Bad Moon Rising (22 page)

(4)

It became a busy night in the store and Crow never found a good moment to talk to Mike, and as the evening wore on the boy seemed more and more like his old affable and comfortably geeky self. Crow let it go.

At closing, Crow and Mike parted with a few jokes and with that it felt easier, more like normal. Mike rode his bike away through the tourist traffic as Crow locked up and shut off the lights. Val tapped on the door just as Crow was heading back to his apartment and he let her in. They kissed in the doorway and then walked hand in hand back to the apartment.

“How was your day?

“We have the memorial all set for Friday night. The Rotary wanted to host it, so we’ll be using their hall, and the college asked if they could cater it.”

“Nice of them.”

“Mark had a lot of friends,” Val said. “Everyone wants to make a gesture.”

“How are you with all of this?”

Val shrugged. “Better than I thought I’d be. I stuffed my purse with tissues thinking it was going to be that kind of a day, but I didn’t use a single one. Now, Sarah, on the other hand…she pretty much cleaned me out.”

“Yeah, she looked pretty rocky.”

Val sank down on the couch. “She’s keeping it together, but only just. No change at all with Terry.”

“I know, I spoke to Saul a couple of times today.”

They sat with those thoughts for a while. Val broke the silence by saying, “Twelve days.”

He looked at her. “What?”

“Newton’s folklorist friend will be here on the twenty-ninth. Then we can find out what we have to do to put Mark to rest. The thought of him just lying there in that drawer…” She shivered.

“I know, but we’ll have to be pretty careful with how we ask her. Just ’cause she’s a folklore professor doesn’t mean she believes any of this.”

Val nodded. “We’ll be careful, but I intend to find out one way or another.”

“I’ll look through my books again tonight when Newt gets here. Maybe there’s something I missed.”

“You looked, honey. Newton looked. I looked, too. It’s not there. Your stuff, good as it is, is mostly the pop-culture version of folklore. We need to go a lot deeper than that.”

The doorbell rang. “That’s him.”

Crow let Newton in. The little reporter, looking seedier and more haggard than ever, slumped down into a chair and set a bag down between his sneakered feet. The contents of the bag clinked. Crow knew that sound and came to point like a bird-dog.

Val beat him to the punch. “Newt…you do know Crow doesn’t drink.”

Newton gave her a bleary stare that for once was neither deferential nor accommodating. “I do,” he said, and reached down into the bag and brought out a longneck bottle of Hop Devil, twisted off the cap, and drank about half of it down. “And, don’t bother getting mad at me…I didn’t bring it to share.” True to his word, he did not offer one to her.

Val opened her mouth to say something, but Crow touched her arm and shook his head.

“We were just talking about Dr. Corbiel,” Crow said. “And Mark.”

The bottle paused halfway to Newton’s mouth, hovered there for a moment, and then he took another long swig. “I talked with her about that today. No—don’t look at me like that, I’m not hideously stupid. I told her I was researching a chapter for my book and wanted to know about how vam…how these things happen. I told her about what I knew from movies and stuff and she pretty much dismissed all of it.”

“What did she say?” asked Val.

Newton looked over the mouth of his bottle at her for a long moment. “She said that there were a lot of ways, but that if I wanted a definitive answer I’d have to know what kind of…
thing
…did the attack.”

“Oh, Christ, Newton say the frigging word,” Crow snapped. The smell of the beer was making his stomach churn and his mouth water.

Newton gave him an evil look. “Okay, she said we’d have to know what kind of vampire bit him.” The room went quiet. Newton took another pull. “Jonatha said that in folklore different vampires have different methods of predation and different methods of, um…recruitment.” He finished the first beer and took a second from the bag. “The thing in the movies where a vampire drinks someone’s blood and then makes them drink theirs—that’s a distortion. She said that most transformations don’t even require a sharing of blood. Others require that the victim be willing to drink the vampire’s blood. In a lot of them a person can be transformed by a bite, but even if they revive as a vampire they aren’t evil unless they drink human blood, willingly or not. Apparently there are blood rituals to force a reanimated person to become a vampire. But in some cases there’s no bite at all.”

“What do you mean?” Val asked.

“In some cultures a person isn’t turned into a vampire by other vampires. It’s based on a bunch of other stuff. Dying unrepentant is a big one, dying by violence is another. Being born on certain days of the year. Holy days, I think, but she was going pretty fast and I missed some stuff. It’s a wonder we’re not ass-deep in vampires.”

“Yes,” Val said, her eyes thoughtful.

“So, bottom line is that we don’t know which kind of vampire Boyd was. If we did, then the folklore from that country would tell us what we need to know.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Crow said. “From what I read…and I’m admitting I’m no scholar here, but the problem is more complex than that because we don’t know how many of the folkloric vampires were even real. All we know about is Ruger and Boyd, Cowan and Castle, and even there we don’t know that much.”

Val got up and crossed to where Newton sat in the over-stuffed chair. “Beer,” she said and held out her hand. He obeyed without a hesitation and even twisted off the cap for her.

“Whoa!” Crow said. He patted his stomach. “I think the phrase is ‘eating for two,’ not ‘drinking for two.’”

Val shot him a thoroughly vile look and thrust the beer back into Newton’s hand. “You shouldn’t have brought that,” she snapped.

Newton shrugged. “I shouldn’t have moved to Black Marsh and shouldn’t have met you two. Life’s funny sometimes.” He set one bottle down on the side table and sipped from the other.

Standing, arms folded under her breasts, face set, Val said, “If we don’t know what kind of vampire Boyd was…and if we can’t ever know because he was burned so badly, then we have to find some way of testing Connie and Mark.”

“Jesus Christ,” Crow said, and Newton blanched.

(5)

Mike was careful putting the key in the front door lock, was careful opening the door, was careful stepping into the hall. He didn’t want to make any sound, didn’t want to do any of the thousand things that could set Vic off. The hall was all in somber brown tones, barely lit by the baseboard nightlight near the coatrack. Ahead of him the stairs drifted up into shadows; to his right a doorway opened to the hall to the kitchen and, closer, into the big living room. Both rooms were dark. No TV sounds, no radio. The framed photos on the wall—people from his mom’s family that Mike had never met—brooded behind their glass windows.

He moved toward the stairs, had a foot raised to step, but something made him stop. He listened to the house, then turned toward the doorway to the darkened living room.
Was that a sound?

“Mom…?”

Something moved in the shadows, shifting on the couch. He took a step toward the doorway, and peered through the gloom. He squeezed his eyes shut for a second to try and kick in his night vision and it worked enough so that he could now see that the living room shadows ranged from medium black by the windows to a softer golden brown by the doorway. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness Mike could now see his mother’s figure sitting on the end of the couch, shoulders hunched forward, head bent low.

“Mom, are you okay?”

Mike took a step into the living room, but jerked to a stop. The air in there was so thick it was as if the shadows were made of some viscous matter that choked and pushed against him. His muscles twitched as if they had a will of their own and wanted to flee, but Mike forced himself to stay there, kept his eyes locked on the silhouetted form of his mother. What the hell had happened here? What had Vic done to her?

“Mom…what’s going on?”

Her head turn slightly. “M…Mike?”

“Yeah, Mom. Are you all right? Are you sick?” He stood behind the couch, not ten feet from her, still too conditioned to go any further into the room. Another of Vic’s rules.

“Mike?”

“Why are you sitting here in the dark, Mom?” He took a determined step forward through the resistant gloom. “Look, let me turn on the light…”

“NO!”
she shrieked as she recoiled from him. “Just leave me be.”

“Come on, Mom, what’s going on?”

She huddled into herself, turning away from him so that he couldn’t even see the silhouette of her face. “You shouldn’t be in here, Mike, you know Vic doesn’t like you to be in the living room.”

“Mom, if you’re sick or…hurt…then we need to get some help—”

She made a sound and it took Mike a moment to realize that she had laughed. A short, bitter bark of a laugh. “I think we can all agree it’s a little late for that,” she said in a faux light tone that was ghastly to hear.

“Mom?”

“I’m okay. Just leave me alone, Mike. Just go to your room. Do your homework.”

Mike stood there, uncertain. “Well…can I fix you something? Are you hungry?”

She turned farther away from him. He thought he heard her say “Yes,” but he just as easily could have imagined it.

“How about some tea? You want me to make you a cup of tea?”

“I think I heard her say go to your room,” Vic said from behind him.

Mike cried out and jumped as he turned. Vic stood there in the kitchen hallway, arms folded, leaning one shoulder against the wall. He was wearing a tank top and jeans and his arms and chest were cut with wiry muscle.

The moment hung in space and Mike waited for the first blow.

“Now,” Vic said. His voice never rose above a conversational tone.

Mike half turned. “Mom…?”

“Do as you’re told, Mike,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”

Mike turned back to Vic, who was not looking at him; instead Vic was staring into the living room at the figure hunched over in the dark.

“Go on,” Vic said and still there was no heat, no edge to his voice.

Defeated by confusion, Mike nodded and backed away, then turned and ran up the stairs. In his room he crouched by his bedroom door, listening through a crack for any sound of yelling, of hitting, of a fight resumed. But everything downstairs was silent.

After twenty minutes Mike closed his door.

(1)

Newton sat for over an hour on the hard bench at the Warminster train station, chewing butter-rum Life Savers and drumming his fingers. A paperback book on vampire folklore was open on his lap, but he was too jittery to read. Commuters looked at him with his rumpled outdoor clothes and his razor-stubbled face and assumed he was homeless and gave him a wide berth. Newton was aware of their stares, but didn’t care. In the three weeks since Little Halloween and the trip down into Dark Hollow he hadn’t slept more than three hours at a stretch. Insomnia kept him up, too much coffee jangled his nerves, and when he did drift off the dreams kicked in. It was better to be sort of awake and wasted than to be asleep and at the mercy of his overactive imagination.

For the hundredth time he looked up at the wall clock above the ticket booth. Just shy of three o’clock. Jonatha Corbiel was nearly half an hour late. As each northbound train pulled into the station he stood up and searched the faces of the debarking passengers. Jonatha had given him only a vague and sketchy idea of what she looked like. “I’m tall, dark, and top-heavy.” Amused and intrigued by her description, he conjured images of a leggy beauty with a deep-water tan and a grad-student’s wire-framed glasses. Something like a brainy Jennifer Tilly or a scholarly Jennifer Connelly with olive skin. Maybe someone with the delicacy of a Maggie Gyllenhaal but with lots of wild curling black hair, dressed in the jeans, flannel lumberjack shirt, and Dr. Martens that comprised the dress code of the understipened Ph.D. candidate.

Thus self-conditioned, he was totally unprepared for the woman who suddenly loomed over him like a skyscraper. He had seen her get off the train, but had not even thought that she might be Jonatha despite the fact that she did, indeed, fit the description of tall, dark, and top-heavy. She smiled down at him and in a thick Louisiana accent said, “Let me guess. Willard Fowler Newton, or what’s left of him?”

He stared up at her. “Uh…Jonatha…?” he stammered, rising.

“In the flesh.”

He goggled. Jonatha Corbiel was certainly tall, and at six-one she towered over Newton’s five-seven. She was certainly dark: her skin was an exquisite and flawless blue-black, as richly dark as that of her Ashanti ancestors. And she was certainly top-heavy, with large breasts straining at the fabric of her faded gray U of P sweatshirt, distorting both letters. Standing at his full height his eyes came to just above her chest and try as he might, he could not help but stare.

“Might as well get it over with,” Jonatha said with tolerant amusement.

“Er…what?”

“I have really big boobs. Take a good look and get it out of your system.”

His eyes leapt immediately away from her chest and up to meet hers, which were filled with humor. He felt his skin ignite to a fiery red.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “You must hate that.”

“I’ve been used to it since I was fourteen.” She looked around. “Where are your friends?”

“We’re meeting them at the diner. Couple blocks from here. My car’s over there…” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the parking lot and reached for the small suitcase that stood next to her. She let him carry it, but opted to hold on to her laptop case, which she wore slung over one shoulder.

“Let’s go, then.” Her tone was on the affable side of matter of fact, and he turned and led the way to the lot, trying not to cut looks at her as they walked. Jonatha Corbiel was a knockout and Newton had no experience at all around women of that level of beauty. None at all. In the thirty yards between the bench and his car he managed to bang his knee into the
Intelligencer
news box and trip down two of the three steps from the platform. When they were in the car, Newton drove slowly and badly and tried not to study her face in the rearview mirror. She wore seven earrings in her right ear and four in her left and silver rings flashed on each of her long fingers; she wore no makeup, and he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

“I…really want to thank you for coming up here. I know it’s a lot to ask.”

She shrugged. “I’ve had it on my list to visit Pine Deep at some point.” She smiled and held her hands out like she was reading a movie marquee. “Pine Deep, Pennsylvania: The Most Haunted Town in America. To a folklorist that’s like the mothership calling me home.”

“The charm wears off once you live here for a while.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m interested in this book you’re writing on vampire and werewolf legends in Pennsylvania. I don’t think anyone’s ever done a folklore book as specific as that for this area.”

“Seems to be a theme with us,” Newton said dryly.

“In the last ten years I’ve done over fifty field investigations of reported vampirism in eleven states, and fourteen of werewolfism. You’d be amazed how often these things are reported. All of them were duds, dead ends. It always turns out that the witnesses were untrustworthy, or the evidence faked or simply misidentified.”

Instead of replying to that, he said, “We’re here.” He pulled into the lot of the Red Lion, a Greek diner on the corner of County Line Road and Route 611, and parked next to Val’s two-year-old Dodge Viper. Inside, Gus, the owner, gave him a friendly grin.

“You looking for Val and Crow? They’re in the back.” He picked up two menus and ushered them into a nearly empty dining room. Newton made introductions and everyone shook hands.

“Thanks for agreeing to come up here,” Val said after they’d ordered coffees.

“Well, Mr. Newton piqued my interest with his book. A mass-market trade paperback deal is something we academics only dream of, so being extensively quoted and footnoted in one is actually a good career move.”

Newton’s cover story was only partly a lie because Newton did plan to write a book, leveraging his celebrity as the reporter who broke the Karl Ruger/Cape May Killer story. Even his editor, Dick Hangood—who was not Newton’s biggest fan—thought a book deal would be a no-brainer, but no actual deal yet existed.

Crow sipped his coffee. “Newt’s been tapping me for info since he started on the project. Up till now I’ve been the local spook expert.”

“I know,” Jonatha said. “I Googled you and saw how many times you’ve been quoted.”

“Then you’ll know that most of it has been related to hauntings and such,” he said, nodding.

“You’ve been quoted a few times in articles about werewolf legends, but just in passing. Do you have a folklore background?”

“Not really. I’ve read a lot of books and when you live in Pine Deep you tend to pick up on things.”

Newton watched Jonatha as she studied Crow. She had shrewd eyes and didn’t blink until after Crow finished talking. Newton recognized that as an interviewer’s trick. She was looking for a “tell.” If you blink you can miss small changes in the other person’s expression, pupilary dilation, nostril flaring, thinning of the lips, angle of gaze—all of which could reveal a lot more about the subject than words or tone of voice. Newton had seen cops use the same tricks. So far Crow seemed to be doing pretty good.

Newton said, “I’ve been collecting some oral stories—things that have not yet been recorded and some weird things have come up that are outside of my own experience.”

“Outside mine, too,” Crow said.

The waitress came and they ordered. Cheese omelets for Crow and Jonatha, a stack of French toast for Newton, and a bagel with whitefish for Val. Everyone had second coffees.

“If you don’t mind me asking, Ms. Guthrie,” Jonatha said, “what’s your involvement in this?”

“Val, please, and I’m an interested observer.”

“Crow and Val are engaged,” Newton explained.

Jonatha stirred Splenda into her coffee. Her eyes lingered on Val’s. “I read the last few week’s worth of papers. Please accept my condolences.”

“Thanks.”

“I read that the mayor of the town is in a coma.”

Val paused. “Yes.”

“Unrelated events?”

“Yes.”

“But on the same day as the attacks on your brother and his wife.”

Val said nothing.

“Which is the same day you shot and killed that criminal, I believe?”

“Are you going somewhere with this, Dr. Corbiel?”

“Jonatha. No, I’m just trying to put the pieces together. You’ve all been through a terrible series of events. It’s pretty amazing that you can find the peace of mind to work together on a pop-culture book.”

The food arrived, which gave Newton, Crow, and Val time to share some brief eye contact. All of them were hustling to reevaluate Jonatha Corbiel. When the waitress left, Crow said, “Distraction is useful under stress, don’t you think?”

“Distraction? That’s a funny word to put on the pursuit of a book on vampires. I would have thought you’d have had enough of monsters by now. Human monsters, I mean, which I think we can all agree are much worse than anything we find in film, fiction, or folklore.”

Val tore off a piece of bagel and put it in her mouth as she leaned back in her chair and assessed Jonatha. “Is this going to be a problem? Would you rather not help us out with this?”

Jonatha gave them all a big smile that was pure charm and about a molecule deep. “Not at all. I’m rather interested to hear what you have to say.”

They all digested that as they ate, but it was Jonatha who again broke the silence. “So…who wants to start?”

“Why don’t I give it a shot?” Crow said.

She waggled a corner of toast. “Fire away.”

“Okay, if you’ve been reading about Pine Deep, then you’ve read about the Massacre of 1976.”

“The Black Harvest and the Reaper murders, yes.”

“Um…right. Well, since the seventies there have been a lot of urban myths built up around what happened. Have you heard of the Bone Man?”

“Sure. That’s the nickname given to Oren Morse, the migrant worker who was falsely accused of the crimes.”

That threw Crow. “Falsely…?”

“I have copies of the news stories, Crow,” she said. “When Newton told me that the records from the Pine Deep newspapers had been destroyed in a fire I just probed a little deeper. Crimes of that kind are widely reported, and I have photocopies of the stories as reported by the Doylestown
Intelligencer
and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Some
Daily News
and
Bulletin
articles as well. Prior to his own murder, Morse was quoted in an
Intelligencer
article. It was just after your brother was murdered.”

If she had tossed a hand grenade onto the table she could not have hit Crow harder.

“What?” Val and Newton both exclaimed.

“Your father was also quoted in four separate articles, Val,” Jonatha said, “beginning with the murder of your uncle.”

The three of them sat in stunned silence, gawking at her.

Jonatha finished her toast and cut a piece of omelet. “Mmm, good food here,” she said as she chewed. The silence persisted and finally Jonatha put down her fork. “You didn’t know your father was in the papers, did you?”

“No,” Val said. Her face had gone pale.

Jonatha folded her hands in her lap and looked at them in turn. Some of her smile had faded. “Okay, let’s cut the bullshit, shall we? Val, you and Crow lost family to the Reaper. According to the news stories you were friends with Morse, who worked for some time for your father. Your town’s mayor, Terry Wolfe, lost a sister to the killer and was himself hospitalized. All through this there was a terrible blight…the Black Harvest in question. Now, thirty years later we have another blight, another series of brutal murders, and violence again hitting the same three families. Even some of the dimmer news affiliates have remarked on the coincidence, but they left it as coincidence.” She pursed her lips. “I don’t much believe in coincidence.”

Crow opened his mouth to say something, but Jonatha held up a hand. “Let me finish. After Newton contacted me about this…about his
book
, I started reading up. I read everything I could find, including everything about Ruger and Boyd. That makes for some interesting reading.” Her dark eyes glittered. “The news stories say that Crow and a Philly cop named Jerry Head both shot Ruger—and this is after Crow kicked the stuffing out of him—but the guy not only manages to flee the scene and elude a concentrated manhunt but then shows up a couple of days later and attacks again. Stronger than ever. How many bullets did it take to bring him down the second time?”

Instead of answering, Val just said, “Go on.”

“Then Boyd attacks and kills two police officers on your farm. The news report—Mr. Newton’s own news report—states that one of the officers emptied his gun, apparently during the struggle. All those shots without hitting the suspect? A week or so later he attacks your brother and sister-in-law, kills one of your employees, and almost kills you and you have to empty an entire clip into him to bring him down.”

None of them said a word.

“Then Newton here contacts me for backstory on the folklore of vampires and werewolves, wanting specifically to know how to identify a vampire
after
it has been killed.” She drained her coffee cup and set it down on the saucer. “Folks…how stupid do you really think I am?”

After almost half a minute of silence, Val said, “Well, well.”

To which Crow added, “Holy shit.”

“Okay,” Val said softly, “then what do
you
think is going on?”

Jonatha shrugged. “It seems pretty clear to me that you all think you have, or possibly
had
, a vampire here in Pine Deep.” She arched her eyebrows. “Am I right, Val? Crow?” They said nothing. “And very probably a werewolf, too.”

Crow opened his mouth to reply, but Val touched his arm. Her eyes bored into Jonatha’s. “What if we were to agree? What would you do if we said that we thought that we were dealing with something supernatural here in Pine Deep?”

“Then,” Jonatha said, “I’d say that you’d better tell me absolutely everything. Everything that’s happened, everything you suspect.”