Underdead (Underdead Mysteries)

by Liz Jasper

  A familiar-looking, stocky woman who had gone down to talk with the players rejoined us in time to hear this remark and affirmed that this was probably true.

  Becky introduced me. “Jo, I’m not sure if you know Rachel. She was the assistant boys’ varsity coach last year but now she’s head coach over at Polytech.”

  I remembered then where I had seen her. “I think we met once, when you were at the coffee shop with Bob,” I said, shaking her hand.

  Her face took on a bittersweet look. “Yeah. The place with all the ambience. Bob loved that rat hole.”

  Her eyes filled with tears and I quickly changed the subject. “Kendra seems to be filling in nicely as coach.”

  “Oh, she’s great,” agreed Becky enthusiastically. “In fact, she’ll probably be coaching them next year.”

  “Actually,” Rachel said, “I’m pretty sure she turned down the job already.”

  Becky’s eyebrows shot up into her hair. It was still black from her holiday dye job, but she had added a few maroon stripes. “Why would she do that? The boys’ team is way more prestigious than the girls’—not that it should be of course.”

  “I know. Boys’ team coaches can make a small fortune coaching summer league. But for some crazy reason, Kendra decided she wanted to keep coaching the girls.”

  “Good for her,” Becky said. “She’s worked hard to build her team—they might have a real chance at the league title next year. It’s nice to see that she’s not going to leave the girls just to chase money.”

  Rachel nodded. “She really cares about the sport, even helped me get the job over at Polytech.”

  I couldn’t hide my surprise. I felt sure Bob hadn’t known. It had been obvious her departure had been a blow to him—and for the team as well. He hadn’t found an adequate replacement or Kendra wouldn’t be down there now, pitching in. Rachel must have read something of this in my silence, for she hastened to add, “I asked Kendra not to tell Bob—or anyone at Bayshore for that matter. I didn’t want her to bear the brunt of my defection when all she was doing was being nice. It can be hard for women to get good coaching jobs.”

  Understandable. Commendable, even. “How’s your new team doing?”

  She dimpled. “We’re not in the same league as you guys—literally and figuratively—but it’s nice being the head coach. “

  “Well, if Kendra doesn’t want the job, maybe you could come back next year as head coach.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she demurred. “I think they’d want someone more experienced.”

  “You should think about it,” urged Becky, warming to the idea. “Bob said you were good, and I know the kids liked you.”

  Rachel’s reply got lost in the roar of the crowd. The game had started up again and we hastened to take our seats. The light misty rain that had been falling on and off all morning had picked up a little during half time, making the second half more mud-ball than soccer, full of unexpected turnovers and dramatic saves. I booed and cheered energetically along with the Bayshore crowd, but in truth I barely saw the game. My mind was back on Bob’s murder.

  If what Becky had said about Rachel’s credentials was true, Rachel had a good shot at getting Bob’s coaching position. As she’d said, it was a prestigious and lucrative job—and one Rachel couldn’t have hoped to get in a million years had Bob not died. Was it possible she had killed him for it?

  I didn’t know if she would have done it, but I was pretty certain she could have. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Bob had invited her to join us for a beer after the parent conferences. His last conference had been at eight. What if she’d made plans to meet him in his classroom? She knew her way around campus. It was possible she’d made it upstairs unseen. After killing Bob, she could have ducked into an empty classroom when she’d heard Alan coming up the stairs, and disappeared past him back down the stairs when he went into my classroom to help Bob.

  I stole a glance at Rachel. She was cheerfully absorbed in the game and cheering wildly, and my image of her as a stealth killer faded like the wild fantasy it undoubtedly was. It was hard to imagine her killing Bob, over a coaching job of all things, especially when she already had one that she apparently liked. And she had seemed genuinely sad over his death. But then lots of people have done things in the heat of the moment they’ve regretted afterwards.

  I stifled a sigh. I was having a hard time with this sleuthing thing. Thinking the worst of everyone was unexpectedly depressing. I could, of course, unassign myself, but I knew I wouldn’t. Bob hadn’t deserved to die. And I hadn’t forgotten (nor had the Bayshore community) that I had been tacitly implicated in his death.

  On a positive note, I could probably scratch Kendra off the list, since she had turned down Bob’s coaching job. And what a shame that was, I thought as our team scored another goal to seal the win. She really was a good coach.

  Chapter Fifteen

  * * *

  It was eight o’clock on a Saturday night and I was sitting at home, alone, on my couch, flipping through channels and getting unreasonably irritated that there was never anything even halfway decent on weekend nights. For some reason, the TV network execs always seemed to believe I led a much more exciting life than I did.

  I clicked off the TV and threw down the remote in disgust, at a loss of what to do with myself. I refused to grade papers on a Saturday night out of principle. I should be out doing something—figuring out who murdered Bob, for example. But, there wasn’t much I could learn outside of school and besides, I couldn’t go out at night anymore, now that I was afraid of the dark. Or rather, what lurked in the dark.

  Was this what my life was going to be like from now on?

  I had gotten rather used to the monastic life of a teacher—the early mornings, early nights, and days spent in the company of preteens doesn’t exactly lend itself to a wild social life. But I had been able to accept it as a short-term problem, a brief dry patch that was probably good for me in some wholesome, personal development sort of way, and had consoled myself with promises to make up for it over the summer. But now…

  Even if someone were to ask me out, could I even go? What if I ran into Will? Or even another vampire? There were more of them out there and from my experience with them, vampires tended to frequent the sort of places people went to on a date.

  Yet if I were to be honest with myself, it wasn’t really the vampires out there that I was worried about. I was worried about me, what I might do. What if, some time between the appetizer and entrée, my vampness suddenly took over and I bit my date? Could I even do it? I ran my tongue worriedly over my incisors. Were they growing longer? They seemed normal, but maybe I was just used to my new fangs.

  I reminded myself that Will’s teeth had looked perfectly normal when I had met him, and felt a moment of relief. Maybe that whole pointy incisor thing was just a myth. Nonetheless, just to be sure, I forced myself to recall what Will’s teeth had looked like after he had bitten my neck, and for a moment, I was transported. I remembered the fear, felt the terror that held me captive as I watched his teeth descend again toward my throat. I made a noise like a gargled scream and snapped myself out of it. A cold sweat beaded my brow and I wiped it away with a shaking hand.

  It wasn’t a pleasant memory, but I had gotten the information I’d wanted. Will’s incisors had been wolfishly long, much longer than he wore them normally, if that’s the right way to put it. I leaned back on the couch, taking deep yoga breaths—with my eyes open—until the memory had faded, and soon my native curiosity reasserted itself. How did vampires get their teeth to work?

  There must be some sort of trick to it, some way to get them to grow on cue. Unfortunately, if there was a trigger I didn’t know how it worked. What if I set off my fangs by accident? Worse, what if I couldn’t get them to retract? What did I tell my date? “Sorry, gotta go, dental emergency. Could you be a doll and call 1-800-DENTIST for me? Tell them to send a van.”

  I paced frantically around my small
apartment for a while before ending up, as I always do in times of great stress, in front of the fridge. I opened it, but instead of taking out butter and eggs for cookies, I found myself reaching for an apple. I stared at it for a long moment.

  Then I tilted my head and sank my front teeth into it.

  “Ow!” I cried, fingering my aching teeth in dismay. They hadn’t penetrated more than a couple millimeters into the cold, hard fruit. I probed my aching incisors curiously with my tongue. Nothing. Undeterred, I plucked a large tomato from the fruit bowl on the counter.

  This time, I was more successful, at least insofar as my teeth made definite headway into the fruit, but it was a very ripe tomato and it squirted everywhere. Okay, I reasoned, wiping seeds off my forehead, the first one was too hard, this one was too soft. But that was about as far as I got with the logic part, as I refused to admit to myself that what I was really looking for was something approximating a person’s neck.

  I began trying things pretty much at random, biting them in the order I found them. In short order, a bell pepper, a cucumber, an orange, and a head of lettuce joined the growing reject pile on the counter. In growing frustration, I routed around in the fridge for more things to try. I had high hopes for the cheddar cheese, but it, too, was a bust. Finally I tried what I should have started with—a raw steak. I pulled tomorrow night’s dinner from the fridge and removed the butcher paper. I held it firmly between my hands, thought vampire-ish thoughts, took a bite and…nothing happened.

  I conceded defeat. I hadn’t succeeded in getting even the tiniest of fangs with anything I had tried. I must have been going about this the wrong way. Maybe it wasn’t a physical trigger. Maybe it was something more…bloody.

  Unfortunately, most of the ways I could test that theory were disgusting, immoral, and impractical, unless I wanted to bite my own arm, which was just plain gross.

  After some consideration, I pulled the blender out of the cabinet and threw in a cup of water and the steak. Once I had puréed it into a fairly homogenous red mash, I poured it through a sieve into a glass. Tiny specks of red floated around randomly like dust motes. I took a cautious sniff. It smelled, not surprisingly, like raw beef. I closed my eyes, tried to imagine it was blood and I was a vampire, and took a large drink.

  I don’t know which was worse, the taste or the texture. The blending had warmed it a little which made it, if possible, even nastier. I spat it out into the sink and rinsed my mouth under the tap for good long time.

  I was so absorbed in getting every last speck out of my mouth that I didn’t hear the doorbell ring. I did hear the pounding on my door. It was Gavin.

  “Oh good, you’re home. I thought you might be.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” It was one thing for Gavin to find me home alone and dateless on a Saturday night and quite another for him to expect it.

  He checked his automatic progress toward my kitchen and the cookie jar to look at me in surprise. “Your car was out front and the lights were on in your apartment.”

  Oh. “Well, I’m busy.” I placed myself squarely between him and the kitchen. He regarded me suspiciously for a moment and then moved past me. He stopped just inside the kitchen doorway and stared open-mouthed at the mess.

  The various items I had mangled and discarded lay on the counter in haphazard piles, and the meat purée, which had oxidized to a sickening brownish grey, coated it all like a foul slime.

  But that wasn’t the worst part. Even from where I stood, I could see teeth marks in several of the fruits and vegetables. The tooth imprints in the red apple, in particular, were clearly demarcated, like a picture in a Snow White storybook. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to guess what I had been doing.

  “Had a little trouble deciding what to have for dinner?”

  I pushed past him and began shoving the ruined food into the trash. I could feel the red flush of embarrassment spreading from my burning cheeks to the tips of my ears. Gavin didn’t say anything as I tossed and wiped and cleaned. When I was done, the entire counter area by the sink was sparkling, in conspicuous contrast to the rest of the kitchen.

  I dried my hands on a clean kitchen towel and turned around slowly to face him. I didn’t know what to say. He stared at me for along moment with unreadable silver eyes and then slowly reached forward and brushed a finger against my cheek. When he pulled his hand back, there was a tomato seed clinging to his finger.

  “Come on.” He spoke roughly. “You need to get out.” He led the way back outside and after a brief hesitation, I grabbed my coat, tucked my driver’s license, a credit card and two twenties into the back pocket of my jeans, and followed him. It wasn’t as if I had anything better to do.

  “I thought I had to stay indoors at night,” I said as he beeped open the Jetta.

  “You should,” he agreed. He stretched the seat belt across his broad chest in one quick, efficient movement and pulled away from the curb.

  “I thought you were supposed to encourage me to do what I ‘should’ do.”

  “I’m supposed to keep an eye on you. I can do that from the batting cages. Just be sure to choose a wooden bat, just in case. That’s a joke, Jo.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Twenty minutes later we pulled up to a well lit urban amusement park I never knew existed. The place pulsed with light and sound. “You were serious about the batting cages,” I said, trying to take it all in. In addition to the batting cages, there was a mini-golf course, a speedway where you could race miniature roaring Formula One cars on a winding track, and a giant arcade with glittering, jangling machines of all types. In the middle of it all, a large, multicolored outdoor carousel piped out old-fashioned music that wove through all the discordant sounds like a cooling breeze.

  Two hours later, after I had knocked many, many balls senseless, Gavin steered me into the food court and bought me a large hot fudge sundae. I felt like a little kid, happy and tired after a healthy dose of good clean fun. Vampires and murderers seemed as distant and remote as fairy tales, and for once, Gavin didn’t bring them up. I couldn’t help but wonder why he had done this for me, and how he knew this was just what I needed. Maybe he hadn’t been lying when he told me I reminded him of his little sister.

  Despite having taken great pains to eat my sundae like a lady, I managed, as I somehow always do, to get hot fudge on myself and had to go to the bathroom to de-sticky.

  It was the first time I’d gone into a public restroom without first doctoring the mirrors, and I entered warily, not sure what I’d do if someone noticed that I didn’t reflect as well as everybody else. Thankfully, I had it all to myself.

  I wet a wad of flimsy brown paper towels and dabbed gently at my chin, but I couldn’t see myself well enough in the mirror for such a genteel cleanup to have much effect so I bent down and washed my face in the sink. As I was rinsing off the soap, I heard the door open and stole a glance at the mirror, trying to assess whether it was mounted high enough over the sinks for me to stay out of range. Fortunately, it didn’t matter. No one had come in. I breathed a sigh of relief. Really, this whole vampire thing was ridiculously hard to live with.

  I reached for more paper towels to dry my face when suddenly I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  “Hello, Jo,” said a voice behind me as a blast of musky perfume hit me like a wall.

  I jumped about a foot in the air and turned to find Natasha standing behind me. She was calmly applying lipstick—by feel, I assume, since her lovely heart-shaped face didn’t reflect one whit in the mirror. “Jesus,” I said, clasping a hand to my chest. My heart was beating so fast I wondered if I was having a heart attack. “You scared the crap out of me!”

  Her smile made my flesh crawl. “Oh, did I? Poor Jo. I’m so sorry.”

  “What are you doing here?” I tried to keep the nervousness out of my voice, though I knew Natasha was well aware of her impact. “Are you following me?”

  “Now, why would I do that?” She drifted closer
, blocking my path to the door. I resisted the impulse to move backward, surreptitiously bending my knees instead, in case she attacked.

  She pouted prettily. “Really, Jo. I don’t know why you act so hostile toward me.”

  “Maybe it’s because you killed my friend.” Truth be told, my fear of her had little to do with whether or not she had killed Bob.

  This gave her pause. “Did I?” she said delightedly, “Which one was he? Oh wait, you don’t mean that teacher, do you?” She tilted back her head and laughed. “Really, honey, that’s not my style.” Her smile faded and her lovely face took on an unbecoming hardness. “You know as well as I that I didn’t harm a hair on his head. Will told you he’d put him off limits.”

  She stepped closer, eyes glittering dangerously. “You’re off limits too.” She reached out a hand tipped with long, red nails and stroked my hair. I cringed. “You’re his new pet. None of us can touch you. He wants to turn you himself. You should be flattered. He hasn’t troubled himself over a new recruit in a long time.”

  I shoved her hand away from me. “How interesting. Wait, don’t tell me. The last person he recruited, it you wasn’t it?”

  Her eyes narrowed dangerously as she managed, barely, to keep herself in check. “Don’t act so smug, you little bitch. He would never think to blame me if you bled to death from slashed wrists in a public bathroom, would he?”

  I realized I’d made a mistake and had pushed her too far. I was pretty sure she didn’t have a knife on her—her tiny purse wouldn’t hold one, and the bulging curves in her formfitting clothes were all her—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous. I glanced wildly around the room, looking for something I could use as a weapon or a shield, but even the trashcan was nailed securely to the wall.

  Natasha smiled excitedly, a singularly unpleasant look, and began to circle me, like a cat playing with a mouse. I was about to scream for Gavin, when a group of girls came storming into the bathroom, giggling and rushing for the stalls. I pushed past Natasha and ran out of the bathroom toward the food court. I took the last corner at a full sprint and ran smack into Gavin.