LaVonde knew the approaching end of an interview when she heard it. Without any preamble she stood up and started gathering her things together. “I'd better go,” she said, clumsy as she gathered her things. “It's been a while. Larry might be back soon.”
Jesse Beth looked at the clock – nothing even a little like an hour had passed, they both knew. She stood up, though, cup in her hand, and walked LaVonde to the door.
“Thanks for letting me talk to you about your aunt,” LaVonde said from the porch. “Like I said, it's not for a story, it's just for me. Still, I appreciate it.”
“You got a personal problem that needs solving, huh?” Jesse Beth smiled kindly. “I know that look when I see it.”
“Not me,” LaVonde blurted out. “My...” She hesitated. “Partner.”
Jesse Beth nodded, took a pull from the mug, smacked her lips again. “It's an old story,” Jesse Beth sighed. LaVonde thought she meant the story of the lover in trouble, but Jesse Beth added, “But maybe it'll help you some. Feel free to come by again sometime if you need something. Just make sure to call first.”
LaVonde stood there for a moment, nodded, and left. It was that simple. Nothing leapt out at her. Jesse Beth didn't watch ominously from the front door of her home. Nothing. She just drove back out of Flat Rock and through town and then on back to her home, leaving Jesse Beth and her homespun witchcraft in the shadows of an alien hollow curled against the base of an unknown mountain in the opposite end of Creation out of sight of some husband or another. The whole way, she wondered how on earth she could manage to work this information about the old woman murdered so long ago into a conversation with H'Diane.
H’Diane was standing in the field where Clyde’s body had been found, staring at the trampled ground, shivering in the wind. The sunlight here was weaker and the winter harder somehow. All the dead, trampled grass had a sharper edge to it and the clouds looked worse. The middle of her murder investigation was not a great time for the drought to lift, to be honest, but everything was a mess already anyway. Her mystery 911 caller had probably been the one who mucked everything up out here and now she had a request from a local paranormal group to “investigate” at the crime scene. She had zero desire to give them access to her crime scene, but she had wanted to spend some time out here just soaking in the details, waiting for inspiration or insight to arrive, and, for reasons she expected would remain opaque to her, the Sheriff had personally asked her to do these “investigators” the favor of granting them a meeting at the scene itself. They probably included the kid of a campaign contributor or something. Sheriffs are usually cops, sure, but they’re politicians, too. H’Diane had been warned by LaVonde, when she took this job, never to forget that particular background detail.
She heard a heavy vehicle pull up the drive and then several doors open and close. Great, the whole gang showed up. They probably thought they were going to get to set up shop right here and now. H’Diane took a little pleasure in knowing she would get to burst their bubble.
Four women were eventually visible emerging from the brush and woods that ringed the clearing. Most of them were dressed for a winter stroll but one was dressed in something closer to adventuring gear: beige cargo pants with loaded pockets, work gloves and a puffy parka in high-visibility yellow. She had dark hair and the outfit managed to blend the notions of desert fatigues and utility worker. She carried herself with a confidence one step above the others and then some. While the others fanned out, she directly approached. The woman had a card in her hand before she reached H’Diane and held it out, her driver’s license in the other. “Detective Bing?”
“Yes.” H’Diane took the card and read it: North Carolina Para-Science. Gobbledygook. “I’m the lead investigator on this case. I understand you’d like access to the crime scene. I’m afraid I can’t allow that. I appreciate your desire to see the case resolved,” and here she looked back up to meet the woman’s eyes before giving a very faint smile. “I’m sure that’s your interest, and not something more… sensational.” She smacked her lips with distaste after saying it. “Still, I can’t allow disruption of this location. This is still an active investigation. I’m afraid I can’t permit you to have access to it.”
The woman looked around. “And yet, here we are.”
H’Diane smirked a little. “I was asked to meet you here. I see it as extending the courtesy of showing you there’s nothing screwy going on and to demonstrate that a large portion of the field has been roped off with police tape. I wanted you to see for yourself that we aren’t allowing anyone in; that this isn’t just about you.”
The woman nodded and shrugged a little. “Fair enough,” she said. “What about when the investigation is over? This won’t be a crime scene forever.”
H’Diane nodded. “True. After we’re gone it’s up to the property owner. Any deal you work out with them is just that: between you and them.”
“I’m not trying to rush you by asking, but do you know when you’ll be through here? A general time frame, or whether it will be days or weeks, anything like that?”
“Days,” H’Diane said. By this point, the trail was cold. She’d be lucky if they ever found another piece of evidence in the course of her career and that sat hard with her. She had not been ready to lose her first real case but it had slipped through her fingers before she’d even known it was happening: that call to 911, the mucked up footprints, the house in a tiny neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. “I’d expect us to be done in a few days.”
The woman nodded. “Thanks. I – “ She stopped and sighed and her features softened a little. “You’re right. We just want to help in our own way. I don’t want to get in the way of the cops. You’re doing your job and you’re the professional here, but on the chance our methods might turn up anything of use to you, anything at all, I want to make sure we get a chance to try.”
“What exactly are those methods?” H’Diane tried to sound exactly and merely polite when she asked. No reason to insult a friend of the Sheriff but no reason to encourage them, either.
“Well, Janine over there is a sensitive.” The woman made air quotes as she said it and H’Diane knew the look of disbelief when she saw it. “Marilyn does dowsing and talks to the media because she’s older and looks like everyone’s grandmother.” The woman shrugged at H’Diane and smiled. H’Diane was surprised by the honesty. “Sue handles our finances and general gofering and I do tech.”
“And your name is?”
“Jennifer McCordy.”
4
Two nights later, Roderick and I sat out on my back porch around 3:00 AM. After my run-in with The Transylvanian, I’d mostly needed to think, so I just drove around for the night. I stopped in little country gas stations where, in the age of credit card readers, they can all go home at a reasonable hour and leave the pumps on to keep skimming off the night owls. The next evening, I sat around playing Solitaire and failing to watch some show on television about hot criminals. I find it amusing to watch television throw a little tea party about sanitized deprivation. A show about actual vampires would get cancelled halfway through the first episode because it would be too gruesome and too dull for them to stomach: far more so than their “reality” television. People are too accustomed to everything being filtered and screened and edited, even the “real” things. Everything gets dressed up to look good for the cameras. They want to see some under-educated schlubs screw around and then talk shit behind each other’s backs, not literal backstabbings. Humanity likes to flirt with the darkness but it doesn’t want to put out.
Roderick pulled up around midnight. He was dressed in flannel and an old pair of cargo pants and hiking boots. I asked him where he’d been hiking and he smiled. “Asheville is full of backpacking types. I’m just blending in, cousin.” His long, pale hair was a little less stringy and a little better kempt and I wondered if maybe this trip was doing him some good. He snickered at the television show in a way I recognized from my own private r
eactions to it. I clicked off the set and we went out on the back porch. He sat an old wicker chair and I told him all about the outsider, The Transylvanian, his little brood of helpers, Cliff, all that. He listened with that weird little half-smile he has and then we sat in silence for an hour or so.
That's something vampires get very good at: just letting time pass, doing nothing much.
The back yard was in bad need of a mow. The guy I'd been sending PayPal to every month hadn't been out in October, figuring it would be so cold and so dry that it wouldn't need much. Weeds, though, don’t pay much attention to the weather. I'd have to send him an email and ask him to get over here sometime after I left. There wasn't much of a yard: mostly trees and woods and then forest. I could see the lights of a couple other houses, off through the trees, way off, but I doubted they noticed me. I tend to keep the place fairly dark when I'm around. I sat and listened to a little critter of some sort rustle around in the grass and the leaves. Might have been a squirrel, might have been a chipmunk, might have been a mouse. There was an owl in a tree somewhere about fifty yards off. It hooted every now and then and I wondered when it would make its way over for its meal.
Finally Roderick said, very softly, “It seems to me like there's one very obvious explanation.”
I turned towards him, surprised my neck didn't creak like an old door hinge when I did it. I nodded, watching him light a cigarette. His eyes were kind of glassy, kind of dreamy. He was staring at absolutely nothing and it amused him somehow.
“The Transylvanian is going to turn Cliff. Soon, I would imagine. Otherwise, why kill off the family?” Roderick shrugged. “He sounds like the old-fashioned type, anyway and he’s obviously fond of having a brood of loyal followers around. But that doesn't explain the deal with the English and Ramsey murders. I can come up with some way in which he sees killing Clyde and taking the son as his own to be tying up the loose ends of that killing but it doesn't explain why he killed them in the first place or why he particularly cared that Clyde investigated that murder for the FBI.”
“SBI,” I corrected quietly. “State.”
Roderick fluttered a few fingers, still staring at that amusing nothing. “Whatever. So why does The Transylvanian – wicked name – why does he care so much?”
I shrugged and continued to sit back in my big, round, padded papasan chair.
“And what about that charm?” Roderick's voice was so low it was nearly a whisper and his eyes widened a little at the mention of it. “What a fascinating little detail. I wonder if Cliff took it?”
“He wasn't wearing it when I saw him.” I tried to figure out what Roderick was staring at, maybe something I'd missed, maybe a seam in the screen mesh that enveloped the porch on its three exterior sides. I couldn't find anything to look at, myself.
“Maybe under his shirt?”
I shook my head. “Maybe so. I don’t know.”
He smiled at me without looking at me, a wicked little twist of his mouth. “I would love,” he finally said, “To meet the other vampires in the area.”
I snorted at him. “Why's that?”
“Well, Bob didn't have The Transylvanian in his notes, right?”
I nodded. Roderick still wasn't looking at me but he seemed to notice it, as he responded after:
“So the Bobs Regime didn’t know about him but The Transylvanian did know about the Bobs, right? He said he knew this outsider wasn’t Bob. So he knew a vampire who was known to the Bobs, or some chain of vampires to connect them, but Bob never found him and none of them told Bob about The Transylvanian.”
I blinked, and reached up to scratch my scraggly goatee and stubble. I hadn't shaved tonight, just stayed in and looked scruffy. Vampires get locked in whatever state we were in when we were turned. Forever. I have to shave every night if I want to look decent because I didn't shave that night: the night I was turned. There were all kinds of things Agatha had told me to do and that I didn’t, but she had told me explicitly to have some stubble. That way, if beards took over as the style, I could say I was just regrowing mine and, if being clean-shaven became expected instead, I could shave in a minute every night and fit right in. Agatha’s smart. She’s been at this for a while. That says a lot about her, not much of it good. For his part, Roderick wakes up every night with a split nose and bruises on his wrists from a pair of police handcuffs. He heals fast – we're talking seconds here – but he has them again the next night, like clockwork. It makes me grateful all I have to do is shave. No electric shaver can take down a vampire's beard, I have to use an old blade and put some weight behind it, but if that's as bad as it'll ever get then that's just fine by me.
“You know,” I said, “You've got a point there.”
Roderick went on. “So he’s being hidden by others in the area. There’s no way the brood he showed off at the film plant are all the cards he’s holding. He probably has some all over the area. If he wants lookouts at the plant, that’s one thing. If he’s finding out about what goes on out in the world, too, why wouldn’t he plant a few eyes and ears there, too? It just stands to reason. But he didn’t bring them up or brag about them, so those are the ones he wants to keep hidden from you. He wants to intimidate you and keep you in the dark. Doesn’t exactly sound like he’s just minding his own business.”
I struggled with several emotions, none of them good. I’d been so focused on Clyde and Cliff and The Transylvanian’s connection to them that I hadn’t stopped to think through the implications of what he’d shown me when I was there: this pack of humans and vampires he’s got running up and down the place on command. “And that’s another good point.”
He finally turned and looked at me. One eye was slightly more dilated than the other, something I've seen him do when he's about to become unpredictable. “Does that mean I get to go?”
“No,” I said, too fast. He started to twist up the corners of his mouth again in that wicked smile and I followed quickly on my own heels. “This is the first time I've been back since I came around to introduce myself right after I took Bob down. If I show up with a bunch of muscle, it'll look like I'm already in need of protection, already on the ropes. I want to finish cementing a sense of authority and control.”
The truth was that I didn’t fully trust Roderick with information about who all the other vampires were in the area. He wouldn’t have scared a twelve year old with that bird chest and those spindly arms, but I was hoping to flatter him. Really I wanted to put him off treating this as a game. Roderick tends to break a few pieces when he plays a game. This – The Transylvanian, the mountains, all this Last Gasp bullshit – was not a game. It was my life. My unlife. Whatever. I had one hand up in a placating gesture, palm flat, facing towards him, fingers together and pointing up. Roderick smiled slightly more widely in a way that made the vampire core get twisted up in a reaction I didn't wholly understand. I grimaced a little. “Seriously, no. This is my turf. Do me the favor of respecting my wishes.”
“Your... authority?” Roderick's smile turned into a full, slow grin.
I frowned at him and huffed. “Don't be ridiculous. I'm not going to play that sort of stupid game with my own kin.”
Roderick laughed sharp and high and fast. “I'm kidding, Cousin Withrow.” He put both hands up. “I promise not to do anything you wouldn't do.”
I frowned again. “No cryptic half-meanings,” I growled.
He laughed again, clapped his hands together twice in sheer delight. “OK! OK.” He laughed more. “I promise not to take anything upon myself that disrespects your...” He licked his lips, opened his mouth as if to start with a vowel, namely au, then closed his mouth for a moment, breathed again and said, “Wishes.”
I hrmphed at him.
He held out one finger. “Pinky swear.”
Sometimes you just have to go with the flow, meet someone where they are rather than where you want them to be. Reluctantly I held out my own hand and our little fingers clasped one another, cool as marble in the night
air. “Pinky swear,” I said. He smiled at me, batted his absurdly long eyelashes and then started staring at his pinky finger in silence.
We were silent for a long time, undisturbed even by the sound of breathing except for Smiles’ heavy, dozing snores, then I looked away from the little electronic Sudoku thing I’d bought out of a gas station’s dollar bin. It wasn't backlit but I could, of course, read it in the dark. Roderick was still staring at his pinky finger, still holding it crooked exactly as before, with the dead butt of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I drew a breath that sounded like sandpaper. “Any new ideas for your product endorsements?”
The lights went back on in Roderick’s eyes, like a golem whose magic word has been inscribed for the first time. “Waverly home appliances,” he said without hesitation. “Preferably the washer and dryers. Did you know they make an all-in-one? It’s a front-loading washer that then becomes a dryer when it finishes a load.” A long, slow smile spread out across his lips and the cigarette butt tumbled unnoticed to the floor of the deck. He was still looking at something I couldn’t see, but at least now I could see him looking.
“You’ve seriously spent time thinking about this, haven’t you?” I smiled at him. “What’s your selling point for the washer-dryer business? Why vampires as spokespersons?”
He scoffed, brow knit, eyes wide. “Really, cousin? Blood, obviously. ‘When I need an alibi, I say Waverly Wash & Dry!’” He sang it like a ‘60s advertising jingle, voice high. “It has a ring to it, right? Who could resist their brat screaming that at them in the White Goods aisle of a Sears & Roebuck?”
I chuckled a little, but that was a relic of the time when I thought he was just joking. “I don’t know how to break it to you,” I said, “But Pedro Almodovar already had your idea. It’s in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Late ‘80s, early ‘90s? Sometime in there. I watched it on tape.”
Roderick’s face fell a little and he said, “Damn, you’ve seen that, too? How many people have seen that? Has everyone seen that?”
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 12
