Vampire Blood (30 page)

“Maybe not,” she replied, her eyes distant, “but all I can think of, Jeff, is that the police didn’t stop my father from being kidnapped and killed; the police didn’t save the Albers or any of the others. They haven’t, even yet, a damn clue to who’s committing these crimes, so you can’t blame me one bit if I’m a little skeptical about putting Joey’s life in their hands. Now can you?”

“No,” Jeff sighed. “I don’t blame you, but what else can we do? We can’t camp out here in his room, day and night, until he can come home.”

Jenny contemplated Joey’s damaged, sleeping face tenderly, knowing Jeff was right, but not knowing what else to do. Joey twisted restlessly in his sleep, as if he were having bad dreams. He cried out, moaned.

There were scratches, marks, on the side of his neck. Somehow familiar. Jenny stared at them.

Her dad had had marks like them on his neck. It seemed ages ago now.

“Let’s go home, Jenny. You need to rest or you’ll be no good to no one, not even yourself. We’ll get a good night’s sleep. I’ll put a call in to Sheriff Samuels on our way out, and see if he can spare a man for the night outside Joey’s room. Then tomorrow we’ll decide what to do about it. I’ll even ask a few of the nurses and aides to keep a special eye on Joey tonight, if it’ll make you feel better, but I agree with the doctor, nothing’s going to hurt him here. He’s safe.”

Jenny gazed up lovingly at Jeff and nodded weakly. She was so confused about everything, her head was killing her. “Okay. Whatever you say.”

“Good. I’ll go make the call and meet you by the nurses’ station in a few minutes.”

When he’d left the room, she pulled a delicate silver chained necklace with a tarnished cross on it from around her neck and placed it carefully around Joey’s, clasping it in the back. It’d been a present long ago from her father after her first communion. This morning, she’d seen it lying in a corner of her jewelry box when she’d been searching for something else, and had, for some unexplainable reason, taken it out and put it on. After all these years. She’d thought, at first, that it’d just been a sentimental act precipitated by her father’s death. Something he’d given her as a child that made her feel closer to him now that he was gone.

In that moment, though, looking down on those mysterious bites on the side of her brother’s neck, she wasn’t so sure.

She followed Jeff out the door. They were supposed to spend the night with her mother, who suddenly didn’t want to be alone that night.

* * * *

“Do you still think we’re in danger?” Jenny asked Jeff, as she leaned over the restaurant’s window in the sunlight the next morning. She was pushing in the metal glazers points that held in the new windowpane with a putty knife.

Her question didn’t fool him one bit. She was frightened.

Jeff cocked his head at her, his hand with the putty knife poised above the window. He was working along behind her, tediously pressing in a straight line of putty where the glass met the wooden frame.

Since it was warmer than the last few days, almost hot again, he was wearing cutoff jeans, a short-sleeved T-shirt and a strip of cloth tied around his forehead like an Indian.

He didn’t like being so close to the theater, suspecting what he did, so his glances kept sneaking in that direction, as if he expected to be attacked at any moment.

It was broad daylight, he kept assuring himself, and so far all of the attacks had apparently taken place at night.

“I don’t know, Jenny, but I’ll tell you this. First your horses, your friends, your father and now your brother. Looks like a kind of pattern to me. Doesn’t it to you?”

“You might have a point there,” she responded unhappily.

He turned to stare at her. Something was going on in her mind that he couldn’t figure out. Something was bothering the hell out of her, and she wouldn’t let him in on it yet. He was trying to be patient, but he didn’t like it.

“You want my opinion? I told you before. I think we should grab your mother and your brother, no matter how sick he is, attach the trailer behind Joey’s truck and move to another state. Immediately. Cause I think this is bigger than us. I don’t think we have a chance in hell of fighting it. Whatever it is. I believe we should get the hell out of town. Go into hiding. Now.”

“Coward,” Jenny replied sullenly.

“No, I mean it. I think we should go.”

She lowered her eyes, staring somewhere off into the distance. Not saying anything to his suggestion. That in itself was different.

A few days ago she’d confided, “I can’t leave Summer Haven. I’m not running away. I’ve done that most of my life. No more. This is my home. No one’s chasing me off. I’ll fight if I have to, but I’m not leaving. Ever. I don’t want to talk about it again,” she’d said. Then she’d strode purposely away to avoid another confrontation.

They were at Joey’s Place putting in a new picture window. Right after the damage was first done, the day that her father’s body had been found, they’d slapped up a large piece of plywood until they could get the time to fix it right.

“Can’t have anyone else breaking in here and looting the place,” she’d said, with the tears of grief fresh on her cheeks.

Doing something, anything for Joey had seemed to help her. She’d measured the window with her father’s old tape measure she’d had in her car and had remarked, “I’ll call tomorrow and order a new window. Thank goodness there wasn’t any damage to the window frame, only broken glass. I want this place cleaned and looking as good as new when Joey comes back.”

“Sort of like a present to your brother, huh?” he’d asked. She’d never had any doubt that he would make it.

“Something like that.”

“Jenny?” He stood up, the stiffened muscles from squatting so long making him grimace, and wiped the sweat from his brow with his fingers at the same time. He’d caught the uncertainty in her eyes.

What the hell was bothering her?

Earlier, when they’d visited the hospital, Joey had been awake. He was doing better, though extremely weak and unusually restrained, for Joey anyway. The despair was still with him. He wouldn’t say much. Only that he hadn’t made any of his story up. Vampires
had
attacked him.

He was terrified of the dark, terrified of people. He said he couldn’t stop the nightmares.

Jenny hadn’t tried to talk him out of any of it. She’d listened or watched, her face troubled.

Sheriff Samuels had sent out men to stand guard outside Joey’s hospital room whenever he could spare them. Since the kidnappings and murders had increased, the sheriff said he was going to call in the FBI and Jeff prayed it’d be soon.

The nurses had informed them that if Joey awoke at night and found no one else in the room, he’d lapse into hysterics, screaming,
They’ll get me, they’ll kill me this time.
And he’d have to be heavily sedated.

Some nights, when an officer wasn’t available, he and Jenny would stay as long as they could. Until the nurses caught them and ushered them out. They didn’t know what else to do. They couldn’t afford to hire a bodyguard for her brother.

They finished puttying the window.

“Well, that’s done,” Jenny groaned, stretching. She was wearing shorts, too, and her hair was captured in a braid.

Jeff couldn’t help but admire her, she was so pretty, so alive. He loved her so damn much and was so grateful she’d allowed him back into her life. This time, he’d sworn, he’d never let her down again.

“Let’s get inside and clean the rest of the mess up in there.”

“Anything you say, boss,” he joked as he trotted behind her.

After they’d swept the loose glass up and scrubbed the blood away, Jenny went behind the counter and made a pot of coffee. When it was ready, she poured them both cups, gathered the left-over donuts they’d bought that morning and set all of it on the counter.

She was drinking her second cup with Jeff when she calmly asked, “What happens if they, whoever they are, try to kill Joey again?”

“We don’t know that they will.”

“If they do?”

“Jenny, I told you we could take Joey and your mom and leave.”

“No, not yet, the doctor says he’s too weak, too sick to be moved.”

He eyed her thoughtfully. It was the first time Jenny had even considered going. It gave him hope.

Abruptly she changed the subject. “Do you know anything about ... vampires?” Then she chuckled as if it were a joke.

He stared up at her in the sunlight, taken aback. Not only at the question, but at the fact that it was Jenny asking it, joke or not.

He played along. “Jenny, why are you asking
me?
You’re the expert. After all,” he mentioned softly, smiling at her, “you did write a book on them, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

“In
Summer’s Night,
if I recall correctly, you wrote about all the ways one can kill a vampire. Didn’t you?”

“I did. I just never thought in my wildest nightmares that I’d ever have to make any other use of that knowledge. If any of it was anything other than pure fiction. Who knew?”

“Didn’t your dad have an old shotgun at the farmhouse?”

Jenny shut her eyes. She seemed frustrated. “According to legend, a shotgun won’t kill vampires.”

“What does?” he played along, with no hint of sarcasm.

“A silver bullet in that shotgun maybe, or a stake in the heart and then hacking the heads off. To be caught out in sunlight. If I remember my research accurately.” Jenny gnawed her lip and slid her eyes away.

“Whew, sounds messy, and dangerous, too.”

Jenny shrugged. “I guess it would be.”

“Why don’t we go over there now and confront them?” Jeff said carefully. “It’s daytime. We’d be safe. If they are vampires, that is, they’d be sleeping, wouldn’t they?”

“Yeah, they would,” Jenny responded.

The last few days, for some reason, things had begun to nag at her, she’d confessed to him, stopping her in her tracks. “
I sure wish I would have made it down to the basement the other day, saw what was making all the noise down there. If Michelson wouldn’t have stopped me.”

It was as if she were bringing together pieces of a complicated puzzle using snatches of her conversations with Michelson, what she’d seen and experienced at the theater and other things she wouldn’t talk to him about. She was keeping secrets, but he wasn’t about to push her until she was ready to reveal what they were.

She frowned. “Could be they are down there.” She laughed nervously. “Well, if you believed in such things.”

“Yeah, if you believed.” He gave her a hard look.

She reflected a moment. “Who could face them anyway, day or night, unless they were prepared to fight them,” she mouthed softly, so softly he knew she was actually talking to herself, not him. “Who knows where myth ends and reality begins.”

“Yeah,” he replied sarcastically. “If you believed in that sort of thing. Silly, huh?”

“Yeah, silly,” closing the matter. She refused to look at him, yet her restrained manner gave her away. She was worried. She was beginning to believe and didn’t want to.

They fell silent, as if by some unspoken rule, and finished their work.

After about an hour, Jeff announced, “Let’s go home. We’re done here.”

“Good idea,” Jenny murmured. “Let’s go home.”

* * * *

The following evening, Jeff read through the last three days of old newspapers that had accumulated as Jenny cleared up the supper dishes. They hadn’t been home much lately to read them.

They’d visited Joey at the hospital before supper. He had been groggy from the sedatives most of the time, or asleep. At least he was healing.

When Jenny sat down, Jeff handed her the front page. “Look at this.”

Jenny scanned the columns of cramped type. “All the articles on missing people?”

“Yes,” Jeff retorted grimly. He’d walked over to stand at the window, his back to her, gazing out.

Jenny read the first one, her eyes clouding over.

“The old woman’s daughter claimed she went to the show at the new theater and never came home. Two nights ago,” she stated lamely.

Jeff was beside her. He’d picked up more pages from the table on his way and dropped them in her lap.

“Read that smaller story on the bottom of Tuesday’s front page.”

Jenny read it, her lips pursing tighter every second. “Says here that the two teenagers went out for the evening. Their mother isn’t sure where they went, but, here,” she tapped the paper, “she says that earlier in the afternoon they were talking about going to the theater, the Rebel, for their late show.” Jeff nodded.

“A coincidence?” she pondered aloud.

Jeff raised his eyebrows at her. “No, the newspaper reporter doesn’t think so, either. He’s going to talk to the theater owners and investigate it.” He thought for a moment and remarked, “I wonder if the sheriff has called in the FBI yet?”

She got up clutching the newspaper in her hand, headed for the telephone and dialed, her hand shaking. “Good evening. Could I speak with Sheriff Samuels, please?”