Damon (9 page)

“No, don’t do that.” Damon grouped all his findings together and set them aside on the bed.

“Why not?”

“Because they didn’t want anyone to know about it,” he said. “Whatever he’s carelessly left out in the open he’ll hide if he thinks you’re suspicious. Can you get me into his house?”

“No, and don’t even ask. They’re like parents to me. I love them. Leave them alone.”

“You can get us invited in, though.”

“No,” I insisted. “You’ll say you’re going to the bathroom or something and start going through their chest o’ drawers.”

He stared at me for a long time, as if he couldn’t believe I would be so unfair to him. Then he hopped up and went to the closet. When he returned, he held a small dusty box.

“Is that the box?”

He sat down without answering and handed me the old cigar box.

Curious, and unaware, I opened the box – and immediately threw it across the room with a yelp. I stood up on the bed to keep my feet away from the floor.

The box landed open revealing the skeleton of a human hand.

Damon threw me an annoyed glance and went to retrieve his ugly little joke. I couldn’t believe he would do something like this to me, just because I wouldn’t scheme with him to rob Bella and Chester. “You jerk! Not funny!”

“It wasn’t meant to be funny,” he said. “My granddad kept a human hand in a box.” He gave me a long, serious glance. “I don’t think that’s funny at all.”

I was reassured, at least, that Damon understood the thing used to be attached to someone’s arm.

I sat down, but shied away from the cigar box when he joined me on the bed.

“Is it real?”

“It’s real,” he said with a serious nod. “He got up one night late, went out in the back yard, and dug it up. The next day, he drove here and gave it to your drugstore guy.”

“So, Chester knows about this hand skeleton?”

He gave me another annoyed look. “Of course. They’re all in it together. Vampires. There’s more.”

“Lord,” I complained. “I don’t want to see anything else disgusting. Did your granddad have both hands?”

“Yeah, it’s not his. It belonged to one of their victims. This isn’t disgusting. It’s a letter.”

I took the yellowed envelope and removed the letter. Though, it was more of a note than a letter. “Oh, it’s from Grammy!” I recognized her handwriting although the letter was unsigned. I read the lines aloud. “Meet this Thursday at seven. Leave word with C if complications arise.”

“See,” Damon said. “They had a secret club. They were meeting Thursday at seven. He knew the place. ‘C’ stands for Chester Brewer. Leave word with Chester if complications arise.”

“Do you know when this was written?” It seemed so obvious to me. They didn’t have a secret club. Grammy and Damon’s grandfather had been having a secret affair. Probably after they’d both lost their spouses. Though, I couldn’t imagine why they’d needed to hide. I wanted to believe my sweet grandmother would never cheat on her husband. I wanted to trust in the person I’d known her to be. But, I had to admit the note was odd.

If Damon’s grandfather couldn’t make it, he should tell Chester, so Grampa Harvey wouldn’t find out? The only part I couldn’t understand was how Chester could have been involved in something so sleazy and deceitful. He’d been friends with Grampa Harvey, too. “Maybe ‘C’ stands for someone else.”

“No,” Damon said. “He had the box. He’s in the picture, and he has the missing jewelry.”

“You don’t know that. Oh, you know what? We’re being stupid. ‘C’ stands for Corky, not Chester. Of course, Chester wouldn’t have been involved in anything like that. But I think Corky would have.”

He handed me another letter. “Read this.”

I took the letter, immediately noticing Chester’s handwriting. “If you tell your son the truth, we’ll all be damned. The secret dies with us.”

Damon sat down beside me. “But he did tell me the truth. They were vampires. Alien vampires. Powerful beasts with fur and fangs.”

I wanted to focus on whether Damon and I might be related, not bizarre stories of vampires. I got enough nonsense about the devil chasing my mother as it was. But, Damon was every bit as obsessed with his story as my mother was with hers.

Growing up, his father must have looked like a beast. A gigantic beast moving around the house, making loud noises, growling and raging. Or suddenly stepping from a doorway with a silent, deadly expression when Damon thought he was alone. A beast coming into his room at night to stare down at him with insanity so hard and fierce he, as a small boy, couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing.

How many times had I backed away from Mama, staring up into the face of a monster?

“Your grandfather said that to you? He said they were vampires?”

“He said they were bitten.”

“Bitten by a vampire?”

“He was dying. He said he wanted to tell us, but he couldn’t. He said they were in a cave, hunting for treasure.”

“What kind of treasure?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. There was some old story about hidden gold and gems in a cave somewhere. One of their great-grandparents hid it. But he died before he told anyone where it was.”

I held up the jewelry. “They found it. The amethyst.”

“Exactly. You see? I’m not making this up. They found the cave and there was a vampire living in there. There’s a reason we’re the way we are. The reason your mother and my father are crazy. Not because they’re related, but because of the vampire blood. They’re poisoned and the only way to find the antidote is to uncover the mystery.”

I read over the two notes again. It did seem as though the old folks had been keeping secrets. Chester’s note wasn’t signed, but I knew his handwriting as well as my own. He’d wanted Damon’s grandfather to keep a secret. A secret that would ruin them if uncovered? I couldn’t imagine Chester or Bella ever doing anything illegal, dangerous, or even unethical.

The notes bothered me. I didn’t like uncovering things about the past that made me question the people in my life. Chester had kept a human hand in the drugstore. Right over my head. Secretly.

“What about the hand?” I asked. “If it’s real, you have to take it to the police.”

Damon began gathering up his evidence and put it all in the boot box. “No. They’ll keep it.”

“Why do you want it? Who does it belong to?”

“I don’t know. But it’s an important clue.”

I tried not to smile. “So, what, now we’re looking for a one-handed man? Sort of like in
The Fugitive
?”

“I don’t know.” He kept back the old picture of the six friends, leaned forward and stared intently at it. “I just don’t know. The answer is in Knoxville. What’s her name again?”

I looked where he pointed. “Verna Jarvis next door.” She wore a round black hat and white glasses that came to points at the ends. “You stayed with her, too, when you were little.”

“Yeah,” he breathed, staring at me with wide eyes. “Okay, so we’ve finally got everybody. Your grandmother, my grandfather, Chester, Bella, Corky, and Verna Jarvis.”

“Yeah. Except for the one who took the picture.”

“The camera was probably set up on a tripod. Every member would have been in the picture.”

“And some people we’re forgetting.”

He shook his head. “Who?”

“Grampa Harvey, Corky’s wife and Mr. Jarvis. And your grandmother. They all moved here together.”

“No. They don’t matter. Just these six.”

“Okay.” There was no point in arguing with him.

But he did make me think. I’d never really thought it was odd before, that the group of them had all moved together, but now it did seem a little weird. They weren’t family, they were just friends. So, why would they all up and move to such a small, remote, and boring town at the same time? What were they hiding from? And what did it have to do with the skeleton of a human hand they’d kept in a box?

Damon leaned back against the headboard as if a terrible burden had been lifted off him. He patted the mattress next to him.

I crawled to him and snuggled down beside him, draping my leg over his, resting my head on his shoulder. I lifted his shirt and traced the scars on his chest, about a dozen slash marks crisscrossing every which way. They reminded me of the pick-up sticks game I used to play as a kid.

“My granddad killed himself,” I confessed. I’d never said those words out loud before. It felt strange. “He hanged himself from a tree in the back yard. Gram had it cut down.”

“That’s all right,” Damon said. “He wasn’t part of the group.”

“Your grandmother killed herself,” I told him when he didn’t confess. “Bella told me.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He lazily stroked my hair. “Does Mrs. Jarvis live alone?”

“Stay out of her house,” I warned.

He didn’t make any promises. Instead, he lifted my chin and silenced me with a commanding kiss that instantly sent us into a spiral of desire and solace.

“Maaagggic!” my mother wailed.

This time, I ignored her.

***

We had a terrible time with Mama the next morning. She was still mad at me for not coming when she’d called the night before. She’d had to put herself to bed, which she deeply resented.

I was trying to be pleasant, but that only annoyed her more.

As we moved around getting breakfast, she kept getting in my way and bumping into me. Finally, she grabbed an empty coffee mug, called me a whore, and hit me in the back of the head with it so hard I fell face-forward into the sink. When I straightened, the room took a spin. And, damn, but it hurt.

Damon came to check on me and the next time she came for me he was there to stand in front of me like a bodyguard.

She looked at his large frame, muscled arms, and changed her mind about knocking people silly. For now.

“This is my house, too,” she grumbled as we ate cereal. “She can’t make me leave. I was born in this house. The devil can’t enter my house. I have seven charms. They think they’re gonna dump you in the river. I know they do. No you don’t. Shut up. Fuck you. I heard that, mister.”

Damon ignored her, and I tried to. Despite the bump forming on my head, and the accompanying headache, I felt much better this morning. I’d had a good night’s sleep and Damon was extraordinarily handsome in the morning light.

An odd giddiness swirled in my stomach. I did love him. And strangely, I wasn’t as scared anymore. He’d seen the inside of my house, and liked me, anyway.

In fact, I think Mama and I made him feel comfortable. At home. Free to be his nutty self.

I hadn’t thought it possible to find a man who could accept my life. Especially after the incident with Teddy. I’d been so fearful I’d never given anyone a chance to really know me. I’d lived in dread of the inevitable look of terror in their eyes when they met Mama, and imagined me in twenty years.

When Damon looked at me, he only smiled.

CHAPTER SIX

That night I had a dream that changed everything. The dream was full of fragmented images with occasional lingering scenes.

I was in the house, my house, except I wasn’t in my time, I was in Gram’s time. I was in Gram’s house. And I was a ghost walking through the rooms, walking by people unseen and unheard.

Gram was there, young and dressed in black, dressed for a funeral. Chester and Bella were there, Corky and Mrs. Jarvis, and sitting on a scratchy-looking tan sofa with his legs crossed, was Damon’s granddad, Elliot. They all looked young, exactly as they did in the photograph, in their early twenties, and dressed in the same clothes, black suits and black dresses, but I sensed the time frame was different. They hadn’t just come from a funeral. They were having a secret meeting. I could hear them and yet I couldn’t understand the words they spoke. Not as if they spoke a different language, but as if they were speaking from a distance. They were arguing. Gram and Chester were pacing. Bella sat on the arm of the sofa, rocking in agitation, Corky stood by the window with his arms over his head as if he couldn’t quite contain himself, and Mrs. Jarvis sat in a chair with her head in her hands. But Elliot sat on the sofa as cool as could be, simply watching the scene, seeming somehow cleverer than the rest.

I began to back away, involuntarily, dragged away by Time, and I left the scene just as Gram screamed, ‘We killed a man!’

And then I was being dragged by orderlies down white hallways toward doom and despair, the previous scene fading in importance as my own frantic situation took over.

When I woke at six the next morning and found Damon packing bags for our trip to Knoxville, I didn’t argue. The dream had affected me in a profound way. In a way that made everything around me – the house, my hands, Damon’s eyes – all seem urgently bright.

Damon was right. I knew – somehow I knew – he was right. The old folks were hiding something. And we had to find out what, exactly.

Before we lost our minds.

I woke realizing I’d been carelessly going on about my pointless life, oblivious, while Time chased me - ruthlessly. We were running out of time. Daily.

One day soon, I, and Damon, would be as far gone as Mama. And then it would be too late.

If there was a way to prevent insanity from taking over we had to find a solution soon. Very soon.

It had always been in the back of my mind. What if I turned out like my mother? According to Aunt Cynthia, Mama had been a normal child until her early twenties. And then the strangeness had begun. The paranoid behavior, the violent outburst, the delusions. By the time they’d realized she was seriously ill, it had been too late to do anything about it, except dope her up on medications.

If Damon and I became like our parents, who would take care of us? Chester, Bella and Mrs. Jarvis were the only ones left of Gram’s family of friends, and they were old now, in their mid-seventies. Too old to take care of three crazy people, even if they were so inclined. They had been good friends with Gram and Grampa Harvey, and Elliot. But they weren’t family. They owed us nothing.

We’d all end up in a mental institution. Lost and forgotten.

The notion of that scared me half to death.

So, I was going to Knoxville, regardless of the consequences.