“Wowza,” says Dominic.
“And then the Morgans brought their grandkids into the B&B, then some other summer people came in—”
Ella interrupts me: “And then the L.L.Bean boys came back.”
“And we were trapped,” I say.
“And we had no choice,” she says. “We had to go out the window.”
Dominic holds up his hands. “So what’s the verdict? Are they paparazzi, stalkers, or vampire hunters?”
“They’re . . . something,” I tell him.
“Yep. Something more than autograph seekers,” Ella adds. “Now we’re going to see my aunt and uncle and find out what’s really going on,” Ella says.
Dominic waves the photocopies and says, “I do believe I’ve earned my right to go along.”
“What about your parents? Aren’t you confined to your house?” I ask.
“They’re at work,” Dominic says and laughs. “Plus, didn’t you blow your house arrest already?”
25
When we hurry into Ella’s house, she finds her dad writing at his desk. “Hey,” I hear her say. “Writing,” he replies.
After Ella finds a wastebasket and dumps her reclaimed trash, the three of us walk through to the kitchen. Outside the window, the dune’s mass of feathery sea grass is blowing in the wind. Gray clouds are forming over the ocean. Ella opens the cabinet and pulls out a package of Oreos, and I immediately gobble down three. Dominic swallows a dose of four. After all, we’re on the verge of confronting Edgar and Ceil about just exactly who they are. And this requires fortifying ourselves with chocolate cookies.
The kitchen door creaks, and Ceil peers in on us. “I thought I heard you kids.” She’s thin and weary-looking but stunning in black pants, a black sweater, red lips, and dark glasses. “I need coffee.” She reaches for the Gusty’s carafe, pops off the lid, and raises it to her nose. She inhales deeply, then pours a cup and drains the contents. “My life’s blood.”
Edgar glides in after her and takes a seat at the kitchen table. “A cup, Ceil, my love.”
“Wait.” Ella pauses, and I wonder how she’s going to start. “Aunt Ceil? Uncle Edgar? Can we talk for a second?”
“Yes, lovie?” Ceil says.
“There is something you need to know—I need to know—I need to ask.”
Ceil hears the shakiness in Ella’s voice and puts her arm around Ella’s shoulders. “What’s the matter, El?”
Dominic and I shuffle uncomfortably. Seconds pass. Or a minute. Then Ella comes through with a big blurt.
“Are you guys vampires?”
It feels like the kitchen clock stops ticking, the refrigerator ceases humming, the icemaker halts mid-cube-making. An eternity passes in silence and then . . . Ceil laughs.
“It’s not a joke!” Ella says. “You say you talk to vampires, you stay out of the light, you . . . you . . . cover the mirrors. You don’t eat.” Ella’s on a roll. “Cats and gulls are being drained of blood since you came.”
“Ella!” Edgar’s deep voice stops her with a warning tone. His neck turns red with irritation. “We’re not vampires.”
“Edgar,” Ceil warns him.
“No, Ceil. This is too much,” he argues back. “This is ridiculous.”
But Ella’s gathered her courage. “Prove it.”
“How exactly would you like us to do that?” Ceil says.
“I don’t care,” Ella demands. “The usual way.”
It crosses my mind that vampires have tricks for just such occasions.
“Fine,” says Ceil hoarsely. “Get a cross, cook up some garlic, open the drapes, let in the sun, bring out a Bible.” She pushes herself up from the table with her thin white fingers and slowly pulls her dark glasses away from her face.
It’s cool white, and her eyes are . . . normal human eyes. Eyes that don’t flinch in the light of the kitchen.
But Ella’s not taking any chances. “Wait right here,” she says, then backs to the door and bolts down the hall.
“Dad, do we have a Bible?” Ella yells.
The four of us stay frozen in place until Ella rushes back in, holding a black book with a gold cross on the cover. She thrusts it at Ceil like she’s offering a gift. A chance for Ceil to prove herself.
Ceil sighs and takes it.
In a slightly ceremonial way, she raises her hand and places it over the cross. Edgar reaches over and places his hand over hers. In unison, they look at Ella.
Dominic, Ella, and I look at their hands.
No smoke rises, no flesh sears, no flames erupt. No screaming, writhing, or melting takes place.
“So?” says Ceil. “Did we pass?”
Ella dissolves into tears and rushes to Ceil, who wraps her in her arms. Dominic and I both let out deep breaths.
“Honey, we couldn’t tell you. It’s our arrangement with our publisher. We agreed to say we talk to the Count—to keep some of the myth alive. Do you understand? It’s marketing.”
Mom’s words echo in my head. It’s marketing.
“But there are people following you,” Ella gets out between sobs. “Why are they doing that?”
Ceil sits up. “What do you mean?”
Our intel tumbles out of Ella. “There are two men in town and they call themselves John Smith and Bob Jones and they say they are from Ohio and they own electronic cigarette stores and they’re just here to fish, but they don’t know how to fish, and they have fake IDs, and they dig in our trash, and they have a map that brought them here, and they have a copy of Transylvanian Drip in the bottom of their duffel bag and there’s a note in it that says: Buddy Denton Show—Victoria Kensington is Edgar Waterman and Ceil Waterman.” She sucks in a huge breath. “And they have this.” She thrusts the scrap of paper with Ceil’s signature at her.
It’s not exactly the way I would have explained the matter, but it definitely strikes a chord with Edgar and Ceil. Edgar rushes toward the garage while Ceil gets on her feet and heads upstairs.
“Stop!” Ella yells. “Please. Tell us what’s going on.”
Edgar and Ceil slowly turn around.
“What do these men look like?” Edgar asks.
Ben hands him the photocopy of the drivers’ licenses.
“Oh, Ceil.” Edgar hands her the paper. “It’s them. The Woodleys.”
“We really have to go,” Ceil says to Ella.
“No,” Ella says with a voice that means NO. “No one is going anywhere until we get the whole story, and I mean the whole story. Who are the Woodleys?”
“Maybe my mom can help” comes out of my mouth, while my head is thinking, Now is the time to call the cops.
“Oh, no.” Edgar and Ceil shake their heads vigorously. “That’s just a waste of time. We’ve been through too many police reports. They never do anything. No police, no sheriff. No law. They’re useless.”
“What? They won’t do anything about what?” I ask.
Edgar sinks into a chair. “Show them, Ceil.”
Ceil walks upstairs, gliding like a ghost, and returns with a handful of scrawled handwritten messages. She lays them on the table, and we each reach for one, read it, then pass it around. They all say pretty much the same thing.
John and Bob, aka Jack and Wally Woodley, claim to be friends and confidants of Count Le Plasma too. And they say he told them his stories first, and they say the Count demands that Edgar and Ceil give them “the dough from the cat in the van story.”
“These guys are nutballs,” says Dominic, “and crooks! Nutball crooks.”
“Of course they are!” Ceil’s agitated again. “But they keep writing us and emailing us and sending messages to our fan-mail PO box.”
“And you called the police?” I ask—carefully, so it doesn’t sound like I didn’t hear them the first time. I just want to be clear about what they told the police.
“It’s all so awful,” Ceil whispers and puts her face in her hands.
There were never three kids more interested in the complete expl
anation of “awful” than the three of us. Ella, Dominic, and I sit perfectly still, waiting for the details. Edgar and Ceil both start talking at once, and it begins to pour out.
“We have lots of fans who think they’re vampires, or want to be vampires, or want to be around vampires.”
“When the Woodley brothers told us they also talked to the Count, we thought, whatever, and figured it would pass.”
“Then they started demanding money.”
“Which is when I wrote them a letter. That’s how they came to have the scrap with my signature that you found. Like I said, our contract with our publisher says we can’t reveal that we don’t actually talk to the Count. It’s the myth that sold the books. We have to take the public position—at all times—that we are his friends and storytellers.”
“So Ceil wrote the Woodleys and explained we had received no such instruction from the Count and that we would not pay them anything.”
“Which is when we started to get ugly threats.”
“Gruesome threats.”
“So we went to the NYPD and told them what we could.”
I don’t want to interrupt, but I have to ask, “What do you mean, ‘what we could’?”
“Well, we didn’t want to violate our contract. So we said, ‘We write these books. Here they are. We have two crazed fans,’ and we showed the police the letters and emails.”
“What did they say?” Ella asks.
“They rolled their eyes and said we should make an official complaint for stalking and terroristic threats, and they’d open a case and investigate it.”
“What’d they find out?” Dominic asks.
“Nothing. They couldn’t identify the senders. They couldn’t find anything.”
“But you sent them a letter. Did they check that address?” I ask.
“Yes. But it was a PO Box in Brooklyn, opened under a false name.”
I tell them, “You have to tell my mom.”
“Sorry,” Edgar says. “We’ve had enough of being laughed at by law enforcement. We’re just going to leave. These people can’t hound us forever. They’ll lose interest. They’ll take up after some unsuspecting zombie writers.”
Ceil hesitates but then nods. “He’s right. She’ll only think we’re crackpots like the others did.”
I’m about to say, she will not! when Edgar points his bony finger at me. “Quinnette, you are not to say a word to your mother about this. Do you understand? Will you respect our wishes? This matter is ours to deal with.”
“Err, we’ve all told our parents we think these guys are spying on you,” Dominic says.
“Oh, no.” Ceil rubs her eyes and shakes her head. “Please. Not another word to anyone. Ella, please don’t tell your father either. We’ll inform him when we’re ready.”
I want to respect their wishes and leave it to them, but I think they need to know something. “My mom is coming here tomorrow to talk to you about John and Bob. She wants to warn you. She wants to investigate.”
26
The next thing I know, Edgar and Ceil are tossing their things in suitcases. Ella brings a tube of toothpaste, then a bottle of shampoo, but she’s mostly in the way. Ceil gives her a hug and tells her to sit.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“Don’t know, but it’s time to leave Maiden Rock,” says Edgar.
“I don’t think you can just drive out of town in the Flying Spur and not get noticed,” Dominic says.
That stops them both.
“John and Bob are all over this town,” I add. “You can’t just drive out, especially in that car, without being seen.”
“How about leaving town in a boat?” Ella says. “Ben could help us. He can get one.”
Everything in me says tell Mom, tell Mom, tell Mom. But I don’t want to lose Ceil and Edgar’s trust, and I don’t want Ella to think I’ve betrayed them. I search my brain for options. The boat idea isn’t a bad one. I mean, after all, they have a right to leave town any way they want. They’re not the stalkers; they’re the stalk-ees.
Ceil laughs. “We couldn’t drive a toy boat around a bathtub.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think so, El,” Edgar says.
Ella looks a little hurt.
Dominic says, “What if Ben drives the boat?”
“Maybe, but where could he take them?” Ella asks.
And that is seriously worth asking. Edgar, Ceil, and Ben would be leaving the tidal pool in a small boat headed into the open ocean in the middle of the night with no plan.
Edgar and Ceil shake their heads. “We won’t involve you children in this. It’s our problem.”
My brain performs the perfect backflip and comes up with the solution. “I know where they’d go, and I know who’d take them there.”
All eyes are on me, but I’m not worried. This is a kid-free boat plan: “It’s really simple. We’ll have the sisters pick up Edgar and Ceil here, using the convent van, and drive them up to the yacht club. Sister Rosie will turn around and drive back to Pidgin Beach, and Sister Ethel will take them in a boat down the coast to the lighthouse. There you can meet back up with Sister Rosie and be on your way!”
“And I could drive the Flying Spur down to Pidgin Beach, and it would be there for them,” Dominic says, a little too hopefully.
“No one will be driving the Flying Spur but me,” Edgar says.
“Then just leave it here, like a decoy,” says Dominic.
“That’s good. The car will stay in the garage,” Ella says, “but between the nuns’ van and the boat, we can still get them to the lighthouse, and we’ll figure out how to get them on their way from there tomorrow.”
“We can’t do this tonight,” I say. “The sisters don’t even know about it.”
“Then tomorrow night. We’ll do it tomorrow night,” Ella says. “That will give us twenty-four hours to convince the sisters and get everything in place.”
Everyone looks at Edgar and Ceil for their agreement.
“Wait one minute,” Edgar says. “Hiding in vans and riding in boats with nuns on the open ocean in the middle of the night?” He picks up his monogrammed Ballistic duffel bag and hoists it over his shoulder again. “I think not.”
“He’s right, children,” says Ceil. “We have to do this our way.”
“Or . . . ,” Ella says, “we could tell my dad all of this. I’m sure he’d help.”
Ceil looks alarmed. “We do not want to bring your father into this, Ella. Confiding in you kids has been stressful enough.”
I follow Ella’s lead. “Or my dad? We could tell my dad. I’m sure he would help, and he’s not a police officer.”
“Yeah,” Dominic adds, “or we could get my parents. They’re ocean scientists. They know a lot about the sea at night.”
This flood of options seems to break down Edgar and Ceil’s resistance. Edgar lets the bag slide off his shoulder. He leans against the doorframe with a deflated look on his face. “Suppose we consider your plan—and not because we can’t do this ourselves—but suppose the sisters will help. When could we realistically get out of here?”
“I’m sure we can do it tomorrow night.” I probably sound more confident than I am.
“That’s just not good enough,” Ceil says, biting at her red thumbnail.
“Aunt Ceil, it’s only twenty-four hours,” Ella says. “Just stay in the house for twenty-four more hours.”
“Staying in the house isn’t the problem,” says Ceil. “Quinnie’s mother is coming here to talk to us tomorrow morning. Isn’t that what you said, Quinnie?”
The kitchen door squeaks open, and we all nearly jump out of our skin.
Mr. Philpotts sticks his head in. “What’s going on in here?” He walks toward the latest supply of caffeine from Gusty’s and finds it empty. He has a lot of catching up to do. “Ed, Ceil, what’s with the luggage?” He appears to have just woken up from a deep afternoon sleep. I know this look. He’s had his head deep in his computer, inventing the gory d
etails of a crime.
All five of us fidget until Ella says, “Aunt Ceil and Uncle Edgar are going to go up to Bar Harbor for a few days.”
Her dad scratches his head and yawns. “Is there any more coffee?”
“Sorry,” says Ceil. “I got the last drop.”
“Bar Harbor sounds like a good idea,” says Mr. Philpotts. “Get out of Maiden Rock for a couple days. By the way, unless you’re leaving tonight, Ed, Margaret Boyd, the sheriff, wants to stop by and talk to you tomorrow morning,” says Ella’s dad.
“So we’ve heard,” says Ceil.
27
It would be best if Edgar and Ceil could leave tonight, but we have to talk to the sisters, talk to Ben, and think through the logistics. So we leave Edgar and Ceil to concentrate on what they will tell Mom in the morning. Dominic says he’ll fill in Ben.
That night, after I say good night to Mom and Dad, I start shooting out to-do texts:
Me: Tomorrow morning, Ben and Dominic go to the boathouse to get Ben’s uncle’s skiff ready.
Ben: On it.
Dominic: One hundred percent.
Me: Ella and I will get the sisters to help us.
Ella: Yep!
Me: A nautical map?
Ben: On it.
Me: Marine torch?
Ben: On it.
I toss and turn all night. The ocean seems louder than usual, like it’s trying to tell me to be careful. But I am being careful, I tell myself. Aren’t I? I mean, none of us kids are going to be in the van with the sisters and Edgar and Ceil. Check. None of us will be in the boat with Sister Ethel, Edgar, and Ceil. Check. We haven’t gone anywhere near John and Bob in person. Check. That is, if you don’t count us being on the ledge outside their window when they came into their room. Nobody’s doing anything illegal except the L.L.Bean boys, aka John and Bob, aka the Woodley brothers—crazed fans who got crazy enough to demand money from their favorite authors.
Still, I decide to get up and write Mom a note. I’ll leave it for her so she won’t find it until it’s too late to stop the getaway.
Mom,
I just wanted you to know that we talked to Edgar and Ceil, just like you did, and I’m not sure what they told you, but they know John and Bob. Actually, they know them as Jack and Wally Woodley. These guys are crazy fans who say they talked to Count Le Plasma, and that he wants Edgar and Ceil to give them all the money from the “cat in the van story,” which would be Transylvanian Drip. Edgar and Ceil have tried to get help from the NYPD, but the police said it was kind of Edgar and Ceil’s own fault for telling people they talk to vampires. We haven’t mucked around in any police matter. We’re helping Edgar and Ceil get out of town because they don’t want police help and I guess that’s their choice. I’m telling you everything I know.
Vampires on the Run: A Quinnie Boyd Mystery (Quinnie Boyd Mysteries) Page 13