by Lee Killough
One way to find out…if the city library here were still open.
A phone call established it was, and provided him with directions there. Once there, he hunted up the phone book collection at the reference desk, then stood eyeing the row of thin directories on the “Local” shelf. Might as well go for broke, he decided…and pulled the one for Baumen.
Opening it, he held his breath…paged to the B’s…sighed in relief. Houston, we have Biebers. Twenty-five of them, ten with rural addresses, and two in a town called Lebeau.
“You’re looking for Biebers?”
He looked up to find the reference librarian quirking a brow at him, and realized he must have spoken aloud. “Sort of. I wasn’t sure I’d find any. Around Bachman there were only Biekers.”
The librarian nodded. “The Biebers are all in northern Ellis County and Bellamy County.”
Garreth wrote the Bieber addresses in his notebook, then looked up the address of the high school. “I take it the Biebers were in another of those Volga German groups settling here?”
Her brows went up again. “You know the history. No, the Biebers used to be Biekers living around Schoenchen. Then about 1900, Anton Bieker had some bitter disagreement with his father and took his wife and children, all thirteen of them, and moved north and changed his name. If it isn’t prying, why are you looking for Biebers?”
He gave her his story.
She listened with interest. “So you think this Maggie Bieber can help you find your grandmother?”
“Or at least tell me if Mary Pfeifer is really her name.”
“There are Pfeifers in Bellamy, too…the county seat. You ought to check there as well.”
To maintain his cover story, he went through the Bellamy directory and took down Pfeifer addresses. Not entirely an empty exercise. Bellamy had eight Biebers, as well.
Would he get lucky in Bellamy County, he wondered as he left the library. Tomorrow would see.
Meanwhile, what could he do the rest of the night besides pace and speculate about tomorrow. Go to a movie? Return of the Jedi was playing at the local theater, he noticed. While he had seen it earlier in the year, filling another empty evening without Marti, it was escapist watching — except for the bullshit with Darth Vader at the end where they got sentimental over him being Luke’s father and seemed to forget about all the mayhem and deaths he was responsible for — so he might as well watch it again.
The movie had not even started, however, when he discovered a problem with theaters and vampires. If this were a weekend crowd, blood smell would have swamped him. Sitting in the empty rear row with a box of extra-butter popcorn under his nose helped mask the scents from tonight’s handful of patrons. Except for one scent with an acidity that reminded him of the hospital and kept distracting him. A part of Garreth wanted to find the source…ask if he/she were ill…urge the individual to see a doctor. Instead he left, reflecting that if a disease altered blood scent a particular way, a vampire doctor would make one hell of a diagnostician
In the parking lot he regarded the long night ahead and almost missed his Embarcadero forays.
Thought of which prompted a question he needed to address. While he still had half the blood he brought with him, when that ran out, what did Kansas offer for refills? Jackrabbits and prairie dogs? Considering the size of the prairie, finding enough of those struck him as chancy. Rats, though, lived everywhere. Where here? Barns, probably, and maybe grain elevators.
Hays had a big one. Sitting in the middle of town, unfortunately, where unfamiliarity with its interior structure and possible location of his prey in it outweighed confidence in his stealth. Blunder around enough and he was bound to be noticed. He needed an isolated elevator…like the one in dead little Dixon. Maybe the county had a Dixon counterpart somewhere close.
North of town, the highway followed rolling hills. At the crest of each, Garreth scanned the horizon for the elevator shape. Concentrating on that, he caught sight of the moving shadows in a field off to the side barely in time to brake and avoid a deer and two nearly-grown fawns as they crossed in front of him.
Deer. He turned in at a pasture gate and climbed out to stare after the animals. Deer had more blood than a rat…enough to give him some without having to die? If he could catch one. Watching these vanish over the hill, he calculated the odds of that as slim to none. But what more might be in the field. The night wind brought him a warm scent of something blood-filled. Cattle, maybe. Cattle had even more blood and should be easier to catch.
He climbed over the metal pipe gate and followed the blood scent across the pasture. Catching up with prey, he realized, did not equal control of it. Would his power work for something so much bigger than a rat?
A hell of a lot bigger than a rat. Coming over the rise brought him face to face with not cattle but a single bovine, looming huge as a elephant and pale as a ghost in the twilight brightness of his vision…with huge testicles between its hind legs announcing he confronted a bull.
Garreth froze. The bull snorted in surprise.
Doubts raced through his head. Not just about the ability to stare into the eyes when they were on the sides of its head, but assuming he managed that, could he find a vein? That was one hell of a thick neck.
The bull snorted again and lowered its head. He needed to act or retreat. Garreth licked his lips and wiped sweaty palms on his jeans. Moving enough to catch one of the cow’s eyes, he focused on it. Would one eye work?
Maybe. The massive head stayed down, but seemed more relaxed. The flare of its nostrils eased.
Now what? Would it stay docile if he looked away to go for the neck? Lane had to do that to bite him, but continued controlling him with her voice. Would that work with an animal? Only one way to find out.
Still staring it in the eye, he eased closer and pushed at its neck…braced to run like hell if necessary. The hair felt warm, soft, and curly under his fingers. “Lie down,” he said, making his voice low and soothing.
It rocked a little. He pushed harder. Its legs sagged, forelegs folding first, followed by the hind ones. Its nose dropped to its front legs.
Garreth moved closer and pushed some more. “Roll over. Lie flat.”
With a sigh, the bull did so.
Garreth felt an urge to sigh, too, in relief. Except now he had to look away. Murmuring soothingly, Garreth knelt and moved his hand up the neck into a hollow behind the jaw. He probed, searching for a pulse…found it, beating strong and slow. Keeping the fingers of one hand on it, he knelt, bent over the outstretched neck and, extending his fangs, and bit where his fingers touched.
And found only flesh and the barest taste of blood.
Not again! He wanted to scream in frustration.
The bull twitched. Garreth fought panic. The pulse throbbed under his fingers. He smelled blood under the pale hide. It had to be in there somewhere. He made himself try again, biting in a slightly different position.
This time blood spurted. The twin gushers filled his mouth. After his usual refrigerated diet, its heat startled him and he nearly jumped back. But the hunger ignited by the hot flow quickly overcame surprise. He hung on, drinking his fill.
His fill, but as with the rat blood, not to satisfaction. He sat back, holding thumbs over the punctures with frustration snarling in him. Blood was blood. Why was this not good enough?
The bull lay still, its eyes closed. Garreth removed his thumbs. The punctures had stopped seeping blood. A handful of earth rubbed into the hide covered the marks.
When he stood the bull rolled onto its chest, but made no attempt to stand, just lay with its eyes closed. Still, he backed away keeping his eyes on it. He did not turn until over the hill, then, once out of sight, he ran…partially to put distance between himself and the huge animal, partly in a vain attempt to run away from the longings racking him.
But enjoyment came, too, in the nighttime strength and energy clamoring for release. The ground streamed beneath his feet as power surged through him.
Soon exhilaration drowned all other thoughts and he gave himself up to the unthinking joy of motion. He had never run this fast before! The gate lay ahead and instead of stopping to crawl through, he hurdled it.
Landing beside the car, he discovered that his heart and breathing returned to normal in seconds. He grinned. At this rate, he could run for miles without even trying. What a kick!
A spotlight lit him up.
He froze in its glare, throwing up an arm to shield his eyes. The action came reflexively but even as his forearm rose, Garreth realized it served another purpose as well, to keep the person behind the light from seeing his eyes reflect red.
A car door opened.
The spotlight prevented him from seeing who climbed out, but the very fact of a spotlight suggested law enforcement. He lowered his arm enough to peer over it and identify a light bar on top of the car. Which might or might not be good, remembering times on patrol with a few partners before Harry. Too bad he had no badge on him.
“Evening, son,” a voice said from behind the light.
The casual tone of the greeting gave him hope of a friendly encounter. “Good evening, Officer.”
“Deputy sheriff,” the voice corrected him. “What’s your name?”
“Garreth Mikaelian. My driver’s license is in my hip pocket. Would you like to see it?”
“If you don’t mind.”
As Garreth fished out his billfold and extracted the license, the deputy said, “You have California plates. You a student at the college?”
Yes, there was a college here. He debated his answer and chose honesty. “No, just passing through. I’m staying at the Holiday Inn.”
“What are you doing way out here?”
What answer would the deputy accept? What would he accept if their positions were reversed? “I’m a night person and your town goes to sleep before I do. So I took a drive. This is a spectacular sky. I don’t see anything like it in San Francisco.”
“Don’t you see No Trespassing signs out there?” He pointed to the one wired to the fence beside the gate.
Okay, maybe this was turning not so friendly and good thing he had not shown a badge and made himself look more irresponsible. Garreth gave the deputy a sheepish grimace. “I saw the sign but I wasn’t going to do anything but walk to the top of the hill and back. Which I did.” Would it help to come across as an ignorant city boy? “I didn’t even bother the cow that’s sleeping on the other side of the hill.”
“Cow?” The deputy laughed shortly. “The Good Lord looks after fools. Son, that ‘cow’ is Vale’s Chablis of Postrock, Postrock ranch’s prize Charolais show bull…or he was until he got too mean to handle.”
Garreth swallowed. “Mean?”
“He’s put three men in the hospital, one of them crippled for life. You could have paid for trespassing with your life.” The deputy returned the driver’s license. “Suppose you go on back to town and stay out of pastures, especially when they’re posted.”
Garreth went, shaking in retrospective fear.
By the time he reached the hotel, that had been replaced by exhilaration. Though ignorant of the risk he took, he controlled the bull…which should mean no trouble with less dangerous cattle. Giving him a plentiful source of blood which did not have to die feeding him. He needed a better excuse for nocturnal activity, though. The next deputy might be less friendly.
Jogging suggested itself. Everyone ran these days and he enjoyed the one tonight. Before he headed to Baumen tomorrow, he would buy a pair of running shoes and a warm-up suit to lend his story credence. But maybe exercise more caution, too, in his choice of cattle to fed on.
13
Driving east from Hays on I-70 then north through Bellamy to Baumen, Garreth focused of being positive. Baumen had Biebers. Lane was going to be one of them, or at least whoever wrote to her was. Entering the town trying to feel vibes of her past presence, his thought became an astonished observation that their main street, Kansas Avenue, was wider than the Embarcadero. Almost as wide as their shopping district was long. Railroad tracks stretched north up the middle, flanked by two traffic lanes and diagonal parking on each side.
He crossed the tracks onto Pine Street, noting automatically that City Hall occupied the next block west of Kansas, surrounded by the fire station behind it to the south and police department on the west. But when the high school appeared on down the street, his focus snapped back to Lane. Would he find her here or not.
As in Pfeifer, a secretary in the principal’s office led him to the library and handed him over to the librarian, Miss Mary Schumacher, a lean, brisk woman in her sixties. When he gave her his story, she showed him the yearbook shelf at the rear of the stacks, brought in a chair for him, and left him to his reading.
He started with 1930, when Lane would have been fourteen and a freshman, assuming she gave her correct birth date when arrested. Mental fingers crossed, he turned to the freshmen. His pulse jumped at the name Bieber under three pictures…only to slow in disappointment when neither of the two girls were named Madelaine and despite the small size of the pictures, clearly bore no resemblance to Lane. The sophomores and juniors also had small pictures…with only a male Bieber in the sophomore class and none in the junior class, or among the eleven seniors, who each had nice large pictures.
Well, detective work always meant plowing doggedly on.
He reached for the 1931 yearbook and stopped. No, he might as well go for broke, and the big senior pictures. He pulled out the ‘33 year book. Still, to be thorough, he checked each class, in case she were younger than she claimed, or had been held back. Fifteen freshmen, no Lane. Not among the thirteen sophomores or thirteen juniors, either.
Garreth turned the page to the senior class.
Lane stared up at him from the first picture…unsmiling, eyes boring into the camera with such challenge it felt like a physical blow. Cold and anger rushed through him. The maiden is powerful.
Did he say it aloud? Behind her desk, Miss Schumacher turned to look at him. He bent his head over the yearbook with Grandma Doyle’s photograph, as though comparing it to those in the book, and presently went on to the ‘34 yearbook, and the rest up to 1937 before sitting back with a sigh.
Miss Schumacher came into the stacks. “I take it you didn’t find Mary?”
He shook his head. “The trouble is, while I always thought Mary Pfeifer might not be her real name — if I were pregnant out of wedlock in those days, I wouldn’t use my real name — now it occurs to me there’s no way to know if she’s really in this picture.” He held it up. “We assumed she is because of her name on the back, but we didn’t have Grandma to tell us if this Mary is Mary Pfeifer. After all, how many girls were named Mary back then, including you.”
“Have you checked in Bellamy yet?”
“No, but I will.” He toyed with the photograph. “I’m thinking now that the person I really need to find is a girl who according to my grandmother’s diary, visited Mary once. She told my grandmother her name was Maggie Bieber, and since she knew where Mary was, and maybe was the one who wrote to her, I’m thinking they must have been friends and gone to school together.”
Miss Schumacher frowned. “I don’t know any Maggie Bieber. I was in school with a Madelaine Bieber, but we called her Mada. She graduated a year ahead of me in ‘33 and I don’t think she had any friends.”
Someone who knew Lane! Garreth gave her all his attention to encourage her to talk. “Why no friends?”
“She had a temper as fiery as her hair. Say one word she didn’t like and she’d be at the person with tooth and claw…boys as well as girls.”
That sounded like the Lane who tried biting Claudia’s ear off. Could any of those teachers still be alive to appreciate how well Lane had learned to control her temper?
“Looking back, we didn’t help.” Miss Schumacher sighed. “She was big and gawky, easy to provoke…and teenagers can be so cruel.”
“You can’t think of a single friends she h
ad?”
“Not in high school. Maybe in college. I don’t know how or why, maybe because she was smart as a whip, even though it was the Depression her father scraped together tuition for Fort Hays. But she was only there one semester before running off with some professor. To Europe, the story was. It was quite a scandal. He abandoned a wife and children.”
Europe. Where someone brought her over? Europe seemed like vampire country. Maybe her story about escaping ahead of Hitler’s storm troopers was the truth. “What happened to her after that?”
“I don’t know. She never came back here. But you might ask her mother.”
Electricity shot through him. “Her mother is living? Here in Baumen?” Maybe the letter writer?
“Oh, yes, Anna Bieber. Just a minute.” She left for her desk.
Garreth watched her open a phone book..even as he checked his notes. He had an Anna Bieber at 513 Pine…just down the street from here.
Miss Schumacher came back with a slip of paper and the same address. “I hope this helps you.”
So do I, ma’am; so do I.
The hope that carried him to Anna Bieber’s house lightened even the pressure of daylight.
The fire leaping out as he neared the door burned just as hot, however. He knocked and retreated a step to ease it.
A middle-aged woman answered the door. Not Lane’s mother, obviously. Maybe a sister, though he saw no resemblance.
“I’m looking for Mrs. Anna Bieber,” he said.
The woman opened the door. “Come in. I’ll get Mother.”
The fire vanished. He followed her inside.
Mrs. Bieber turned out to be a petite woman with white hair pulled back in a neat bun, nothing like the strapping woman Garreth expected to spawn an amazon like Lane. Though she moved slowly, she still walked straight, and her eyes met Garreth’s directly, undimmed.
