“What did he do?” she asked the silver-haired man in the table next to her.
“I’m not sure,” the man said, his tone dismissive.
But she wasn’t going to let it go. “What do you mean, you’re not sure. Everyone is treating him like he’s done something awful.”
“Well, he did,” the man said. “We’re just not sure what.”
“He was an investment banker,” said the little old lady at the table across from the man, her tones hushed as if she had called the gentleman Julka had been talking to a sex crimes pervert.
“Isn’t that a common job?” Julka asked.
“Not exactly,” the woman said. “And he is retired.”
“So what is the problem?” Julka asked.
“Well, those bankers,” the woman said, “they caused the meltdown.”
Meltdown? Oh, the woman meant that financial thing that happened a few years back. Julka had to study it in Advanced Greater World Studies, so that she could converse about it. The “meltdown” had a serious impact on children worldwide, making Santa’s services even more necessary, and overwhelmed him with extra work.
“You think he had something to do with that?” Julka asked, referring to her handsome gentleman. How could he have? He seemed so nice.
“They all did, those bankers,” the woman said in hushed tones.
“And some of ‘em really screwed people,” the silver-haired man said. “They took money from everyone, leaving us with nothing.”
Julka looked out the door, as if she could still see the gentleman. “So why was he digging people out?”
“He seems to think we’ll accept him as a neighbor,” another woman said snidely from the back. “But we never will. Him and his ilk, they ruined us.”
A bunch of others nodded.
“Can’t you forgive him?” Julka asked.
Everyone stared at her as if she had grown a third head.
She shrugged. “I mean, he seems really sorry.”
“There are some things in life,” said the silver-haired man, “that sorry doesn’t solve.”
6
MARSHALL WAS COLD, wet, tired and discouraged. He had promised himself that he wouldn’t quit until he’d finished the last of the neighborhood, but as he drove down the one plowed street, he saw orange wooden saw horses on the road, with a hand-made sign that warned of more downed power lines.
Earlier in the day, he would have figured out a way around so that he could finish his self-assigned mission, but this time, he simply didn’t want to go on. He wanted to get home, take a warm shower, and forget that the day ever happened.
Part of the problem with his neighbors was his house. It was too big for the neighborhood. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t built it: he had bought it, back when he was feeling flush—a large Tudor/Colonial blend that actually worked. It sat on a rise overlooking the entire neighborhood, and underneath the house proper was a gigantic garage that originally housed the first owner’s antique car collection.
As Marshall rounded the corner, he hit the garage door opener, then wished he hadn’t. The driveway was snowed in again. He had cleared it at five a.m., but there had been quite a bit of snow since then, and even more had toppled off the hillside. The garage door was open, but there was no driving inside until he cleared a path.
He pulled into the turn-around in front of the driveway, shut off the engine and rested his head on the steering wheel. He was inclined to chain the equipment to the truck with padlocks and go inside.
But he knew better. Given the way the neighborhood felt about him, someone would damage the equipment, and he would just blame himself for leaving it outside.
He sighed. Today proved one thing. It didn’t matter how much he did, how hard he tried or how many times he explained that he had retired before the collapse. He would always be a pariah here.
Much as he loved his house—and he really did—he would have to move. He couldn’t stay. He needed to find some other nifty house in another nifty neighborhood—and then he had to avoid the neighborhood meetings, or if he went, he would simply say that he was a retired numbers runner. Because, in essence, that was all he had done.
He had run numbers for a bunch of gamblers who had ignored him anyway. They were getting off scott-free, and he was staying here, inadvertently paying for their mistakes.
And missing opportunities with pretty women who wore inappropriate elf costumes at the end of October, women (woman) who had the most enchanting accent and the loveliest blue eyes he had ever seen.
Too bad he had met her under such strange circumstances.
Too bad he would never see her again.
He certainly would have loved to find out exactly who she was.
7
SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE let him go. Julka slipped out of the line, and headed for the door. The poor man. Everyone in this strange town blamed him for something they didn’t even understand.
No wonder Santa had a policy of staying out of Greater World affairs.
Julka hurried out of the Burger King. More cars were coming in, all of them with families inside, and everyone looking miserable.
She understood how snow could make people miserable—she got tired of it herself, long about May—but she never understood how anyone minded the first snowfall of the year, particularly one as dramatic as this one had been. Yes, it was cold; yes, the wind was harsh; but oh, it was always so beautiful.
That’s what these people—all of them—seemed to be missing: The very beauty of living.
She cut across the parking lot, then went to the side of the health club. She only gave a cursory glance around her to make certain no one was watching—these people were so sour that they probably wouldn’t accept real magic if they saw it.
Then she crouched, and sprang upward, using all those magical muscles she had gotten when she got this assignment. She floated up to the roof. The sleigh shimmered ever so slightly, its outline only visible up close, and then only as a cutout against the sky.
She stepped inside, and winced at the stench of peppermint. Delbert was standing at the counter in the back, making a chocolate peppermint banana smoothie. She didn’t even have to check her watch. The appearance of the smoothie meant it was now officially afternoon.
“Took you long enough,” he said.
She ignored that. He said it every single time she came back in the sleigh. Sometimes the statement was accurate, and sometimes it wasn’t. This time, it probably was.
She went over the array of cobbled together computer and magical equipment near the guidance system, and took her seat.
“We need to find someone,” she said.
Delbert swallowed the smoothie in one long gulp, then wiped the brownish stain off his face. “Not our job,” he said—or rather, mumbled. His mouth was still full of smoothie.
She hated the equipment. It looked like three 1950s television sets combined with a steam engine, rope, and a calliope. It had been designed by Santa hundreds of years ago, and modified every century or so. It hadn’t gotten this century’s modification because the fairies who designed the system were at war, and Santa didn’t want to get involved.
The fairies were, so far as she knew, one of the few groups that could easily combine technology and magic. Santa had relied on them for his entire career. Until now.
She put her hands on the screen. She didn’t have the magic to do a Santa-time search, where all she had to do was think of the person and end up with the name, address, personal history and current Naughty/Nice ranking. Instead, she had to use the screen as a window into the camera mounted on the sleigh’s runners.
“I want this thing airborne,” she said.
“Good,” Delbert said. “We going back to work?”
“We’re ahead of schedule,” she reminded him.
“We still have 35 houses to go,” he said.
“And five days allotted. We can do 35 houses in a morning.”
“What happened out there?”
he asked.
“Just get this thing in the air,” she said.
He didn’t argue. She was nominally in charge, even if he was an S-Elf. He was an S-Elf on double-secret forever probation, and he would probably never be in charge of anything ever again.
So he moved across the small cockpit to his little chair. Santa’s sleigh had gorgeous benches and seats that molded to your frame. The back-up sleighs were utilitarian because they needed room for food storage, sleeping compartments (uncomfortable and dangerous sleeping compartments, which was why the advance team had a hotel budget), clothing, and other supplies.
Delbert’s hands moved over what looked, to Julka, like a smooth countertop, and the sleigh shuddered. There were only two reasons an S-Elf had to be on a sleigh. The first was to test—as realistically as possible—Santa’s entry into the various houses, and the second was to fly the sleighs. Only S-Elves had the encoding (some of the more scientific types said DNA, but others believed it was just a magical quirk) to get the sleighs in the air.
The sleigh wobbled and tumbled, and then righted itself. Delbert had had too much peppermint and was flying impaired. But Julka wasn’t going to report him—at least not yet. Because if she did, then they might send a replacement, and she wouldn’t be able to get away with…what? She wasn’t sure what she was trying to get away with.
She just knew it was something.
She peered in the glass screen, which bubbled outward just a bit, distorting the images of rooftops, roads, and snow, snow, snow. Crews worked everywhere, repairing power lines or putting up signs telling people to stay away from lines.
No wonder people looked so sad. She hadn’t quite realized the extent of the devastation before. The North Pole knew how to deal with snow from September to May; apparently here, in New England, they did not.
Then she saw what she was looking for: a flatbed truck with snow equipment. It was parked on a road in front of a house, and there he was, in the driveway with a snow blower, sending fresh wet snow in an arc onto what had probably been the lawn.
“There,” she said, pointing.
“Can’t,” Delbert said. “No kids. Not this year, and probably not next.”
“I don’t care about the roof,” she said. “I want to talk to the guy with the snow blower.”
“You know that’s not allowed,” Delbert said.
“And you know if you were right, we couldn’t get hotel rooms with the Greater World money that we’re earning. I want to land on his lawn.”
“He doesn’t have a lawn,” Delbert said. “That’s a pile of snow. And if we land anywhere near the removal equipment, snow will land on us and make us visible.”
“So land on the other side,” she said, not hiding her exasperation.
“Why is this so important to you?” he asked.
“It just is,” she said. And she realized that was her answer. She couldn’t leave their parting like it had been. She needed to talk with the handsome man one more time.
Delbert sighed and ran his hand on that countertop. The sleigh veered slightly to the left, making Julka lose her vision of the street and the snow blower. Then the sleigh settled out and hovered its way down, using its mechanical rudders.
The sleigh landed near that nifty staircase. Julka got out of the sleigh on the far side and sank into the snow up to her knees. She cursed (hoped Delbert didn’t hear her since cursing outside the sleigh was a reportable offense), and used her rooftop magic to skim along the top of the snow to a side street. Then she brushed herself off as best she could, and walked down the icy street as if she had come from the Burger King.
She wasn’t quite sure how to play this. “Yoo-hoo!” seemed too casual. “Hi!” probably impossible to hear over that blower. Walking up behind the handsome man and tapping him on the shoulder would probably scare him to death.
So she waited at the edge of the cleared-off area, and waited until he shut down the blower midway through the job, probably to take a short rest.
“Um,” she said, wishing she had planned this better. “Excuse me?”
He still jumped like she had screamed at him. He turned around fast, nearly lost his balance on the ice, and had to use the handles of the snow blower to catch himself.
“Um,” he said. “Hi.”
He sounded confused. Indeed, he was looking at her as if he wasn’t sure if she was real.
She smiled at him and walked (carefully) up the slick driveway. “I just…you’re a banker right?”
He let out a small sigh, and then shook his head. “No, I’m not a banker. I’m not anything really. I’m retired.”
Judging from his tone of voice, she had asked the wrong thing. But she had committed herself to this, and she wasn’t going to back off.
“Retired?” she asked. “I thought only really old people retired.”
He smiled. The smile was small, reluctant, as if he didn’t smile all that often. “It’s a nice way of saying I quit.”
So she had said something wrong again. Maybe reading and studying customs wasn’t quite the same as understanding them.
“Oh,” she said. “I thought in New England that retiring was mandatory at a certain age.”
He frowned, then barked out a laugh. “In New England?”
“That’s where we are, right?”
“Yes, but—where are you from?”
She couldn’t answer that. She had to give the company’s stock answer, which she felt wasn’t complete enough. “Up north,” she said.
“Canada?” he asked. “I thought Canadians knew about the United States. After all, we’re kinda hard to miss.”
“Yes,” she said, “I mean, no. I mean, you are hard to miss.”
She couldn’t keep going in this direction. She was really screwing up. She understood the difference between the United States and New England, she thought, but apparently not well enough.
“I just came to talk to you after lunch—those people were so strange. They said you did something wrong, but they didn’t know what.”
“They just need someone to blame,” he said. Then he rubbed a gloved hand over his face. “That came out wrong. It came out like I’m accusing them. I’m not. It’s just—”
“You retired,” she said, still not entirely understanding what that meant.
“Yes,” he said.
“And you’ve been spending the last few—months? Years? Being nice to them.”
“No,” he said sadly. “I’ve just been trying to fit in, and that won’t work.”
Then he shrugged, and said, “But you didn’t come here to talk about that, did you?”
“I…” her voice trailed off. She didn’t have a plausible lie. She had never been good at lying, even when she was supposed to for Santa or the kids.
So she pulled off her mitten and stuck out her hand. “I’m Julka.”
“Marshall.” He took her hand, but didn’t shake it.
“Hi,” she said, and blushed.
“Hi,” he said, and shifted just a little. He hadn’t let go of her hand yet.
She liked the way his hand felt, bigger and warmer than hers, enveloping hers altogether. Her eyes met his, and something shivered through her. Something better than nice.
He seemed to feel it too, because his eyes brightened. “I’d ask you to dinner,” he said, “but after that lunch—”
“I know,” she said. “I made a pig of myself.”
“No, really,” he said. “It’s not that. How about coffee? It’s really cold and we could have some coffee. Although I think most places aren’t open. Half the town has lost power.”
“Do you have power?” she asked. Besides power over her. Because he still held her hand and she didn’t mind. She always minded when a man held her hand too long. And some of the elves were just plain gropey, which she didn’t like at all.
“Um.” Marshall glanced over his shoulder at the house. It looked way high up from here, with its odd mixture of Tudor and Colonial—and its seemingly pe
rfect roof. “I do have power. I can make us coffee.”
Her eyebrows went up. “This is your house?”
He nodded. “I thought you knew that.”
She shook her head. No kids, Delbert had said. Not this year, and probably not next.
“So you’re not married?” she blurted.
“No,” Marshall said. That grip on her hand remained loose. The question didn’t seem to bother him. “No girlfriends either. Not for the last year or so.”
She wanted to say How lonely, but then she hadn’t had a special fella for years now and she wasn’t lonely. (Was she?) She had grown up with most of the guys at the North Pole, and they held no mystery for her.
She wanted mystery. She wanted difference. That was why she wanted to travel.
“I should say I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, “but I’m not.”
Then she smiled. She usually wasn’t that forward. In fact, she couldn’t ever remember being that forward, especially with a guy she knew nothing about.
“I can make you coffee inside,” he said, “Or bring it out if you think that’s too bold.”
“It’s not too bold,” she said.
“It’ll take maybe ten minutes to finish the driveway. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” she said.
He smiled at her, then slowly let go of her hand. She felt the loss, not just of his warmth, but of him. She stepped back out of the way. She wished she had the skills some of the elves did. Snow removal with the snap of a finger. But her own magic was odd: seeing solutions when other people didn’t even know there were problems. And the added magic she had gotten for the rooftops job hadn’t helped at all.
He turned his back on her and started up the snow blower. As he went forward, someone grabbed her arm. She eeped. She didn’t see anything. But she smelled peppermint and stale elf sweat.
Delbert.
“Hey,” he said. “What is all this? You’re not supposed to fraternize.”
She could barely hear him over the snow blower, and she couldn’t see him at all. He had on his invisibility shield, the same kind of shield that Santa used when a kid stumbled on him in the middle of the night. Only S-Elves could use an invisibility shield, but she’d sure like to try, if nothing else than to get rid of Delbert.
Santa Series: Three Stories of Magical Holiday Romance Page 3