The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  You don’t want to believe it, she thought.

  If he were dead, I would have sensed it. I folded my arms.

  That’s a bit of a cliché, she thought. Then she blocked her thoughts and said, “Sorry.”

  “He was with me nearly every day for thirteen years,” I said. “You weren’t around.”

  She flinched. Then she turned and left the room.

  While she was gone, Dashay told me her theory of my father’s death: Malcolm had killed him. My mother had told her about him, and she considered him Evil Incarnate.

  “The obit says heart failure,” she said. “That could mean anything. I never heard of one of us having a heart failure, unless it was you know what.” She made a fist with her left hand, thumb on top, and simulated a hammer with her right.

  “Do people really use stakes in the heart?” My father hadn’t been entirely clear on that point.

  “It’s been known to happen.” Dashay didn’t sound sure she should discuss this topic. “Sometimes, you know, people don’t know any better. Ignorant folks get the idea in their heads that somebody’s a vampire, and then they decide to get rid of the somebody.” She frowned. “I don’t like people much. If I hadn’t been one once myself, I wouldn’t have any use for them at all.”

  She turned away from me, toward Harris. “Hey, that’s pretty good,” she told him.

  Harris was coloring a seahorse purple, mostly inside the lines. The coloring book featured an array of sea creatures; he’d already finished the octopus and the starfish. I moved to look over his shoulder, inhaled his peppermint breath (he brushed his teeth twice a day). I didn’t want him to leave, ever.

  “Where’s Joey?” I asked.

  “Napping on the porch. As usual.” Dashay didn’t think much of Joey. “So, Ariella, you look more like yourself today. You must be feeling a lot better.”

  “I guess.” I stared down at the photos again. “What do you suppose happened to our books and furniture and our other stuff?”

  “Good question.” She stood up, stretched her arms. “Don’t know, but I’ll ask.”

  It took a few days to get answers, during which time I grew bored with being ill. I began to walk around the house, then the yard. On the southern side of the house, my mother had planted deep blue hydrangeas and plumbago; they’d been green hedges and shrubs last I looked, but during my week away from the world they’d burst into bloom. I recognized them from photos in the book my mother had given me. The air smelled hypnotically sweet from night-blooming jasmine and the blossoms of orange and lemon trees. It was hard to stay depressed in Florida, I thought.

  But later I ventured down a path I hadn’t explored before, and I found a different sort of garden. Roses climbed a trellis edged by hollyhocks and snapdragons. Water trickled down the sides of a fountain shaped like an obelisk. Tall grasses bordered the patch. Everything in the garden was black — the flowers, the grasses, the fountain, the vines that climbed the fountain, even the fountain’s water.

  “Welcome to my garden of gloom.” Dashay had come up behind me.

  We sat on a black iron bench and listened to the fountain. I was reminded of a story I’d read by Hawthorne: “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” most of it set in a macabre garden of jewel-like, poisonous plants.

  Yet I found this garden’s darkness curiously comforting. “Why did you plant it?” I asked.

  “I’d read about gothic gardens. Two or three hundred years ago, if you lost someone you loved, you planted a funeral garden, and when you sat in it, you did your mourning. You have to let yourself mourn, Ariella.”

  “Did someone you loved die?”

  “I lost my parents and my first love, all in the same bad year.” Her eyes were like amber, translucent yet clouded. “That happened back in Jamaica, a long time ago.”

  She looked from the fountain to me. “But you don’t want to hear that story now. Afterward I saved my money and bought myself a one-way ticket to Miami. You don’t ever want to go to that place. Gangs of mean vampires roam around Miami, biting people right and left, competing to grow their fang-gangs. And they’re into that blood-doping thing — they steal blood from hospitals and blood banks and inject themselves. Vicious! I wasn’t off the plane an hour when I got vamped.

  “I didn’t like that scene, so I headed north, looking for a place where folks would leave me be. That’s how I found ’Sassa and met your mother.” She smiled. “Sara’s been my best friend ever since that first day we met at Flo’s Place. We were both down on our luck, but we were feisty, and we trusted each other. We pooled what we had, and we built Blue Beyond. Hard work brings rewards, honey.”

  Dashay had survived more heartbreak than I’d encountered. Yet I felt a little jealous of her. I inhaled the spicy scents of the black snapdragons, wondering if I’d ever again have a best friend.

  After I found the garden of gloom, I spent less time in bed. I joined Mãe and Dashay, and sometimes Bennett, for meals in the kitchen. I didn’t talk much, but at least I was able to eat. Inside, I still felt numb.

  One afternoon Dashay and I were having a snack — slices of honeycomb, cheese, and apples — when Mãe came in, papers in her hand. Her friends had sent new pictures of my father’s grave. This time we could see the bottle clearly — a bottle of Picardo, half full, next to three long-stemmed red roses.

  “Like Poe’s grave,” Mãe said. “You know, the cognac and the roses.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Every year on January 19 — Poe’s birthday — someone leaves a bottle of cognac and red roses on his grave in Baltimore,” she said.

  “I’ve heard about that,” Dashay said. “Very mysterious.”

  My mother said, “Not really. Members of the Poe Society do it. They take turns. Raphael was a member and he did it himself, one year. He made me promise not to tell anyone. I guess keeping the secret doesn’t matter, now.”

  “It’s a sign,” I said. “It means he’s still alive. Father said that Poe was one of us.”

  They looked at me with pity, and I didn’t want to see it. “What else did you find out?” I said. “Did Dennis sign the death certificate?”

  “No,” she said. “It was signed by Dr. Graham Wilson.”

  I’d let myself imagine a scenario in which Dennis signed it, helping my father stage his own death. Now my convictions began to waver.

  “Ariella,” she said. “I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

  “My father wasn’t seeing Dr. Wilson.” I crossed my arms. “My father never went to any doctor.”

  Mãe and Dashay exchanged glances. After a few seconds, Dashay said, “Find out about Dr. Wilson. It won’t hurt to ask.”

  My mother shook her head, but she went back to her computer. Dashay handed me another slice of honeycomb. “How do you feel about taking the horses out?”

  I knew she was trying to distract me, but what of it. I’d brood as we rode.

  When we came back from our ride (Dashay on Abiaka, me on Johnny Cypress), we walked the horses around the paddock to cool them, then gave them grain and water.

  Mãe sat on the front porch, waiting for us. I studied her face and tried to hear her thoughts, but nothing came through. She had a sheet of paper in her hand, which she gave me.

  It was a copy of an email: “Sara, No problem at all. We checked with the real estate agent, and she said the house’s contents are in storage. Apparently the will leaves everything to your daughter, and the executor is Dennis McGrath. Don’t you know him? He’s got an office at the college, if you want me to call him. There was some buzz when Ariella didn’t show up for the funeral, but it’s died down now. Sullivan handled the arrangements. Let me know if you need anything else. XO, Marian.

  “P.S. Didn’t you ever meet Graham Wilson? Nice guy. Good doctor. One of us.”

  I sent my mother a triumphant smile, and she sent me back a thought: Maybe.

  We didn’t agree on what to do next. I wanted to head for Saratoga Springs, talk to Dennis and Dr. Wilson
. Mãe said that wasn’t wise. Michael had told her about Agent Burton (they’d had quite a talk, she said), and we weren’t going to take any chances.

  “Then you should go,” I said.

  “Ariella, think for a minute. What purpose would that serve? If you’re correct — if Raphael is still alive — he doesn’t want the world to know that. After all, if he staged his death, he did it for a reason.”

  “Why would a vampire do such a thing?” Dashay shook her head.

  “Because he wanted people to think he was mortal?” I said, thinking as I spoke. “Because somebody was going to expose him?”

  “His motives don’t concern us.” Mãe sounded more and more authoritative, and part of me resented her taking charge. “If he’s alive, he might have contacted us. But he hasn’t.”

  “Why should he?” The email was a crumbled wad of paper in my hand, and I began to smooth it out. “We left him. We both did. And neither of us ever called and told him where we were.”

  “He could have found me, any time.” Mãe crossed her arms — the same gesture I always made when I felt defensive. She heard me think that, and she set her arms emphatically at her sides. “I’ve always used my real name. It didn’t take you long to track me down.”

  “Aunt Sophie called him after she saw you that last time. She told him you’d said you didn’t want to be found.”

  “At the time, I didn’t. I was honoring my bargain with Malcolm.” She crossed her arms again. “What makes you think that Raphael wants to be found?”

  “The bottle of Picardo,” I said. “And the three roses. And the inscription: ‘So let us rejoice / While we are young.’ It was a kind of joke we had.” I tried to sound persuasive, but I realized I had no proof that he was alive. All I had was a stubborn hunch.

  Chapter Fifteen

  My father had more than once expressed deep skepticism about attempts to distinguish creative thinking from analytical reasoning. Wasn’t it obvious, he asked, that science and art demanded both? He liked to quote Einstein: I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious. His own mind was by nature so logical, yet so curious, that for him, the creative and the analytical were the same.

  But I have a different sort of brain, one that proceeds from intuition and imagination as much as from logic. My discoveries often are unexpected, and they depend as much upon leaps as logic or patient plodding.

  Once I decided to believe my father was alive, the problem was how to find him — because I’d also decided that whether he liked it or not, he would be found. I couldn’t have told you why I was so determined. Perhaps it was pride on my part. I’d come too close to completing the puzzle to accept losing its first piece.

  And so I plagued my mother with questions: Where had my father been happiest? Did he ever speak of living elsewhere? What things did he require, beyond the obvious?

  She was working in the beehives, pulling out trays and checking them to see if the colonies were healthy. Unlike Mr. Winters, she didn’t need a smoker to sedate the bees and keep them from stinging. All she had to do was talk to them. “Hello, my beauties. Did you smell the lemon blossoms this morning?”

  In between comments to the bees, she answered my questions. He’d been happiest, in the old days, when he was in the American South. He liked warm weather and the slow drawl of Southern culture. He’d talked a few times about “retiring” in Florida or Georgia, by the ocean. As for things, he didn’t demand much. He’d worn the same sorts of clothes and shoes since his Cambridge days; when they wore out, the London tailors and shoemakers made more. He had his books and journals, he developed his own blood supplements, and he had Mary Ellis Root to do his cooking.

  “What happened to her?” I asked. “Is she still in Saratoga Springs?”

  “Her name wasn’t mentioned.” Mãe beckoned to me. I stood close behind her and peered over her bent shoulder. “Good morning, Queen Mãeve,” she said.

  It took me a second to spot her. The queen’s lower body was longer, more pointed, than those of the other bees. She moved from cell to cell of the honeycomb, laying tiny eggs the color of rice.

  “How does he make the supplements?”

  “You probably know as much as I do.” She gazed at the queen with affection. “He extracts plasma from the blood of cadavers —”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  She looked up at me. “Why so alarmed? It’s not as if he kills them. When I lived there, the blood came from Sullivan’s funeral parlor. When they embalm a body, the blood is usually discarded, poured down the sinks. Your father paid Sullivan to deliver it to him. Recycling takes many forms.”

  “So he used human blood.”

  “And animal blood, too. He got deliveries twice a week, same as we do. You must have seen the Green Cross vans. They’re the most reliable delivery service when it comes to transporting blood.” She carefully slid the frame back into the hive. “He used the plasma to make the supplements — some in the form of tonics, some as freeze-dried particles. He kept what he needed and sold the rest to a company in Albany. I have some of the freeze-dried stuff in the kitchen; they market it as Sangfroid.”

  I’d seen the red and black canister in the kitchen. “Where do you buy Sangfroid?”

  “Green Cross delivers it.” My mother was staring intently into the next hive. “Come and look, Ariella. Have you ever seen a more beautiful bunch of bees?”

  Hundreds of bees clustered on the glistening gold honeycomb, making tiny movements unintelligible to me. “So clever,” she cooed to them.

  “They’re lovely,” I said, feeling unexpectedly jealous. “When does the delivery van come next?”

  My mother gave me a present: my own cellular phone. She said she had mixed feelings about the technology, but that since they used the home phone for business, I should have my own number.

  At her suggestion, my first call went to Michael, to let him know I was all right. Obsessed with finding my father, I wanted to ask him about Dennis and Mary Ellis Root, but he’d never met them, and he had no reason to know if they were in town. I didn’t have much else to say.

  “I miss you,” Michael said, his voice equivocal.

  “I miss you, too.” In a way I was telling the truth: I missed the boy he’d been before Kathleen’s death. “Maybe you can come and visit us sometime.”

  “Maybe.” But the way he spoke made it seem a remote prospect. “Ari, I need to ask you something. Kathleen said some things about you. She told me that I should be careful around you, that you weren’t —” He stopped talking.

  “She told you that I’m not normal?” I said. “Well, that’s true.”

  “She said — stupid stuff. She was into that weird role-playing and witchcraft, and who knows what else. But she acted sometimes as if it were real. She said you were a vampire.”

  In my mind, the word glowed like embers.

  “And I know that’s ridiculous, but I still have to ask if you know anything about how she died. Do you know anything?”

  “All I know is what I read, and what you told me,” I said. “I had nothing to do with her death, Michael. I wish I’d been there that night — sometimes I think I might have been able to save her. But I got sick, and you drove me home, and the next thing I knew, your father called mine to see if she was with me.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “No apologies needed.”

  I asked him if there were any leads in the case. He said that the police were questioning stable hands.

  Once I’d sorted through what I knew about my father, and what my mother had told me, some facts emerged as possible means of tracking him down. I wrote them in my journal.

  First, every January my father went to Baltimore. Going to Baltimore next January might be of use. But January was months away, and I wasn’t inclined to be patient.

  Second, my father was devoted to his research. To conduct the business of Seradrone, and to stay alive, he needed
a steady supply of blood. That meant inquiries should be made to the Green Cross service, and perhaps to funeral parlors. But where?

  Third, he relied upon his helpers: Dennis McGrath and Mary Ellis Root. Find them, and a trail might lead to my father.

  Fourth, contact his tailor.

  Those were the immediately obvious avenues to finding him. Of course, he might have done something unexpected — run away to India, or begun a new life as a teacher or writer. But I didn’t think so. As my mother had said, most vampires are creatures of habit.

  That night after dinner, Mãe, Dashay, Harris, and I sat outside in the moon garden that lay on the house’s northern side. (Joey had been sent to bed by Dashay; the moon excited him, and he made too much noise.) Mãe had planted an array of white flowers — angel’s trumpets, moonflowers, flowering tobacco, and gardenias — in a circular plot, and we sat on two facing benches made of weathered teak, watching the flowers seem to glow as the sky darkened. A half moon hung low in the June sky, and the heavy perfume of the tobacco plants made me sleepy. Around us, mosquitoes droned, but never even brushed our skin. Their noise reminded me of high-pitched string instruments. I know it’s not a pleasant sound for humans, who fear their bite.

  I told the others about my plan to find my father. The Recovery Plan, I called it. They listened without commenting.

  “I plan to begin making calls tomorrow,” I said. “I feel well enough, and my head is clear again.”

  “That’s good,” Dashay said. Next to me, Harris made a sound of agreement.

  Mãe said, “And what if you do find him, Ariella? What then?”

  I didn’t have an answer. Her face was half in shadow, and Dashay sat beyond her, nearly invisible. I tried to imagine my father sitting on the bench next to my mother, taking in the night air, admiring the lanternlike glow of the flowers, and I failed. I couldn’t picture him with us.