Vampire Blood (2 page)

Chapter Two

August 15

Summer Haven

Jenny Lacey spied her father’s antiquated Chevy station wagon bouncing up her gravel driveway long before she heard the honking outside her trailer.

She neatly refolded the newspaper she’d been reading and slid it towards the middle of the kitchen table as she stood up.

Awful about those grisly animal mutilations outside Stanton,
she thought,
and all that suspected satanic cult activity lately, so many crazies in the world. Awful.

Making sure she had everything, she scooted out the door. She locked it behind her and ran towards her father’s tired smile.

He waved a hand at her through the dusty, cracked windshield.
Get in, get in.
He looked wearier than usual, somehow, his face drained of color.

She slid in next to him, grinning like a child, and slumped back up against the seat. She stuck immediately to the hot plastic, like a magnet to the outside of a refrigerator. The station wagon didn’t have air-conditioning, and it always stalled in either really hot or cold weather. What did she expect? It was old.

“Gonna be a real hot one today, Jenny. The weatherman said gonna hit a hundred, maybe more. Whew!” Her father chuckled, as he nodded at her. “You ready to paint a house in it?”

She smiled. “Ready as I’ll ever be, Dad.” She was a tall thin woman in her late thirties with straight brown hair and melancholy brown eyes. She pitched her purse, some bags and her sack lunch into the back seat. The lunch toppled off and onto the floor. Jenny didn’t bother to retrieve it.

“Dad, what are those scratches on your neck?” she asked.

“What scratches?”

Jenny leaned closer to him and gently ran her fingers over the two small blood-encrusted slits at the base of his throat, no longer than the length of her thumbnail. “These scratches.”

He winced, covering them with his right hand.

“They hurt, don’t they?” She shoved his hand away and peered closer. “Looks like small...bites. Where’d you get them?”

“Don’t know,” he muttered. “They’re nothing.” He looked at her a second. “Don’t hurt none.”

“You feeling okay?” Jenny pressed, close enough now to notice how awful he looked.

“Sure, sure,” he brushed her worrying off. “Just a little tired, that’s all. Been having bad dreams. It’s the darn heat.” He grinned weakly. “Stop fussing over me like an old mother hen.”

“Well, if you start feeling funny, Dad, get those bites looked at, will you? Some bites, spiders’ especially, can make a person pretty sick. That Brown Recluse spider, they say, can bite you and then a whole chunk of your skin will just rot away. Yeck.”

He glared at her for a moment. “Thanks a lot, that’s a heck of a thing to tell me.” Then he grunted and pushed down on the brake pedal as they came to the highway.

Jenny gave up.

“I brought those extra paint brushes along like you asked me to,” she offered brightly, sorry for scaring him.

“Thanks, honey. You always remember everything, don’t ya?”

“Of course. Got a memory like an elephant. You’ve always told me that.” Jenny tossed a smile over at her father as they rattled out onto the highway with a screech of tires. He still drove like a crazed teenager, even though he’d be sixty-five on his next birthday.

She noticed the paint-splattered coveralls that he’d worn a week straight, and she shook her head. “Don’t you ever wash those things, Dad? They look like they need it. Don’t you remember where the washing machine is anymore?”

“Yep, sure I do,” he answered curtly, as he shoved his jury-rigged glasses up higher on his nose with his left hand, leaving one hand free for the wheel. He’d fixed them with white medicinal tape again, because he’d dropped them a few days ago and had accidently stepped on them. Said he hadn’t the money to get them fixed properly.

Things never changed.

“Just haven’t got around to it. Been too busy.” There was a touch of peevishness in his usually gentle voice.

Too busy, my eye,
she thought. Ever since Mom had walked out on him last winter and moved into a rat-infested apartment in town (to find herself or some such nonsense) he kept refusing to face that she wasn’t coming back. His clothes piled up, the house got dirtier and dirtier and things continued to crumble under his feet while he waited and waited for his alcoholic wife to stop drinking.

Might as well wait for it to snow in July, you stubborn old man,
she told herself as they sped towards town for breakfast.

She knew her father was too old to be fixing and painting other peoples’ houses, climbing ladders and stumbling around on high roofs, but he was too stubborn to admit it, like with a lot of things in his life. Even if he was small, wiry and had never been sick a day in his life, he wasn’t getting any younger.

Lately he’d started fumbling and dropping things, and he’d forget things like where he’d laid the tape measure or what he was just about to do. Absentminded as all get out. It was beginning to worry her, along with his mysterious exhaustion. A lot.

He’d give someone the shirt off his back for he was a good, loving man. Her father had always been there for her.

He should be retired and sipping lemonade on his front porch as other people did at his age. It was the constant lack of money that forced him to keep working.

Her parents’ little ten-acre farm, where her trailer sat, hadn’t been profitable for years. They’d once had cattle, chickens and horses when she and her two brothers had been children. They’d had crops, wheat and sometimes corn.

Now all the cattle and chickens were long gone, sold away one by one over the last drought years. As for the horses, well, there were only old Lightning and his mate, Black Beauty, left. Two bags of bones. She couldn’t even run them hard any more.

Thus, her father had become somewhat of a house handyman around Summer Haven. Which was a joke in itself, seeing as how Jenny could still hear Mom nagging at him because he’d never fixed a thing around their house and still didn’t.

Jenny tagged along and helped on his painting jobs, not only because she had to keep an eye on him, make sure he didn’t work himself to death and that he got paid, but because since she’d moved back to Summer Haven after her second divorce, she would be flat broke if she didn’t.

Besides, painting houses and helping her dad with light carpentry at eight dollars an hour was sure a lot better than slinging hash at her brother’s greasy-spoon restaurant. At least she was outside more.

Jenny pursed her lips in thought, sensitive as always over the whole work thing. Her father, like everyone else, couldn’t understand why she was doing any of it in the first place when ...
no, don’t start on it again,
she warned herself.
Drop it.

Jenny returned to daydreaming out the window, and, as usual, purposely wiped out all thoughts of her past.

The heat waves were already shimmering across the asphalt road as it coiled into the horizon before them, like a piece of that black licorice she’d always liked as a child.

It was going to be a scorcher, all right.

“I was going to suggest we skip breakfast this morning to get an early start on painting the Albers’ House, as big as it is, but I sure am famished,” her father said. His face was sweaty as he ran his stubby hand over his very short, gray hair. It looked like a bristle brush, he kept it so short. “Joey’s probably expecting us anyway.”

No doubt. “I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to skip breakfast,” she replied. “Besides, I could use a cup of that stuff he calls coffee. It’ll shock me awake.” She grimaced and yawned.

“Ah, it’s not that bad. Great biscuits and gravy.” He swerved the car into the shopping center’s entrance and pulled up before the hole-in-the-wall called Joey’s Place.

Her younger brother, Joey, owned and ran the tiny restaurant beside the old boarded-up Rebel Theater. Joey’s Place, as Joey had dubbed it, was not only the best place to get homemade biscuits and gravy, it was the gossip hub and social spot where everyone hung out in the small town. Joey had put everything he had into it, and though he’d barely broken even over the two years he’d run it, it was the first thing that had truly made him happy.

He’d tried a lot of other things before he’d stumbled onto the empty restaurant. The previous owner hadn’t done as well with it and had gone broke. Joey had gotten it for a song. It was Joey, an amicable, charismatic character, who’d made the place a success—and his fantastic cooking.

Joey was thirty-six and divorced (like everyone else in the world). Jenny and Joey were so much alike, both storytellers, but his gift was verbal while hers had always been the written word.

They got out of the car. Jenny’s blue jeans felt damp with the heat, and her T-shirt was already splotched with her sweat.

She gazed up at the closed theater as they walked by with a yearning wistfulness.

“Had some great times in that theater, Dad. Some of the best memories of my childhood. I hate it looking abandoned like that.” She nodded at the Rebel, patting the crossed, aged wooden boards over the elaborate doors as they passed it.

The theater was a two-story rambling anachronism that had originally been built in the nineteen twenties. In its day, it had been the height of fashion in movie palaces with its crystal chandeliers, etched mirrors, velvet staircase and ornate upper balconies, a fairyland decorated in what Jenny had always fancifully thought of as a sort of Spanish Renaissance.

The theater was one of the oldest buildings in Summer Haven, and somewhere around the nineteen seventies the rest of the shopping center seemed to spring up around it. Some years after that, the old white elephant of a movie palace closed its doors for good and died. The owner had decreed it was too expensive to run when he’d declared bankruptcy. And now, who wanted to go to the movies when there were big screen television sets?

It’d never died in her memories.

She could still smell the buttery popcorn, feel the plush velvet carpeting beneath her tennis shoes and feel the prickliness of the chairs on her bare legs below her shorts just like it was yesterday. She could still see Joey, Thomas, Jeff and herself laughing as they came tumbling out of those same doors on a long-ago summer’s night. Their faces reflected like mirrors what they’d just seen: horror, delight and pathos. The theater liked to show the real moldy oldies late Saturday nights.

She’d been swept off her feet by spectacles like
The Ten
Commandments
and
Ben Hur
. Ah, and how she’d loved those old monster movies:
Godzilla, The Blob, Count Dracula
and
The Mummy.

Jenny took a deep breath, glancing down.

“What’s this?” she wondered aloud, kneeling to touch a large red stain on the sidewalk in front of the theater’s door. When she lifted her fingers and turned them over in the sunlight, they were sticky and wet. She sniffed them.
Blood?

Her stomach churned, and she hastily wiped her fingers off on the old boards. Rising to her feet, staring up at the theater with puzzled eyes, she whispered to no one, “Wonder where that came from.”

Her father had already reached the restaurant, though, and hadn’t heard her.

“Coming?” He turned around at the door and was giving her an impatient, hurry-up look.

“Yeah,” she answered drily. No sense in mentioning the blood to her father, he wouldn’t care anyway. Mind your own business, he’d say. Like always.

Inside Joey’s restaurant, they found two empty stools at the counter.

Joey’s Place had been a donut shop once, and it still reminded Jenny of a donut shop. The walls were brilliant white, and a counter with attached white and red stools lined the whole back of the smallish room. The floor had a nondescript red carpet. Joey had repainted everything a cleaner white and had hung lots of campy, framed pictures of old movie posters (he was, like her, an obsessed movie buff) and travel posters along the white walls to give the place some color.

It gave a person something pretty to look at while they ate, Joey had explained. The mix created an eccentric, but unique atmosphere that Jenny found had unexpectedly grown on her.

It was different.

The place this morning was crowded as usual though it was barely seven o’clock. In this heat, her father liked getting an early start.

“Morning, Dad, Sis. Up early, huh?” Joey was placing cups of steaming coffee in front of them before they even asked. He seemed glad to see them.

“The early bird gets the worm, remember?” Jenny winked at her brother, a tall, ruggedly handsome guy with long dark hair he wore tied back in a ponytail. He had light green eyes the color of her peridot birthstone.

“Besides, we had to get up early. We have the Albers’ monstrosity to paint. We figure it’ll take about two years, at least,” she said with feigned dislike, throwing her hand up against her forehead dramatically. “We thought we’d better get a punctual start.”

Joey chuckled. “Whew! The Albers place. You gonna paint all of it?” He had turned to gaze at his father, who was sipping his coffee and sighing with pleasure. “All twenty floors, huh, Dad?” Joey played along.