“I just have a few questions.” He moved around her room like he was touring a museum, examining the posters on the walls, the books on the shelves. “Do you know the Shady Rest Retirement Home? Any friends or family there?”
“No.”
“That’s where Mrs. McCallister—your new friend—was from. You know where it is?”
“No.”
“Other side of town. Now, that place isn’t exactly Fort Knox, but do you have any idea how a senile old lady on foot could cross twenty miles of suburbia without anyone noticing?”
“No, I think that’s your job.”
Card smiled at her. Looked at her Emma Frost Sideshow Collectibles statue on top of her bookshelf, picking it up and examining it.
“Could you please be careful with that?” Mindy added, feeling like she was breaking some kind of stalemate. “It’s pretty delicate.”
“Sorry, sorry—your parents buy you that?”
“No, I bought it. She’s my favorite character.”
“What’s that, life goals? Thinspiration?”
Mindy rolled her eyes. “It’s a school night.”
Card set the statue down. “Where have you been the last few hours?”
“Here. In my room. Playing Tomb Raider.”
“Any witnesses?”
“No. It’s a single-player game.”
Card nodded. “Seems your style.” He reached into his pocket, taking out a notepad, and it suddenly bothered Mindy that he hadn’t had it out before. He took his time, opening it to a dog-eared page, then working backward. “Alright. Five o’clock, Mrs. McCallister takes her medication, stays in her room. Four hours pass. You’re here, in your room, standing on your head or whatever. Mrs. McCallister turns up on your front yard after being attacked by our ‘animal’. Grabs you, smears blood on you, you wash it off.”
“Yeah,” Mindy said, kinda wishing Card would go back to circling. She didn’t like how still he stood, how he looked at her like he wasn’t sure where he would move next. “That’s right.”
“So if we find little bits of your skin under her fingernails, it’s just because she happened to ring your doorbell and you answered it and, uh, gave her a hug.”
Mindy stared at him. Almost too confused to be angry. “Do you always accuse the nearest teenage girl of a crime?”
“I do when the victim shows up on her doorstep. Why don’t you come down to the station, let our lab boys run a few tests. I know you’d hate the thought of everyone wondering what you had to do with these attacks when just a few swabs could clear everything up.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“You seem like the kind of girl who thinks she’s very smart. I wonder if you’re smart enough to get the picture before I have to snap the cuffs on.”
* * *
She wasn’t in handcuffs. Mindy clung to that thought. She held onto it, a life preserver on a stormy sea.
The interrogation room—“interview room,” which Mindy couldn’t think about without putting mincing air-quotes around it—reminded her of a janitor’s closet. It was a place where you put things, but without any care or attention. You just stowed them there and forgot about them until they were needed. That’s how Mindy felt. Forgotten. They made her wait for what seemed like hours. She’d heard that guilty people slept. She didn’t. But she still didn’t know what that made her.
She wasn’t in handcuffs.
She thought about Lucia. Thought about how much she could’ve angered Lucia, calling her on her bullshit, cutting her off from “Mindy time.” Funny how she’d used to wonder if Lucia cared about her at all. Now maybe Lucia cared so much that… Mindy tried not to think about a cat leaving a dead mouse on the doorstep. She tried harder.
Card came in. He could arrest her, but he couldn’t compel a DNA swab or any of that other CSI bullshit. He needed a court order for that. So he’d keep her here while he got a judge to sign off on it. Mindy wondered how long it would take at this time of night.
He sat down across from her, a folder under his arm. It stayed there like a gun in a holster. “I was just thinking about that guy who got his throat gnawed on by a coyote.” He opened the folder. There was a crime scene photo. Mindy almost would’ve believed it was tinted red, except the colors were so normal around the edges. “Remember that? We’re the police—we kept investigating it. Obviously, his truck was covered with blood. Covered in it. What’s weird is that a lot of it’s missing. We have the blood that’s in his body, and we have the blood on the ground, and then we have at least three pints of blood that’s just gone. So then we had one guy missing blood—” He pushed the stack of photos toward her. They were red too. He spread them around the table like he was setting up a board game. “Now we have a lot of people missing blood. What does that sound like to you, Mindy?”
It wasn’t a question. There were no questions. It was like he was giving a monologue, every word precise, calibrated, sharpened, chiseling away at Mindy. Only they didn’t bite into her. There was a shield around her, a feeling of warmth, a thought of fuck this guy. It was talking in Lucia’s voice and Mindy repeated everything it said, like an actor with well-learned lines.
“Are you asking me to help solve your case? Because I’m not Nancy Drew. Okay, I’m a little Nancy Drew. I’ve read all the books and some fanfic online, you know, crossovers with the Hardy Boys. Not, you know, the kinky stuff, they’re just good friends…but maybe someday, when Nancy’s ready for a real relationship…”
“I don’t want you.”
“I get that from a lot of guys.”
His hand lashed out, fist striking the table, hard enough to jolt it a few inches to the side, the legs squealing on the tile floor. Mindy jumped. Card left his hand on the table, tightening his knuckles. “I want whoever put you up to this. Look at the pictures. Look at them.”
Mindy did. She’d known Lucia was capable of all that. She’d known, damnit. “You’re still printing out pictures? Ever heard of a smartphone or a tablet? So much better for the environment…”
Card stood. He held the folder at his side, empty. “Let me give you a piece of advice, little girl. You’re not smart enough to act this stupid. I’ve read your file. National Honor Society, no detentions, no absences. You’re almost valedictorian. I don’t believe you roped yourself into this; I think someone pushed you. Befriended you, seduced you, whatever—and now that you’ve been sucked in, they’re hurting people. They think they’re some kind of vampire, and they’re pulling this hoax—I don’t know why. Some social media bullshit, I’m guessing. It doesn’t really matter, to you or to me. You’re in over your head, but you think you’re just too fucking smart to go under, don’t you?
She looked into his eyes. Maybe if she’d seen one bit of caring—just a little bit—she would’ve given him another answer. “Well, I’m here, aren’t I? I hear they only let smart people in…”
Card gathered up his folder. “All right, then. I’ll let you think about it. In the meantime, let’s see how your parents feel about their little girl being in trouble with the cops.”
The door locked behind him. Mindy hung her head, pressing it to the cool tabletop. She closed her eyes. She didn’t feel guilty, just tired.
They left her alone for half an hour, but Mindy didn’t worry. She almost wished she could. There was a thought growing like a cancer inside her, killing her worry like an Ambien—Lucia wouldn’t let anything happen to her. An hour from now, a week, a month, that very night, El could come strolling in. She would tear through the cops not with machine guns or a chainsaw, but her bare hands. And, streaked in blood, she would kick down the door and pick Mindy up and carry her away, over the dead. And Mindy found that thought so comforting, she couldn’t even be frightened of it.
The door cracked. Mindy jumped, her brain screaming Card, but it wasn’t him. One of the deputies was looking at her. “Come on. You’re free to go.”
In the lobby of the police station, Lucia was still giving he
r alibi, declaiming to Card with the boundless confidence of a particularly talentless American Idol contestant. “So yeah, our windows face each other dead on, I have a sweeping vista of the next house over, it’s messed up. Who designs a neighborhood like that? Imagine if it were some creepy old guy with a bald spot and shit.” Here, Lucia gave Card a smile. “Anyway, she was there the whole evening. Didn’t slip out the window or anything. You really thought she had the athleticism for that? Because I’ve seen her try push-ups. It’s like watching Tara Reid count.” Lucia put on a nasal voice. “One…twooooooooo…”
“Anyone who can account for your whereabouts?” Card asked, words short like his teeth wanted to grind together more than to open.
“I was on the phone to my boyfriend, Quentin Morse. Well, ex-boyfriend. We’re kinda sorting that out. He’s seeing other people and I’m crying a lot.”
“Can I go?” Mindy interrupted, and Card looked over at her. Eying her like a dog would look at a slab of meat.
He nodded. “Stay safe now. Your parents are—”
“I’ll find them,” Mindy said, walking right past him.
Outside, Lucia did her Batman thing, appearing in front of Mindy as soon as she’d excused herself from the cops. Mindy automatically looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but this late at night, the place was a blue canvass with light spilling out from the police station. They were at the outskirts of that light, meeting their shadows.
“You’re welcome,” Lucia said, leaning against the flagpole.
Mindy scanned the parking lot for a parental vehicle. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“What, you don’t think I had anything to do with Aunt May back there, do you?”
Mindy stopped and closed her eyes. She really didn’t like being this angry. It made her keep wondering if she was a bitch. “At the moment, I’m really not sure what you’re capable of. Clearly.”
She heard a single click of Lucia’s heels as the other woman stepped toward her. “Not to rain on your parade, but if you’re going to be pissed at me, could you wait five minutes for me to do something to be pissed about?”
This, this feeling of being about to scream and cry and possibly do even more things at the same time, Mindy hated it. But she hated Lucia more for bringing it out in her. “There’s the usual bullshit you pull, and then there’s how you see me. I thought you looked at me as a person, but apparently you just see me as something your boyfriend can get off on!”
“You should be thankful someone can.”
Okay, Mindy thought. Okay, okay, okay. She turned around and faced Lucia, who somehow didn’t look pretty anymore, she looked annoying. “My sexuality is not the most important part of me, but it is a part of me. It’s not a joke. not a game. It’s not a trend or a style or a fad. It’s not a girl crush. It’s not ‘all girls are a little bit bi.’ I’m attracted to women. And maybe you rolled out of bed one morning and decided to be a dyke, but I didn’t! It took me a long time to get here, and I didn’t do it just so you could cast me in some porno!”
She said it advancing on Lucia, step by step, inch by inch, until Lucia was backing away from her, into a bicycle rack, the loose metal swaying slightly as she collided with it. She bent backward, and Mindy felt compelled to follow her, to shove her over those looping waves of metal, to grab her by the shoulders and push her back until her feet left the ground. She didn’t, but just for that one moment, it made so much sense.
“I’m sorry,” Lucia said, as if pushed to that point beyond defensiveness, that point where she was so desperate to keep Mindy that it almost seemed unfair to deny her. “It was before we were friends.”
“I was always your friend,” Mindy said as headlights pushed the black away. Her parents were circling the parking lot, looking for her. When Mindy looked away from them, Lucia was gone.
CHAPTER 17
For most of her life, Mindy had had no contact with Lucia. Being without her should’ve been like going back to normal. No more harebrained schemes, no more shenanigans, no more hot-queasy feelings that slid into Mindy’s stomach at random times, summoned by the thought of Lucia. But the only thing worse than it was when it stopped.
She should’ve been glad she didn’t have to worry about that now.
For the first day, she felt like she’d lost an arm, or like she was a lost arm. A phantom limb. She had jokes to tell Lucia, lazy thoughts to share with her on text message, dumb YouTube videos to e-mail to her. They got blocked up, crammed into her body by invisible gates, and she felt like she might explode sometimes.
The second day, those gates were wider, taller, locked tighter. It seemed like things—just little things—got caught outside by them. Things that would’ve made Mindy laugh didn’t get through. Things that would’ve made her sigh, flutter, tear up… They must’ve been going right past Mindy. Instead, she felt like white noise.
The third day was quiet. So quiet. The white noise had faded, leaving that hum you can hear in those long stretches of the night when dogs aren’t barking and cars aren’t running. The sound of the moon, maybe, singing a lonely song in case anyone would care to hear it. She thought she was over it.
Day four, five, six, she’d see Lucia swinging out of her house or coming back to it, as quick and irrevocable as a knife jabbing into flesh, and the Band-Aid was ripped off. Sometimes it struck Mindy as hard as a fist in her stomach. She’d go to the bathroom or the supply closet and cry until she found out how many tears she had.
And she was grateful for those minutes that felt like hours, those absences that led to school administrators and safety officers finding her, sending her to the nurse’s office for a checkup, explaining to her gently that it wasn’t safe for good little students in the boiler room. Because the hurt meant it was real. It had happened.
Mindy didn’t get to sleep the sixth night. Part of it was the lingering adrenaline that stayed right under her skin instead of going back to wherever it was supposed to be—being arrested, fighting with Lucia, almost killing a man. Part of it was that she kept hearing weird noises from Lucia’s house. Not vampire noises. More like…shop class.
Finally, she put her headphones on and played Enya music until she couldn’t help but go to sleep. She woke up three hours later, in the middle of the night feeling perfectly refreshed but with nothing to do because it was four in the morning. And that noise was still coming from Lucia’s house…
Mindy got dressed, went downstairs, out the door, across the lawn, knocked on Lucia’s door. A silent pause, then the noise started again. Mindy tried the doorknob. Unlocked, of course. She went inside, up the stairs—gathering a few scraps of litter to throw away in passing—and went to Lucia’s room. The door was open.
Lucia was wearing eye protection, a rubber science lab apron, and dish-washing gloves. Her iPod—no, it was a Walkman—was stuffed in her belt and she was listening to something on headphones, performing the lyrics sotto voce as she worked a hacksaw through a two-by-four plank of wood. The wood had already been painted in candy cane stripes.
Then there was the papier mâche, the store mannequins, a stereo, and what could be either an IED or fireworks of similar legality and deadliness. Overnight, Lucia’s room had turned into one vast, unassembled attempt by Wile E. Coyote to kill the Roadrunner.
“Lucia, what’s going on?”
Lucia noticed her abruptly—rather like a cat hearing a vacuum cleaner—and she hit herself in the face with the hacksaw as she moved to take her headphones down. Managed it with the other hand. “Oh, Minz, hi, I was just—it’s a surprise.”
“I would agree with that. Is that confetti?”
Lucia looked. “Yes.”
Mindy nodded and resigned herself that, much like Lost, this would not make more sense if it was explained. “I just wanted to come over and apologize for being so upset the other night. It’s one thing to be angry, but it’s another thing to be angry at someone, and I shouldn’t have yelled or punched you in the tit or—”
; “It’s an apology.”
Mindy held up her hands. “I wouldn’t go that far. You did try to get me to have sex with Quentin.”
“No, all this!” Lucia waved her hands around. “It was going to be a big apology, I had the marching band lined up, it was going to be just like one of those movies where Matthew McConaughey screws up with a girl, then gets back with her by making a big crazy gesture! Or running through an airport, but we don’t have an airport here.”
Mindy put her hand on her heart. “This is all for me.”
“Yeah, you kinda ruined it by forgiving me so fast. Can you keep being angry with me for like two more days? I hired an Elvis impersonator, but he is going to take a while to get here.”
Mindy smiled hard enough to give herself laugh lines.
“Okay, if you can’t be angry with me, and let’s face it, who could, can I hug you? I really need to hug you if you’re going to be looking all huggy.”
Mindy nodded and was all of a sudden wrapped up in a hug. One look at her and Lucia had seemed so small, folded up in herself, lost in her own white skin and dark hair and fangs, fucking fangs.
Mindy knew she could make it better. Not right, but better.
“I hate fighting with you,” Lucia said. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.”
“I’m not a fan myself. Let’s quit doing that.”
“Listen, you know how in all those cheesy romances someone says the other person should stay away from them because they’re bad news? Well—I really am bad news. New York Times headline—bloodsucking vampire on the loose—that’s the definition of bad news. So if you wanna stay away from me, I completely understand. But do it for your own good. Not because of something stupid I did when I didn’t even know you. I mean, you knew I was stupid going into this. I never lied about that.”
“You’re not stupid. You just—don’t always remember to be smart.” Mindy forced herself away from Lucia’s chill. She felt like she had to stay against it. Warm it up. “Our relationship has to change. I can’t keep giving all the time and get nothing back.”
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 22