The Origin of Dracula (2 page)

I looked up from my computer to see Barbara Price, one of the senior reference librarians, marching toward me, ready for her shift. Barbara was gruff with the library patrons, rude and impatient when answering their questions. I felt sorry for the patrons who had to deal with her.

“All yours,” I said as she walked through the wooden gate and entered the reference area.

“Hopefully I’ll make it through my shift without getting too many stupid questions,” she said, smiling conspiratorially as if I shared her sentiments. “Friday is always stupid question day.”

I stood up, relinquishing my seat. “At least you’ve only got four hours.” The library closed at seven on Fridays.

“That’s four hours too long.” She sat down and logged on to the computer. “Did you look over the Virginia display?”

I glanced to the far end of the library, which featured the display—her display. Books on Virginia’s history, all non-fiction, except for one slim volume written during Virginia’s colonial period. “I did—it looks great.”

“I thought so, too. Do you want to add anything to it?”

“Nah. It doesn’t need anything more.” Even if it did, I knew better than to make a recommendation. She’d solicited suggestions from the other librarians, then scoffed at their suggestions behind their backs.

“Have a good weekend,” I said, and headed toward the front foyer.

“You too.”

That wasn’t going to happen. There were no longer any good weekends, any more than there were good weekdays. The reference desk was the only anchor in my life. Every minute away from it was spent floating aimlessly in a choppy sea with no port of call. Still, this weekend, for Nate’s sake, I planned to force myself to at least
act
like I was standing on solid ground. I’d channel the little energy I had into that. I loved Nate more than anything in the world, and I desperately wanted to build a new life for him. But right now, pretending to have a good weekend was the best I could do.

Even though my mind and spirit were adrift, I was there physically for Nate. I was always one of the parents who arrived first to pick him up from the afterschool program. But that stemmed from my guilt. Before Lucy’s death, Nate wasn’t in the afterschool program; I’d arranged my shifts so that I could pick him up right after school. Lucy and I hadn’t wanted Nate to be one of those kids who had no choice but to spend his entire day away from home. But now, because I needed to work as many hours as possible, Nate had become one of those kids.

I hurried to my car, an older Camry, climbed in, and headed to McKinley Elementary School. Friday afternoon traffic was heavy. The Northern Virginia suburbs had long ceased being just a bedroom community for Washington, D.C. Major businesses were located in every county, and when you threw in the federal government offices and the major shopping districts, it all added up to a thriving metropolitan area with way too many cars on the road, especially during rush hour.

I navigated through the typhoon of traffic with one hope in mind: that this evening would be the one that ushered in significant change, that this evening would be the one where I’d finally sail out of the netherworld and into port—a port of normalcy. The new normal, the one without Lucy.

I’d driven home many times over the last few months with that single hope in mind, only to be disappointed.

But this evening would turn out to be the one that delivered. Not on the hope, but on the change. Significant change. Change that was about as far as you could get from a new normal. I was about to sail out of choppy seas and into a maelstrom of chaos.

When I walked into the classroom, Nate looked up from the book he was reading,
Encyclopedia Brown Saves the Day
, and flashed me a huge grin. He hurried to the back of the room, grabbed his backpack and a small, model house made from popsicle sticks, then raced over to me.

“Two more days, Dad,” he said, his blue eyes sparkling with anticipation.

“Yep—and I heard from Will’s mom. Will’s coming, too.”

“That means everyone’s gonna be there.”

On the way home, Nathan was a chatterbox. This had both an upside and a downside. The upside was something I’d convinced myself to believe as opposed to something I knew for sure: when Nate rambled up a storm, it meant he wasn’t noticing I wasn’t there for him. The downside was something I
did
know for sure: Nate’s monologues didn’t require many responses, so they made it easy for me to not be there for him.

“Dad?” he said. “Will he?”

Will he what?
I thought. I knew his question had something to do with the birthday party, but my attention had drifted too much to know any more than that. I glanced at him. He was leaning forward in the back seat, restrained by his seatbelt, eagerly awaiting my answer.

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I was thinking about tonight’s dinner. Will he what?”

“Will the magician show me some tricks?”

“Of course. I already talked to him about it.”

“What kinds of tricks?”

“A card trick, a disappearing coin trick, and a couple of tricks that are going to be surprises.”

“Four tricks?”

“Yeah. And maybe more, if there’s time.”

“Good. I’m going to do them for my afterschool class. Ms. Johnson said I could do them next week.”

“That sounds like a good plan.” I checked the rearview mirror. Nate was beaming with pride.

“Can I pick up the cake with you?” he said.

“Sure.”

He had insisted on being involved in all facets of planning the party. Lucy had usually planned his birthday parties, so this might’ve been his way of staying close to her. But it had also crossed my mind that he thought I wasn’t up to planning the party, or worse: he could tell I wasn’t totally there for him and wasn’t capable of planning
anything
.

He didn’t talk much about Lucy anymore. We had talked about her death a lot during the first couple of months. Mostly about how random it had been. She’d been murdered in a carjacking and it was hard for him to understand why the thief had picked her out. The irony was that his instincts would turn out to be better than the police’s, but who would’ve guessed that then?

Over the next seven months, there had been a healthy geometric decline in these conversations about Lucy’s death. There were a lot of studies about how young kids dealt with the death of a parent. Many concluded that a good number of kids had a hard time accepting that a dead parent was gone forever. These kids believed their dead parents would come back and walk right through their front doors as if death weren’t permanent.

But Nate seemed to grasp that his mom wasn’t coming back. In those first couple of months, many of his questions were in one way or another attempts to confirm that her death was irreversible. He wasn’t expecting her grand return. Instead, he was getting used to the idea of no return. And as it stood now, he’d done a hell of lot better at accepting the tragic loss of his mom than I had.

I turned onto Fillmore Street, pulled up to our house—a small, white craftsman that Lucy had always described as warm and cozy—and parked. Nate grabbed his backpack and popsicle-stick house and scrambled out of the back seat. As we walked toward the front door, he turned the popsicle-stick house over in his hand, examining it.

“I like the afterschool class, Dad,” he said.

Warmth bloomed in my chest, and my thoughts suddenly lost their bitter edge. Nate was happy with the afterschool program. He didn’t see it as a bad turn in his life, which made it a good turn in my life.

I leaned down and kissed him on his forehead. “Good for you, sweetheart. I’m glad you like it.”

“Yeah. The extra stuff we do is good. You don’t have to change your work to pick me up. ”

That warm sensation bloomed again. He wanted me to know that it was okay that he had to stay late. He was a good kid, doing his part to make our new life work. Of course, there was another interpretation. He didn’t want to hang out with his shell of a dad.

I unlocked the door and we walked into the house. “Do you have any homework for the weekend?”

“No—I mean yes, but I did it already.”

“Great.”

He plopped his backpack down on the couch. “Can I watch TV?”

“Sure—until dinner is ready.”

He headed toward the den, toting his popsicle-stick house. I grabbed his backpack and headed into the kitchen. I’d taken over Lucy’s job of going through his backpack to check and see if he’d been assigned homework or if the school had sent home any notices. He was pretty good about telling me if he’d been given homework, but it was a different story when it came to those notices. If I didn’t dig them out, sometimes they’d remained buried in the bottom of his backpack for weeks.

At the kitchen table, I unzipped the backpack and pulled out his workbooks. While flipping through them, my thoughts drifted to the long night ahead, the part that came after cooking dinner and washing the dishes and getting Nate ready for bed, all of which was the “normal” part of the night. What came after all of that was my transformation into a nocturnal creature. Reading one newspaper after another on my iPad. Sitting zombie-like in the den watching movies. Camping on the edge of my bed, going through photos of Lucy. Wandering from room to room, tidying up an already tidy house. Standing in the back yard, staring up at the stars in the dark night sky, wondering why Lucy had been taken from me.

I closed Nate’s math workbook, pulled out his vocabulary workbook, and noticed a white, letter-sized envelope peeking out from under another workbook. My first thought was that it was a notice from school, another one that without my intervention would’ve sunk to the bottom of the backpack and stayed buried there for a while.

As I pulled it out, it dawned on me that the school rarely sent notices home in an envelope. Usually they arrived in the form of a brightly colored flyer. Turning the envelope over revealed that there were no markings on either side. If it was a notice from school, surely it would’ve said, “To the parents of Nathan Grant.” Maybe it was a note from the afterschool program or an invitation for a play date. But this was wishful thinking on my part—I’d already concluded that it was neither of those.

From the second I spotted the envelope, a queasy, sickly feeling started to grow in the pit of my stomach. Holding the envelope in my hand made the queasiness worse. The envelope’s texture felt unnatural. It was smooth, as it should be, but it also felt cold and clammy, almost wet, even though it was completely dry.

If I hadn’t opened the envelope—if I had just thrown it away—would my life have remained undisturbed by the horrors that followed? I’d never know. Because I
did
open it, and I pulled out the folded sheet of paper inside.

I unfolded the paper—it was a letter, clean and neat, printed on a laser printer. The letter started with my name,
John
, with no salutation before it. No formal
Dear
or informal
Hi
. Then came the first paragraph, made up of one simple and powerful line:

The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

I recognized the quote immediately—William Faulkner—and the words hit me like a punch to the gut. I couldn’t breathe. I knew exactly what these words referred to, and I didn’t want to keep reading.

But I did.

The body washed away and disappeared. The river took it downstream and out of your life.

Until today. Now it’s washed up onto your doorstep.

My heart was thumping heavily, pumping fear throughout my body. My awful transgression had come back to haunt me. The past wasn’t dead.

The time for revenge has come,
the letter continued.
I will kill your precious son on his seventh birthday.

I fought to breathe and tried to will my heart to stop its manic thumping. The queasiness in my stomach had turned into painful nausea.

If you have any doubt about the veracity of my threat, I suggest you check in with your partners in crime. You’ll find a connection that will serve as proof of the devastating damage I can wreak.

There was almost no doubt in my mind that this threat was real. The past had been waiting patiently, more patiently than was humanly possible, to spring forth and attack. This wasn’t revenge as much as it was justice. Over the protests of my thumping heart and overwhelming fear, I forced myself to read the rest of the letter and tried to convince myself that it was a hoax.

This is a game, and in a game each player has a chance to win. You will have one chance to save your son. If you can find me and tell me my name, tell me my true identity, I will spare your son.

A tiny ray of hope.

The letter wasn’t signed, but it did end with a name:

Dantès.

I immediately understood that since this wasn’t his real name, it was part of the game, just as the Faulkner quote had been. The person who’d written this letter had chosen Dantès as his pen name for one reason. Anyone who’d finished the required reading in his or her high school English class would know the reason: Edmond Dantès was the main character in the most famous tale of revenge,
The Conte of Monte Cristo.

The game had already started, whether I wanted it to or not. I put the letter down and slowly inhaled, then exhaled, forcing myself to breathe more calmly. Again, I tried to will my heart to stop its violent thumping, but it wouldn’t. My painful nausea grew more acute.

My physical reaction to the letter, along with the questions spinning wildly in my head, made it hard to think straight. I continued to breathe in and out slowly, hoping this would help me regain at least enough composure to gather my thoughts. It was urgent to prioritize what needed to be done. Then, from my scattered, rambling thoughts, one imperative emerged:

I have to stop Dantès before he kills Nate.

That was all. Nothing else mattered.

But how?

By heading over to the closest police precinct. Right now. Playing Dantès’s game was the wrong move. Trying to discover his real name, his identity, was the wrong move.

But going to the police meant telling them what had happened twenty years ago.
So what?
If it would save Nate, I’d do it.