High Heels and Holidays

Chapter Five

"Gin," Maggie said, discarding a six as she laid down the rest of her cards with a flourish. "That's twelve million dollars you owe me, Sterling. You don't want to play anymore, do you?"

"No, I suppose not. But we could do something else, couldn't we?"

What was going on here? Something was going on here, that was for sure. She decided to see if she was right. "I could grab my jacket and we could go to the park, see if your friends are there. You could stay with them, let them pelt you with snowballs, and I could go do some shopping. I don't have a single gift bought yet, you know. How does that sound?"

Sterling's complexion turned white, then rosy red. And the guy wondered why he couldn't win at cards? "Oh. Oh, no, Maggie. I shouldn't think you'd want to go shopping alone. We could go together, I suppose? Although it's fairly cold outside, and it's so nice and warm in here. We should stay here. Yes, I think we should stay here. It's better here. Alex would want to know where we are, don't you think?"

"Where did you say Alex is, Sterling?" Maggie asked as she stood up, stretched, then walked over to admire her tree, hoping she sounded only politely interested, and not like she wished Sterling would go find Alex, and then the two of them could go somewhere. Like to the moon. Right after one of them told her what the hell was going on.

Alex had "joined" her for breakfast, which meant that he'd come strolling in with the morning newspaper and a suggestion that she consider bacon and scrambled eggs as a fine start to another lovely crisp, sunny December day.

The pans were still soaking in the sink, damn him, and she'd given in to the urge to try the homemade plum jam Socks's mother had sent over a month ago and she'd been pretending hadn't been sitting in the cabinet. Stop smoking, gain ten pounds, lose two, eat plum jam, and gain back three. It was just the way the world worked ...

She'd kicked Alex out at noon, after a morning spent discussing the debacle that had been their trip to England, and within moments Sterling was at the door, volunteering to help her with the rest of her Christmas decorations. Not one to turn down a volunteer, they'd spent the next hour setting out Maggie's favorite pieces, winding fairy lights around two of her fake potted plants, and then dragging all of the empty boxes to the freight elevator and back down to the basement storage area. After that, Sterling pulled a deck of cards from his pocket and sat down at the game table in one corner of the room, as if digging in for the duration—whatever the duration was.

When Sterling didn't answer her question, Maggie finished adjusting one of the crystal bells on the Christmas tree and turned to look at him. He was wearing the Santa hat again, and admiring his reflection in the mirror. "You look very nice, very festive. Getting in the spirit, are you?"

Sterling frowned, pulling off the hat. "I don't think so, no," he told her, dropping back onto one of the couches. His sigh was deep, and heartfelt. "It's all this crass commercialism, you understand."

Biting back a grin, Maggie decided it was time to pull up a couch of her own and try to take a peek inside Sterling's mind. "Crass commercialism? Where did you hear that, Sterling?"

He spread his hands. "Everywhere. It's all about gifts, and decorations, and more gifts and ... well, and more gifts. It's all very depressing. Almost enough to put a person into a sad decline."

"Yes, I can see that," Maggie said, rubbing her chin. "What would you like Christmas to be about, Sterling?"

He shrugged, looking at her over his gold-rimmed glasses. "I'm not sure. I ... well, I just don't think your Santa Claus helpers should be selling watches and purses and such on street corners, do you?"

"You mean they should be giving them away instead?"

Sterling's expression went unnaturally stern. "No, I don't think I mean that at all, Maggie. But should Santa Claus be selling things?"

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," she said, reaching for her nicotine inhaler. She was pretty sure she'd been a nicer person when she smoked. "There are other Santas, you know, Sterling. Santas who collect money for, uh, for those less fortunate."

"Tell me," Sterling said, leaning forward on the couch, and Maggie found herself giving him a thumbnail sketch of holiday charities and holiday Santas, all of which served to return a smile to Sterling's unusually sad face.

"Okay," she then said, clapping her hands together as she got to her feet. "Now what do you say we give the tree one last inspection, and then I think I'll go take a shower?"

Sterling got to his feet and walked over to stand beside Maggie as the two of them looked the tree up and down.

Maggie reached out after a few moments and bent one of the smaller branches on the artificial tree so that the tassel on one of the ornaments could hang straight. "That's better."

"It all looks very nice, even if it isn't real," Sterling agreed. "You really do like Christmas, don't you, Maggie? And all the fol-da-ral."

"Fol-da-ral? Wow, Sterling, that's a good one. But, yes, I do like it. I adore Christmas."

"Even when you get it wrong," Sterling said, and then quickly clapped his hands to his mouth.

"Excuse me?" Maggie rather glowered at Sterling as he backed away from her. "And why does that sound like you opened your mouth, Sterling, but Alex's voice came out?"

"Oh, no. No, certainly not. Surely not."

Maggie made come-to-me-speak-to-me gestures with her hands, and Sterling backed up another step. "What did he say? He had to have said something. God knows he's always got to say something."

"Well," Sterling said, forced to stand still now that he'd inadvertently cornered himself between Maggie and the back of the nearest couch, "you just made a simple mistake, that's all. Nothing important, really. Oh, you know what, Maggie? I think I forgot to feed Henry. Poor thing, running on that wheel of his all day. He must be famished. I really must be going now, and surely Saint Just will be back at any time. It's already past three, isn't it? So that's all right."

"Right, it's past three. And we'll get to that next, Sterling—why it's all right, whatever it is, because Alex will be home soon. But for the moment, let's get back to me getting it wrong. Getting what wrong, Sterling? Where? How?"

"It's ... um ... not that it wasn't an honest mistake ... and you were much less experienced at the time and ... why, anyone could make the mistake ..."

Maggie reached into her pocket, took out a fresh nicotine cartridge, and held both it and the nicotine inhaler up in front of Sterling. She opened the empty inhaler and dangled the cartridge over it, just as if she was going to drop a bullet into a gun. "I've been good. I've been sucking air, Sterling, for three days. Don't make me use this."

"You had a Christmas tree in a book years before Christmas trees ever came to England," Sterling told her quickly, then took a quick breath. "There, I've said it. Now put that away, Maggie."

Maggie slipped the two plastic pieces and the cartridge back into her jeans pockets. "I what? No, that's impossible. I research everything. Sure, I make a few mistakes, who doesn't? But Christmas trees? Everybody has Christmas trees."

"We didn't," Sterling told her, obviously feeling more confident now that Maggie had holstered her nicotine inhaler. "Yule logs. Holly berries. Crape myrtle. But not trees. Yet you mention one, in some detail, actually, in one of your Alicia Tate Evans books. Saint Just pointed it out to me."

"I did? Oh, wait. Yeah, I remember now," Maggie said, nodding. "Alex read my Alicia Tate Evans books?"

"No, I don't believe so. At least not for several years."

Several years? Maggie felt a shiver ice-skate down her spine as she fumbled in her pocket for all the pieces of her addiction. Alex hadn't even been here several years ago. As of about seven years ago, he hadn't even been invented, the Saint Just mysteries hadn't been invented. "Run that one by me again, please, Sterling."

Sterling looked as comfortable as a balloon in a room full of pin cushions. There was nowhere to go where he wouldn't end up in trouble. "Um, he hasn't read them at all?"

"Not at all," Maggie repeated, fitting the cylinder into the holder. "But he knows about them."

"Yes. Precisely. Not me, of course. I came later. The finishing touch, as it were, that made the rest of it possible. Well, I should go feed Henry."

"Oh, stay a while, please," Maggie told him quietly, and Sterling, who had been eyeing the door, slouched against the back of the couch. "I want to hear all of it. Now."

"But there's really nothing to say, Maggie. You know Saint Just lived inside your head until he decided to come out."

"No, I don't know that, Sterling. It's what I've been told, but I don't know it. As a matter of fact, I try very hard not to think about it."

"You really shouldn't, if it makes your head hurt, or any of that. I hadn't lived there quite so long—in your head, that is—and Saint Just was already firmly in residence when I got there. I once asked him how long he'd been with you, and he said he'd been there since the beginning."

Now here was something she hadn't heard before. "From the first day I began writing? Is that what you mean? What he means? That he's been the glimmer of an idea in my head for as long as I've been writing?"

"No, from the beginning, Maggie. I think, now that I consider the thing, he mentioned the word ... um ... puberty."

"Oh, God," Maggie said, staggering over to her desk chair and collapsing into it. He'd been with her that long? She'd been measuring men against him ever since she'd first looked at Jimmy Gilchrist and decided maybe boys weren't all dopes? Except they'd all turned out to be dopes, hadn't they? Dopes, or duds. All these years, she'd never found one, not a single one, who could measure up to, live up to ... to the imaginary man living in her head? Maggie blinked, trying not to faint. "He's been with me that long?"

Sterling was on firmer ground here, it seemed. "Oh, yes. Evolving, you understand. And then, at last, you named him, which he appreciated very much by the way, for it's just the name he would have chosen for himself."

"Just the name, huh? The Viscount Saint Just," Maggie heard herself say over the ringing in her ears. "All along? All these years? I'd been ... building him?"

"Your perfect hero, yes. I am just delighted that you chose to make me believable as well, or else I shouldn't be here, should I, and where would Henry be without me?"

"Hungry," Maggie muttered, waving Sterling toward the door. She needed to be alone. She needed to think about this. "Wait! There was something else, wasn't there? Oh, right, I remember. Alex was here this morning, you showed up the moment he left, and now you're concerned as to when he'll be back, because you want to be gone. I'm being babysat, Sterling, aren't I?"

"I'm afraid I don't understand the term," Sterling said, now backpedaling toward the door. "Truly, I don't."

"Oh, yes, truly you do," Maggie said, already calling up her search engine on the computer. "But never mind. I'll figure out the why of it on my own."

Sterling escaped, and Maggie typed a few words into the search engine, and then clicked on one of the articles that appeared. Christmas trees were introduced to England from Germany around 1841. Maggie's books, those written as Alicia Tate Evans and those written as Cleo Dooley, all dealt with the Regency, 1811-1820. She'd written about a Christmas tree in one of her Alicia Tate Evans books, and nobody had caught it. Not her, not the copy editor. None of her half dozen fans of those older books. Nobody.

"Well, now, that's embarrassing," Maggie said, cupping her chin in her hand as she called up her Solitaire program. There was no sense getting involved in anything else, not with Alex bound to show up for babysitting duty any moment.

Where could she take them? Some place that had the potential to drive him crazy would be nice, some place that would bore him out of his mind up until the moment she melted into a crowd and watched as he went nuts looking for her ... which would serve him right for growing in her mind.

"Since puberty? Jeez ..."