Chapter 6
Forty people were on the main escalator when it stopped, at nine fifty-two on Friday morning.
Caroline was on the mezzanine when it happened.
She heard it before she saw it. The steady mechanical hum that ran under every other sound in the atrium, so steady she never noticed it, cut out all at once.
Then came a clunk, deep in the floor. Then a woman’s voice, loud and surprised, said, “Oh!” and forty shoppers lurched forward on the steps and grabbed the rail.
Caroline was already moving.
“Luz,” she said into the radio, walking fast. “Main escalator’s down. I need two people at the bottom and two at the top. Nobody else gets on.”
“Copy. On my way.”
“And call Delco Elevator. Tell them it’s Hadley’s and it’s the second Friday in December, and if they’re not here in an hour, I’ll drive to Media and get them myself.”
“Copy.”
At the top of the escalator, a man was already yelling. He was big and red-faced and had a shopping bag in each hand. He wanted to know what kind of store let its escalator break at Christmas. Behind him, a teenage girl was crying because her grandmother was halfway down and had gone pale.
Caroline went past the yelling man without looking at him.
She went down the stopped steps, one at a time, saying the same things over and over in her calm announcing voice. Everybody’s okay. Hold the rail. It’s just stairs now. We’re going to walk down together. She reached the grandmother, a tiny woman in a purple hat, and took her elbow.
“I’ve got you,” Caroline said. “What’s your name?”
“Bernadette.” The woman’s hand was shaking on the rail. “I have a bad hip.”
“Okay, Bernadette. I have a bad day. We’ll go slow.”
Bernadette laughed, a thin, surprised laugh, and they went down together, one step and then another, while the people behind them waited.
At the bottom, a stock boy was waiting with a chair.
Caroline sat Bernadette down in it and asked a cosmetics girl to bring her a cup of water and a cookie from the candy counter, on the house.
Then she turned around to look at the atrium.
It was ten o’clock on the second Friday in December. The doors had been open for an hour. The line for Santa already went halfway around the floor. And the escalator was the only way to the second floor besides one set of stairs and two small elevators. The second floor was toys.
In five minutes there would be a traffic jam of strollers at the bottom of the stairs. In ten minutes someone would get hurt.
Caroline keyed her radio.
“Homer,” she said. “Where are you?”
“Second floor, by the trains,” the head elf said. “What do you need?”
“Every elf you’ve got that isn’t holding a baby. On the main stairs. One every five steps, with candy canes.”
A pause. “You want the elves to direct traffic?”
“I want the elves to make it a parade,” Caroline said. “Strollers go up the elevators. Everyone else walks the stairs. Every kid who makes it to the top gets a candy cane and gets told they climbed the North Pole.”
Another pause. Then the old man laughed.
“I’ll have them there in three minutes,” Homer said.
He had them there in two.
By ten-fifteen, the main stairs of Hadley’s were lined with six elves in green felt, handing out candy canes and shouting encouragement.
The kids thought it was the best thing that had ever happened.
Somebody’s dad started singing “Up on the Housetop,” and half the stairway joined in.
The strollers went up the elevators in a neat line, with Luz running them like an air traffic controller.
The red-faced man with the shopping bags stood at the top of the stairs and watched his own small son climb the whole way up singing.
At the top, the boy got his candy cane. He turned around and yelled down to the atrium, “I CLIMBED THE NORTH POLE!”
The red-faced man looked at Caroline. He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, like a man admitting a debt, and went off to look at trains.
Delco Elevator got there in forty minutes.
* * *
The ten o’clock Santa quit at noon.
His name was Ernie, and he was new this year, and Caroline had had a feeling about him since October.
He had a beautiful real beard and no patience at all.
At eleven fifty-five, a little boy had sneezed directly into his face.
At eleven fifty-seven, the little boy’s mother had asked if Santa could please take the photo again, because her son had blinked.
At noon, Ernie stood up off the big red chair, took off his hat, handed it to the nearest elf, and walked out the Walnut Street doors in his full Santa suit.
The line watched him go.
There were about a hundred and fifty people in the Santa line. Most of them were under the age of eight.
“Oh no,” Luz said on the radio. “Oh no, no, no.”
“Where’s the one o’clock Santa?” Caroline said. She was already walking fast across the marble.
“On the Market-Frankford Line. His train’s stuck at Girard. He says forty minutes.”
“Can Homer do it?”
“Homer weighs a hundred and forty pounds. He’d look like a Santa who’s been sick.”
Caroline reached the Santa area. The big red chair sat empty in front of the tree. A hundred and fifty faces looked at it. Somewhere near the back, a small girl started to cry, very quietly, the way kids cry when they aren’t sure yet if they’re allowed to.
Caroline climbed the two steps onto Santa’s little stage.
She didn’t sit in the chair. She sat on the step in front of it, in her black dress and her red scarf, and she took a book out of the basket beside the chair.
The basket always had books in it for the kids who got scared and needed a minute.
She held up the book so the whole line could see.
It was The Night Before Christmas, the big old edition with the gold pictures.
“Hi, everybody,” she said. “I have some news. Santa had to go feed the reindeer.”
The crying girl stopped crying and stared at her.
“They get very hungry around lunchtime this close to Christmas,” Caroline said. “So he’s gone to feed them, and he’ll be back soon, in a new suit, because Dasher always gets hay on the old one. And while we wait, I’m going to read to you. Is that okay?”
The line said yes in about a hundred and fifty voices, not all at once.
So Caroline read.
She read The Night Before Christmas twice.
Then she read How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which was also in the basket, and did all the voices, and the kids screamed with happiness when the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes.
A few of the parents laughed too. One of them was filming, and Caroline didn’t care.
She read The Polar Express. She was halfway through a second reading of The Night Before Christmas, with a four-year-old boy sitting in her lap because he’d climbed up there and nobody had stopped him, when the one o’clock Santa came puffing through the Walnut Street doors in his suit, pulling on his gloves.
“Ho, ho, ho!” he boomed. “Sorry I’m late! Blitzen ate my hat!”
The kids went wild.
Caroline gave the four-year-old back to his mother and stood up and brushed off her dress. Her voice was a little hoarse. Her feet hurt. She felt, for the first time in a week, completely and simply happy.
Across the atrium, by the perfume counter, a woman in a camel coat was watching her.
Caroline’s stomach dropped before she could stop it.
Then the woman turned her head, and Caroline saw that she was sixty at least, with short silver hair and small gold glasses, and nothing like Brittany at all.
The woman was holding a Hadley’s coffee cup.
When she saw Caroline look at her, she lifted the cup a little, like a toast.
Caroline nodded back, puzzled, and went to find Luz.
* * *
“There’s a lady in a camel coat,” Caroline said on the radio at one-thirty. “Silver hair. Gold glasses. Have you seen her?”
“I’ve seen her,” Luz said. “She was at the escalator this morning. She was by the Santa line when you were reading. She was in cosmetics about ten minutes ago. I thought she was a store detective from somewhere.”
“She’s following me.”
“You want me to have security talk to her?”
Caroline looked down from the mezzanine. The woman was on the ground floor again, by the glove counter now, looking up at the dome as if she were measuring it.
“No,” Caroline said. “Not yet.”
At two-forty, the lost child call came.
It came the way they always came. A mother’s voice somewhere on the second floor, going up and up in pitch.
Lily? Lily! Then the radio, crackling with the toy department manager’s voice.
“Code Candy Cane, second floor. Four-year-old girl. Pink coat. Brown pigtails. Name is Lily. Mom turned around for one second by the dollhouses.”
Caroline had written the Code Candy Cane plan herself, seven years ago, after a little boy had wandered out onto Walnut Street and been found by a bus driver two blocks away. She had never needed the whole plan. She did not wait to find out if she needed it today.
“All doors,” she said into the radio. “Every door to the street, somebody stands on it. Nobody walks out with a little girl in a pink coat unless her mother is with them. Stairs, elevators, fire exits. Luz, take the second floor with me. Everybody else, look low. Four-year-olds hide low.”
She was on the second floor in ninety seconds.
The mother was standing in the middle of the toy department with both hands in her hair. She was maybe twenty-five. She was saying I just turned around, I just turned around, over and over, to nobody. Caroline went straight to her and took her by both arms.
“What’s your name?”
“Kayla—it’s Kayla—”
“Kayla. I’m Caroline. I run this floor. Every door in this building is covered. She can’t get out. We’re going to find her.” Caroline held her eyes. “What does she love? What’s her favorite thing in here?”
Kayla stared at her. “What?”
“If Lily could go anywhere on this floor. Where would she go?”
“The—” Kayla’s face crumpled. “The houses. She loves the little houses. She wants to live in one.”