Unwrapping Mr. Roth (9 page)

“It wasn’t my world, either, dear. I adapted.”

“But you wanted to.”

Eldora made a
yes-and-no
waffling hand gesture.

Before Gillian could spit out her rebuttal, Eldora put her arm back around Gillian’s shoulders and got them walking again. Eldora said nothing. Just walked.

In the sunroom, she sat Gillian down on the long cushioned bench in front of the window and turned so their knees touched.

“I sympathize with you, Gillian, I really do. You got thrown into this mess without a primer and it’s all snowballed since the day you married Nicholas. But hear me out. Matches like yours don’t tend to be one-sided. Obviously Nicholas needed something from you. Perhaps you needed something from him, as well?”

“Besides him absorbing my debt, you mean.”

Eldora made a dismissive swish of her hand. “Drop in the bucket. Give it some thought, though. Certainly, there’s something you need from him?”

Do I?
Gillian had to give it some thought. She was so used to not expecting anything from people, so she was perhaps blind to what he might offer her besides money and sex. Those were nice to have, but she needed more than that.

“Oh! There you are.” Kori entered the sunroom carrying an opaque plastic garment bag over her shoulder.

“What is that?” Gillian asked.

“Your dress for the ball. Uncle Nick says you need to try it on because he only guessed your size.”

Gillian furrowed her brow. “
Ball
? What ball?
”

Eldora cleared her throat and shook her head at her grandchild.

“What?” Kori asked. “He did. He even sent the seamstress. Oh, Gillian, it’s so cool! Since we’re in the palace this year and can’t be snatched, Uncle Nick said he’d have the ugly charm lifted for the ball so we can actually dance with boys. Isn’t that awesome?”

“Kori, I’m trying to talk Gillian off a ledge here,” Eldora said. “You just pushed her back onto it.”

Gillian slouched against the window and covered her face with her hands. “Lay it all out now. What else do I have to do to get through Christmas?”

“Well, there’s the ball, obviously, which is the twenty-third,” Kori said. “There’s a board meeting that same morning which you have to attend.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re on the board now. You take Grandmother’s seat.”

Gillian dropped her hands and looked to the elder nymph.

“I would remain on the board to give you respite, but I suspect you would be more suited for the job,” Eldora said meekly, and she cringed.

That tugged at Gillian’s heartstrings. Eldora had been pulled into a job she hadn’t wanted, too, and she simply didn’t have Gillian’s balls. If Gillian could ease the woman’s anxiety for even a little while, she’d do it.

“Of course,” Kori continued, “you get to deliver some gifts on the evening of the twenty-fourth with Uncle Nick.”

“I’ll pass,” Gillian muttered. As far as she was concerned, being Nick’s wife for the moment absolved her of her duties playing Mrs. Claus.

“The twenty-fifth is actually a pretty relaxing day,” Kori. “We have a really big breakfast and a really big dinner and in between the two we usually lie around like lazy hounds. The twenty-sixth…well.” Kori shrugged. “I guess that’ll be the day of one of the elf king’s destructive tantrums if you hightail it out of here.”

“You make it sound like I have a choice. He’s admitted he’s kidnapped me. One way or another, there’s going to be a tantrum. The question will be whether it’ll be his or mine.”

Eldora pinched the bridge of her nose. “Dammit, Nicholas.”

***

On Wednesday the twenty-third, Gillian was all set to tell the elves to
hell
with their ball. All the politics and bickering on display at the board meeting had set her head reeling. Really, the meeting was less about how to distribute toys to deserving boys and girls, and more about which elf or fairy or whatever faction had committed which transgression. She needed a glossary just to keep up with it all, which Eldora had kindly provided her. Nick was being absolutely unhelpful in assuaging her distress at the situation and in fact seemed to be ignoring her altogether.

That suited her fine for the moment. She was brainstorming creative ways to back out of the event and having tea with the nymph teens out in the sunroom when Agnes ran in wearing a maniacal grin on her face.

Oh hell, what now?

“Milady, I found them!” Agnes hustled over to the bench toting Puffer. He wore a little red and green gingham bow he would have never worn for Gillian.

Gillian sighed. “Who did you find?”

Agnes held a tablet computer out to her.

“Your old bosses, is who. You know, the ones who shut down the school?”

Gillian snatched the device from her, and she scanned through screens of maps, the last of which included a pin on their location at that precise moment. They were somewhere in West Virginia.

“How’d you get this information?” Gillian narrowed her eyes at the half-kobold helper. “And
why?
”

Agnes gave a dismissive flick of her hand. “Ain’t done nothing for you we wouldn’t have done for Mr. Nick. And it was easy. We had the teamsters keep their eyes peeled for their camper in case they should see it while they was out on the highways. Of all people, Merle Evans spotted it when he was making his last run up to Canada.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. We been keeping an eye on it ever since.”

“What are you even going to
do
with that information, Gillian?” Kori asked as she let Puffer lick bacon grease off her fingertips. “Uncle Nick would use it to kick someone’s ass.”

“Good thing I’m not Nick, but why doncha wash your hands? We can go run a little errand.”

Kori gave Gillian a suspicious stare.

“What?” Gillian asked, giving one of her curls an angry twist.

“What kind of errand?”

“A queenly one. You could stay here, if you’d like. I just thought maybe you’d like some fresh air.”

“You’re going to get in trouble with Uncle Nick.”

“I’m going on queen’s business. I’ll take it up with Nick myself later.”
What’s one more thing to argue about?

Kori turned on her heel. “I’ll get your cloak.”

***

Gillian teleported Kori to the coordinates from Agnes’ map, and found themselves smack-dab in the middle of a no-frills RV campground.

“Ew!” Kori clamped her nostrils closed between her thumb and forefinger and did a quick skip around a mud hole.

Noticing the necrotic smell and the cloud of germ-carrying black flies hovering around the nearby trash skips, Gillian decided their little junket would be a short one. She might have been a country girl, but she had her limits to how much nature she could stand all at once.

She did a businesslike walk over to the door of the RV, pulling Kori along by the crook of her arm. Gillian gave the door a brisk knock and pushed Kori in front of it before fleeing to a spot where she couldn’t be easily seen. Heavy footsteps sounded inside the big beige vehicle, and the door, with its hinges in urgent need of oiling, creaked open.

“Yes?” came Gillian’s former boss Gina’s voice.

Kori felt around for some words, hemming and hawing. “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, I know y’all done got real com’table. I’m from this here campground, mm-kay? County says we’ve got a bit of a backup with our sewage going on out here and that the fumes are, uh, above rec’mended levels.”

Gillian clasped her hand over her mouth and nose before her snort could come out.

“I’m sorry,
what
?” Gina asked.

“What I’m sayin’, ma’am, is that we’re gon’ have to ebac…evacey…backyouate,
hell
, clear on out of this here campground until we can unplug the body. I, uh, mean…run a snake. It’s a sanitary concern, you see.”

“Well, lord, honey, I can’t move just yet. My husband’s not here. He took the car to the bank in town. I have to wait until he gets back.”

Gillian would have bet a pint of fudge brownie ice cream that money he was depositing belonged to the preschool parents. Three hundred bucks made a huge difference to folks in their tax brackets, and she was going to get it, even if she had to throw some blows. She hated people who took advantage of others.

“What bank?” Gillian threw her voice and did her best impersonation of Kori’s singsong soprano.

Sometimes with the ring, such as on the day she and Hortense had their altercation, Gillian could pop into places just by thinking about a person. Usually, though, she had to have a specific spot in mind, else she’d land nowhere near her intended location. She needed more info if she were going to catch Hal.

“Well, there’s only one bank in town, honey. Why?”

“No reason!” Kori squeaked. “Uh, y’all head on out as soon as y’all can. Don’t light no matches or nothin’.”

“Oh-kay, then.” Gina closed the door.

Kori crouched low and scampered around to the front of the RV. “Don’t ever do that to me again!” she whispered, her silver eyes wild and wide.

“Oh, hush, you did great.” Gillian grabbed Kori by the collar of her cloak, said a little prayer, and thought,
bankbankbank!

They teleported to First Fourth Bank, twenty feet from the ATM where Hal was stabbing numbers onto the keypad with one hand and stuffing a wad of cash into his back pocket with the other.

Gillian mouthed to Kori, “You grab the money, I’ll deal with the rest.”

Gillian checked the lot for witnesses and, seeing none, padded up behind the florid man with the stealth only a plant nymph and one pissed-off former nursery school teacher could manage. As Kori slipped her hand into his back pocket to grab the cash—all the while making a
blech
face—Gillian pressed two fingers into Hal’s back and barked in a deep voice, “Don’t turn around. This is a stickup!”

It was the best she could come up with.

Hal put up his hands, dropping his ATM card onto the dusty sidewalk in the process. “Don’t shoot!”

“Cooperate, and I won’t. How much money do you have in that account?”

“Uh, I dunno!” he said, his hands and arms starting to quiver.

She poked her fingers into his shoulder blade just a bit harder.

“I mean,
shit
, not much! I took most of it out already. You know, you can only take out so much per day.”

Gillian mouthed, “How much?” to Kori, who was counting the bills she’d found in Hal’s pocket, and Kori mouthed back, “One thousand.”

One thousand dollars was at
least
fourteen thousand dollars short of the May tuition the parents had paid in advance and several thousand dollars. She didn’t even try to mentally tally the paychecks the teachers and staff were still owed. She didn’t know what Hal and Gina owed in rent, but she was going to let Kurt worry about that. As a commercial property owner, he probably had his own ways of squeezing money out of folks.

Gillian covered Hal’s eyes with her free hand and nodded down to the ground, indicating that Kori should pick up the ATM card.

Kori snapped it up, and went one step further and retrieved Hal’s wallet, checkbook, and keys from his other pocket.

Smart. That’ll slow him down for a while.

Gillian took her gun-fingers off his back, grabbed Kori’s arm, and quickly teleported them back to the campground. Hiding behind a tree, she dialed Agnes’ number.

“Yeah?” Agnes answered in her usual raspy bark.

“Hey, do we have any wreckers or rigs around that can pull an RV?”

“Heh heh, sure do. What do you want to do, just make a little trouble for them or liquidate it?”

Thinking of all that money people were hurting for, Gillian said, “Liquidate it.”

“Oh, we’re good at liquidating.” Agnes laughed and the pure evilness of her cackle made the little hairs on Gillian’s arms stand on end. “Give ’em ten minutes to get there. Try to get any passengers out, eh? It’d actually be easier if they weren’t around to see their vehicle’s, uh,
departure
.”

“Um…okay, I haven’t really thought this out very far in advance. It’s not like I can manhandle her. I’m not strong like Nick and I can’t freeze time.”

“Maybe not, but you’re smarter than Mr. Nick—don’t tell him I said that—so I’m sure you’ll think of somethin’.” Agnes disconnected.

Gillian looked at Kori again. “Improvise?”

“Sure. This’ll be a good story for the girls later. They never get to do stuff like this.”

“Don’t get used to it. Hope your next queen is a priss.”

“I don’t want another queen.”

“Sorry, sweetheart.”

Sighing, Kori strode back to the RV door and knocked loudly. “Yoo-hoo! ’Scuse me, ma’am?”

Gina threw the door open and snapped, “What
now
? I really need to go. Some dumbasses held my husband up at the bank and he ain’t got keys to get back.”

“Wow, you should call the police, ma’am,” Kori commented. “We don’t get crazy city crimes likes that out here.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll deal with it ourselves. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

Gillian snuck up to the backside of the open door and whipped around it to grab Gina’s wrist and Kori’s shoulder simultaneously. She teleported the three of them to the first place she could think of—Kurt’s office—to deposit Gina, and then teleported Kori to the palace before Gina could realize who was responsible. All that bouncing around had caught up to her, so there in front hall in front of the visiting Ho’s, Gillian tossed her cookies onto the stone floor.

“Ugh.”

“Aren’t you going to offer us hospitality?” Horty asked when Gillian finished dry heaving.

Gillian looked at her smug, smirking face. Gillian wiped her mouth on her sleeve and pulled the service bell to summon whichever poor elf was charged with hazardous waste cleanup. “The only hospitality I’m going to offer right now is not knocking you into next week. You know I’m capable of it, blondie, so don’t press me unless you want to lose another clump of hair.”

Horty’s jaw dropped.

Honoria scoffed. “Rude!”

The trio stormed toward the kitchen where Gillian suspected Eldora would be found.

“If you’re going to be
queen
,” Holly called over her shoulder, “you need to learn your place, as does big brother. The two of you would have never survived in Daddy’s court. There are customs to uphold—
niceties
. You’ll last longer if you toe the line.” They paused as if to await her rebuttal. Naturally, she had one.