Aidan reached the truck stop, a noisy, cheerful place where the jukebox played too loudly, and felt better for having people around him. He took a seat at the counter and reached for a menu.
A friendly waitress—her name tag read “Doris”—took his order right away. While Aidan was sipping his coffee, a boy rushed in, waving a sheet of pink paper and beaming. He was about seven, Aidan guessed, and he had freckles and one missing tooth.
“Look, Doris!” the child cried, scrambling onto one of the stools, right next to Aidan. The lad glanced up at him, smiled with what could only be amiable recognition, nodded a greeting, and then turned his quicksilver attention back to Doris. “There’s a letter from Aunt Neely!”
Aidan’s heart somersaulted at the mention of the familiar name. It was unusual, after all, and it followed that he’d known her here in Bright River.
“What does she say, Danny?” Doris asked, grinning as she set a dinner of chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans in front of Aidan. She winked at him before turning her full attention on the boy.
Danny still clutched the letter in one grubby hand, and it was all Aidan could do not to reach out and snatch it away from him. “She isn’t in Phoenix anymore—she’s in Colorado,” the kid announced importantly. “She was working in an office for a while, but now she’s got a job in a steak house. Aunt Neely was bored sitting behind a desk. She says she’s got all kinds of—all kinds of—” He paused and consulted the paper. “Nervous energy,” he finished.
Aidan felt warm inside, and oddly amused, and he could explain neither emotion. He stuck his fork into his food, but his ravenous appetite was gone.
“And look at this great stamp!” Danny said, slapping a pink envelope down on the countertop.
Aidan strained, saw the return address: 1320 Tamarack Road, Pine Hill, Colorado. “I used to collect stamps when I was a lad,” he commented casually.
Danny beamed at him. “I must have a thousand of them. Aunt Neely sends them to me all the time. I’ve got a whole boxful from England.”
England. That produced another vague recollection, more a feeling than an image. He’d been so certain that he’d met the elusive Neely in Bright River, but the mention of the country he’d just left touched a resonant chord in his spirit.
1320 Tamarack Road, he repeated to himself. Pine Hill, Colorado.
“This Aunt Neely of yours must be a pretty interesting lady,” Aidan commented when Doris had given Danny a cup of hot chocolate and bustled off to wait on some new arrivals.
Danny’s eyes were alight. “She is. She used to work for a real senator. He was a crook, and she almost got killed because she told the FBI what he was doing, but she’s okay now.”
Aidan frowned, for the child’s words stimulated still another memory that wouldn’t quite come into focus.
He finished his meal, returned to his huge, echoing house, and wandered restlessly from room to room.
In the morning, after a virtually sleepless night, Aidan called the car rental company and asked them to pick up the vehicle he’d driven from New York. Then he went out to the garage where his white Triumph Spitfire awaited him.
He smiled when the engine caught on the first try, and sped into Bright River. His first stop was the supermarket, where he purchased staples—milk and butter and bread—along with tea and potatoes, both fresh and frozen vegetables, and a thick steak. Passing a florist’s shop, he suddenly stopped, grocery bags in his arms, oddly stricken by an enormous bunch of white roses on display in the window.
Aidan felt yet another tug at his deeper mind, and this one was patently uncomfortable. The flowers had some significance, he was certain, but that was all he knew.
Walking slowly, Aidan took the bags of food to the car and set them on the passenger seat. Then he returned to the florist’s window and stood there, looking at the roses, trying to work out why they stirred him so.
He swallowed, fighting an unaccountable desire to weep.
A gray-haired woman put her head outside the door of the shop and called, smiling, “Hello, there, Mr. Tremayne. Aren’t those the finest roses you’ve ever seen? I buy them direct from a nice man upstate—he raises them in his own greenhouse. They smell wonderful, too, unlike those poor anemic things they sell in the supermarkets these days.”
Since the woman had called Aidan by name, he probably knew her, but her identity eluded him. He smiled and went into the shop, drawn there by some curious force buried in his subconscious.
The scent of the roses was delicate, but it seemed to fill the small shop, overshadowing the perfumes rising from bright splashes of colorful flowers grouped in buckets and pots and vases.
Aidan selected eight of the roses, which were still tightly budded, and put money on the cluttered counter.
“Good day, Mrs. Crider,” he heard himself say as he left the shop with the strange purchase. So he had known the woman’s name, after all, though he still had no recollection of meeting her before.
How odd, he thought.
At home Aidan found a crystal vase in a cabinet in one of the bedrooms and put the roses in water even before bringing the groceries in from the car. He set the flowers on the marble top of the round antique table in his entry hall and then stood staring at them for a long time, his arms folded. He wondered why the sight satisfied him so much, and at the same time stirred in him a seemingly fathomless sense of loss.
He supposed he was probably a little crazy, which wasn’t really surprising, considering that he’d been found naked in the middle of an English snowstorm, lying inside a circle of stones like some kind of sacrifice.
He’d get over it, he assured himself, turning from the roses and heading outside for the bags he’d wedged into the passenger seat of his car. One of the few things he knew for certain was that he was a resilient sort, not easily broken.
Still, the scent of those flowers haunted him, and he kept going back to them, wondering and trying to remember.
Something else troubled him, though, even more than the roses did. It was the name Neely and the newfound knowledge that she lived in a place called Pine Hill, far away in Colorado.
After a steak dinner, which he devoured, Aidan retired to his study. The place was crammed with books, some of which he remembered reading and many that he didn’t. The paintings on the walls were only vaguely familiar, though he knew he’d done them with his own hands.
He sighed, took an atlas from the shelf, and flipped through until he located a map of the United States. Bewildered, fascinated, driven, he sought and found Colorado, then traced the distance between that place and Connecticut with the tip of one finger.
Once again Aidan whispered the name of his private ghost: “Neely.” Once again he searched his mind for something more than the fading image, but it was no use. Nothing came to him, except for a sensation of sweet sadness, and a yearning so keen that it brought tears to his eyes.
Suddenly Aidan was seized with a terror that he would forget the face, and even the name, as he had forgotten so many scattered details of his past.
He rummaged for paper, scrounged up a pencil, and bent over his desk, in such a hurry to sketch the features wavering in his thoughts that he wouldn’t even take the time to sit down. He finished in a few strokes, wrote “Neely” beneath the rendering of the beautiful young woman with large, inquisitive eyes and short dark hair, and gave himself up to the sweeping relief of having captured her likeness before she vanished from his mind’s eye.
Aidan sat looking at the drawing for a long time, memorizing every line and curve.
Neely huddled in the big leather chair facing her therapist’s desk, her blue-jeaned legs curled beneath her. She bit her lower lip, silently reminding herself that she wouldn’t be able to come to terms with the events of the past few months unless she talked about them. Still, getting started was hard.
“You work at the Steak-and-Saddle Restaurant, don’t you?” Dr. Jane Fredricks prompted kindly, reviewing Neely’s
information sheet.
Neely nodded, grateful for the gentle push. “I wait tables there. I like being busy all the time—that way, I don’t think so much—and since I work the night shift, I’m always with other people when it’s dark.”
“You’re afraid of the dark?” the doctor asked.
Neely bit her lip again, then forced herself to go on. “Not exactly,” she said. “I’m afraid of—of vampires. Except for one, I mean, and—oh, hell.” She bit down hard on her right thumbnail.
Dr. Fredricks didn’t grab the telephone and shout for help, or even gasp in surprise. “Vampires,” she repeated, with no inflection at all, making a note on Neely’s chart. Neely’s voice trembled. “Yes.”
Dr. Fredricks met her gaze directly. “Go on,” she said. Neely stared at her for a moment. “I suppose you’re going to say there aren’t any such things as vampires,” she finally blurted out, “but there are. As crazy as it sounds, they really exist.”
“I’m not questioning that,” the doctor pointed out calmly. “You needn’t convince me of anything, Neely—you’re not on trial for a crime, you know. You needn’t justify what you believe. Just talk.”
Tears welled in Neely’s eyes, blurring her vision, and she snatched a tissue from a box on the edge of Dr. Fredricks’s desk to dry them. “I met my first vampire on Halloween night,” she began, sniffling. “Isn’t that fitting? Of course, I didn’t know Aidan was a vampire then—I just thought he was, well, a little different—”
Dr. Fredricks nodded encouragingly.
Neely spilled the whole story, over the next forty-five minutes, and even though nothing was resolved at the end, she felt better for having told another human being what had happened to her.
“Are you going to lock me up in a rubber room?” she asked, toying with the pile of crumpled tissues in her lap. The doctor laughed. “No, of course not.”
Neely leaned forward in her chair. “Surely you don’t believe there really are vampires?” she marveled.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” reasoned Dr. Fredricks. “We’re here to talk about you. Can you come back next Tuesday?”
19
Neely was just reaching for the handle of die front door at the Steak-and-Saddle when, through the glass, she saw chaos erupt. The fire alarm and die inside sprinkler system went off simultaneously, and patrons and staff alike shrieked and scurried in all directions. Water roared from the ceiling and spattered on the floor, the counter, the people, everything.
Neely stepped back from the entrance just in time to avoid being trampled, and even then she was nearly knocked into the flowerbed.
Duke Fuller, the owner of the restaurant, came out laughing, soaked from the top of his balding head to the soles of his expensive cowboy boots. Duke had a way of taking things in his stride, a trait that made most people like him right away.
“Go on, take the night off,” he said, waving a huge hand at Neely as she stepped over the bricks bordering the petunia patch. “I got an idea Coach Riley’s boys were behind this—they’re feelin’ their oats because of that basketball game they won—and I’m damn well gonna make ’em clean up the mess.”
Some of the customers stayed to help, but Neely had been feeling drained since her session with Dr. Fredricks that afternoon, and she had cramps in the bargain. So she turned around, got back into the used Mustang she’d bought after arriving in Denver by plane, and drove home.
1320 Tamarack Road was a humble place, a one-bedroom cottage with linoleum floors and plumbing noisy enough to disturb the dead, but it was solid and real, and Neely liked it. Besides, she spent very little time there, since she worked all night and, having developed chronic insomnia, sat reading in the library most of every day.
She hoped she’d be able to sleep, now that she’d told Dr. Fredricks the secret she hadn’t been able to give voice to before. The effects of her problem were beginning to show; she had bruise-like shadows under her eyes, she was too thin, and she cried so easily that it was embarrassing.
Every day, every night, she told herself that Aidan would come back to her, and still there was no sign of him, and no word. Had he perished in the attempt to become mortal again? Or had he simply lost interest in her?
Neely hung her coat in the tiny closet just inside her front door and kicked off her crepe-soled waitress shoes as she moved across the living room. She flipped on the television set as she passed to the kitchen, which was really just three cabinets and a sink shoved into an alcove, and the frenzied cacophony of some commercial tumbled into the quiet.
The refrigerator yielded the remains of a carton of cottage cheese; Neely got a spoon and went back to the living room. There, she curled up in the ancient easy chair, still in her polyester uniform and her pantyhose, to eat and watch the news channel.
Neely kept expecting to miss politics, all of a sudden, to yearn for the excitement, the prestige, and the intrigue of being in the center of things. All she missed, however, all she ever yearned for, was the sight of Aidan Tremayne, and the sound of his voice. She could adjust to the rest, even the outlandish truth of what he was.
She sighed, spooning a small heap of cottage cheese onto her tongue even though, as usual, she had no appetite. It was downright crazy to be this miserable, she thought, chewing and then forcing herself to swallow—and over a missing monster, no less—but she couldn’t seem to lift herself out of the doldrums.
Neely took another bite, then could bear no more and set the thin plastic carton aside, atop last week’s issue of TV Guide. She got out of her chair, crossed the cool, smooth floor to the television set, and switched channels until she found one showing classic movies.
When a forties-style Count Dracula appeared on the screen, resplendent in his high-colored black silk cape, Neely made a soft, abrupt sound that might have been either a chuckle or a sob. The Count had very white skin, and his hair came to a dramatic widow’s peak on his forehead, but of course it was his overlong and extremely pointed incisors that marked him as the dreaded vampire.
Neely reached out for the old-fashioned channel knob—the TV, like the rest of the furniture, had come with the house—but she couldn’t quite complete the move. She stepped backward, away from the set, filled with a strange tangle of emotions—panic, joy, fascination, a fierce desire to deny that any such creature could ever have existed.
She went into the bedroom and exchanged her uniform and pantyhose for warm flannel pajamas, figuring that, by the time she returned, either the movie would be over or she would have found the fortitude to turn to something else.
Instead Neely moved like a sleepwalker, sank numbly to the floor in front of her chair, and sat watching as if she’d been hypnotized. She knew she should get up, go to bed, read a book, take a bath, do anything besides just sitting there obsessed, but she couldn’t gather the strength to move. Her gaze slid to the telephone on the other side of the room; she wondered if she was finally going to collapse under the strain. Maybe she should call Dr. Fredricks, right now….
And say what? I’m so sorry to bother you, Doctor, but it seems I’m watching an old vampire movie—a hokey one, at that—and I can’t bring myself to miss a moment.
Neely caught her right thumbnail between her teeth and bit. The movie went on, darkness gathered at the windows, and still she sat there, mesmerized.
A sudden burst of light, barely glimpsed out of the corner of her right eye, made Neely jump and cry out.
Valerian himself was standing in front of the couch, gaunt and even somewhat scarred, but for all of that, just as magnificent as ever. Instead of his usual dashing evening garb, he wore medieval garments, leggings, soft leather shoes, and a tunic of rough brown wool. A mean-looking sword dangled from a scabbard on his belt.
Watching the screen image of Count Dracula, the vampire laughed aloud.
Neely’s inertia finally left her; she scrambled to her feet and looked around for a weapon, but all she found was the cottage cheese.
Valerian
’s gaze sliced to hers. “What will you do,” he drawled, “stab me through the heart with a teaspoon?”
Neely’s own heart seemed to bounce spasmodically between her breastbone and her spine. Valerian had been cordial enough in the past, but she had never deluded herself, for so much as a moment, that he was her friend.
“What do you want?” she asked.
Valerian sighed, one hand fiddling with the fancy molded steel handle of his sword. “It would take more time than I have to tell you that, my lady,” he said sadly.
Neely collapsed into the easy chair, since she couldn’t stand any longer. Now that the first rush of fear had subsided a little, she wanted to ask about Aidan. At the same time she was afraid—what if Valerian answered that the experiment had failed and Aidan was dead? What if he said his friend was alive and well but had decided not to go to all the trouble of loving a mortal woman after all?
“He loves you still,” Valerian said; clearly, he found her thoughts as easy to read as one of those big billboards out by the freeway. His voice seemed to echo the combined sorrows of the ages, deep and profound and eternal.
Neely raised one hand to her throat. “He survived, then.” Valerian’s great shoulders seemed to sag beneath his tunic; he was the very image of weary despair. “After a fashion, yes. He’s a mere man—good-looking, but really quite ordinary, when you consider what he once was. All eternity would not be time enough to work out the puzzle of why Aidan, or anyone, would make such a sacrifice.”
A shout of joy rose in Neely, but she stopped it in the middle of her chest. She wasn’t about to put her most private feelings on display for the likes of Valerian, but there was another reason for her reticence as well. Aidan had become a man again, as he’d dreamed of doing, but he’d apparently made no attempt to find her.
Even without his supernatural powers, it shouldn’t have been that hard to track her down, she thought, heartbroken. True, she hadn’t left a forwarding address on file at the Bright River post office or anything so obvious as that, but Aidan could have reached her through Ben if he’d half tried.
The Black Rose Chronicles Page 28