“I am tired, even though I sleep all the time. Could …” I blushed again. “Could a person be bitten by a vampire and not know it?”
Frank got up from his chair and came around his desk. He brushed aside my hair and peered down at my neck before I had a chance to object to the examination. He swore, his breath tickling the skin behind my ear. “I can’t see in this light …” He grabbed me by the forearm, pulled me from the chair, sat me on the edge of his desk, and aimed his desk lamp at my neck. He tilted my head right, then left, his blunt calloused fingertips methodically palpating my skin, his voice crisp and business-like as he gave me a run-down on the vampire modus operandi.
“It is possible for a vampire to drink a victim’s blood without him or her knowing. They would come at night, of course, but they must have previously been invited in. Have any of the Russian studies professors been to your house?”
“No,” I answered, and then yelped as Frank slid his hand under my shirt.
“Sorry, just trying to be thorough. I don’t see anything, but I’m afraid you’ll have to check the femoral artery. Do you know where the femoral artery is?”
“Yes,” I said, blushing even more.
“Do you sleep alone?” he asked.
“Uh … no …” I could feel the blood heating my whole chest now. I hoped Frank didn’t think it was a reaction to his touch. Because it wasn’t.
“Then it’s probably not a vampire attack. Still, I’ll look into it.”
The only think he was looking into right now was my cleavage.
“Hey, I don’t think vampires bite there.”
Franks mouth quirked into a crooked grin. “No?” he asked, straightening the collar of my shirt. He was just stepping away when I heard a step behind him. I looked up, over Frank’s shoulder, and saw Liam standing in the hall, his face white, his eyes wide.
I opened my mouth to call his name, but he was already gone, vanished so quickly I almost thought I’d imagined him. But that was just wishful thinking.
I pushed Frank away – or tried to. Frank’s chest was a solid obstacle. “Liam?” he asked, pursing his lips to keep from grinning. “Uh oh. That probably didn’t look so good from his angle.”
“I’ve got to catch him.” I tried pushing Frank again and this time he stepped aside.
“I’m sure you’ll come up with a very reasonable explanation for why I had my hand down your shirt.” He was grinning now, not trying to hide his amusement. “Let me know what you come up with. I’ll be happy to back you up.”
I opened my mouth to reply but realized I didn’t have time to spar with Delmarco. “Just look into why all our students are getting sick,” I snapped as I left the room. “I’ll take care of Liam.”
I didn’t look back but I could hear Frank’s laughter echoing in the stairwell as I ran down the four flights. I was hoping Liam had gone back to his classroom as there were twenty minutes left to his class period—what had he been doing upstairs anyway? Maybe he’d come up to get a book from his office? – but I found his classroom empty except for a tow-headed boy sleeping with his head pillowed on his arms.
“Hey.” I shook the boy’s shoulder. When he looked up at me blearily I recognized him from his tattoo as the Weezer fan who’d been snoozing in the infirmary earlier. “What happened to the creative writing class that meets in here?”
“Yeah, that’s my class, man. I’m here. I made it to class.”
“Uh huh, good for you. So where are the rest of the students and where’s Mr. Doyle?”
“Liam? Hey, he’s cool …” The boy rubbed his eyes and looked around the empty classroom. “Hey, where’d everybody go?”
I sighed with frustration and turned to go but the boy grabbed my hand and pointed at the chalkboard. “Look, they left me a note. How cool is that?”
Written in Liam’s elegant old-fashioned script were the words: Wilder, I cancelled class due to low attendance. Go back to your room and get some sleep.
I felt a lump in my throat reading the cheerful, bantering note. Liam must have written it minutes before he went upstairs and saw me with Frank. “How long ago …?” I started to ask Wilder, but when I turned around I saw he’d already fallen back to sleep.
I left Fraser Hall and crossed the quad, scanning the paths for Liam, but it was hard to make out the faces of the muffled pedestrians bowed under the heavily falling snow. I stopped in the library to see if he’d gone there, but the rooms where he usually sat were empty save for studying – or napping – students. His independent study with Nicky wasn’t for another hour. There was no place else to look but home.
I started off fast down the path to the southeast gate, but slowed when I went through it. I could see footsteps in the snow leading up to the porch steps, but none leading away. There was a light on in the front bedroom Liam had made into a study. So he was home. I clasped my hand to my chest, conscious for the first time of how hard my heart was beating, how afraid I’d been that he’d be gone. But my relief was quickly replaced by uncertainty. What was I going to say to him? How could I explain what he’d seen in Frank’s office? I could try telling him that Frank had been looking for a tick in my hair – but down my shirt? No, I’d never be able to tell that lie with a straight face.
Or I could tell him the truth. That I’d gone to Frank because I suspected the college’s resident (and tenured!) vampires were helping themselves to student blood – and maybe mine, too. Why not? I thought defiantly, marching across the street. No one had told me I had to keep the college’s secret. I could take him to Liz and Soheila to backup my story …
I stopped halfway across the street. Even if I managed to convince Liam that Fairwick was populated by witches and fairies, I could only explain what happened in Frank’s office by blowing Frank’s cover – first to Liam and then potentially to anyone I asked to confirm my story. If Frank’s cover was blown he wouldn’t be able to investigate what was making so many students – and myself – sick. And while I might find Frank annoying and arrogant, I also suspected that he was the most competent and efficient man to get that job done. I couldn’t compromise his ability to do it.
I walked the rest of the way across the street and up the porch steps more slowly. I opened the door, still without the slightest idea of what to say to Liam, and tripped over something in the foyer. Looking down I saw that it was a bird’s nest with a cracked blue egg inside. I stared at it, trying to figure out how it had come to be in the foyer, and then remembered that it was one of the “finds” that Liam had brought back from his poetry walks and left on the table in the foyer. I glanced at the table and saw that all the other objects that were usually there – the wooden bowl where we left our keys, the pile of spare change, the basket full of takeout menus – had been swept onto the floor. Clutching the house key in my hand because I didn’t know where to put it in all this chaos, I followed the debris up the stairs, my feet crunching on shards of blue glass from a bottle that had once stood on the windowsill on the landing, to the doorway to Liam’s study. He was at his desk, which was empty save for the round gray riverstones he collected and used as paperweights, gazing vacantly out at the falling snow. The cold gray light had washed his face of all color, blanching his skin as white as the cotton shirt I myself had washed and bleached and ironed. His black hair and eyes – sunken deep in their sockets – looked like part of the gathering afternoon shadows, as did the loose folds of his dark wool coat. He looked, in the pitiless winter light, as if he might vanish if I blinked my eyes.
“Liam …” I said.
He raised his hand without turning to me. “Don’t,” he said. “You don’t have to explain. I understand.”
“You do?” I stepped softly into the room and perched on the edge of the chair we’d bought in Bovine Corners a few weeks ago.
“Yes. I know we’ve gone too fast … that I never gave you time to get over breaking up with Paul. It’s natural you should have second thoughts.”
“But I don’t!” I
cried, getting to my feet. “What you saw … It’s not what you think. Frank ….”
He winced at Frank’s name and held up his hand again. I noticed this time that it was trembling. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about what you may or may not have done with Frank Delmarco. It’s what you said to Nicky Ballard that upset me.”
“What I said to Nicky?” I sank down into the chair, searching my mind for what he could mean. “I talked to Nicky about her break up with her boyfriend …” And then I remembered. “She thought that finding a new boyfriend was the best cure for heartbreak because she thought that’s what I had done.”
“And is it?” He turned now. His eyes were rimmed with red, the only color in his face. “Is that why you’re with me? As a cure for heartbreak?”
“No,” I said. “I know that’s how it might look from the outside, but you and me coming together … I know that had nothing to do with Paul.”
“But you said we might be a mistake.”
“Nicky said that to you?”
“She wrote about it in the journal she turned in today.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to recall exactly what I’d said to Nicky. “I think what I actually said is that you and I are old enough to deal with the consequences of our mistakes. I didn’t mean that us being together was a mistake.”
Liam tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “From what I saw in Frank’s office today you seem to be having second thoughts.”
“Hey, a minute ago you said you didn’t care about that! Anyway, it wasn’t what it looked like.”
Liam laughed. The sound startled me. “That’s exactly what the unfaithful lover always says in the movies when he or she gets caught.”
“Oh, Liam, please. This isn’t a movie!” I was beginning to get exasperated. “Sometimes I think you’ve learned everything you know about love from the movies.”
The minute the words were out I remembered Jeannie and the things Liam had learned from his time with Moira, but it was too late to take it back. Liam was already getting up and reaching for the duffel bag at his feet, which I’d missed seeing until now.
“Liam,” I cried, reaching for him, “I didn’t mean …” But when I laid my hand on him he jerked his arm away as if my touch had burned him. He held his hand up in front of his face, fingers clenched into a fist, his eyes dark and wild in his pale face. Then he turned and left, so quickly that I felt the air stir from his coat as he whipped around. I stood staring after him until a sharp pain in my hand drew my attention. I looked down and saw that I’d slipped the toothed end of the house key between my fingers the way Annie had once shown me to do if I was afraid someone was following me. Part of my brain had been so frightened by Liam’s reaction to my touch that I’d been ready to attack him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I DIDN’T GET much chance to dwell on the fight – or on that surprising flash of violence I’d seen in Liam’s eyes – because fifteen minutes after Liam left Mara showed up for her work-study assignment. Most college freshmen would have taken my failure to show up at my office as an opportunity to take the afternoon off, but not Mara.
“I was sure you’d want to get some more work done on the Dahlia LaMotte papers. They are so very fascinating.”
Normally I would agree, but the last thing I wanted to do that afternoon was catalog the romantic fantasies of a reclusive spinster – especially with Mara, who had a way of zeroing in on the most erotic passages of LaMotte’s fiction. I hadn’t really intended for Mara to read the more salacious material in the handwritten manuscripts; I’d only asked her to make a record of how many pages LaMotte wrote each day. I wanted to see if LaMotte wrote more as the book progressed, if she was sometimes blocked, and how much time she took off between books. But it was impossible to keep Mara from reading the material and she often picked the raciest scenes to read aloud, asking for embarrassing explanations of sexual terms. Whenever she came across a word she didn’t know she would come sit beside me – quite close – and point to the word. I wondered sometimes if she wasn’t deliberately trying to make me uncomfortable, or if she might even be trying to make a sexual advance. It made for some long, awkward afternoons, but on this afternoon she did make an interesting discovery.
“I’ve noticed,” she said, looking up from the yellow legal pad on which she kept her page tallies, “that there’s a correlation between Miss LaMotte’s output and the sex scenes in the book.”
“Really?” I asked, intrigued.
“Yes, look …”
Mara came over to where I was sitting on the floor and knelt beside me. She put the yellow legal pad in my lap and reached across me, her arm brushing against my shoulder. “I’ve put asterisks wherever a romantic interaction occurs, one for a meaningful glance, two for a kiss, and three for actual intercourse …”
“I think I get the idea. What exactly is the correlation you see?”
“Well, look at the page tallies. In between the meaningful glance and the kissing scenes Miss LaMotte writes an average of ten to fifteen pages a day. For every book, see, I’ve cataloged them all this way.” She flipped the pages of the notepad and I saw scores of asterisks dotting the pages. So many kisses, I thought trying to remember the last time Liam had kissed me. Would it be the last time? “Then between the first kiss and the intercourse, she writes an average of twenty to thirty pages a day, the number escalating sometimes to as many as sixty pages a day as she gets closer to the intercourse scene.”
“Really?” I asked, distracted from my memories of Liam’s kisses by Mara’s discovery. I picked up the pad and shifted my weight so that Mara wasn’t quite so close. “That is interesting.”
“What’s really interesting is that after the intercourse scene the page tallies decrease again. Sometimes she doesn’t even write anything for a few days. It’s as if she’s worn out.”
I flipped through the pages, each one representing one of Dahlia LaMotte’s novels. Mara was right. There was a definite pattern. It was as if Dahlia LaMotte became increasingly excited as the sexual tension between her characters mounted and then suffered a sort of sympathetic post-coital slump after they finally made love.
“Mara, that’s a really important discovery. Thank you very much.”
Mara smiled a rare smile and her cheeks glowed pink. She looked almost pretty. The poor girl, I thought, she gets so little encouragement, I really should make more of an effort with her … invite her over with some of the other students for dinner sometime … But not tonight, I thought, yawning, I just wanted to crawl into bed and go to sleep tonight.
“I want to go through these and think about what you’ve found,” I said, getting to my feet. “Why don’t we call it a day?”
Mara looked disappointed but then brightened. “Can we work again tomorrow?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, even though tomorrow wasn’t one of our scheduled days. I might as well throw myself into my work to distract myself from replaying in my head the fight I’d had with Liam.
After Mara left I made myself a cup of soup and took it upstairs to my bedroom to eat in bed. The house felt hollow and empty without Liam there. I went into his study and looked out the window across the street to the inn to see if there was a light on in his old room. There wasn’t. Had he gone somewhere else? Or taken a different room? Or was he there and sleeping soundly, undisturbed by our fight?
Before I left the room, I noticed that he’d piled the gray riverstones into a small pillar – as if he’d been fashioning a grave cairn. They looked so eerie like that I unpiled them. I carried one of the stories into my bedroom, its cool, round, weight somehow soothing in my palm.
As tired as I was I still couldn’t sleep that night. Even the racy Dahlia LaMotte manuscript of The Viking Raider failed to distract me. I’d come to the part where the heroine is finally to be ransomed back to her royal fiancé. Her Viking captor unlocks her room one last time the night before she is to leave and sweeps in …
… like a stor
m at sea come to capsize my resolve. “Will your young lord do this to you?” he growled, sinking his bristly face to my breasts and licking my nipples until they hardened. “Or this?” grasping my hips and grinding his manhood against me, but then pulling back, teasing me as I thrust upward, hungry to feel the length of him inside me at last. Always he had held back this one last intimacy between us, preserving my maidenhood for my intended. But I no longer cared what my husband might think on our wedding night. I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him to me, begging him to come inside me. “Ah lass,” he moaned as he finally entered me. “You have conquered me. It is I who am your captive.”
And even though I knew full well that by the logic of these books the Viking and the Irish lass would end up together by the last page my eyes filled with tears when he gave her the key to her cell as a final parting gift and she read the note tied to it with a scarlet ribbon.
“I give ye the key to your freedom, lass, but can you give me back the key to my heart?”
When I turned out the lights Liam’s side of the bed – how had we ended up with sides so quickly? – yawned like an icy crevasse I might fall into if I relaxed a muscle. I lay tensed, replaying our argument over and over, trying to come up with some other way I could make it come out differently, but instead I kept coming up with the same interlocking loops. I’d doubted that we were right together and told Nicky that we might be a mistake, and then I ended up in Frank’s office letting him put his hand down my shirt. I could try to explain that I was only trying to discover what was making me so tired and thin, but then mightn’t the reason I couldn’t sleep and I was losing weight be that I had made a mistake? Maybe Liam and I had moved too fast. What did I really know about him? There was always a piece of himself that he kept to himself – I’d thought at first it was the sadness over Jeannie’s death, or the part of him that wrote poetry, but when he’d drawn his arm back today I’d thought he was going to hit me. Had I sensed that potential for violence all along? Was I looking for a way out of the relationship? Was that was the reason I’d gone to Frank with the idea about the vampires because really, I could have looked down my own shirt to check for fang marks.
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