Hank thought the woodshop was cool, with all the tools and paints tidily lined up and hung above a long, spotless wooden bench. Dad's tool shop had had sawdust all over everything. For a garage, this was pretty great. Hank wondered if the man had more tools down in the basement. Maybe the big fancy power tools. There was a key in the door lock. It made him really want to go look and see what was in there.
Gigi was more fascinated by the cutouts of gingerbread people, some of them bigger than she was. Single sides of these in various stages of being painted were stacked against the walls a couple of feet deep all over the garage. The completed ones had two sides—a back and a front, and in between the cutouts the man had made sides so that each gingerbread man stood on his own and formed kind of a box.
After she'd seen that, though, she was ready to go back inside. "Let's get him to call Mama now," she said to Hank.
But Hank was still eyeing the basement door, though he pretended not to be. Instead, he nodded at the tools. "I wonder if he'd teach me to use these things," he said. "Dad always said I was too little."
"When we were home, we were littler," Gigi said. She felt very old now. She walked back to the door and tried to open it but it wouldn't open. So she knocked. No answer. So she pounded.
All at once it opened wide and she fell into the kitchen, banging her knee on the doorsill.
Before she could think to cry the man said, not very nicely, "What's all the racket for?"
"I want to bake cookies now," Gigi said.
So they did, but the cookies were funny-tasting.
"Let's call Mom," Hank suggested later.
"It's too late," the man said. "Your mother will be in bed."
"No, she won't," Hank said. "She works at night."
"Then she'll be at work. Give me your number and I'll call from work tomorrow. You two can stay here while I'm gone. I've got a big TV and some toys and lots of stuff for you to play with, except you are not to go into the basement under any circumstances. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good. Just make sure you mind me on that score and everything will be fine. Meanwhile, I'll put you two to bed upstairs. Here, have some warm milk with your cookies."
"I'd rather have cocoa," Gigi said.
The man nodded accommodatingly.
He even had a separate room for each of them, with big beds like Mom and Dad used to have.
"Tomorrow night, when I come home, I'll bring a Christmas tree and presents," he promised as he tucked Gigi in. She was suddenly very, very sleepy.
"I don't have a nightie," she said.
"You don't need one here," he said. "But take off your clothes so you don't get them dirty in your sleep."
And that night she had a very strange dream. She dreamed a teddy bear crawled into bed with her but it was very big and it kept trying to bear-hug her and ran its paws all over her and kept checking her bottom to see if she'd peed the bed—that's what it said it was doing. Except it didn't have paws, it had hands and sometimes it pinched. When she woke up, she was crying and her bottom hurt.
But downstairs in the big house, bacon was frying and Hank opened the door to her room and said, "Come on, lazybones, wake up. He's making us waffles in the shape of gingerbread men."
Gigi felt very sleepy as she pulled on her shirt and pants and followed her brother downstairs.
They ate bacon and the waffles shaped like gingerbread men with butter and lots of syrup and peanut butter because they wanted it and orange juice and hot chocolate. It was the biggest meal Gigi had had outside of a fast-food place since they'd left home—and that seemed like such a long time ago, back when she had been very little.
The man didn't say they had to brush their teeth or wash their faces or anything, but when Gigi had to go to the bathroom it hurt really bad and she came back crying about it, expecting sympathy. Instead, both the man and Hank told her not to be such a big baby.
The man was wearing a suit and tie that morning, and looked important.
"Now, until we can find your parents, you kids are welcome to stay here," he told them. "Tonight when I bring home the Christmas tree, we'll get out the ornaments and trim it. Tomorrow, I've arranged with Santa for a special surprise visit since you missed Christmas this year."
"And by then Mom will probably be here, huh?" Hank asked, sounding almost disappointed at the prospect.
"Sure," the man said, picking up his briefcase. "Now, remember what I told you yesterday. You can go anywhere in the house but the basement. It's dangerous down there, and I think I've given you enough to enjoy yourselves with that you can respect my wishes. The key is in the lock, and you could disobey me, of course, but if you are good children, you won't do that and you won't get hurt. I also don't want you messing with the phones because you might—accidentally, of course—call long distance and cost me lots of money. So I've put them all away in a safe place. Now I'm going to go and lock you in for safety's sake. I expect you, Hank, to take good care of Gigi and I want everything neat and tidy when I come home for our Christmas party. Understand?"
Hank nodded, but Gigi, who still hurt, just whimpered and sucked her thumb.
The last thing the man said when he left was, "Now you remember what I said about staying away from that basement."
* * *
The man who looked like Santa Claus in a business suit locked the door from the outside so his precious merchandise couldn't get out. He walked through the Christmas decorations and out to his car, and headed for the freeway. He could hardly contain himself, he was so excited at this new find. Usually you had to travel to another country or to some unsavory ghetto, risking who knew what diseases to get what he had happened upon not quite by accident. A collector's dream.
Not that he hadn't done a certain amount of preparation. There was this house, of course, with all of its little secrets. Only his most avid fellow enthusiasts, ones on whom he had lots of insurance against being tattled on, knew about this place. Even his wife had never known about it.
He also had good bait. The gingerbread houses were not easy to make and assemble, and he could enjoy only the delicious pangs of frustration as the children came and went, attended by parents. There was pleasure of a sort in that, of course, but nothing like this.
It was risky, though. These were not some immigrant youngsters from South America or India sold by or stolen from their parents and smuggled in for the pleasure they could give the man and his friends. These children were local, lost, maybe being hunted for by the police. However, if he was generous with his luck, and shared them with his more influential friends, he would have allies who dared not betray him, no matter what disposal he had to make of the children eventually. He drove up I-5 to Seattle, where he was touring the downtown facility.
He was proud of his work, aware that he had helped the new administration turn this whole sorry liberal business around, using state money and facilities to return things to their proper status. Admittedly, the so-called caseworkers were rebellious at times, disliking the necessity of returning the family to its proper prominence, the father particularly to his rightful place as supreme head of the family. The man was a father himself, but the woman he had chosen to be his mate had gotten some strange ideas in her head during all of that women's liberation crap, and then had misconstrued what the children told her about his loving and mutually satisfying relations with them. She knew better than to try to take him on in court—not to mention that she knew he'd make her very, very sorry if he caught her—and had simply disappeared with his little ones. Since his appointment, he had been too busy changing the system to court anyone else. However, the very changes that had robbed him of his family, the changes that allowed women to leave their husbands and the courts to tell a man how to treat his family, would make it easy for him to find another nice situation when he was ready. Single mothers with many children were quite the norm now, and many of them would be glad enough for a roof over the family's head to refrain from having too many difficult opinions on what he should do.
He entered the downtown facility and was immediately fawned over by that silly woman he had personally appointed to be supervisor. She had become politically active in support of Mrs. Bob (Florence) Foster, the antifeminist, antiabortion, pro-family, pro-industry candidate for state legislature, and while campaigning for Mrs. Foster, had developed the hots for the current governor and campaigned for him as well.
The governor, who was not a particular man and who had very conventional tastes in sexual entertainment, had hinted strongly that the lady should be rewarded for services rendered by a job suited to her skills and background. She had a degree in psychology dating from 1959 from Spokane Evangelical Women's College, or SEW as it was known to alumni. She also was a minister in a mail-order church, which gave her the alternative credentials necessary. Quite a find, actually. She wasn't just another playmate of the governor's but was an effective agent for the sort of changes both the governor and he wished to make in the current system.
However, she fawned all over him and made eyes at him the whole time he was there, and he couldn't wait to get away. He did notice a young woman in gray half-nodding over her paperwork. He had a word with Bitsy Hager about her and learned that the girl was one Rosalie Samson, a chronic troublemaker who resisted the new policies and tried to go behind her supervisor's back. Hmm. This was where it took a strong hand, a firm grip, to steer the department in the proper direction. He could replace her, at no cost to the state, with one of his volunteers from the Washington League of Religious Women. He made a note to that effect to leave in his evaluation for Mrs. Hager. In case she missed the point, in Hager's presence he stared at Samson's back for a significantly long moment with a kindly, concerned, but regretful air. Then he looked back at Hager with his best careworn expression of resignation.
Following the inspection, he found a pay phone and made a call to a colleague who also had an office downtown. He had had an extra bounce in his step with the anticipation of sharing his find with this like-minded enthusiast.
"I've found something extremely tasty," he told the colleague. "When can we meet to discuss it?"
The colleague was very eager, but heavily committed all day and all night. "I have a meeting with the Bainbridge Planning Commission this evening and need to take the six-thirty ferry right after my appointments today. If you'd care to ride over with me, I think we could be relatively anonymous."
"We could just stay in your car."
"Oh, no. Watching the children cavort on the ferry is one of the few joys of my day. It will be crowded and noisy, so if we're discreet there should be no difficulty."The man who looked like Santa Claus was somewhat uneasy with this arrangement, but then, the risk of being found out, the sauce of danger, added to the pleasure of the sport, something he felt as keenly as did his colleague. It was amazing how unaware—how dead, really—other people could be as long as you conformed outwardly. "I'll meet you in the rear, then, of the six-thirty boat."
"I'll look forward to it."
* * *
Rose felt as if she had lived through a week by the time she dragged herself to work that morning. Cleaning the filthy bathroom at the shelter had given her time to come down from the adrenaline rush that had kept her going throughout the night. Her consolation was that between the excitement of the tenderness that had unexpectedly developed between her and Fred and being shot at by a gang who subsequently rescued her from being beaten by another, she probably wouldn't have been able to get to sleep anyway.
She didn't begrudge the work at the shelter, though. Felicity had scrubbed as hard as she had, and was the first to tackle the toilets, and Rose found herself attacking her share with more zeal than she'd ever devoted to her own bathroom. Maybe it was self-defense against the germs, which probably had microscopic muscles the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger's by now, judging from the dirt and the stench. By the time the erstwhile residents began filing in to prepare for another day on the streets, the place was clean, smelling of disinfectant and restocked with soap and toilet paper. Rose used some of each herself before she and Felicity left. At some time during the night, Felicity had taken from her pockets more packages of toiletries and laid a package beside each sleeping person. From outside, the world's two most seductive smells, coffee and bacon, invited the shelter's occupants to come out to the sidewalk for breakfast.
"This is really something, Felicity. Some of these folks will remember this for a long time," Rose said.
"Only those who are able to move along," Felicity said. "The others will come to take it for granted. The medical team will be in later to see to those who are too sick to leave."
Felicity made another call from her portable phone before they left, and in another few minutes moving vans began arriving with plastic-covered mattresses, bunk beds and bedding. A laundry and diaper service truck with Chinese lettering on the side followed close behind.
"Who's paying for this?" Rose asked.
"The people who run these businesses can afford it," Felicity said.
"You are the biggest blackmailer I've ever met," Rose said. "But it's great."
"Nonsense," she said. "If someone hadn't done something similar for the people helping out here, they might be in worse shape than those in the shelters. It's less like blackmail and more like tithing—except instead of going to some bloke who decides how to distribute their hard-earned cash for them, they come right in and intervene with their own goods and services to help people directly. I've also instructed my alumni to be on the lookout for those among the clientele there who are capable of serving the food and doing the cleaning and maintaining the facilities for the others, so they may be hired to do so."
"You're sure you won't reconsider running for governor?" Rose had asked at the time.
Felicity laughed too, looking at Rose's smelly, dirty outfit and dust-smeared face and hair. "If you can say that now, I'd have you for my campaign manager. I'm pleased that what we've done here tonight has helped, but it's only one night and one shelter and over the long run, there may be, will surely be, complications and shortcomings and abuses, just as there always are. A clean bathroom, a hot meal, a warm place to sleep and a bar of soap don't cure everything. Such things don't make reasonable people of the insane, find jobs for the unemployed, or cure drunkards and drug addicts of their addictions. Not even magic can do that, and what we've done here isn't magic. But it is a start."
"Unless I start cleaning up now and get to work looking more respectable than this, I'll be joining the ranks of the unemployed soon myself," Rose said ruefully.As they headed back up the steep incline to Third Avenue to catch the bus, a young man in jeans and a sports jacket was stopped by the man from the park bench the night before. "Hey, buddy, don't walk so fast. I got a good joke to tell ya."
"Yeah? What?"
"Well, there was this old lady lived all alone with her ol' tomcat, see, and all of a sudden poof! here comes the fairy godmother and she said, 'Because you've been a nice ol' gal I can give you three wishes. Whaddaya want?' So first the old lady wants to be rich, then she wants to be a babe again, and hey, presto, she is. What do you think her third wish was?"
"I don't know. What was it?"
"If you got fifty cents I'll tell you. I'm not panhandling, mind you. I've gone into business as an im-prom-too standup comedian and thas my cover charge."
"Fifty cents, huh? Okay," the younger man said and dug into his pocket.
The bus came then and Rose didn't hear the punch line, because Felicity pulled her aboard among the throng of morning commuters on their way to work, all of whom made as much room for Rose, who did not smell like her namesake, as they possibly could. Felicity had reverted to her pristine silvery self, which hardly seemed fair.
A shower did Rose good, but her clothes were out of the question. Felicity loaned her a pantsuit of soft dove-gray lamb's wool and a plushy pewter turtleneck to wear under it, plus rhinestone and silver star-shaped earrings, which went fine with the mustard seed.
Before she let Rose escape to work, she insisted that she borrow her own makeup and her own "Magique" perfume, which Rose used very sparingly since she seldom wore perfume. Although it had smelled rather musky in the bottle, once it touched Rose's skin it immediately assumed the sweet vanilla-floral scent she preferred.
"Now then, with this," Felicity said, draping a silky white gauze scarf ornamented with sparkly crescent moons and stars sprinkled across it, "and this"—she added a gray tweed Irish walking hat with a dove's feather cockade—"you're set."
Rose pulled the mustard seed out of the neck of the turtleneck and returned the scarf and hat. "I'm a caseworker, not a starlet getting ready for a dance in the rain with Fred Astaire. Let's not overdo it, hmm?"
"Really, dear, I don't know how you're going to find romance if you don't try to look like a princess occasionally."
"Sorry, Felicity, but I'd think you of all people might understand why some of us have to be socialists at heart."
* * *
"I really hate to do this, Cindy," Pill Putnam, the owner of Lucky Shoe Stables, told Cindy Ellis. "You're the best hand I've ever had and if things were fair, I'd be offerin' to make you my partner, not firing you. But without the use of these trails, I got no business. You understand, don't you?"
"Sure, Pill," Cindy said, half angrily, half dejectedly, but trying not to blame her friend or make him feel any worse than he already did. "And now you understand what I've been up against with the three P's."
"The three P's?"
"My stepmother, Paola, and my stepsisters Pam and Perdita. They'll go to any lengths to make my life miserable."
"It was one of them give you that shiner, wasn't it?" Pill asked, pointing to the eye that Perdita had viciously kicked while Cindy was helping her mount.
"Yeah."
"You thought about getting a lawyer? That there's assault."
"Lawyers cost money, Pill."
Pill spat out a sunflower seed, which he gnawed on to give the impression of chewing tobacco. He talked like a Texan but was actually a former cowboy stuntman who had moved to Washington from Venice, California, to pursue his dream of running his own stable. He didn't even eat meat. And he took a lot of vitamins, which was what prompted his fellow film wranglers to hang him with the handle "Pill."
"Well," he said, and spat another seed. "Hell."
"Yeah," she agreed. "Hell. For sure."
"Look," he said. "I haven't got enough to pay you two weeks in advance, but I'll keep Punkin here until the farrier comes to do his shoe and you can find another place to keep him."
"Thanks. I wish you had a stall for me as well. My house-sitting gig ends tonight. Everything I own is in my pack."
"I can give you a few bucks for a locker, but I don't know what else to do. I'd take you in, but the wife is a little jealous of you, you know."
"Jealous of me?" Cindy asked. "Jealous of me? Why? I'm officially homeless, jobless, and if I could find someone who could afford to take proper care of Punkin, horseless."
"Let me check with the accountant and I'll see if I can buy him from you if you really want to sell," Pill said, ducking the more uncomfortable part of the conversation. "He'll be fine once the farrier gets that new shoe on him, though. Meanwhile, I'll tell you what. If you meant it, about the stall, you can bed down in the vacant one just for tonight. Meanwhile, I've got a few things to do. Why don't you lock up tonight?"
"Thanks, Pill."
"It's the least I can do." He shrugged. "I'm sorry."