Secret Santa Page 7

  She let out a sharp shriek and dropped the doll.

  Perky laid on the carpet, motionless. She picked it up and gave it a quick poke, right in its belly. No crunch. No strange sensations. She squeezed it. It was filled with cotton, or whatever stuffing went inside kids’ toys.

  She’d read one too many lousy horror manuscripts this week. That was all. The relentless parade of unnecessary adverbs had begun to infect her. That, plus she had a slight buzz.

  She set the doll on her bookshelf. Time to call it a night.

  There was a knock at her door. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She just wanted to slip out, unnoticed. “I’m not in here,” she said.

  The door opened a crack, and a massively coiffed head popped through. Fabien Nightingale. What was he doing here? She waved him in and told him to close the door. He was bundled up in his fur coat and striped scarf, with a pair of oversized Elton John shades. He looked like a gay character in a Dickens novel. Or a Dickens character in a gay novel.

  Without taking off his shades or jacket, Fabien slid into the open chair across from her desk. “This place isn’t as creepy as I’d expected,” he said. “It’s worse. It smells like…”

  “A dog park?”

  “A nursing home.”

  He wasn’t wrong, but she had no idea how he could smell anything aside from his cologne. Lussi rubbed her eyes. He must have laid it on thicker than usual to cover the absinthe seeping from his pores.

  “You all right, love?” Fabien asked. “Why aren’t you downstairs?”

  “Still nursing that hangover from last night,” she fibbed. He hadn’t come to listen to her complain about office politics. Actually, what was he doing here? She was surprised he’d been let into the building in the first place, and even more surprised someone had apparently shown him to her office. Authors didn’t usually drop by their publishers’ offices unannounced. At least the sane ones didn’t. “Were you in the neighborhood today, or…”

  “You invited me,” he said. “You told me to bring a little fée verte to spike the punch and said we could entertain ourselves by making bets on who was going to hook up. I’ve brought plenty of ones and fives.”

  “I did not say that.” She shook her head. “Did I?”

  He picked up a manuscript from her desk. “You did indeed,” he said, reading over the query letter. “Perhaps you’d better leave the drinking to the professionals. Your liver will thank you later.” He turned the page. “ ‘Last Thursday night was the first time I saw the werewolf pissing on my grandmother’s grave.’ This sounds promising.”

  “You’d think so, right? It’s all downhill from there.”

  He flipped through a few more pages before tossing it onto her desk. “I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, brought you a present,” he said, reaching into his jacket’s inner recesses.

  “If it’s absinthe—”

  “Don’t worry, I already emptied my flask into the punch downstairs.”

  Lussi buried her head in her hands.

  “What? A punch bowl at a holiday party is asking to be spiked,” he said.

  “That punch was already spiked.”

  He raised a brow. “Well, it’s Christmas.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That is none of your business and certainly none of mine.” He pulled out a rolled-up manuscript and flattened it as best as he could on the edge of the desk. “Here’s the reason I transferred on the subway twice from the Upper West Side.”

  She read the title out loud: “Transylvanian Dirt.”

  “You said last night you wanted to read it. Though I’m beginning to understand you may not have been in full control of your faculties…”

  She scanned the first few pages. A prologue set in Nazi Germany. That would have to go. She flipped through the manuscript, reading a line here and there.

  Fabien added, “I’ve been saying this for a while, but vampires are going to come back in a big, big way. You can get ahead of the curve with this.”

  “Wait, this is a vampire novel? They’re dead, Fabien.”

  “You mean undead.”

  She groaned. Bloodsuckers came and went in cycles, like cicada broods. Anne Rice had breathed fresh life into the monsters a decade ago with Interview with the Vampire (a formative book for teenage Lussi), and a biblical flood of vampire novels followed. A few were notable: A Delicate Dependency. The Vampire Tapestry. But only a few. Most should have had stakes driven through them. Readers had soured on vampires in recent years due to the glut.

  Fabien wasn’t having it. “I’ve been out there. Among the people. In Wichita. In Toledo. I see what they read. That book by those splatterpunk knobs has sold over half a million copies. Go tell them vampires are old hat.”

  The Light at the End was a bonanza of blood and tits, written by a pair of failed rock musicians. It crossed lines of good taste Lussi had previously been oblivious to. It was many things, but a sign that vampires were on the upswing wasn’t one of them.

  “Refresh my memory,” Lussi said. “Have you showed any of this to your editor at Harper yet?”

  “Do you think I would be here if I hadn’t?”

  Lussi raised an eyebrow.

  “Rest easy,” he said. “It was a ‘thanks, but no thanks’ from the good folks at your former employer.”

  “I never got the chance to work for them. They laid me off.”

  “A mere technicality. Much like an option.”

  “Fabien, I swear, if you haven’t cleared this with them…”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “I’ve got the rejection letter at home. Suitable for framing. Could you just read this thing? It’s either the best thing I’ve ever done or the worst. I’m not asking you to publish it. You’re not my editor anymore, but you’re the only person in this decrepit industry whose opinion I care about. My agent wants to send it wide next week. I just need to know I’m not embarrassing myself here.”

  She didn’t see how she could fit it into her schedule, with all she had to do by the end of the year. But she also didn’t see how she could tell him no.

  “I’ll take a look this weekend,” she said.

  He didn’t thank her. Instead, he was staring past her. “Where did you get that?”

  She followed his gaze to the doll on her bookshelf. She’d positioned it as a bookend to her small collection of Broken Angel best sellers.

  “It’s a Secret Santa gift,” she said. “A Percht. Some weird German doll. It used to belong to Mr. Blackwood. It’s like a dream catcher—it’s supposed to keep evil spirits at bay.”

  Fabien walked around her desk. Picked it up. “Do you know its age?”

  “I’m assuming it’s old. Xavier Blackwood was old. Old people like old things.”

  “Your powers of deductive reasoning never fail to astonish me,” Fabien said with a smile. He set the doll back on the shelf. “You said it was a Percht? Is that any relation to Frau Perchta?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Lussi said. For all the warm feelings she had for her grandmother, she remembered precious little of her stories. Which was for the best, her sister would have said.

  Fabien didn’t say anything. He turned to the window. The blinds were up. The park across the street was alive with fire and energy tonight. Dusk was when neighborhoods showed their true selves. Was it Nelson Algren who’d said that? Some American poet.

  Fabien placed a finger on the glass and traced the length of one of the black bars. “Iron is often used to keep evil spirits at bay as well, you know,” he said. “What do you suppose the old man was afraid of?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  After she saw Fabien out, Lussi returned to her office. The party was still raging downstairs, but no one had paid her attention as she’d cut through the lobby. She slipped his manuscript into her work bag. She also notic
ed a tote bag resting on the floor beside her desk. Was it Fabien’s, or…? Lussi peered into the bag and saw the Sandy Chainsaw novel Cal had been reading earlier. Cal’s still here? She’d assumed he’d left when she couldn’t find him before the party.

  But there was one place she hadn’t thought to look. The place where he was most likely to be.

  The basement.

  She vaguely remembered telling him that she wanted him to get more manuscripts for her on Monday morning. Maybe he was a try-hard after all and had gone down that afternoon? Lussi felt her chest tighten, remembering how she’d been trapped in the dark steel cage. If Cal was stuck in there, no one would be able to hear him over the loud music—especially now that everyone was plastered.

  She pulled open the top drawer of her desk and retrieved the flashlight she’d picked up at a hardware store after her little episode in the basement.

  As she made her way down the spiral staircase, she noticed the crowd was starting to thin. She made it to the basement door without anyone stopping her. She pulled the chain at the top of the staircase.

  Nothing. Now this bulb was out, too? Great.

  “Cal, I swear to God, you better be down here,” she muttered. She switched on the flashlight and called out for Cal. She waited for a reply. No response. She descended the stairs and cast the beam around. The metal cage with the slush pile was beyond the flashlight’s range. “Cal?” she said again.

  He wasn’t down here. She would have heard him rattling the door if he’d been trapped. And anyway, a strong, sturdy young man like Cal could have ripped the door off its hinges. He might have dressed like Clark Kent, but he was built like Superman. She started back up the stairs when she heard a low mewling sound.

  She carefully lowered herself in a crouching position, shining the beam around. “Is someone down here?”

  The mewling continued; it sounded more animal than human. A wounded or starving animal. She tried the downstairs lights, but they weren’t working. She took slow, steady steps so as not to clack her chunky heels against the concrete. If it was a cat in need of medical attention, she didn’t want to scare it into hiding.

  A gray blur shot across the floor in the path of her flashlight. She tried to follow it with the beam, but all she caught was a thin pink tail disappearing under the shelving. People back home always asked her if the subway rats were really “as big as they say on the TV.” No, she would tell them. They’re bigger.

  The mewling had stopped. She whistled, hoping to draw the cat out. Sometimes that worked with Radcliffe, her eight-year-old tabby. Sometimes it didn’t work, of course. Cats are gonna cat.

  Her whistling morphed into the opening theme to The Andy Griffith Show. Lussi had always found Mayberry disturbing. It wasn’t a small town—it was a black-and-white purgatory, a spiritual pit stop on the road to heaven. Andy, Opie, Aunt Bee…all trapped in Mayberry, repeating the same mistakes over and over, until their sins were fully cleansed. Lussi was four when she’d developed this theory. Her parents stopped taking her to CCD after that.

  Lussi quit whistling…but the Andy Griffith theme continued.

  Unless there was a whistling cat in the building, someone was down here after all.

  * * *

  —

  Lussi froze. She could hear sobs mixed in between bars of the song. It hadn’t been a cat that she’d heard. It had been a person.

  A person crying.

  “Cal?” she said, creeping toward the whistling. She rounded the corner and found the whistler leaning against a stack of boxes, surrounded by a mess of papers. Digby. Drunk out of his mind, from the sound of it.

  He covered his eyes to see past the flashlight. “Dad? You came back for one last laugh, eh. Go ahead, then. Laugh. Get it out of your system, you…you miserable old…old…”

  Lussi turned the light around, illuminating her face. “It’s me. Lussi.”

  He laughed. It sounded like he was out of his mind. “Check out what Secret Santa brought me,” he said, showing off the little plastic toy. “Maureen had it the whole time.”

  Lussi sat cross-legged next to him. An empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s was tipped over beside him. Was it possible to drink so much whiskey that you could speak with your dead father? A question for another time, perhaps.

  “The lights cut out again,” he said. “When I find Alan, I’m going to…” His voice trailed off. “Look at this.”

  He held up a green-and-white-striped computer printout. She directed the flashlight at it but it was only a blur of numbers to her. The last math class she’d taken was in high school.

  “An old balance sheet,” he said by way of explanation. “Not only is this company in the red this year, but it appears it’s never turned a profit. Ever. If the old man had some sort of shadow investor who kept it propped up all these years, he never told me. Or recorded it in the books.”

  Lussi hadn’t been a business major, but even she knew you couldn’t lose money every year for forty years and still churn out books. Digby had to be misreading the reports. Could he even see straight right now? He was in no shape to analyze his own health, let alone the company’s.

  “I can hear my father’s voice, still. In these walls. He’s not done with me.” Digby shook his head. “But I’m done with him. This company…this building. It’s all one big joke. That’s the only reason he willed it to me, and not to his little tramp, Agnes.”

  “His secretary? Isn’t she, like, ninety?”

  “She looks it. I have no idea of her actual age. When my father first started sleeping with her, he was still married to my mother. The divorce dragged on for years and years. My childhood was a procession of court dates. He never remarried, but I got the impression he was still carrying on with Agnes. I would have fired her after I settled in, and I would have enjoyed it.”

  “You didn’t fire her.”

  “The last time I saw her was at the hospital, the day my father bit the big one. She called in the next day to tell Gail she quit. Didn’t even return to clear out her desk.”

  “Sounds like she knew what you were planning.”

  “She knew before I did. Nobody quits this company—that’s what Dad used to say. Well, somebody finally did. She deserves every terrible thing that life is going to throw at her, now that she’s alone and unemployed.” He paused. “I’m sorry. My emotions…That’s too far. I shouldn’t say such awful things. Especially about old ladies.”

  He picked up his bottle, saw it was empty, and heaved it at the far wall. It shattered on impact, raining glass shards onto the floor. Lussi bit her lip. She didn’t know why Digby was opening up to her. She guessed that—like most men—he was simply looking for an audience, and she was the closest thing.

  His head wobbled, threatening to fall right off his neck. How he’d made it down here without landing on his face, she didn’t know. But he was in no condition to go back. She decided to leave him the flashlight. It was past time for her to go home for the day. Cal had probably left his tote bag in her office on purpose and was bar-hopping his way through St. Marks with his friends.

  “Why don’t we let you sleep it off down here, okay?”

  His eyes were already closed, and he was snoring loudly. She pointed the flashlight in the direction of the stairs. A straight shot. She turned it off and was about to put it in Digby’s hands when the mewling started up again. It wasn’t Digby. It was coming from behind her.

  Lussi shined the flashlight back toward the wire cages. The wounded sound was coming from the slush pile. She approached cautiously. She didn’t like how pained the mewling sounded…and she didn’t like where it was coming from. The light was bouncing around, her hand trembling. The closer she got, the wider the area it illuminated. The wire door was open. The towers of manuscripts had toppled, causing tens of thousands of loose papers to spill from the cage…and sticking out from underneath them wa
s a single blue loafer.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lussi spent the rest of her Friday night with Cal in the ER. Diagnosis: fractured tibia, bruised ribs, concussion. Cal had no memory of the accident, but he’d been lying there in pain for hours, unable to move under the weight of the slush pile. There wasn’t enough brain bleach in the world to cleanse her mind’s eye of the image of his white shinbone poking through the skin.

  “I’m sorry you got hurt on your first day, Cal,” she said, holding his hand until his parents arrived. “I shouldn’t have asked you to get the manuscripts when I knew the basement was in such bad shape.”

  “Tha’s okay,” Cal said through a haze of sedatives. “I’s not your fault. Coulda…coulda happened to anyone.”

  But was that true? Lussi had been down in that basement twice now. Both times, something strange had happened. What happened to Cal went beyond hazing—well beyond. Thankfully, all signs pointed to it being an accident. She sure as hell didn’t believe in ghosts, but something weird was happening in that basement.

  Lussi had planned to come in on the weekend to catch up on submissions. Not now. She needed a break from the building. She also needed to seriously think about whether she should go back on Monday. Maybe Blackwood-Patterson wasn’t the place for her after all. Money and cool-ass gothic building be damned.

  By the time Monday morning rolled around, however, Lussi found herself getting up, getting dressed, and boarding the ferry. She emerged from the subway onto the streets of the East Village an hour later. She couldn’t give up so soon. Once more into the fray.

  * * *

  —

  A light snow was falling. First of the season. The sidewalks were a wet, slushy mess. The temperature was hovering right around freezing, where it would stay all day, according to Spencer Christian. Lussi hugged her handbag tight as she navigated the rush-hour pedestrian traffic. She was running a few minutes late. Whenever she was behind, it seemed like she was the only one walking with any sense of purpose.