The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (30 page)

“Nonsense,” Father Edsel boomed from a couch in the corner. “Did you see him? Pale as moonlight! Eyes as black as the depthless depths of space!”

He’d had brown eyes, as far as Stevie Ray could tell, but it wasn’t like that was the relevant part to object to, and he didn’t have the energy to combat Cy’s lunacy. Besides, when you were talking about killing vampires, how was that objectively any crazier than believing the moon was a hollow spaceship full of aliens spying on you?

Well, mainly because the vampires were real, he supposed.

“I wish he’d turned to dust,” former-Pastor Inkfist said gloomily.

Mr. Levitt snorted. “Wouldn’t that be neat and clean? Would’ve spared us having to try to dig up that frozen ground. That grave was so shallow we might as well have just covered him over with some leaves.”

“If he’d turned to dust,” Inkfist went on doggedly, staring at the glass of soda water between his hands, “then we’d know for
sure
he was a vampire, that’s all I mean.”

“He has a point,” Dolph said, but Eileen suddenly snapped her head up, and the focus came back into her eyes, and she sniffed loudly.

“The way he jumped around, bouncing from tree to tree like he was made of rubber, that looked like something ordinary and human to you?”

“Could’ve been he was on drugs or something,” Inkfist said. “Cocaine gives you energy, doesn’t it?”

“And the way he kept coming even when Cyrus unloaded on him with those automatic weapons? He didn’t even
pause
until a few bullets went into his skull.” Eileen sounded justifiably proud about that bit. She’d been the bait, playing little girl lost in the woods, but she’d had a big old .45 caliber handgun in her purse, and she’d put a bullet right in the middle of the vampire’s face while he was trying to figure out who was shooting him from the shadows.

“PCP,” Dolph said. “Like in the movies, the angel dust, they say fellas on that, you can shoot them point-blank and they’ll just keep trying to get at you. And who told us he was a vampire?”

“I told you,” Stevie Ray said. “One of the elders at Pres du Lac. They know about this stuff. In their, you know. Culture.”

“Heathens,” Edsel said, but without much heat, and Inkfist sighed heavily.

“But see,” Dolph said, “what if it was just some fella the Indians—I’m sorry Native Americans—wanted killed for some reason?”

“You people,” Mr. Levitt said. “Even if it
was
, how does it make sense for the tribe to dupe a group of people from the next town over to do their killing for them? It’s not exactly a clever plan. Anyway, he was a
vampire
. What about when we cut his
head
off, and he kept trying to bite us, and rolling his eyes, and even trying to talk for a good ten minutes?”

“It’s like in the French Revolution,” Dolph said. “Isn’t it? They cut off somebody’s head, with a guillotine or such, and the eyes just keep on blinking and the mouth keeps moving, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Mr. Levitt said flatly. “When you cut someone’s head off, there might be a twitch or two, but they don’t try to
eat
you. Not if they’re human. And you saw the fangs, they were as long as golf pencils—why are we even talking about this? We shot him and cut off his head and he didn’t
bleed
.”

“I know you’re right,” Inkfist said. “I still wish he’d turned to dust though. Neater that way.”

“No denying that.” Levitt took a gulp of rotgut whiskey like it was water. “Body disposal’s a right pain in the bottom. But I don’t imagine anybody will come looking for that fella. We were right up against the middle of nowhere anyhow. When the weather gets warmer we can go back and dig a better grave, if anything’s left of him.”

Oh goodie
, Stevie Ray thought. Still, it
had
been the right thing to do, hadn’t it? A couple of fisherman had disappeared the week before, nothing left but their rods and creels and ice saws and a few spots of blood on the frozen surface of the lake, and Harry’s investigation hadn’t turned up anything, of course. With the Scullens and Scales gone, Stevie Ray hadn’t immediately thought
vampires
, but when Willy Noir called to say they’d sensed a wendigo in the area, he hadn’t exactly been surprised. He’d hesitated before calling Edsel and his merry band, but not for long. How was he going to take on a vampire by himself? So they’d gone out on patrol, roaming the woods in pairs, in touch with each other via walkie-talkies and armed with some of the truly distressing ordnance from Cy’s bunker, and on the third night, their bait had drawn the hunter, except they were the hunters and the vampire was the prey, or whatever. They’d killed him. He’d seemed more stunned than frightened, right up until Levitt severed his head with a machete.

The vampire, Stevie Ray thought, looked like a bear who’d just been mobbed and attacked by a whole bunch of salmon. He’d clearly thought they were ridiculous right up until the moment Eileen shot him in the face and Levitt took his head off.

Stevie Ray hadn’t fired a shot or swung a blade, he’d been covering an avenue the vampire hadn’t tried to escape down, but he’d puked up his guts anyway. Oh, hell. Could you get DNA off puke? You couldn’t from crap, but from puke, sure, why not, had to be bits of throat and stomach lining in there, right? What if somebody found that body and found the vomit and did a test and placed him at the scene? Oh, lord, he’d have to go back out there and dump some bleach all over his own throw-up, it was the only way to be safe. He groaned. Covering up crime scenes wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he became a cop.

He looked at the beer in his hand. It was his fifth. He wouldn’t be going back to the woods to clean up things tonight—he’d just get lost and freeze to death. He’d already confiscated the guns they’d used, and he planned to get rid of those tomorrow morning to make sure no ballistic evidence would be recovered, so he’d go back to the woods and deal with the puke after that.

Inkfist was right. A dead body turning to dust
would
have been a lot easier.

Mr. Levitt went with Stevie Ray. They took a can of kerosene and a bottle of bleach, and trudged through the snow, and when they got to the crime scene… they saw the remains had been disturbed. “Must be animals, right?” Stevie Ray said, desperately hoping.

Levitt knelt and looked at the ground. “Not animals,” he said. “Look at those footprints. People. Hmm. Wait here.” He loped off through the woods—the fella was spry for someone on the far side of 70; heck, he was spry for someone 30 years younger. Stevie Ray went ahead and poured bleach over his vomit, just in case it wasn’t a lost cause. Say some hunters had found the corpse. They’d have to walk a while to get a signal on their cell phones, probably. And then it would take Harry a while to get out here to the woods. Not a real long while, though—he knew the woods pretty good, and took his job seriously. He’d be calling Stevie Ray to assist, probably, but of course, Stevie Ray was already at the crime scene, contaminating evidence. Maybe if they moved the body, when the hunters got back here with Harry, there’d be no body here, no physical evidence at all, and Harry’d just think they were drunk or—

Mr. Levitt returned. “Got a look at him,” he said, not even breathing hard. He was holding a pair of binoculars. “They didn’t notice me though. It was one of the Ojibwe boys from the reservation, which could be a lucky break, if he’s one of the ones who knows about vampires, and hates them to pieces. But the other one…”

“What?” Stevie Ray said.

“Bonnie,” Levitt said grimly. “Harry’s daughter. You know. The
vampire
lover.”

“Oh for damn,” Stevie Ray said, numbness washing over him. “The boy was probably Joachim Noir, Harry said she was spending a lot of time with him. He’s all right, Willy Noir was the one who told us there was a vampire to kill. I don’t think he’ll mind. But Bonnie… you’re right, she did love one, but what does that mean? What will she do?”

“Let’s sanitize this crime scene,” Mr. Levitt said. “Should’ve done it last night, but we didn’t have the tools or the time or the energy. Make sure if she
does
decide to tell her daddy she found a body in the woods, there’s no body to find when Harry gets here. Then, who cares what she does?”

“Makes sense,” Stevie Ray said. “But it makes me nervous. She’ll be curious, you know, and what if she starts making waves, asking questions, sniffing around…”

“I wouldn’t worry,” Mr. Levitt said, pulling on his gloves. “Problems like these have a way of working themselves out.”

THE INEVITABILITY OF DEATH

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

J
oachim told his dad about the vampire we found, and he took the news stoically—I’m good at reading people, and Willy Noir was hard to read, and it’s not because of some “inscrutable Indian” bullshit either, since his son was an open book to me, and not even a book with lots of words in small type, but a big colorful picture book, practically a pop-up book. Willy loaded us up in his truck and drove us on a long and silent trip pretty much back where we’d come from, and then a tromp through the same old woods again, which was boring.

But things got less boring, and not in a good way, when we reached the spot where we’d found Jimmy’s body, because Jimmy’s body wasn’t there anymore.

“But—but—I swear, it was
here
,” Joachim said.

Willy Noir nodded. “I believe you. I can smell there was
something
here. But I also smell… bleach?” They sniffed around—seeing two grown men wandering around the trees with their noses in the air, sucking wind through their nostrils, was pretty comical. Turns out the puddle of puke was now a puddle of bleach.

“Whoever killed Jimmy came back and covered up their crime scene,” I said.

Willy Noir nodded. “Which is all I was going to do, so—wonderful. Saved me the trouble.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Dead wendigos superficially resemble dead humans. It’s enough to get the police involved and cause a lot of difficulty, and inquiries, and when a pathologist notices peculiarities in the corpse…. Wendigos are ferocious about keeping their secrets. How do you think they
stay
secret? Whenever it seems like they’re going to become public knowledge, they take steps—killing lawmen, burning down hospitals so autopsies can’t be performed, making it all look like an accident, some using their mind-powers to remove memories or implant false ones. I don’t care who killed the wendigo you call Jimmy—in a war, if someone else wants to attack your enemy, why complain?—but I was concerned they’d left evidence to be discovered. Apparently they realized their mistake and took steps to correct it. Fine with me.” Willy fixed me with a stare. “Is that all right with you, Bonnie? Or do I misunderstand you? Are you concerned for the so-called
victim
?”

Actually, I didn’t know Jimmy at all, and if I’d happened upon him one day and he was on fire, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to kick sand over him. But acting like all vampires were mindless killing machines deserving of death was dumb, and, dare I say it, racist. Somehow it had never occurred to me that the member of an oppressed people could be a racist, but there it was. Nevertheless, I said, “The only good wendigo is a dead wendigo. Still. I wonder who might have killed him.”

Willy shrugged. “There have always been humans who learned of the existence of wendigo, who were brave enough to do something about it. From Abraham van Helsing to Anita Blake.”

Who were both fictional but I didn’t say that, either.

“Anyway, that’s the only wendigo we’ve sensed in a while,” Willy Noir said. “So we’re all safe now.” And he trudged on back to his truck, and we trudged with him. I got Willy to drop me at home.

If I’d realized that was the night I was going to die, I probably would have had them take me someplace else. Maybe Cafe Lo. I always liked ice cream. It would have been nice to have ice cream one last time.

You can actually make a sort of sorbet out of blood, but it’s just not the same.

Harry was out of town for the weekend at some kind of small-town law enforcement convention in the Twin Cities, and I was just puttering around the house, trying to keep myself occupied and keep up appearances. I’d spoken to Kelly and J on the phone a bit, doing the fake girl-talk thing. They both liked me even more once Edwin dumped me—the appearance of vulnerability is very appealing to the weak, I’ve found—and in the interests of building my unimpeachable public mask, I’d nurtured our relationships. When I wasn’t with Joachim, I was with them. I figured even if I wasn’t marrying Edwin, I’d need bridesmaids someday. (I didn’t expect them to be Kelly and J, really—college friends seemed more likely—but you could never be too careful. If I’d learned anything from the vampires and were-creatures of my acquaintance, it was that monsters have to be careful about appearing to be human.)

After I hung up with them and microwaved a bag of popcorn, I thought about calling Joachim. I was thinking it might be time to give in to the tension between us and just have hairy were-beast love. It would probably be hot and messy and passionate and wild, I thought, while I’d expected sex with Edwin would have been a precise and (of course) rather cold affair. Both had their appeal, of course, and I spent some time on the couch painting my toenails and pondering the potential joys of were-vamp-human love triangles. I figured Joachim would come running if I rang him up, and why shouldn’t I? Edwin wasn’t watching, he was probably on to his next piece of hot mortal teenage ass by now, having lost all interest in me the moment I turned eighteen and ceased to be jailbait, Gretchen had probably been right—

The old man was good. I have to give him that. I didn’t have the senses of a wendigo, but I was a long way from unobservant, and I didn’t hear him pick the lock on the back door and slip in and creep up on me in the living room at all. My preference out in the world is to sit with my back to walls, with my eyes on the entrance, but—dumb, I know—I’d come to feel safe and secure in Harry’s house over the months. Why not? My dad was a cop, and for a long time I’d had a vampire keeping an eye on the place, and it’s not like Lake Woebegotten is a hotbed of home invasion crime. So I was on the couch, which is in the middle of the living room, and so the old man got me, fair and square.