“I will pay you fifty thousand dollars” said Lia “I’ll give you twenty five thousand now, and you’ll get the rest of the money when you bring me the information okay?”
She removed the money from a purse with shoulder straps, that she had kept hidden under her coat. Then she placed the payment onto the wooden counter and said:
“You have one week from now, don’t disappoint me.”
Lia then turned on her heel and left the shop.
The thinly veiled threat in her last words sent a shiver down both spines of Abe and Dalia. Abe did not object however, to the large amount of money that she had given them, he just hoped that it was possible for them to earn it.
“What if the girl is dead?” he said to his wife anxiously. “We can’t find her if she’s dead.”
Dalia kissed him on his stubbly cheek and smiled. Abe could be so naive sometimes. She would have thought that he understood the true nature of their supernatural clients by now. Dalia, on the other hand knew that if Amberlee Robinson was indeed deceased, the vampire would know it. She was absolutely right in her assumption about Lia. Her vampire status meant that she was part of the undead community, and this entitled her to special privileges in the non-physical world. Since seeing the missing posters in the supermarket, Lia had used this particular power. She had temporarily closed down the active, thinking part of her mind. By sitting down and doing this she could explore the deeper part of her psyche, and search amongst the spirits who had left their physical bodies. This she had done on many occasions, and had ignored the spirits of all the people she saw, who had been killed by her and her family. She had even seen Elena Hudson, frail and unhappy in death but this had not evoked any sympathy in the vampire because this was who she was. However no matter how hard she tried, she could not locate the spirit of the girl who was causing so much anxiety for Jay. Lia’s sharp instincts told her that Amberlee Robinson was alive and well, in a well chosen hiding place. She also knew that Dalia Jackson would find her.
Lia returned to her house, and slipped back into bed next to Jay. She could hear his soft breathing, and as she rubbed her finger along his cheek happiness welled up inside of her. As she barred her teeth while smiling her vampire smile, she thought how he was hers now ,in his beautiful human form. But soon he would belong to her forever.
Jay had started to sleep much more soundly now, without having the strange, reoccurring dreams about Elena. The change had come when Lia had burst into his life, like a much needed breath of fresh air. He found her quite mysterious in many ways, she was a far cry from Amberlee and some of the other girls from Claremont. They would lay themselves bare at any given opportunity. Lia had somehow put a magic spell on him, she had really got under his skin, in a way no one else ever had, or could. Lia watched with pleasure as she saw a smile play on his lips, while he was still in a state of slumber. She laid her head down beside him, and joined him in a dreamless sleep.
****************************************
Dalia had gone straight up to bed leaving Abe in the shop, when Lia had left. She needed to get some sleep, so that she could go into town the next day, to make the appropriate inquires about the missing girl. Dalia had no doubts that she would get the job done, in the short time she had to do it. She had an old school friend who she intended to go and see. She was bound to know something.
“Hello Fay.”
“Dalia, Dalia Jackson? Well hello there stranger!” said Fay Carter brightly. She was obviously pleased to see her. “What brings you here?”
Fay was in her front garden, carrying out the trash to be collected. She rushed up to Dalia and hugged tightly and with affection.
“I’ve just come into town to pick up some supplies” lied Dalia. “And I thought I’d come and see you. How are you Fay?”
“Fine, fine so I take it you’ve got time for a cup of coffee?”
“Gee I thought you’d never ask!”
They both laughed, and went into Fay’s small but warm and welcoming house. They chatted for a while over coffee and a few of Fay’s homemade cookies, and reminisced about the time when they were kids.
“Hey, are you still using the tarot cards and Ouija boards? I remember when we were doing a séance at your house, and Beth got really scared and started crying. Do you remember that? Your Mom went crazy!”
Dalia did remember ,and with a secretive smile she told her friend that she had moved on from all of that. She took the short silence that followed as an opportunity to mention the missing teenager.
“Hey I hear that a young girl has gone missing. Isn’t that the second one in what, a few weeks?”
“Uh-uh that’s right” replied Fay solemnly, “and I know the family of the latest one, I work for them.”
Even as a little girl Fay had loved to clean and keep house. When all her friends had said that she was crazy, she had just shrugged and said that cleaning made her feel relaxed. Her mother thought that her actions were the result of her little brother death. He’d had a heart defect, and had died when she was very young.
"It’s a terrible situation” Fay continued, shaking her head sadly. “Amberlee wasn’t very happy at home, she was always fighting with her Mother.”
“Really? Oh that’s a shame, but what about her Father, didn’t she get on with him?”
“Oh yeah, I guess, it sure looked that way. He was always trying to defend her when the fights started, but you know he wasn’t her real Father.” Fay paused to take another sip of her coffee. “I know that because the girl was really upset when her Mother made her change her surname to Robinson. Yeah that’s right, her real father was called Clayton, Herb I think her mother called him, amongst other things.”
Dalia’s ears had pricked with interest. This was the sort of information she was looking for.
“It sounds like they must have had a very acrimonious divorce” she surmised. “So where is he now?”
“Oh he’s in Philly, that’s where they are originally from”
''Well maybe she's with him'' Dalia volunteered.
“No, the police have contacted him already, but he says that he hasn’t seen his daughter since he divorced her mother.” answered Fay and Dalia could tell that she believed that statement. She said nothing else about the matter, but unlike Fay, Alexis Robinson and the whole of the Portland police department, she was not going to be so easily fooled.
With day one of the allotted seven over, Dalia returned home to her husband. After making sure that their son was asleep, she sat chatting with Abe about the day’s events and what she had discovered, care of Fay Carter. They both agreed that it was very possible that Alexis’ ex-husband was lying, when he said that he had not seen the daughter that he had lost, when his marriage had ended. It was clear from the added information she had obtained from Fay, who had always been a notorious gossip, that the previous Mrs Alexis Clayton had preferred champagne to beer. So therefore she had jumped from blue collar to white collar, leaving her husband alone with his severely battered pride.
Dalia had been very thorough after she had said goodbye to Fay. She had called the airline, and inquired if there had been any flights to Philadelphia on the date of the evening that Amberlee Robinson vanished. The customer service person had readily informed her that there had been no flights to Pennsylvania on that day at all, due to unforeseen circumstances.
“That means the girl must have stayed somewhere that night” said Abe stroking his chin. “My guess is it was one of them airport motels.”
“But the police have already questioned everybody there” said Dalia, thinking that she may have hit a brick wall. It was Abe’s turn now to smile at her naivety. It surprised him though, his wife was usually so suspicious.
“Well you know as well as I do darlin’ that people lie for all sorts of reasons.” Abe reached for his pipe and lit it. He always smoked it before he opened his shop at nights. “Dalia I think that the best thing for you to do now is to go to those old airport motels and ask s
ome questions, because somebody knows somethin’ and you may find they are more willing to talk to you, because you’re not a cop.”
“Now that’s a very good point Abe” she said with renewed enthusiasm, and she rose from her chair and left the room. A few minutes later she came back. Abe could see that she was wearing her outdoor coat and shoes.
“Hey where do you think your goin’ woman?” said Abe sitting up in his chair. “Shouldn’t you be goin’ to bed now?”
Dalia buttoned up her coat and put on her gloves.
“I’m going to speak to the people at those airport motels. It’s best that I go now. If someone knows something about the girl and is not saying, they must have something to hide, and someone like that probably prefers to work the night shift.”
Abe thought his wife was a genius. That extra twenty five thousand dollars had his name on it, he could sense it.
“Okay, now you be careful darlin’ won’t you?
Dalia told him not to worry and assured him that she would.
‘If I were a runaway teenage girl, I would probably choose a small motel rather than one of the bigger hotels, that way I could keep a much lower profile’ she told herself, and she narrowed down her search in an instant. She went to a couple of the more appealing looking motels, and spoke to the night receptionists at their desks. One person said that he hadn’t been working that night, and the other one said that she had never set eyes on the girl. There was something in the way they said it, that made Dalia believe them both. Then she came to a place called the Shipway motel. It looked very shabby compared to the others, and the ‘p’ in the motel sign was hanging off the wall. Dalia went into the dark and musty smelling reception area. Joyce Miller looked up from her newspaper and quickly stubbed out the cigarette that she had been smoking.
“Yeah, d’yer wanna room lady?” she asked feeling irritated by the woman’s intrusion.
“No thank you” replied Dalia politely “I would like to ask you a few questions though.”
Joyce immediately looked shifty and a little scared. She thought that she had been finally caught, that now she would have to pay the karmic debt, that had been hanging over her head for the last three years. She thought about knocking the woman down and running, but where would she go, she had spent most of the robbery money, there wasn’t enough left to set her up in another part of the United States. It was then to her surprise to see the woman in front of her reach into her purse, and place a large amount of dollar bills on her desk.
It was obvious to Dalia that this woman had the information that she needed. She could tell by the frightened look in her eyes, and she could see that the woman was considering making a run for it. The money was a real sweetener because the rigidness, had left Joyce’s body as soon as she saw it.
“You’re not a cop?” asked Joyce, still a little bit guarded.
“No I’m not a cop” said Dalia, in a voice that she hoped would put the night receptionist at ease.
Joyce Miller grabbed the money from the desk and stuffed it quickly into the pockets of her pants. She didn’t have to count it, she had already seen that there was at least two hundred dollars there.
“What do you want to know?” she said.
Dalia produced the downloaded picture from the internet of Amberlee Robinson.
“Have you seen this girl?”
“You sure you’re not a cop?”
“I promise you I’m not.”
“Ok, she came here a couple of weeks ago, she was a mess, looked like she’d been crying, she wanted a room, I didn’t ask no questions.”
“So you gave her a room and then what?”
“Nothing” said Joyce defensively. “She gave back her key in the mornin’ and she was gone.”
Dalia looked closely at the receptionist’s name badge.
“Come on Joyce you must have more than that. She’s a young girl, she was upset, didn’t she try to confide in you at all?”
“Nope” replied Joyce flatly.
Dalia took another hundred dollars out of her purse, and put the money into Joyce’s hands. The receptionist immediately became a little bit more forthcoming.
“She told me that she was going to Philadelphia, to be with her daddy.”
Chapter Seven
When Jay asked Lia if his friend Kevin could come to her house in Westport, she had immediately agreed. Jay had been talking on his cell to Kevin a lot, and Lia could see that he was missing him. So they arranged that he and Libby would come for a visit the next day. Lia was becoming quite accustomed to being around human beings without pouncing on them. But she did feel that tomorrow may prove a little bit difficult for her, with two other blood filled, mortal bodies in such close proximity. She was used to Jay, she loved him. The vampire didn’t find being with him a struggle at all. She put her great restraint down to the fact that one day, a day very soon, she would drink his blood, and it would be worth the wait. Lia was so looking forward to it. She felt a swoon of delicious pleasure, whenever she thought about sinking her teeth into Jay’s neck, in the middle of their coming together, in a physical and sensual union. She was like a young girl, who was anticipating her upcoming marriage to the boy of her dreams. In a manner of speaking it amounted to the same thing. Jay would be joining the powerful ranks of the undead, and she would forever be by his side. Lia watched him with affection from the kitchen window, as he chopped up some wood. He wanted to impress Kevin with an open fire when he came with his girlfriend tomorrow. Lia had decided that she would satisfy her blood lust by going back through the portal tonight, while Jay slept. She knew that she would have to be quick, but he slept so soundly that he would never know that she had been gone.
Dalia had arrived back at the antique shop at one o’clock in the morning. She had felt very pleased with her night’s work and she knew that her task was almost complete. She told Abe what had happened when she’d met Joyce Miller.
“When I put the money on the table she practically sang like a bird” said Dalia gleefully.
“No kidding” replied Abe, “what did she say?”
Dalia repeated everything that Joyce had told her without embellishment. How the girl had gone to the motel and stayed the night, and how in the morning she had told the night receptionist that she was going to her father in Philadelphia. Joyce had finished her shift about ten minutes after Amberlee left to catch her plane, and she hadn’t seen her since.
“I don’t know what that woman’s story is” Dalia had added thoughtfully, “but I suspect that she has been in some kind of trouble.”
“Never mind about her Dalia, you got the goods, all power to ya!” Abe was delighted with his wife’s investigative abilities. She had put the whole of the Portland police department to shame!
“What do you plan to do now darlin’ what’s your next move?”
“I’m going to Philadelphia tomorrow” replied Dalia smiling confidently. “Herb Clayton shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
She was in the early hours of day two of the task, and she had already made massive headway in her search for the missing girl. Dalia kissed Abe good night and went up to bed. She was ready to finish what she had started.
****************************************
Lia waited until Jay was fast asleep before she got out of their shared bed. He had spent the evening telling her what a great guy Kevin was, and how she was going to really like him. When she’d asked about his girlfriend Libby, Jay had said that they had only recently started dating, and Libby was one of the coolest girl’s around. Lia listened as he told her about how he had been manipulated into going to the dance with Amberlee Robinson. He had not backed out, because he knew that Kevin had really wanted him to go. Jay said that he thinks that Libby had also been ambushed, and that she knew nothing of her date with Kevin until Amberlee had arranged it. He added that even though she hadn’t done it for his buddy’s benefit, it had turned out very well for him and Libby.
The familiar faraway look ca
me into his eyes when he said that he hoped Amberlee was okay, and would turn up soon. He knew that if she didn’t, rumour and speculation would trail around after him for the rest of his life. He then told Lia about what had happened to Elena Hudson. Jay described how a group of them had been at a friend’s house, and how he had spent the evening talking to her. She was quite different from the other girls, her parents were very strict, and rumour has it that they were tyrannically religious. Jay thought that they would have chained her to the house if they could have got away with it. Elena had told him that night how on her seventeenth birthday they had bought her a complete Book of Psalms and made her read some of them, out loud before she could have any dinner. Lia listened without speaking. She could feel Elena’s handkerchief stuffed between her breasts, and she inwardly winced when Jay declared that he still felt guilty, about not insisting that he walked her home that night. He thought that she would probably still be alive, if he had been more forceful.
‘And you would be hers, not mine’ thought Lia. ‘It would be her that you held in your arms, it would be her lips that you kissed and it would be her body that you would enjoy.’
The sharp pang of jealousy impaled the vampire’s senses like a knife made of pure ice. She jumped up quickly and ran from the room and Jay, in complete confusion followed her. In a voice full of concern he asked her what was wrong, he assumed that she felt sad about the death of his friend. He was surprised when she, standing with her back to him and in a low voice, asked if he had loved Elena Hudson. Jay was both touched and amused by her jealousy. He couldn’t imagine Lia ever being threatened by anyone, least of all a dead girl. He took her into his arms, and told her that he had never loved anyone-until now. The passionate kiss that followed was so long that it made them both breathless. Jay lifted the beautiful, light weight girl in his strong, protective arms and carried her upstairs. They lay together on the bed, and as they kissed Lia could feel the heat of his desire growing more and more intense. Her heart started to beat faster and faster as her body responded to him, and yielded to his touch. She could feel his lips as they explored her long, elegant neck and she turned her face away from him, as she felt her lips open and reveal her sharp, white and wolf like fangs. Then she began to moan with pleasure, as Jay moved his hands all over her body and then tried to remove her clothes.
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