who am I?" I asked, as baffled as the girl's father.
"Jane! You're Jane!" Her sulky face was illuminated by sudden enthusiasm as she said to her bemused family, "This is Jane Aubrey!"
Oh, no.
I felt paralyzed with panic.
"No, I'm pretty sure that's Dreidel," Freddie said with a puzzled frown.
"Elspeth, this elf just said she's Esther Diamond." Helen added, "Pay attention, Freddie."
"Then who's Jane Aubrey?" her nephew wondered.
"You're one of them," I said, my well-trained voice barely a croak. I stared in dry-mouthed horror at Elspeth, who was practically jumping up and down in her excitement. "The vamparazzi!"
"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 got 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.")