Underdead (Underdead Mysteries)

by Liz Jasper

  Roger turned to Kendra. “Jo’s right. It’s too important for her to handle alone. Kendra, why don’t you assist her. You’ve done it several times before.”

  Kendra shot me a dirty look and I groaned inwardly. That was not how I had wanted it to go. Either I had little control over the look or Roger was such a fiend he was immune. Probably both. The meeting adjourned shortly thereafter. Kendra and I stayed after to discuss the Science Olympiad.

  It was a short discussion. She handed me a list of five of the ten categories.

  “Here.” She spoke briskly, as if she wanted to get this over as quickly as possible because she couldn’t stand to be in the room with me. “You take these, I’ll take the rest. We’ll have the first meeting with the students later this week. Thursday okay?”

  I nodded. Saying sorry was so inadequate as to have been insulting. The best thing I could do was not slow her down.

  “They can sign up for their three activities then. We’ll take alternate weeks coaching them in our respective areas. I’ll take the first week. You’d better sit in on it, to see how I balance the training among the five areas. Since you’re such a weak candidate for the job.”

  I sat there for a moment after she left, adding a little well-deserved self-flagellation to the mild upbraiding Kendra had delivered. What had I been thinking, trying to use a vampire’s trick on a coworker? I’d seen what it had done to my students, and had been rightfully horrified. How had I concluded it was okay to try it on adults? What about my plan to avoid using it, lest it pull me closer to the dark side?

  That night on the way home from work I did something terrible. That doesn’t mean I can’t justify what I did. I can—and believe me I did a snow job on myself while on the way to do it—but the fact remains that I stole from a church. My church. I stole from work, too—a beaker and a rubber stopper. But compared to the other, that hardly bears mentioning, even if Bayshore is a parochial school.

  Too ashamed to park in the church’s lot, I left my car on a little-used side street and skulked over to the front of the church where I ducked into the shadow of a stone column. I stayed there for ten minutes, wanting to make sure the place was deserted before I made my move. (I was sure after five minutes, but by then I had to talk myself into it all over again.) Then, moving casually as if I had legitimate business there—in front of a locked church, after dark—I made my way to the little alcove near the wide double doors of the church, where a small bowl of holy water was always kept filled.

  In one smooth motion, I dipped the test tube into the bowl, filled it with holy water and plugged it tight with the stopper. Muttering a quick prayer of apology, the contents of which are between me and my maker, I tucked the vial into my pocket and strode quickly back toward my car.

  The moon was high, the evening bright, and my conscience busy. If I noticed the wide gaps between the streetlights on the narrow road, they didn’t trouble me. My right hand hadn’t left my pocket after depositing its burden, and my fingers worried the stopper while my actions worried my conscience. So absorbed was I in my own dark thoughts that I didn’t realize I had come upon my car until I had nearly passed it.

  Or maybe I didn’t realize it was my car because someone else was standing possessively by the driver’s door.

  “Will.” I felt my mouth go dry and my legs turn to rubber. This was it. I couldn’t fight him off if he was determined. The first time I’d surprised him. The second time, Gavin had been there to intercede for me. I knew very well the reason I was alive and pilfering today was that Will hadn’t yet tried a third time. That last time I’d seen him didn’t count—he had held back out of an odd nobility that I didn’t like to think about.

  He came toward me, moving smoothly on his long powerful legs, almost as if he were gliding. I stood there, unmoving, taking in his starkly handsome face as if I were having a dream. The moonlight threw his sculpted face into relief. His long, wavy hair fell in a blue-black curtain past his broad shoulders and his eyes were dark pools of shadow. When he got within a few feet of me, I stopped staring like a lovesick teen and ran.

  I hadn’t gone more than a few yards before I realized the street dead-ended up ahead. I veered between two cars and doubled back to my own, circling it twice while I scrabbled for my keys. Will followed, gaining on me. Holding out the door key with both hands, I made a wild dive for the driver’s side door lock, and missed. Will closed the distance, coming so near he made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. My breath came in frantic shallow gasps and tears streamed down my face. I panicked completely and tried to burrow in through the metal.

  “Jo,” he said, touching my shoulder gently. I flinched as if he had shocked me and cried harder. There was no one to help me.

  “Turn around.”

  “No,” I said in a cracking voice I hardly recognized as my own.

  He touched a hand lightly to my hair. “Please don’t cry. Everything will be all right.” He ran a finger caressingly down my cheek, wiping away the tears that soaked it. It was the tender, romantic gesture of a lover, only it was all wrong.

  I pushed his hand away. “Stop that!” I turned to face him, and now the quaver in my voice was one of fury. “If you’re going to kill me, do it. But stop,” I sputtered angrily, “toying with me. Don’t pretend you care about me. It’s insulting!”

  Will was taken aback. “I do care about you!”

  His apparent sincerity made me even angrier. “No, you don’t! If you did, you’d notice you’re scaring the crap out of me. I don’t want to be a vampire! Do I look willing, Will? Do I? Well, I’m not!”

  I pulled the test tube out of my pocket and held it up. He took a step back.

  “Do you see this?” I demanded, tears of anger streaming down my face. “This is holy water I stole from my church. Stole! Why? Because I met a handsome man whom against my better judgment I kissed because he charmed me with a witty intelligent discussion about books. And I woke up the next morning like this.” I gestured down at myself and Will took another step back, wary of the test tube I was swinging wildly about. “I can no longer run or hike because the sun burns my skin, my complexion scares children, and I can’t enjoy a single stinking bite of shrimp scampi without people concluding I’m pregnant with a dead colleague’s love child!”

  He held out his hands in a supplicating gesture. “Jo, I—”

  “I’m not done! Do you know why I stole this?” I asked in a deceptively calm voice.

  “You want to pour it on me?”

  “No. Because it will heal my skin. At least I think it will. I’ve never stolen a thing in my life—except a pack of gum from the supermarket when I was four, and I felt so bad I gave it back the next day—but tonight I stole from a church to clear up my complexion. My complexion! What kind of person does that? My values are in the toilet and now I’m going to hell all because you randomly picked me out of a crowd one night and tried to turn me into a vampire.”

  “It wasn’t random, Jo.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Is that supposed to make it better? You denied killing Bob because you said he wasn’t someone you would have wanted to spend eternity with. Did you bother to wonder what it’d be like to be stuck for all eternity with me? Don’t you least want a girl who’s willing?”

  His temper flared and he yanked me away from the car. I stumbled but he caught me up against him and captured my lips in a bruising kiss. I felt a familiar warmth course through me as the kiss began to change subtly into another kind altogether.

  Will thrust me away and took a step back. I fell back against the car, feeling the cool night breeze where his body had been pressed against mine. His deep blue eyes burned down into my own.

  “Are you quite sure you’re not willing?” He didn’t wait for an answer but turned angrily on his heel and walked away.

  I got home, somehow; I couldn’t remember the drive.

  Once again, Will could have bitten me, could have completed my transformation, but he
hadn’t. I didn’t know why and my speculations weren’t good company.

  I tried not to think about Will, but I couldn’t think of anything else. It was true, what he’d said. Part of me did want him, and it wasn’t just the vampire part. And, though I didn’t care to admit it, there was a part of me that liked him, even respected him.

  I forced the thought away, horrified and scared about what it might mean, but it kept eating at me until I faced it. Maybe he was right. Maybe I did want to be with him. Wanted to let go of my resistance. Wanted, in fact, to complete the transformation, to stop living this half-life, to become, in full, a vampire.

  No. I couldn’t let it happen. I wouldn’t. With shaking hands, I pulled the vial of holy water out of my pocket, wrested out the cork, and splashed some of the liquid onto my face. I gasped sharply at the pain, nearly dropping the vial. But I continued ruthlessly, almost welcoming the pain, my hot jagged tears mingling with the holy water as it burned into my cheeks, my chin, my neck. I rubbed what liquid remained onto my hands and arms, rousting him out with each of turn of my hand.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  * * *

  The next morning I woke abruptly before dawn. I felt funny, somehow. Different. It took me a moment to get the sleep fuzz off my brain, but when I did, I remembered my experiment with appalling clarity. Oh God! What had I done to myself? I reached a shaky hand up to touch my face, but the skin felt smooth and cool. I flicked on my bedside lamp and anxiously examined my hands.

  For a moment I was too scared to believe what I saw, unwilling to accept the evidence before me lest I suddenly wake up to find it had been only a cruel dream. But the longer I sat there, the more I believed it was true. The scaly patches on my hands were gone, the redness had dissipated, and they were no longer painful.

  I threw back the covers, heedless of the goose bumps that sprang up as the cold night air hit my sleep warmed skin, and rushed to the bathroom. I turned on the bright overhead lights and examined my face again, this time with the help of a mirror. Tears filled my eyes and spilled down my pale, dewy cheeks. I looked…like me, as I had before all this had happened, down to the light scattering of freckles across my nose. It took me a moment to realize the best part—I could see my skin in the mirror. Not perfectly mind you, I was still a little blurry, but now, if I went in the haunted house at Disneyland, I would at least cast a better reflection than the ghostly hitchhikers at the end of the ride.

  I felt as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders and to celebrate, I did something I had wanted to do for weeks. I kicked the face mask into a dark corner of my closet and went for a long run on the beach, chasing waves with the long legged sandpipers and their avian mini-me’s, the tiny sanderlings. By the time I got back, tired and happy, the sun was up and a familiar figure was sitting on my steps waiting for me.

  “Hello, Gavin,” I greeted the detective amiably as he wordlessly unfurled himself into a standing position at my approach. Disapproval radiated from him like heat from a fire. His eyes were like hard silver balls and his well-shaped mouth was compressed into a tight little line, but I didn’t care. I’d have greeted Jack the Ripper amiably just then, I was in such a good mood.

  “Good morning, Jo.” He spoke like a parent whose child had just rolled in, drunk and oblivious, from a night of unauthorized partying.

  Ignoring the censure implicit in his greeting, I knelt down and ripped open the key holder I wore attached to my right running shoe and pulled out my door key. Gavin followed me in and sat himself down at the kitchen table, arms crossed and frowning, while I gulped down a cool glass of tap water at the sink.

  “You’re looking well.” His eyes raked me coldly from head to toe.

  “You make that sound like a bad thing.”

  “Is it?”

  “Don’t burst my bubble, Gavin.” I kept my tone light, but there was steel underneath.

  He made a small conciliatory gesture. “I didn’t intend to. I was just wondering why a girl who couldn’t go outside for two minutes during the day without incurring a nasty burn is out running,” he looked pointedly at my face, “without incident on a Saturday morning.”

  “The sun rose about five minutes ago and I’m wearing a bottle of blackout sunscreen, long sleeves, gloves, running tights, and a hat. I’m in far greater danger of heat exhaustion than sunburn.”

  He just looked at me.

  “I found a new skin treatment, okay? Something the dermatologist recommended but they don’t sell here. My mother bought it for me in London. Do you want their numbers?”

  He searched me probingly for a second or two and then the invisible string that had wound him so tightly gave a little. “That’s all right,” he grunted, but his eyes lingered speculatively on my pale, dewy skin until it turned red for a different reason. “My sergeant said you weren’t home when he drove by at eight last night.” Gavin rested his elbows lightly on the kitchen table. I wasn’t taken in by the seeming idleness of the question; his gray eyes were fixed on me like a tracking device.

  I didn’t like where this was going. I wasn’t about to admit where I had been or what I had been doing there. I certainly didn’t want to discuss my latest run-in with Will—I didn’t really understand it myself. And, I didn’t need a lecture from Gavin on the stupidity of parking in out-of-the-way places at night. His couldn’t begin to compete with the one I’d given myself.

  “I was working late.” I changed the subject. “How’s the investigation going?”

  It was his turn to look uncomfortable. “It’s stalled. We have no suspects to speak of. Everyone in your department had an alibi and no one has more than the most specious of motives.”

  It wasn’t a new position. The police had started with that premise after questioning us the night of the murder. But it was one thing to conjecture an impossible situation, another to know it. “I know. Everyone seems to be in the clear. I couldn’t find out a darn thing.”

  “What do you mean you know? I thought you were staying out of this.”

  Oops. I had got to learn to think before I spoke. “I am staying out of it. But people do talk, and sometimes they say suspicious things.”

  “What sort of suspicious things?”

  The phrase sexy thang seemed to hang like a storm cloud over the room, but I pushed it out of my mind. I knew that Becky hadn’t done anything to Bob, but some of my initial discomfort over that e-mail lingered, like a rotten grape leaves a bitter taste even after you spit it out.

  “Take Roger for instance, our department chair. His reputation is everything to him. He thinks he’s God’s gift to teaching, but Bob was going to give him a scathing review. Bayshore is Roger’s world. If that review had been made public, especially by someone so universally liked and respected as Bob was…” I held up my hands. “I don’t know what he would have done.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Alan. He’s replaced Bob on the review committee, and has Bob’s notes.”

  “Alan. The same guy who found the body? Might he by chance have noticed that you were poking around, looking for motives?”

  I had wondered the same thing myself, but somehow it sounded insulting when Gavin said it. “I have not been poking around. Alan brought it up one day at lunch after Roger had said something particularly condescending. If you don’t want to hear this, say so.”

  Gavin leaned back in his chair, but I didn’t deceive myself he was calm or relaxed. His severe gray eyes and bent nose made him look like one of the scarier voodoo idols. The sort the weary explorer finds when he is too deep in the jungle for running away to make sense, and yet he runs anyway. Gavin’s jaw was clenched so tightly the words came out funny when he spoke. “Go on.”

  “Then there’s Kendra, the ninth grade science teacher.”

  “She has a rock-solid alibi,” Gavin said. “She was talking with the older woman—Mary Mudget?—who teaches seventh grade, when they heard the glass break.”

  “I know. They all have rock-s
olid alibis. That’s why I’m focusing on motive. I don’t know how it was done, but it was done, and I find it highly unlikely that a total outsider could have gone all the way up to the science wing without having been noticed. Between the security guards, administrators, teachers and parents, someone would have noticed a person who didn’t belong.”

  “You mean someone like Natasha?”

  I ignored the sarcasm. “Exactly. She didn’t fit in, and I brought her up. And while you may have written her off, she still on my list.”

  “That is not what I meant, and you know it. Natasha looks nothing like a Bayshore parent. Too young, too flamboyant. And yet, not only did she have the run of the campus, but she successfully spent ten minutes in a one-on-one teacher’s conference. With you. And, you wouldn’t have thought to mention her if Will hadn’t identified her as a vampire for you later that night.”

  That was low. I crossed my arms and glared at Gavin.

  “All right. Fine. You’ve made your point. So. Where are all these strangers who had it in for Bob?”

  Gavin didn’t respond, unless you count more jaw clenching.

  “Perhaps, since your theory isn’t yielding any suspects, you’d like to hear what I have to say,” I said with a fake smile.

  “Absolutely,” Gavin said with equally fake solicitude. “I believe you were telling me about Kendra.”

  Drat. I didn’t have much on her—she had been my weak middle example, and now she had to be my strong lead-in. I beefed up the story a little. “I’m not sure if you’re aware how big a deal soccer is at Bayshore, but it’s the biggest sport on campus.”

  Gavin looked unimpressed.

  “Bob was the boys’ varsity soccer coach. Kendra got stuck with the girls’ team. Even with Title IX, there’s a big difference between the two, especially in the money you can earn on the side coaching summer league and giving private lessons. Bob probably doubled his income that way.”