“And the granny? What's she?”
Clyde shook his head, took a drag, let it waft out his nose and the corners of his mouth while he spoke. I lit another just watching him. “Accomplice? Maybe she tried to warn the kid. Maybe she used to be his babysitter and she stopped by to say hello at the wrong time.” He shook his head again. “Can't say. Regardless of who it was, I figure he'll turn up again. That's why I come out here a lot. He'd have to come back sometime. Too much attention on this one, he's going to come back to make sure he didn't leave anything untidy that might point to him. If I were the murdering sort, I wouldn’t exactly worry too much about the local Sheriff catching me but the SBI's a different story. If he's worried, he'll want to double-check everything. If he's arrogant, he'll want to gloat.”
I smiled a little; I'd heard that tone before behind many of Clyde's hypotheticals. “You don't think it's the outsider, do you?”
Clyde stood silent for a few seconds then shook his head at the ground. “No, I don't.” He took a long drag. “Song chasers go way up the mountain sometimes and it isn’t always a pretty business. They go out at night because it's quieter then, and sometimes the only way to hear the old songs is to sneak up on a house where some mountaineer – who shoots anyone lacking their same last name – is singing them. No, the outsider is the easy answer. My personal opinion...” Clyde paused, looked up at the sky, looked around in the direction of the trees that ringed the clearing some fifty yards away in any direction, went on. “It wouldn't be popular around here, but I suspect he ran these folks across the wrong bunch of hillbillies somewhere and got himself in trouble: maybe some old moonshiner, maybe somebody who married both his sisters. I don't know.” Clyde shrugged halfway before clearing his throat and then straightening his back and his hat at the same time. “There were some things we found that were unusual. Things that point up the mountain to some backwards place more than anywhere else. Anyway, I expect it's a lot simpler than some complicated con and a stranger. That's too neat and too messy all at the same time. Wouldn't be able to build much of a career at it, killing rich orphans and old women, would he? Meantime, it's too convenient for some of our fine citizens to point at an outsider and remain certain of their own purity.” He spat suddenly, at the ground, the shadows. “A couple years of police work has taught me about purity.”
I let him stand there without saying a word. He was headed away from the personal conclusions that I knew would endanger him – regardless of whether he was right – and I didn't see any need to get out and push along the way. Finally Clyde turned back to face me and put on something like a smile. “Anyway,” he drawled, “We'll get 'em sooner or later.”
I ran the details through my head again and sighed. I could afford to talk to him as my old friend, for just a moment, rather than prey. “I have to tell you, my instincts are different on this one. I don't think you'll ever know who did it or why. I don't know who did it, Clyde, but I don't think you will, either. It's so random, there's nothing to tie it together. I wouldn't know where to begin.” I smiled a little. “Not that I'm questioning your skills as a detective.”
“Thanks.” Clyde produced a soft, dark chuckle: two parts maybe to one part is-that-so. “But I'm pretty sure I'm right.” He nodded to himself. “Pretty sure.” He enunciated each syllable distinctly, as though a separate word: pret tee sure. We stood in silence for a couple of minutes, finished our cigarettes and eventually turned our attention to those two depressions again. After a few forevers had gone by, Clyde spoke. “You really are looking well,” he said.
I smirked, unseen in the dark. “Clean living.” Clyde snorted loudly and I tsk'ed him. “Now, now. Judge not. How's Edith?”
Clyde produced the most unguarded, honest expression I'd seen all night: a broad smile. “She's great,” he said. “It's our third anniversary in seven weeks. Christmas, you know.” He looked over. “We missed you at the wedding.”
“Sorry.” I chewed my lower lip for a second. “Business.”
“I imagine your line of work does demand a lot of travel.” Clyde didn't sound too wounded, which was kind of him. “Edith hasn't seen you at all since graduation. She said to let you know you're welcome any Sunday for lunch.”
“Maybe this winter. Depending on the time.”
Clyde nodded and looked away again. “It's been ten and a half years since we graduated from high school and nobody in this town has seen you since the day after we walked the stage. You didn't even show up for your family's funerals – didn't even have funerals in the first place.” His voice was dragging a hundred questions around behind it. I’d have hated to be some perp hearing him wind up like that in an interrogation room somewhere.
I sighed a little. I'd figured he would get there eventually. “Yes, I did. I just didn't tell anyone about them. I wanted privacy.”
“And the community wanted to say goodbye.” Clyde wasn't angry. He was just sad. He coughed finally and shook it off. “None of my business. Sorry.”
“No offense taken.” My voice was low. I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to think about it. One day I'd have to open up that corner of my mind and look inside but not yet. I had plenty to think about, wonder about, to keep that far from the front burner. “Thanks for bringing me out here. I hope it doesn't get back to anybody. I just wanted to see for myself.”
“Don't mention it.” Clyde gestured with the flashlight and I went first, retracing my steps back to the cars. When we arrived, I walked over to mine with the keys already in my hand. He stopped halfway to his and the light swung around as he spoke. “Don't think anyone hates your or thinks you're too classy for them just because you went away. People get over things. They grow up. Sometimes I...” He paused and dug out another cigarette, lighting it. “Well, sometimes I think I know how you felt or maybe how you feel now, coming back here. I spent a long time at headquarters just training. I've seen enough of the local underbelly through fresh eyes to feel like I can't really just walk out my front door in the morning and fit into the rest of the world. I...” He paused again, took a drag. I said nothing, indicated nothing, just listened. “I'm wasting your time,” he finally sighed.
“No,” I said, quick off the starting block. “You're the best friend I've got in this town – hell, this end of the state. You can tell me. I know what you mean. I went off to college and now this place feels like a pair of shoes I grew out of: beat up, worn down and I can't go anywhere without it hurting a little. If you need to talk, I've got a phone.”
“Thanks. If nothing else, call us the next time you're in town. Maybe by then you can babysit for us.” He and Susan had been going together for four years when they got married. They were perfect for each other. I'd tried to set them up when we were seniors but it didn't take for a couple years. Edith was too smart for this town, always had been; so was Clyde. I couldn't believe it when I found out he'd bothered to go get educated and had wound up back here as the long arm of the law no one liked to see. The State Bureau of Investigation didn't help with cases back then. They just showed up and took them away from incompetent locals. “Just… whatever your situation is, stay in touch.”
“Will do.” I smiled, touched the brim of my hat – too small, too cheap, like all of mine were when hats were de rigueur and now it was crushing that haircut Agatha had paid so much money for me to have – and got into the car and drove away.
I went fifteen miles, watching my mirrors the whole time, cutting across dirt roads, doubling back. Finally I pulled into an Esso way down out towards nowhere and stepped into the phone booth. Beyond the meager lights of the gas station I could see apple trees by the tens of thousands spreading away in all directions, the sharp edges of leaves outlined in starlight. “Operator,” I murmured into the receiver, “I need to place a long distance call to Atlanta, charges reversed.” It took a minute or two to get the call set up. When a voice came on the other line I kept my report simple and by the book:
“Suspected activity, natives bli
nd.”
“There will be a telegram to you tomorrow evening, Mr. Surrett.” Agatha's help were all very crisp, very professional. I outranked them, but only nominally. I hung up the phone, got back into the gray sedan and set off for my motel. I had nothing but time to kill. Back then it felt like I'd never be out of time, that time just stretched out in front of me like so much endless highway I'd never have to leave or share or think about.
That was over half a century ago. I was young and stupid.
Now I'm old and none the smarter.
2
Now
“Sudoku is probably the single greatest thing that ever happened to vampires.”
That's what I was telling my cousin Roderick when I pulled the Firebird into the driveway in Hardisonville on my first return there in what felt like a hundred years. I couldn’t believe the things technology made available to me. Here I was, driving along in my car with a cellular phone on speaker, and I could just chat away with Roderick as though he were right there in the cabin with me. In truth, he sounded like he was at the other end of a tin can telephone, but he had explained to me that we – all of us, society or however you want to call it – had tacitly accepted degraded performance in one area for dramatically enhanced utility. It felt backwards to me, but the phone itself felt a little bit like magic.
“No way,” Roderick purred. “Infomercials: humans preying on other humans in the middle of the night. I think it’s cute. it’s like watching kittens wrestle.” Roderick purrs everything, unless he’s angry. His voice is a little hypnotic in a weird way and I’ve never been able to tell whether he cultivated that quality or it just happened on its own.
“You think infomercials are the best thing that ever happened to us? Ever?” I reached up and back and scratched Smiles behind the ears. He’s a hundred fifty pounds of Doberman I feed a little of my blood now and then to keep permanently young and stronger than a team of horses. At the moment, he was curled up on a towel I’d draped across the back seat with his head poking between the front seats so he could keep an eye on me and the road.
“On second thought,” Roderick mused, “I’m going to say it was skin cancer. It made them so paranoid. Pallor has never looked healthier.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Where are you staying, by the way?”
“I'm in Asheville. I can't find a decent place to stay in the countryside.”
“Lots of good hotels around,” I said, “But suit yourself. Been in long?”
“I got here three nights ago, actually. You know, Asheville has a very rich history.” He emphasized 'rich' as if it were a suggestive curse word. “Hauntings, murders, suicides, ghostly hitch hikers, a headless horseman, all kinds of fun.”
Roderick is... well, I don't know what to say about him. He likes trouble. He likes to pry and poke. He likes to find all the buttons on a person or a place and press them to see what happens. Roderick is a psychopath. Probably.
The thing about my cousin is that he really is my cousin. That's not some weird la familia vampire bullshit. He's my father’s middle brother’s youngest son’s only child. He was born about twenty years after I was but through a weird set of coincidences we both got turned. He never knew his maker like I know mine, though. He was an orphan. I think that’s part of what made him how he is. He lives in Seattle – grew up there – and the local boss, name of Emily, keeps an eye on him for me. I've been to visit. It was weird, but I extended the invitation in return. He may be a freak but he's family. None of us gets to choose the one we wake up in. “I see you've done some research,” I replied, neutral. I paused, then: “I'm glad you're here.”
“I promised I'd come visit.” He said it too simply for it to be the whole truth, but that’s just par for the course for us. “Emily sends all her love.”
“Tell her same back, if you talk to her.”
“When shall I come by?”
“I've got an appointment,” I said. “I'll call you later tonight, maybe tomorrow. That okay?”
“Of course, cousin.” Roderick sounded calm and that was always good. “I'll talk to you then.”
He hung up and so did I.
I only go back to Hardisonville every autumn, now. No need to stick around a lot; it's not like there are many of us up there. I'd been up on my victory lap – that's what Roderick called it – after I'd burned Bob the Third down to a pile of bubbling fat and taken over fifteen years earlier, but there weren’t many bloodsuckers up here to whom I needed to pass the news of the old boss’ demise. I now simply resolved to make my visits to Clyde coincide with my friendly little check-ins on the tiny handful of us who can blend in across a rural population that sparse. In a little place like Hardison County, a single sloppy vampire can really do a number on a town. It doesn't matter that they – humans – so vastly outnumber us; we so vastly overpower them, after all. Their refusal to believe in us works to our advantage but their ready inducement to mass hysteria works to theirs. To live as a vampire in such a place requires a tremendous amount of restraint combined with a little con artistry or a loyal servant or some other means of minimizing one’s own direct impact.
I'd rung up and gotten a week's subscription to the local newspaper before I came up to visit the old place so I'd have something to read, some source material for catching up on local events, puzzles to work on. Crosswords are good but Sudoku is better. That's part of the deal with living forever, or at least a very long time: we have to work hard to stay nimble. The body doesn't age of its own accord, doesn't weaken – quite the opposite – but the mind decays fast if one doesn't keep exercising it. I'd found chasing numbers around on a grid was satisfying and it stretched some corners of the brain I hadn't had to use in a while. I've tried buying the big books but they don't work for me. I don't want to become an expert. I want something to do when I get done reading the newspaper. Doing a book of puzzles feels too much like jogging in place. Doing the puzzle in the paper, the one all the humans find themselves stuck on over a bowl of oatmeal in the morning light, now that feels real.
I'd had to leave Raleigh right at sundown and stopped twice to buy gas on the way, cruising into Hardisonville around 11:15. The Firebird tears through that stuff, just eats it up. I should get something cheaper to run but nothing today feels as solid as a big slab of steel from the '70s. Sure, the paint is faded and the panels are dinged and the seats are sagging and half-crushed, but it’s my Firebird. Even if I wanted rid of it, I couldn't show up on a car lot at lunch to close a deal on the paperwork for a new one. Maybe I could line things up to walk in after dark, pay cash, whatever: it can be done but it draws attention. It earns the notice of the IRS, of the bank, of the salesman on the lot. Things like that have to be very carefully planned and executed or else you’re always stuck on the lookout for a moron you can get past without a million little questions. Sometimes it seems like it would be easier to do everything at a remove, through a slave, but I’m always trying not to give in to that eternal temptation to just go completely off the grid and withdraw from legal life. No, that way is madness. I know how it works for vampires who do that. They get proxies - butlers, assistants, interns, “nieces” whose names are on the deeds - to do all the legwork for them but it never pans out. Even if they try at first to do most of it themselves, to keep an ear to the ground of common experience, slowly over time they draw further and further back – or get pushed further away – until they’re just out there somewhere in the shadows, one too-curious patrolman or one nosy neighbor or one ambitious servant away from having everything taken in the fluorescent glare of bureaucracy or the silent swipe of petty theft. I like to keep things simple but most of all I like to keep things me.
I've made concessions, of course. No man in his eighties looks like me: hair thick and curly and dark black, face more or less unlined except by the little creases even an immortal acquires from worry or thought or, perhaps, from too much Sudoku. I was turned at twenty-four but I look thirty or thirty-five; I always looked older
than I was. I'm my own grandson on paper but it doesn't much matter given that when I sign for something I put down my name, Withrow Surrett, just as bold as I please. I’ve had to give up one public career to pantomime being a failure at another. For a while, I was a lay-about trust fund baby and now - in theory - I’m a failed writer selling off a collection of his grandfather’s paintings one at a time. That bothers me sometimes, but not as much as it would bother me to hide altogether. Agatha doesn't like it, of course. She thinks it makes me conspicuous, but to hell with that. I am who I am. I didn’t accept immortality so that I could become someone else; I did this so I could be here when the world of the living finally meets my standards.
I gathered up the stack of newspapers from around the blue delivery box at the end of the drive then turned and walked all the way back up the steep drive to the front door of the house. It was just pouring the rain in great sheets that night, a real drencher blowing up and over the mountains from the southwest, but I hadn't thought to bring an umbrella. Don't much care for them, to be honest. I'd rather feel the rain than insulate myself. I fished around for my keys, came up with them, and tried a couple of different ones before I got one that would turn the lock. House keys, they all look alike these days. No personality at all. Lightning was cracking far off, jagged veins of day on the other sides of mountains revealed in silhouette.
Smiles followed me out of the car, down the drive and back up. He was the first one into the house and into the dry where he promptly sprayed the foyer with a rapid and thorough shake. I closed the door behind me but didn't turn on the lights in the hall or anywhere else in the house. I could see just fine by the light of the VCR, blinking 12:00 at me every two seconds. I checked my watch: late but not so late I'd missed him. Clyde still went out to that field on this night every year, rain or shine.
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 2