Descending Son

by Scott Shepherd

  Jess held up a palm to make clear none was taken. “You’re tagging along?”

  “Hell yes. I’m not missing out on the chance to meet a real live vampire.” Benji smiled. “ ‘Live’ being a figure of speech, of course.”

  2

  Vampire.

  The fact that word even entered his brain was almost enough to send Jess running for the closest loony bin to demand being locked up in a rubber room.

  What surprised him even more was that he considered himself the last person to expound tales of eternal bloodsuckers.

  Walter Stark had insisted on a no-nonsense upbringing for his children that didn’t allow for flights of fancy. His father had never read Jess a fairy tale, taken him to a movie, or even offered up an imaginary story. Walter believed in hard truths and life lessons; he would tell Jess the world was a rotten place—one had to fight to get a toehold and not let go when someone tried to rip it away. Those lectures never offered up a supernatural being as the threat one should be looking for over his shoulder.

  But as Jess rode shotgun in the Mustang toward the Jameses’ house, he thought about what Benji had said in the Sands’s office. The legends of vampires and people rising from the dead went back to the dawn of man. Were these really just byproducts of wild imaginations, or were they rooted in some fact, regardless of how small? Jess could make the same argument about UFOs and their alien pilots. Were we really that exclusionist to believe we were the only sentient beings in the entire universe?

  A long sabbatical in the aforementioned rubber room would not change what had transpired in Palm Springs since his arrival. Sure, most of it defied a logical explanation. But Jess knew what he’d seen with his own two eyes.

  Call him a vampire. Walking dead. Nosferfuckingratu. Until someone offered up a better explanation—as far as Jess was concerned—Walter Stark had died and come back to life.

  He considered how this fit into everything else that had occurred the past few days. Tom Cox’s death. Edward Rice having his fingers in every slice of the Stark family pie. What about the two attempts on Jess’s life? There had to be a connection to what had happened to his father. He voiced these thoughts to Benji.

  “So we’re going with the vampire thing, huh?” asked Benji, waiting for a traffic signal to change.

  “Humor me.”

  “Yeah. Twist my arm.”

  “Really?”

  “I still think you’re suffering from some post-grave trauma. But if you accept vampire, lots of questions get answered. The cross on the picture and the motel wall. The dead patients at Meadowland—vampires need to feed on something, right? What better than old people? Speed along their demise—their deaths don’t look so suspicious.”

  “Good reason Tom Cox would fear for his life and beat it out of town,” Jess pointed out.

  “It also explains why someone would chase him down to keep the secret from the outside world.”

  “Our mystery motorcyclist.”

  “He must be in on it.” Benji drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and shook his head. “Except he was out in broad daylight. Sort of rules out vampire.”

  “Are you making fun of me now?”

  “Just trying to help you build a case.”

  Jess considered that for a moment. “Might explain the over-the-top outfit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jess reminded Benji how his father shielded himself from the rising sun by covering his skin with a heavy coat. “That material the cyclist wears would provide ten times the insulation of a coat. Might allow someone like my father to move around during the day.”

  “If the idea weren’t so terrifying I’d say that’s totally awesome.”

  “Certainly explains someone trying to get rid of me a couple of times. The more I dug and asked questions, the closer I was getting to the truth. Much easier to have me out of the way.”

  “They think you’re still in that hole in the desert.”

  “My father knows better.”

  “Who’s he going to tell?”

  “Whoever ‘they’ are—the ones that he said were ‘killing’ him. I’m presuming one was Edward Rice. Though I’m not exactly sure where he fits in. The man’s a physician. How does that link up with the craziness we’re talking about?”

  “Well, sticking with classic vampire lore, he’d be considered a ‘familiar.’ ”

  “What the hell is that?” asked Jess.

  “Like the Vichy with the Nazis. You throw in with the oppressors to save your own hide, and hope to be rewarded with riches and a long life.”

  “That describes the man perfectly,” agreed Jess.

  The Jameses’ driveway appeared on the right. Benji steered the Mustang up the asphalt; the only car in the driveway was Jess’s SUV. Benji pulled in right behind it and shut down the engine.

  “Looks like no one’s en casa,” observed Benji.

  “At least the cops aren’t here.”

  But neither was Tracy.

  The housekeeper who answered the door wasn’t a live-in. She took the bus in from Indio each day, got off at the stop at the bottom of the hill, dutifully trudged up the driveway, and arrived at eight on the dot to start mopping, dusting, and ironing.

  This morning no one had answered her persistent bell ringing. She knew the actor was tending to business back in Los Angeles, but had expected Tracy to be at home. This wasn’t strange—Señor James and Señorita Tracy were always coming and going as they pleased. So she let herself in with her house key and went about her normal routine.

  “Shall I be leaving message?” she asked in broken English.

  Jess saw no point in dragging this woman into the madness he felt gripping him tighter and tighter. He shook his head. “My friend was dropping me off to pick up my car. I left it here last night.”

  He pointed at his SUV in the driveway, and then looked at the wrought-iron table in the entryway. His keys were right where he had left them. Jess felt the hole in his stomach open up even deeper.

  The maid handed him his keys, convinced he was telling the truth. Jess wished he could be as easily swayed that Tracy wasn’t in serious trouble.

  Like in her own grave somewhere deep in the Coachella Desert.

  TRACY BEFORE

  Sometimes it felt like they were the two loneliest people in the world, though Tracy knew this would sound ridiculous to anyone meeting them for the first time. Jess’s father owned half of Palm Springs and her famous sire pretty much ruled Hollywood. But unless one was the scion of such privileged people, she didn’t expect them to understand. So they just sucked up the Poor Little Rich Girl and Boy tags and reveled in each other.

  Tracy understood Jess right away. She wasn’t surprised that taking over a massive real estate business was the farthest thing from his mind. Standing in the pool with her hands wrapped around his waist, listening to him tell her about the great novel he was reading or the old movie he’d discovered, she knew Jess’s aspirations spun from the realm of his imagination and not toward the bottom of a balance sheet. He was a daydreamer, borne from countless hours spent alone as a child because his parents were too busy building their fortune.

  “What do you think you want to do?” she would often ask. His answers would vary. Some days he wanted to pump out the Great American Novel that explored the human condition. Other times he’d talk of going to grad school and getting a psych degree. More than once he mentioned signing up for one of those charitable organizations that rebuilt houses in devastated Third World countries.

  The common theme was he liked knowing what made people tick. When she pointed this out, he told her it came from being raised by a father who didn’t give a shit about anyone.

  “My problem is that my dad cares about everyone else,” Tracy said. Clark James was a Hollywood icon who threw everything into his career. He often told Tracy there were hundreds of people depending on him to keep churning out hit after hit. The irony was that Clark’s dedication to this extended
family was usually at the expense of his one legitimate heir, who he left in the hands of nannies and housekeepers. For Tracy, feeling aimless with one year left to go in college was to be expected—she would have been shocked had it been any other way.

  Jess changed all that. For the first time since her mother died, Tracy found herself looking forward to getting out of bed (except, of course, when Jess was in it) and attacking the day. They were constantly taking road trips deep into the California desert and explored every inch of the Death Valley National Monument. Out in the wilderness, they felt free at last, with nothing expected and no one to answer to.

  It was a different story in Palm Springs. Neither of their families seemed thrilled they were together. It made Walter Stark crazy that his son had taken a job in a local bookshop just to stay close to Tracy. Walter constantly told Jess he was wasting time with that “dilettante” and that he should get on with his life. Jess shrugged it off, but it bothered Tracy more than she would ever let on.

  For Clark James, it was “No one is good enough for my little girl.” The few weekends the actor spent in Palm Springs put a crimp in their sleeping arrangements as they’d taken to spending most nights in Tracy’s bedroom when her father was off filming. There was no way either of them wanted to be under Walter’s watchful eye. When Clark was home, Jess became very proficient at hopping the fence into the Jameses’ backyard, using the hide-a-key Tracy left under the stone tortoise near the kitchen door to sneak inside, and tiptoeing up the back stairs to her bedroom. More than once, Jess climbed out a second-story window and beat a quick escape as the actor called Tracy down for breakfast after they’d both overslept.

  She occasionally wondered if Jess was involved with her because it pissed off his father so much. Each time she thought about bringing it up, Tracy chickened out. If it were true, she decided she didn’t want to know about it.

  The closest she came to asking was one night when they were curled up at the foot of her bed, eating popcorn and watching The Graduate. Jess had brought the DVD from home because he couldn’t believe Tracy hadn’t seen it. He was constantly stunned by her lack of film knowledge and she was always reminding him that just because she grew up in the home of a famous actor, it didn’t mean she saw a lot of movies.

  “We only watch the ones my dad starred in,” she lamented.

  This got the proper response—a big “Awww” from Jess, which led to cuddling and the good stuff that came with it. Afterwards, he popped the movie in and they watched Dustin Hoffman stumble into a relationship with Mrs. Robinson, only to fall head over heels for her daughter later on. Two hours later, after Ben finally chased Elaine down and convinced her to get on the school bus, Tracy was sobbing uncontrollably.

  Jess was puzzled by her reaction. She wiped away the tears and said it reminded her of them—the uphill battle they faced with their families not wanting them involved with each other.

  Jess said he didn’t care what anybody thought, it only mattered that he loved her. It was the first time he had ever uttered the words out loud.

  Tracy told him she loved him too and began to cry again.

  Again, Jess was confused. Tracy said she was now crying because she was so happy.

  She didn’t dare tell him the truth.

  3

  Jess told Benji to go back to the Sands. At first his high school buddy resisted; he wanted to make sure Jess was going to be okay. He swore to be careful and bring Benji up to speed on his search for Tracy, and then made him promise to keep the vampire theory under wraps. Benji said no problem. He might have been ninety-nine percent on board but Benji knew he would sound like an inmate who had just fled the asylum to a nonbeliever.

  Jess watched Benji spin the Mustang down the driveway and head toward the setting sun. Then he hopped into the SUV, gunned the engine, and followed suit. But he only drove halfway down the block and parked on the mountain-shaded side of the street. Jess settled in to watch the coming and goings at the Jameses’ house. The coming side was a dead end. Two hours passed, the skies darkened, and the only thing that appeared were a few lights in the house.

  In the meantime, Jess grew increasingly worried about Tracy. The lack of a police presence convinced him no one had reported her missing. The fact the housekeeper didn’t know Tracy’s whereabouts and was clueless about the bizarre backyard activity the previous night, like masked men clubbing people’s heads and dumping them in a car trunk, made him fear Tracy had succumbed to a similar fate. Even if his cell phone hadn’t died in a waterlogged coffin somewhere in the desert, Jess didn’t have Tracy’s number to try and reach her. He knew she’d changed it years ago. There were a few nights shortly after he’d left Palm Springs when he drunk-dialed her, only to get a disconnect recording with no forwarding number.

  So, at eight o’clock, when the housekeeper locked the front door and caught her bus at the bottom of the hill, Jess decided enough was enough. It was time to take a look at things himself.

  As he climbed a tree and dropped into the Jameses’ backyard, it occurred to Jess that he had probably sent Benji on his not-so-merry way because he suspected breaking and entering was in his immediate future. It was enough to entrust his lifelong friend with his vampire saga; dragging him into actions that could land them both in jail was more than he could ask.

  For a moment, Jess was surprised he had no qualms about what he was doing. But what had started out as curiosity and guilt about his father had become personal. There had been two attempts on his life and he’d witnessed something no one would believe. If Jess didn’t pursue it, nobody would. Plus, someone might try to kill him again—hoping the third time would be the charm. It behooved Jess to get to the bottom of everything.

  There were no telltale signs of Jess’s abduction from the backyard the previous evening. He hadn’t been outside with Tracy for very long, and it wasn’t as if it had been a knockdown drag-out battle with his two assailants, breaking everything in sight like some B-movie dustup. Jess had been sucker-smacked with the shovel and knocked out cold. If something similar had happened to Tracy, there was nothing around the pool to indicate a struggle, kidnapping, or chase had taken place. That left the inside of the house to explore. He was happy to see some things never changed; the hide-a-key was still under the ceramic turtle, and the alarm code was identical. (“Oscar,” ironically the one thing the owner coveted that he had never gotten his hands on.)

  A few minutes later Jess was inside the Jameses’ house.

  The kitchen was immaculate. Jess couldn’t tell if it was because the housekeeper had scrubbed her fingers to the bone or no one was using it. The refrigerator wasn’t quite bare, but in a house this size one would expect more choices than the few items that looked as if they’d been left for the housekeeper to prepare her lunch.

  As Jess moved through the rooms, he grew increasingly uncomfortable. The house seemed to be unoccupied, with no indication that anyone had spent any time here. This was particularly strange since three nights earlier there had been at least two hundred people swarming through it for his father’s birthday party. He hadn’t felt this emptiness then. Even the previous night, alone with Tracy, it seemed more lived in. Maybe the Jameses’ house was really nothing but an empty shell that was filled only when it was necessary to make a big show. Sometimes the illusion was for a ton of people, other times it could be for just one.

  He had a nagging feeling the encounter with Tracy fell into the latter category, and his suspicions weren’t mollified on the second floor. The housekeeper had certainly been generous with the vacuum, Endust, and Windex. Everything had been sucked up, waxed, and polished clean. It added to the preserved-for-museum-posterity feeling that crept into Jess’s bones as he continued to explore.

  Finally, he came to Tracy’s bedroom. His hand hesitated on the doorknob. His last truly happy time had been spent inside those four walls seven summers before. He thought about not going inside, not wanting to tarnish the memories with the baggage he’d carried aro
und with him ever since.

  But with that baggage came the dissolution of dreams he’d once shared with the girl who lived inside this room. Gone were the writerly aspirations and noble ambitions of exploring the human psyche. It was simple to blame his family and past events for most of this descent, but Jess knew he had his own culpability to deal with.

  Of course, standing in the hallway outside his ex-girlfriend’s bedroom after breaking into her house was one hell of a time to develop a conscience.

  Jess opened the door and stepped inside.

  The room was clean enough to perform a sterile operation. The bed was so neatly made it was impossible for Jess to ascertain whether it was the housekeeper’s doing or it hadn’t been slept in for a number of days. When he had last been in Tracy’s room, it was full of the trappings of a senior girl in college—rock posters, knick-knacks from college, chick-lit books, and school texts. He remembered Tracy had also lined one wall with the greeting cards he used to leave on her windshield each time he left the house; they had been interspersed with snapshots taken on their trips to the desert together.

  None of those was on display now. Jess hardly expected them to be after seven years, but he kind of wished they were.

  Two walls were now bare. One had a framed Clark James movie poster, some Rom-Com Jess had made a point of not seeing when it came out. The fourth had a nondescript floral painting. If Jess hadn’t spent so much time there years before, he would have sworn he’d walked into a guest room, not Tracy’s.

  He opened the closet door and found very few clothes. He was no expert on women’s fashion but thought there was maybe enough for a week’s worth of changes, and that was a conservative estimate. He flipped through dresser drawers and found about the same amount of undergarments. He thought this peculiar; Tracy had said she was living at home but there weren’t enough clothes for a short vacation stay. And that was even if she spent most of the time hanging around the pool in the one swimsuit he found.