“Look!” said Heather. “On the escalator. Isn’t that Savannah?”
Lynnette followed Heather’s pointing finger and stood atop the hay bale so that she could see over our heads.
“It is Savannah-Nana!” she squealed, and before I could stop her, she jumped off the bale of hay and squirmed through the line of people waiting to have their pictures taken.
“Lynnette! Wait!” I called, but she was gone, swallowed up by the crowds.
12
« ^ » “The couches upon which the old Romans reposed at table were often inlaid with silver, gold, ivory, tortoise-shell, and precious woods, with carved ivory or metal feet; and the furniture of a rich man’s house represented in itself an enormous fortune.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
I charged after Lynnette with Heather McKenzie close behind me, but the child was half my size and able to dart through openings in the crowd that got me a glare or an icy “Do you mind?” when I tried to slip through the same spaces.
By the time we finally elbowed our way over to the escalator in the middle of the floor, there was no sign of the child nor of Savannah in the solid flow of people jammed onto the moving stairs. Nevertheless, we stepped on and I shoved Heather in front of me since she was several inches shorter.
“You keep looking up there for Savannah,” I ordered. “I’ll check out the floor.”
We rose steadily while I anxiously scanned the area for a small pink T-shirt and a long bouncy pigtail. If there were any children at all on the first floor, I didn’t see them. A flash of rainbow pastels entering Arte de Mexico raised my hopes till I saw it wasn’t Savannah.
Going with the flow, we crossed a glass-enclosed walkway and reached the mezzanine. Hallways crowded with people branched off in different directions from a central reception desk where more crowds waited for the two elevators. There was a glass door that led outside and I recognized the street where I’d dropped Drew Patterson an hour or so earlier, which meant that this part of Market Square connected with the String and Splinter.
For a panicky moment I considered trying to see if Drew was still inside the club and could help us hunt for Lynnette, but then I recognized a familiar face standing near the elevators. “Mr.—Tomlinson, is it?”
He had switched uniforms and now wore a patch on his sleeve that identified him as an employee of a private security company, but it was my bailiff from the courthouse all right
“Oh, hiya, Judge,” he beamed at me. “Enjoying Market?”
“Not at the moment,” I answered. ‘I’m missing a little girl. Did one pass through here a few minutes ago?”
“Bugs Bunny shirt?” he asked. “Blonde hair in a braid?”
“Yes! Where did she go?”
“She took the elevator up to five. You just missed them.”
“Them?” asked Heather.
“Kid with her grandma, right? Gray-haired lady in a fancy spring dress? She asked me where the Century showroom is. On five, I told her.”
Unlike the elevators over in GHFM, the elevators at Market Square were built to hold more than six people at a time. And since they serviced five floors instead of GHFM’s eleven, we only had to wait six very long minutes instead of twenty.
Of course, it might have been a bit longer if we hadn’t had a chatty Mr. Tomlinson to part the waters for us and escort us to the front of the crowd.
“Who’d you wind up giving the baby to?” he asked as we waited, and I remembered that there’d been a different bailiff in my courtroom after lunch.
“The father.”
“On account of he’s moved back in with his folks?”
I nodded. “That tipped it.”
“Figured it would,” he said sagely.
“So which is your real job?” I asked.
“Oh, this here’s just temporary,” he confided to me as we waited. “Normally, see, I take vacation days to work the Market, but the guy who was supposed to be working your courtroom today—Sam Dow? He had to take some personal leave ’cause a water pipe in his camper van sprang a leak and he had to wait in for the plumber, so I took Sam’s place till he could get back.”
“He lives in a camper van?” Heather asked.
“Oh, no, Sam’s bunking in with a bunch of us Market bachelors for the week, but he didn’t just rent out his house this year, he’s rented out his camper, too.”
Since the elevators seemed to be taking their own sweet time, I said, “Market bachelors?”
“Yeah. There’s six of us with houses over near Oak Hollow. Three or four bedrooms from when our kids were growing up. During Market, we can rent ’em to the buyers for three thousand apiece. Our wives go to the beach or go visit relatives and five of us guys squeeze in with whoever’s turn it is to put us all up. Normally, see, Sam sleeps in his camper, but this year, what with him renting it, too, there’s seven of us bunched up at Marvin’s. That many makes it a little hard.”
“Crowded bathrooms?” I asked sympathetically.
“Oh, that don’t bother guys. No, ma’am, it’s the poker. See, poker’s best with five guys. Six is stretching it, and seven? Takes too long to go around the table with bets and if you try anything fancier than five-card stud, you run out of cards. Okey-dokey, here’s your elevator.”
While the car emptied out, I asked Tomlinson to hang around the area for a while. “The little girl’s name is Lynnette and I’m supposed to be baby-sitting. If she comes down before we do, would you hold on to her for me?”
“What about her grandmother?”
“That’s not her grandmother.”
“But yes, please hold on to her, too,” Heather said as we entered the elevator.
Amiably, Tomlinson promised that he’d do what he could.
The car stopped at each floor but for every two that got off, three more wanted on and we were still quite crowded when we finally reached five.
Century Furniture Industries seemed to take up most of the fifth floor.
“I’m sorry,” said a company employee at the entrance when confronted by this new deluge of potential customers, most of whom seemed to be decorators and interior designers, “but there’s a half-hour wait for a representative if you wish to view our galleries.”
While others drifted over to hear the mini-lecture on how Century’s state-of-the-art robotics could turn out a perfect copy of a fifteenth-century refectory table from a Spanish monastery, I asked the employee if he’d noticed a small girl and an eccentrically dressed woman.
The man shook his head with a rueful smile. “We’ve been so swamped today I might not have noticed an ostrich in a tutu if it was wearing a buyer’s badge.”
But he took pity on my obvious anxiety and waved me in.
I left Heather by the entrance to keep an eye out for them.
“Take your time,” she said, scribbling on her notepad. ”This is really sort of neat. They buy an antique table for five thousand, use a robot to reproduce every wormhole, scratch, or gouge mark and then sell the reproductions for eighteen hundred a pop. You know something? I may actually get a real article here after all.”
I cautioned her not to get so caught up in robotically reproduced wormholes that she would miss Lynnette and Savannah.
Despite my admonition to Heather McKenzie, the Century collection was so stunning that I was in danger of forgetting why I was there myself. There was dignity with touches of whimsy, there was an impeccable attention to detail that shrieked quality, and there were so many people in the long galleries that it was easier to look at furniture than scan for Savannah—especially since a lot of the upholstery was in muted spring neutrals that would camouflage her layers of pastel chiffon.
I found myself coveting a massive couch, a solid cherry serpentine sideboard, a bombé-based armoire, an eight-foot-tall highboy.