Masking for Trouble

by Diane Vallere

  “But the timing seems awfully suspicious, doesn’t it? To deliver this notice today?”

  “I’m telling you, Jerry’s going to freak.” Kirby said.

  “I’m not going to tell him. Not yet. He doesn’t need the extra stress, and maybe I can fix this.”

  A heart attack six months ago had caused a shift in my dad’s priorities. While some people might slow down and take things easy, Dad wanted to sell Disguise DeLimit and see more of the country. The problem was with me. My own priorities had shifted, and I’d decided to move back home and take over running the store. We hadn’t worked out a price as of yet, so technically the store was still in his name. I suspected that he wanted to make sure I was in it to win it and not merely doing it as an act of generosity.

  We were lucky; the town of Proper City, Nevada—a mere forty miles from Las Vegas—had long ago experienced an identity crisis. City planners had mapped out restaurants, public transportation, a post office, and a library, but their failure to give residents an identity had led to a unique twist: our city loved costume parties. Not only for Halloween, but for birthdays, poker games, engagement parties, wedding showers. The Super Bowl. The Academy Awards. And at least one Mad Hatter’s tea party, just because.

  I’d grown up in Disguise DeLimit, wearing costumes to school instead of clothes from the mall. I’d taken a detour—moving to Las Vegas to work temporarily as a magician’s assistant—but ultimately, I knew, this was where I was meant to be. Besides, now I got my kooky outfits at wholesale.

  The true test of running a costume shop comes in late September and runs through October. The Halloween season. We had five thousand costumes available for rental, in addition to the various ones we sold. Kirby wanted us to broaden our scope by building a website and shipping costumes around the country, but for now, I was content to learn the ropes and do the best I could.

  For the first Halloween in forever, my dad wasn’t at the store to ensure business as usual. He trusted me to do that. He’d never been able to get away from the store in the past, but the opportunity to buy some inventory had come up, and we’d agreed that I could handle things for a few days while he made the trip. A few days had turned into a week thanks to a blizzard on the East Coast, and business as usual was about to blow up in my face.

  “It’s okay, Margo. People still know that we have the best costumes. Think about how many rentals we’ve had over the past month with people getting ready for Halloween. We just about blew up the sewing machine, it’s been so busy. This is a minor setback,” Kirby said.

  “I hope you’re right,” I said.

  Kirby filled a rolling rack with garment bags that were bursting with completed costumes. He rolled the rack out back to the delivery van. I considered stopping him, telling him there was no point making any more of the store’s deliveries, but I couldn’t bring myself to face that possibility.

  To Kirby, the matter was settled. I hadn’t mentioned my deepest fear to him. That once people heard the costumes they’d rented weren’t eligible for the prizes in the annual contest, they weren’t going to be happy. It wasn’t just bragging rights that they’d win. The grand prize was a thousand-dollars. They might think that we knew all along and that we kept it from them so we could get their money.

  I glanced back at the sheet of paper and flipped to the last page. Approved Businesses headed the sheet. Underneath was a list of stores that had been purchased by Haverford Venture Capital and were allowed to benefit from the privately funded party. And on the top of the list was Candy Girls.

  I should have known.

  Candy Girls, our shop’s main competitor, was a bigger, newer, all-around impersonal party supply store. It was the main employer of the eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old female population of Proper City. They’d mounted more than one smear campaign against us, most of which resulted in a backfire that doubled our business.

  But this was bigger than a smear campaign. Not only would Disguise DeLimit not have the winning costume at tonight’s party, but chances were, the winner would come from our biggest competitor. It would be the end of an era.

  Kirby looked at me from across the store. His ginger-colored brows pulled together, and his freckles stood out against pale skin. I shook my head—a response that neither clued him in nor comforted him—and shoved the papers into the back pocket of my hobo pants. The store was scheduled to close in twenty minutes. We’d adjusted our hours so we’d have time to make deliveries tonight before the party. Now that extra time would be spent making phone calls to everybody who had rented from us. The girls by the Dr. Seuss costumes waved at me, and I pushed our troubles aside and went back to business.

  Normally our costumes rented for three days, but the week prior to Halloween was different. Proper City had first been founded by a prospector named Pete, who swore off booze, gambling, and women if he’d only strike gold. He did, and Proper City was born. After his death in the ’30s, the town fell onto hard times, and the only new citizens were scofflaws looking for asylum from California. The state line was only a few miles from our border, which made Proper City popular for a whole other set of reasons.

  In the ’50s, a group of city planners who felt that Nevada needed a family-oriented town to counter Las Vegas got together and designed their version of fantasyland. Streets were named after fairy tales, and zoning had approved one library, one post office, one movie theater, and one grocery store. Other businesses came and went, but a few stuck around. Mom-and-pop stores like Disguise DeLimit—even though ours was a pop-and-daughter shop—were fewer and farther between.

  When you’re a town that was born on paper, you have to find your own identity, and Proper City’s love of costumes became ours. We became the costume capital of the world. Just about anything that was cause for a party became a cause for costumes. There was a page of photos on our city’s website that showed off everything from Laila Mishkin’s teddy bear party—yes, teddy bears got costumes too!—to Sol Girard’s Wild West Poker Game. But even a community who wears costumes for any occasion can recognize that Halloween is the time to pull out all the stops.

  We extended the three-day rental window to a week during October so people could have the confidence that whatever they selected would be theirs for the full seven days of festivities. And now . . .

  When the last of the customers had finished with their rentals, I locked the front door and moved the money and charge slips from the register to the safe. Soot, my cranky smoke-gray cat, swarmed around my ankles and meowed at me. Perhaps a dog would have been willing to wear a costume around the shop, but the most I’d been able to get Soot to wear was a tiny necktie that hung from his collar.

  “What am I going to do, Soot?” I asked. Soot licked his paw and rubbed it over his face. “Proper City is a community, and people have come to trust us. This”—I waved the paper—“is the kind of thing that can break that trust. Should I call everybody who rented a costume and notify them?” I shoved the papers into the back pocket of my hobo pants, scooped up Soot, and carried him to the office, where I started making phone calls.

  At four, Kirby returned to the store and joined me in the office. “The deliveries are all made and the store’s locked up. How’s it going in here?”

  I stared at a stack of rental papers. “So far, four cancellations.”

  “That’s not so bad. How many people have you called?”

  “Five.”

  “Oh. Well, one didn’t cancel. Maybe all of the duds were at the top of the stack.”

  “That was Don Digby. He knows he can’t get a proper alien costume anywhere but here, but I could hear the disappointment in his voice.”

  Don Digby was my dad’s best friend. The two of them had bonded over conspiracy theories and blues music. Don didn’t expect to win the contest. He considered Halloween an opportunity to bring the truth about a hidden government secret to the public and, because of
that, suspected he was under surveillance and, therefore, would never win the contest.

  I couldn’t even begin to think about telling my dad that I’d screwed up so badly my first Halloween running the store. This was his favorite time of year. Before he’d left, he’d spent a week putting together the windows, a diorama of Nosferatu seated at his table with Jonathan Harker. Silver candelabras and serving bowls were filled with grapes, bread, and even a turkey. They were on loan from the local antique mall. The silver serving dishes, not the food.

  “There has to be a way to fight this,” I said. “That guy can’t just barge in here and give me papers a couple of hours before the party. That’s not fair.”

  Kirby reached for the shelf above the desk and picked up a metal box with hinges on the back and a handle on top. He set it in front of me, opened the lid, and pulled out a stack of unopened white envelopes. “I thought these were bills, so I put them in the bill box. Jerry always paid the bills at the beginning of November.”

  I picked up the stack of envelopes. Haverford Venture Capital was printed above the return address. I tore the envelope open and slid the paper out. It was a notice to appear at the city council meeting. The date was yesterday.

  “How long have these been coming?”

  He shrugged. “It’s October in Proper City. Jerry always arranges for the utilities to bill us for two months in November so he doesn’t have to remember to pay them.”

  “He must have started doing that after I moved away.”

  “He started it last year. It was my idea.” Kirby gestured toward a stack of mail in the inbox. “Just about the only other stuff we get is junk mail. We’ll shred it when we have time, but who has time?”

  “Everybody knows this is our busy time. If somebody needed to get in touch with us, they’d come to the store and talk to us.” Which was exactly what the man with the legal papers had done.

  I ran my fingers over the return address. “I’m going to go see Paul Haverford.” I stood up and pulled a ratty overcoat over my turtleneck and patched trousers. I grabbed the keys to my Vespa scooter, picked my helmet up from inside the back door, and left.

  When the city planners had designed our town, they’d created one major road that connected our two disparate ends. Creative people that they were, they named the main line that connected the two ends Main Line Road. I turned left on it and drove to the far corner, then turned slightly right at a five-point intersection. An aerial view of Proper looked much like a crop circle, and the road that led to the return address on the envelope was at the end of one of the radials that extended from the end of Main Line. The sun was dropping, and the air had turned chilly, snapping at my hands. Shoulda worn gloves.

  I didn’t spend much time at this end of Main Line Road. It was mostly populated with business offices and hotels. A couple of rundown apartment buildings. I’d heard rumors about the people who rented in West Proper. They weren’t the type to put down roots and start a family.

  The parking lot to Haverford Venture Capital held a handful of cars. I parked my scooter in a visitor space next to a maroon sedan and locked my helmet to the seat. My hands were red and raw. I rubbed them together quickly and approached the front door. Through the glass doors, I saw the white-haired man who had been at Disguise DeLimit. He was arguing with another man, who wore a camel topcoat over his suit. White Hair looked my way when I entered.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “I’m here to speak to Mr. Paul Haverford about these papers,” I said. I reached into the pocket of my overcoat and pulled out the envelope.

  “I’m Paul Haverford. Wait for me in my office.” he said. He held his hand out toward an open door to my right.

  I looked back and forth between him and Camel Coat and then went inside. A few seconds of silence passed, and then Camel Coat spoke. “If you don’t tell your lawyers to back off, the deal is over.”

  “There’s no need for threats,” Haverford said.

  I turned around and looked at them. Haverford saw me and closed the door in my face.

  The office was immaculately maintained. A large mahogany desk sat in the middle, in front of heavy bookcases filled with leather-bound books. Framed diplomas from an impressive assortment of schools hung from the wall. On the desk was a name block that read PAUL HAVERFORD. I sat in a soft burgundy leather chair opposite the large wooden desk and waited.

  The longer I sat in the office, crossing and recrossing my legs, the more nervous I became. Having grown up in the costume shop, my confidence level was directly linked to how I dressed. Costumes gave me confidence, which was why I dressed up as different characters most days of the year, not just for one day in late October. But today, I was dressed in a red turtleneck sweater and a pair of hobo pants that had been patched with mismatched squares of plaid. Not the best outfit for a business meeting.

  I pulled out my cell and called my friend Bobbie. We’d both been keeping our costumes a secret and planned to meet up in the hotel parking lot, but today wasn’t exactly going according to plan. When she didn’t answer, I left a message.

  “Bobbie, it’s Margo. Something came up this afternoon and I’m going to be late to the party. I might as well tell you my costume. Look for a”—the door opened and Paul Haverford entered—“giant spider. See you tonight.” I hung up and powered it off, and then stuffed it into the pocket of my hobo topcoat.

  “Ms. Tamblyn, from the costume shop,” Paul Haverford said. He held out his hand and I shook it. “You are here to discuss the paperwork that I dropped off.”

  “Yes. Today is a little late to notify us about this change. We’re the most popular costume shop in Proper, and we’ve rented hundreds of costumes already. A lot of people are going to wear theirs to the opening reception tonight. There’s no way for us to notify everybody and tell them that they aren’t eligible for the grand prize.”

  “We’ve been trying to notify your dad about this for several weeks now.”

  “My dad is out of town. I run the store now. He made arrangements to have the bills turned off in October so we can concentrate on making costumes. Proper City is such a small town that everybody understands. I didn’t open your other letters—”

  “So you received them prior to today?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “That’s the confirmation I needed.” Haverford smiled an evil smile. “Ms. Tamblyn, when I decided to put my money into Proper City, I did so knowing that I would not be a popular man, but with the right decisions, I would be a rich man. A richer man,” he said with a chuckle. “The way to grow a city isn’t to turn off utilities for a month, ignore your bills, and allow citizens to play dress-up. It’s to infuse the city with cash, evacuate the undesirable residents, bring in the kind of chain restaurants and retailers that people desire.”

  “The people here don’t desire that sort of thing. We like our restaurants and shopping just the way they are.”

  “I’m not concerned with what the current residents of Proper want. It’s the new residents that I’m thinking about. The tourists that will come when I have the zoning laws changed and bring in gambling, and the families that will move here because they’re looking for employment in one of the factories I build.”

  “But that’s not what Proper City is all about,” I said. “This town was founded by Pete Proper and he outlawed all that stuff. We don’t want a bunch of factories and casinos. That’s why we live here and not Las Vegas.”

  “Your loyalty to your family business is charming,” he said. The evil smile was back in place. His emphasis on the word “charming” made it sound like he really meant to say “repulsive.”

  My cheeks flushed hot. Despite the fact that I was dressed like a homeless person, that I was half this man’s age, and that I wasn’t a business professional, I was angered to the point of action. I picked up the legal notice that he’d dropped off at the st
ore, stood up, and tore the papers into tiny little pieces.

  “This is what I think of your plans to change Proper City,” I said. I threw the small squares at his desk. They fluttered apart and scattered to the front and the back of his name block, one small piece covering the end of his name so it now read HAVERFO.

  “Violate the agreement and your store will be penalized with a large citation. The law is on my side, Ms. Tamblyn. It won’t take much for me to drive Disguise DeLimit out of town.” He picked up a couple of squares of torn paper and let them fall through his fingertips. “I wasn’t planning on focusing on the small businesses in town until I had my new infrastructure in place, but maybe I’ll make an example out of you.”

  I stormed out of his office and drove home.

  * * *

  IT was closing in on six when I parked my scooter behind Disguise DeLimit. The delivery van was in its usual space, which meant that Kirby had finished early. Either that, or enough people had canceled their costume reservations that his workload had been cut in half.

  I let myself in and dropped my keys into the bowl we kept by the back door. I found Kirby in the office. One pile of paper in front of him had gotten bigger. The other had remained much the same.

  “How did it go with the rest of the calls?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s a good chance that a lot of people are getting ready and won’t get my message until too late. How about you? Any luck talking to that guy who was here?”

  I took the topcoat off and hung it on a hook on the back of the door, and then leaned against the desk. “That guy was Paul Haverford. Of Haverford Venture Capital. I went to the address on the envelope.”

  Kirby whistled. “Dude came here himself? I thought when you were that rich you paid people do to your dirty work.”

  “He’s not making any friends, that’s for sure. There was another guy there when I arrived. They were arguing when I showed up, and then the other guy left.”