The Origin of Dracula (15 page)

I pulled over, and we both climbed out and joined the gaggle of bystanders. Yellow emergency tape separated them from the inferno. Lee didn’t say a word. There wasn’t much to say about the growing dismantling of my life.

While Lee hung back, I made my way past the gawkers, most of them my neighbors. Vicky and Jim, who lived next door, were staring at my house, wide-eyed and utterly flabbergasted. I was about to move past them and duck under the tape when Vicky spotted me.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Nate isn’t with you? They said it didn’t look like anyone was in the house.”

“Nate’s fine,” I said. “He’s good.”

“Thank God!” She hugged me tightly. “I’m so sorry. I just can’t believe it.” She didn’t have to say any more than that. The rest was implied.
How could God take Lucy from you and then your home?
I wanted to tell her it wasn’t God. It was Dantès.

But instead I asked, “What happened? Do they know?”

She shook her head. “The place went up like that. The fire department got here fast, but the fire was faster.” She squeezed my arm. “Whatever we can do, please let us know.”

“Thank you,” I said, then ducked under the yellow tape.

The firefighters were battling the flames with water cannons, but it didn’t look like it was doing much good. The flames were raging on both the first floor and the second, and thick black smoke was billowing from the windows. The place was a disaster.

I swallowed and stood there for a long beat, accepting that nothing of my former life was going to be salvageable. Then I hurried over to a fireman who had taken off his headgear.

“That’s my house,” I said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“You need to talk to Captain Bowman.” He pointed toward a firefighter perched in the cab of a fire truck, door open, speaking intently into a dispatch radio. It was then that I realized I could feel the heat from the fire even at this distance. I was back in hell, in Dante’s
Inferno
, only this time it wasn’t courtesy of Dan T.’s Firegrill. It was courtesy of my own home.

I headed over to Captain Bowman, pulling out my wallet on the way and removing my driver’s license. As soon as the captain saw me approaching, he lowered the dispatcher handset. That and the concern on his face told me he already knew I was the distressed homeowner.

“I’m John Gaines,” I said, and passed my driver’s license up to him. “That’s my house.”

He glanced at my license and handed it back. “I understand that you have a son—”

“He’s safe. He was with me.”

“Great. Good.” The captain’s concern softened. “That’s the best news I’ve heard tonight.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“Not yet. That may take a while. When did you leave the house?”

My life had gone so far off the rails that it seemed like an eternity ago. “About four-thirty,” I said, hardly believing it.

“Did you notice any strange odors before you left?”

“No.”

“Were you storing anything flammable in the house? I don’t mean liquor. I mean something highly combustible.”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“Nothing at all? Nothing in the basement? Sometimes people forget they stuck a propane tank down there. Or gas for a leaf blower.”

“No.”

“What about supplies for a renovation project?”

I shook my head again.

“Well, it’s too early to say for sure what started it, but I gotta tell you it’s a bad one.” Bowman stepped down from his perch and surveyed his battlefield—my house. “When we got here, your place was already too far gone. We got inside, but had to retreat after a few minutes.” He turned to me. “Whatever it turns out to be, I’m betting that fire had help—a lot of help.”

“Help?”

“An accelerant. That fire didn’t go from zero to sixty by itself. When the first neighbor called, she said she saw smoke coming from a downstairs window. Our trucks were on the scene twelve minutes later. The A-side and C-side of the house—the front and rear—were almost lost already.”

“You’re saying someone set the place on fire,” I blurted out.

“We’ll investigate. So will the police. And there’s always the possibility that there was an accelerant in the house that you weren’t aware of.” Then Captain Bowman asked me, point blank, “Do you know or suspect someone who might’ve done this?”

Did
I? Not by his real name. Not even close. “No,” I said. I didn’t want to be interrogated by him, nor by the police right now. Not while the clock was ticking on Nate’s life.

“If you have a lead, or suspect someone,” he said, “you should walk over there to Lieutenant Wilson and tell him.” He nodded over to one of the police cruisers.

I have dozens of leads
, I thought,
and none of them make sense
. They were the leads that a crazy man, a conspiracy theorist would string together: a mysterious woman in the woods, a homeless man living between the hedges, a Mayflower passenger hanged for murder, the castle of Otranto on the banks of the Potomac.

“I wish I had a lead,” I said.

“If you
do
have one, let the police know. If a fire’s the result of arson, it’s usually obvious.” He looked back at the house. “I’m sorry we couldn’t do more.”

Dantès made sure you couldn’t.

“Do you have a place to stay for the night?” Bowman said.

“Yeah… thanks.”

“If you need anything, we have a coordinator that can help you.”

“I’m okay… I mean, under the circumstances.”

“Good. Give Lieutenant Wilson your information and we’ll talk tomorrow.”

I walked toward Lieutenant Wilson as if I intended to talk to him, and I checked out my house on the way. The first floor was a crispy wreck of smoke and charred walls; the second floor was a stronghold of flames refusing to simmer down. But there were a couple of areas where the firemen were successfully beating back the flames with the water cannons.

Staring at the jets of water pounding those areas was sobering, because it made Captain Bowman’s battle strategy perfectly clear: he was using the water cannons to keep the flames from jumping from my house over to my neighbors’ houses. This was a reaffirmation that my house was a total loss. The best-case scenario was that no other houses would be damaged. Dantès had taken the love of my life—Lucy—and now he’d stripped my life of any semblance of normalcy.

I veered away from Lieutenant Wilson and headed back toward the yellow safety tape and Lee. I was now more desperate than ever to find the next breadcrumb. Without it, I’d lose Nate as surely as I’d lost everything else.

I ducked under the tape and hurried past the gawkers, fielding a few
I’m sorrys
and a couple of neighbors’ offers to spend the night, which I politely declined.

Lee was lingering at the back of the crowd, on his cell phone, which he lowered when he saw me.

“Checking on your house?” I said.

“Yeah. It’s fine.”

“Good, because that’s our next stop.”

We headed back to my car, and as soon as we’d left the crowd behind, a woman’s voice rang out: “Having trouble finding the next breadcrumb?”

It was Otranto. Lee and I both whipped around to face her.

She flicked her blond hair away from her face, and this time her beauty hit me as otherworldly. She was too beautiful to be human. She was a seductive demon from hell enjoying a night out on the town. But I pushed that insane thought away and focused on this woman in front of me, clearly of flesh and blood.

“You’re still fighting it,” she said, then glanced back at the flames. “I think Churchill said it best: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’”

“Why all this bullshit?” Lee said. “Get to the goddamn point.”

“Still angry.” Her smirk came back. “How’s that working out for you? Dantès handed you the next breadcrumb. Had your papa deliver it to you in a nicely wrapped package. But you’re blinded by the same baggage your papa carries. You can’t escape the tyranny of your emotions. You haven’t learned to control them. They’re always there, weighing you down. If John hadn’t walked back into your life today, you’d be huddled in your house, crushed by grief. It would’ve killed you.”

Lee didn’t have a response. It was as if Otranto had punched him right in the gut. His big body slumped, beaten down by her words.

Otranto then set her green eyes on me. “Help him figure it out. You’ve got more at stake.”

If she was saying Lee’s dad had delivered the clue, then it meant I’d been on the right track. “The Bellington curse,” I said.

“Warmer.” She was pleased, her smile full of mischievous pleasure. “Think about the pieces in the game. What are they made from?”

Another obscure clue. Was she referring to novel therapy? Were the pieces made from books? That couldn’t be right. This was about Lee.

She put her hand on her hip, stood up tall, and flicked her hair away from her eyes, striking the pose of a runway model. For a few seconds—during which I supposed she expected the lead to miraculously dawn on me—she stood like that, radiant.

But then she darkened with disgust. “How do you know about the Bellington curse?” she demanded.

“Lee told me.”

Her eyes went to Lee. “How do
you
know about it?”

“My whole fucking family knows. That’s how.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and she started to walk away, back toward the crowd.

“Wait!” I wanted more help, but even as I yelled out “wait,” I knew that each visit by Otranto was perfectly calculated. I wanted to chase her down, but that wasn’t part of Dantès’s game.

So instead of going after her, I pressed Lee. “How
do
you know about the Bellington curse?”

“Just like I told her: my entire family knows about it.”

“That’s not the right answer.” So what
was
the right answer?
What are the pieces of the game made from?

And this time the answer came to me. Lee had told me half a dozen times how he’d learned the details of John Bellington’s life. He learned it from one of the pieces in the game. The pieces in the game were made from people. Lucy, Grace, Quincy, Nate, Lee, the homeless man, Dan T., Macon, Otranto, and me.

“I know where to go.” I headed around to the driver’s side of my car.

“Where?”

“To meet a new piece in the game—your Uncle Harry.”

“That’s a long shot.”

“Just get in and tell me where he lives.”

Before I climbed into the car, I took a final peek at Otranto. She was gliding through the gawkers, toward the burning house, as if she was a supernatural creature drawn to the blazing inferno. But there was also clear evidence that she was real, and that came in the form of the stares she drew from my neighbors as she walked past them. They were taken by this stunning woman, just as I had been the first time I’d seen her.

In the car, Lee spoke first. “You sure Harry’s the next stop?” he said.

“‘Sure’ is an awfully strong word. Where does your uncle live?”

“Head to Lee Highway and get on 66.”

I could tell by the way Lee was fidgeting with his hands that he didn’t want to visit Uncle Harry, and the reason—guilt—became apparent after we’d gone about twenty miles on Route 66.

“He should be in an assisted living place,” Lee said, “but his VA benefits don’t even come close to paying for a place like that. So he lives in a crappy apartment. I didn’t have extra money or I would’ve done better by him… but hey, at least it’s not right next door to a power plant. The last place I got him was next to one of those electric substations, so even though it was a decent place, the rent was cheap because no one wanted to live there. Everyone’s scared those substations will give ’em cancer.”

Then Lee told me his uncle’s apartment complex was another ten miles out, in Chantilly, which made sense. There were no cheap rents close to D.C. If you wanted to save some cash, you needed to travel to the far edges of the suburban sprawl.

Unprompted, Lee went on to add more details about Harry’s living arrangements, as if he felt he had to justify them even more. “I got him a caretaker,” he said. “She’s from Guatemala. Sweet gal. She goes to his place in the morning, helps him out of bed, makes him breakfast, and helps him get ready for the day. Then she comes back at night, cooks him dinner, and helps him get ready for bed.”

“You mentioned your uncle was a big storyteller,” I said. “What did you say he said about stories?”

“Stories tell you all you need to know.”

That was the connection that couldn’t be denied. “There’s a story Dantès wants us to hear,” I said, “and your uncle is going to tell it to us.”

“Don’t hold your breath—the guy’s got a million stories.”

“Is there a story he already told you that applies to any of this?”

“Not one that I can come up with off the top of my head.”

“What about a story about the Bellington curse?”

“I already told you what he said about that.”

Right now, as it stood, there was just no way for me to fathom that Dantès’s game could encompass the Bellington curse, the Allegory of the Cave, Uncle Harry, and a new story—a story that Harry had never told Lee. But Dantès knew I’d eventually put it all together. I was playing checkers, and he was playing chess. I was moving from square to square, barely able to pick out my next move, in need of coaching from Otranto—while Dantès was moving effortlessly across the board, planning far ahead. He understood me better than I understood myself.

We drove through one of Chantilly’s low-income neighborhoods, which consisted of a string of rundown, four-story apartment buildings. They were probably once respectable places, but no longer. Even under the streetlights, their fall from grace was obvious: gouged wooden walls and peeling paint, cracked cement walkways, and landscaping that had deteriorated into dirt lawns with random patches of weeds here and there.

After driving seven blocks, passing buildings that got progressively more rundown, with graffiti added to the mix, Lee told me to turn in to one of the extremely narrow driveways between buildings. Driving down this constricted gauntlet felt like a test to see if you could make it through without hitting either wall. And my headlights revealed that some drivers hadn’t passed the test: there were long scrapes along both walls.