A Cup Full of Midnight

by Jaden Terrell

  I said, “Hello, Elisha.”

  She smiled, but not before I saw the hurt on her face. “Jared. You look well.”

  “You too.”

  She tilted her head, searched my face with her eyes. “I thought you might call.”

  “I meant to. I’ve been—”

  She held up a hand. “I know. Busy.”

  “Confused.”

  “How about now?”

  “Getting there.”

  She scribbled something on a scrap of paper and pressed it into my palm. “I’ll wait,” she said, and smiled. “But not forever.” With another flash of teeth, she turned and was swallowed by the human flood.

  I folded the paper and stuffed it into my wallet.

  Josh nudged me with an elbow. “Her number?”

  I nodded.

  “If you don’t call her,” he said, “you really are insane.”

  I didn’t disagree.

  We crunched across the gravel parking lot and he settled into the truck, pulling the seat belt across his chest and waist.

  “Tell me about this game,” I said. “What are the rules?”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding. It’s not Monopoly. You can’t just read the rules off a box top.”

  “Just hit the high points. Is this the game you guys used to play in?”

  “We went a couple of times—me and Razor and the rest of us. Guy named Chuck runs it. He asked Razor not to come anymore.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugged. “Razor thought he was jealous, but I don’t know. This group is pretty straight. Maybe they just got weirded out.” He plucked at his seat belt. “Thing is, Razor didn’t even like the game that much. It just pissed him off that Chuck said he couldn’t play.”

  I slowed for the speed trap in Lakewood, and Josh chatted about the game for the next few miles. I made the several convolutions Map-Quest assured me would take me to the community center. Then Josh leaned forward and pointed.

  “That’s it.”

  There was nothing remarkable about it. No gothic spires or make-believe cobwebs. It was a plain rectangular building with a small gravel parking lot, as ordinary as peanut butter.

  There were already a dozen or so vehicles in the lot, many of which sported bumper stickers. I Believe in Whirled Peas, My Other Car Is a Horse, My Other Car Is a Broom, Cthulhu Saves.

  In front of the building, half a dozen women in brightly colored parkas huddled beside the door, holding up signs that said, Beware the Appearance of Evil and This Game is the Devil’s Work. One said simply, Vampires Suck.

  As Josh and I passed, I recognized a curl of dark hair and the strong, sorrowful features of Marta Savales. Alan Keating’s number one fan.

  I stopped in front of her and said, “Mrs. Savales, isn’t it? Jared McKean. We met at Razor’s funeral.”

  She blinked as if trying to place me, then gave a cautious nod and hugged herself for warmth. “Is this your son?”

  “Nephew.”

  “If you love that boy at all, put him back in your car and drive him home.”

  “It’s just a game,” Josh said. “It can’t hurt anybody.”

  “Is that what you think?” Her eyes glittered in the street light. “I wonder if your friend Razor would agree.”

  Josh blanched. Before he could speak, I laid a hand on his shoulder and nudged him toward the door. Forget about it.

  Inside, people whose costumes ranged from jeans to formal wear milled about or clustered around a cafeteria table draped in black and piled with cupcakes, chips, and soft drinks.

  Two men in suits flanked the door. They pretended to scan us for weapons, using flashlights as ersatz metal detectors, and waved us inside. I pretended I didn’t have the Glock in a small-of-back holster under my sweater.

  Josh and I tossed our jackets onto a table piled high with winter coats. Then Josh tugged me toward a stocky guy with shaggy ginger hair and a beard in need of a trim. He looked like a lumberjack.

  Josh said, “Uncle Jared, this is Chuck Weaver. He runs the game.”

  Chuck gave me a cockeyed grin and extended a hand. “Good to have you, man. Josh says you’re a virgin.”

  “Hardly.”

  “I mean it’s your first time to the role-playing world. Looking for a regular game?”

  “Just checking it out for Josh’s mom and dad. And I’m investigating Sebastian Parker’s death.”

  “That freak,” he said, nose wrinkling. “He wasn’t a player. He was a psycho.”

  Josh opened his mouth and I gave his shoulder a firm squeeze.

  “Care to elaborate?” I asked Chuck.

  “No time.” He gestured toward the milling crowd. “I don’t think I’d be much help, anyway. He didn’t play with us that long.”

  “Josh told me. Why was that?”

  “Look around. You’ll see mostly regular folks in regular clothes. Some people dress up.” He nodded toward a woman in a low-cut red ball gown that looked like it had probably had a previous life as a prom dress. “But so what? It’s all just acting. The problem is when you get somebody who isn’t acting.”

  “Like Razor.”

  “He wasn’t playing a vampire game. He was playing at being a vampire.” He glanced at his watch. “Look, I gotta get things rolling. Josh can show you the ropes.”

  I dug out a business card and handed it to him. “Mind jotting down your number? I have a couple of questions.”

  He gave the card a perfunctory glance and scribbled a number on the back before handing it back. Then he pressed past me and raised his hands for attention. Gradually, the hubbub died down.

  “Hey, everybody,” he said. “Good to see you all braved the inclement weather. Hope everybody stocked up.”

  There was a ripple of good-natured laughter. Here in the South, the merest whisper of the S-word sends people scurrying to the grocery stores for milk, bread, and jumbo packs of toilet paper. In some circles, the list has been expanded to include beer and porn.

  Chuck held up his hands for silence and went on. “Okay, quick review. First, this is a community building, so let’s leave it in as good a shape as we found it. Second, keep the game inside. If you want to step out for a smoke or a quiet chat, that’s fine, but the last thing we need is for the locals to get all freaked out and call the cops because the vampires are acting up outside their community center.”

  There was another spate of laughter. Chuck waved toward the snack tables. “No rowdiness, no alcohol, no non-prescription drugs. There are soft drinks and munchies over there for anyone who wants them. There’s a basket on the table for contributions, if you want to help with next month’s goodies. Any questions?”

  There were none.

  He gave the group an overview I found hard to follow, probably because it came in the middle of an ongoing story line. There’d been an attempt on the life of the vampire prince of Nashville. Before his execution, the assassin admitted he’d been hired by someone in the city—one of the prince’s own subjects.

  I whispered to Josh, “The Vampire Prince of Nashville. That’s what you guys called Razor.”

  Josh hunched a shoulder. “That’s what he called himself. It didn’t have anything to do with this game.” He put a finger to his lips and nodded toward Chuck.

  “The traitor must be ferreted out and dealt with,” Chuck said. “The vampires are coming together to discuss this crisis and the best way to deal with it. Some are meeting at a local art gallery.” He pointed to the center of the room, where tables had been arranged to form the boundaries of an open rectangle. A white poster-board sign on one table said Rogue’s Gallery. He went on, “The Wall Street types are meeting in their boardroom, and the rest of you are either at Court or the biker bar, although the lower elements may be skulking in the sewer tunnels.” He indicated the designated areas and raised his arms like an orchestra conductor. “Let the games begin!”

  “Come on,” Josh said. “I’ll give you a tour.” He tugged me toward the boardroom, whe
re three men and a woman in tailored suits were discussing the nefarious plot to kill their prince. We listened for awhile. Then Josh said, “Hey, look. There’s about to be a fight in the biker bar.”

  I must have looked alarmed, because he rolled his eyes and said, “It’s rock, paper, scissors.”

  “What?”

  “That’s how we handle combat. Rock, paper, scissors. Whoever wins the rock, paper, scissors wins the combat.” He led me toward the area marked Biker Bar, where two men, both in jeans and leather jackets, had squared off chest to chest.

  “Your insolence offends me,” the taller man said with a menacing glower. “In fact, your very existence offends me.”

  The other man, heavily bearded and mustached, sneered. “Talk is cheap, General.”

  “Oh, I’ll do more than talk.”The General cracked his knuckles loudly. “I intend to kick your hirsute Philistine ass.”

  Then they waited for a mediator to arrive, whereupon they did indeed engage in a round of rock, paper, scissors. The hirsute Philistine was the victor (rock smashes scissors), and the General stalked out of the bar while the others congratulated the winner. Once out of the biker bar area, the General dropped his sour demeanor and drifted toward the snack table.

  “See?” Josh grinned. “No bloodshed.” He was more animated than I’d seen him in months. I let him chatter, enjoying this rare glimpse of the kid I’d taught to play cops and robbers.

  “It’s pretty complex, isn’t it?” I said.

  He seemed pleased. “Yeah, it is. Lots of politics and stuff. Mostly, it’s just people standing around and talking to each other, pretending to be other people.”

  “How is all this different from what Razor did?”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “Razor wasn’t playing. He ran a game for awhile because it seemed like fun, and the rest of us liked to play it, but the whole vampire world to him . . . it wasn’t about pretending to be a character. He was the character.”

  “You believe that? That he was a vampire?”

  He couldn’t meet my gaze. “He had some kind of power. Maybe it was just charisma.”

  We wandered from area to area, listening to snippets of conversation. When he was sure I wasn’t going to drive a stake through anybody’s heart, Josh drifted away to join the artistic types and I slipped out for a breath of fresh air. The predicted snowfall had begun, and a patina of fat flakes glistened on the hood and shoulders of Marta Savales’s parka. She stood with her back to the wind, blowing into her gloved hands so the steam from her breath warmed her face. Of the half-dozen protesters, she was the only one left.

  I touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Why don’t you go home, Ms. Savales? The roads are getting worse.”

  “I’ll leave when they leave,” she said.

  “I don’t think you’re going to stop anybody from playing tonight.”

  “Those people are dangerous, Mr. McKean,” she said. “That game is dangerous.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  She reached into her purse and pulled out a billfold, which she opened to a photograph of a dark-haired boy who looked to be in his middle teens.

  “This is my son,” she said. “His name is Benjy.”

  I studied the photograph. Unruly brown hair. Crooked smile with the corner of one front tooth overlapping the other.

  “He looks like a good kid.”

  “He is. Or . . . I think . . .” She tilted her head back, eyelashes wet with snow or tears. “Maybe he was.”

  “You think he might be dead. And you think this game has something to do with that? So why’d you spit on Alan Keating?”

  “Keating is an idiot. Or a devil. Did he tell you about Chase? No, of course not.” A drop of moisture trickled from her nostril. I pulled a tissue from my pocket and handed it to her. She dabbed at her nose. “Thank you.”

  “Who’s Chase?”

  “Chase Eddington. He was one of Razor’s victims—and one of Mr. Keating’s patients. His parents didn’t know about Keating’s connection to Razor.” She twisted the Kleenex into a corkscrew and closed her gloved fist around it. “When they found out who Keating was, they got Chase a new therapist. A few weeks later, the boy killed himself.”

  I thought of Josh, of the splash of blood on white porcelain. Pushed the thought away. “You knew him? Chase Eddington?”

  “No, I met his mother—Hannah, Hannah Eddington—at a meeting for bereaved parents. And—this is terrible, I know—all I could think was that at least she knew what had happened to her son.”

  I touched her forearm lightly with my fingertips. She gave me a bleary smile and I withdrew my hand. “Tell me about Benjy.”

  She looked down at her hands, where a sprinkling of snow and white tissue fibers dusted her gloves. “Sometimes I tell myself he’s dead, and it would be better just to accept that and let him go. But then I think, well, if there’s no body . . . You see how it is?”

  “If there’s no body, he isn’t dead.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering, and nodded. He was a good boy, she said. She hadn’t worried about the role-playing, because her older boys had both been Dungeons & Dragons aficionados, and they’d grown up to be well-adjusted, moral men. Benjy seemed to be following in their footsteps.

  Then he met Razor.

  “He was confused,” Ms. Savales said. “Was he straight? Was he gay? He’d never thought he was gay, but if he wasn’t, then what was he doing with Razor?”

  I stared out at the snow swirling across the parking lot and unclenched my teeth. “He told you all this?”

  “We were very close. I told him he had to stop seeing this man, that it was bad for him.”

  “Let me guess. He wouldn’t stop.”

  “No. He said he would. A few days later, I came home from work and found a note saying he needed to pick up some things of his from Razor’s house. He said he’d be right back.” She gave a hiccupping laugh. “He never came home. His car turned up at the bus terminal downtown. He was so proud of it, he’d just gotten it for his birthday. If he was running away, why would he leave his car and take a bus?”

  She dabbed at her eyes with the ruined Kleenex. “I’m sorry. I can’t talk about it anymore.”

  I asked for a number where I could reach Chase’s parents. She gave it to me, then tucked Benjy’s photo back into her purse.

  “I’ll find your son, Ms. Savales,” I said.

  “I hired a detective once. He couldn’t find anything. There was nothing to find.”

  “There’s always something to find.”

  I went back inside to find Josh and spent another hour watching the game. Chuck drifted from group to group, mediating and filling in gaps in the story line. Affable guy. Smart. Smart enough to stage a crime scene like Razor’s?

  When things broke up a few hours later, Marta Savales was still outside, lips clenched over chattering teeth, meeting the hostile glances of the gamers with quiet defiance. Josh and I walked her out to her car, wrenched open the door, which had frozen shut, and scraped the ice from her windows.

  “One more thing,” I said, holding the door as she climbed inside. “How well do you know Alan Keating?”

  She made an angry gesture, like swatting at an invisible fly. “I went by his office a few times to ask him about Benjy. He said he didn’t know anything.”

  “You don’t believe him.”

  “Benjy once said that Alan Keating was the only person in the world Razor would confide in.”

  “Patient-doctor privilege?” I asked.

  “Maybe. I used to think of psychologists as being a bit like priests in that way.”

  “The confidentiality of the confessional.”

  “That’s Alan Keating for you.” She gave me a bitter smile. “The Devil’s confessor.”

  Josh and I watched her drive away, then bundled into the Silverado and inched our way home as snow spattered against the windshield and ice crusted on the streets.

  By the t
ime I dropped him off at Randall’s place and made my way home, it was almost midnight. Getting ready for bed, I laid my wallet on the beside table and thought of the phone number I’d tucked inside.

  Too late to call Elisha now.

  I wasn’t sure if I felt disappointed or relieved.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The next morning, I spent an extra thirty minutes chipping ice out of the horses’ troughs, then drove to the office on snow-covered streets. The red light on the answering machine was flashing. Messages from two potential clients. A skip trace and a cheating spouse surveillance. Easy money, but not wanting to commit to anything but Josh, I called both back, explained that my slate was full, and referred them to one of my competitors, a former football player named Lou Wilder. Lou and I had our differences, but he did good work.

  I pulled out Razor’s file and sank down in the leather chair behind the desk Frank hated. Scratched and riddled with bullet holes, the massive oak piece dated from the Civil War. One side had been scorched during a Yankee raid. Its owner, a physician, had taken it by wagon train to Arizona, where it held vials of drugs and jars of liniment until the doctor passed away and his son, the local sheriff, appropriated it. Over the years, it passed from family member to family member like an unwanted foster child, until it finally made its way to Tennessee, where a client of mine gave it to me in lieu of payment.

  As it turned out, I loved the thing. It made me feel like Wyatt Earp.

  I sat behind it with Razor’s file in front of me and jotted the names and numbers of the coterie members onto the back of a business card. Tried the first number, Dark Knight’s. No answer. Dialed the number Barnabus shared with Medea, and the answering machine informed me, in a cheesy Bela Lugosi imitation, that I could leave a message at the shriek. I told Bela who I was and asked for a call back.

  I pulled out the number Marta Savales had given me, leaned back in my chair and thought of Chase Eddington, the boy who had killed himself. Just by dialing the number, I would scrape these people raw.

  But my nephew needed answers, and more important, the detectives who suspected him of murder needed answers. To save Josh, I would scrape the whole world raw.