Death's Excellent Vacation (10 page)

“It’s over,” I told her.

Tammy ran and hugged me. I wanted to say something profound and comforting, but all I could do was repeat, “It’s over.”

At least Tammy wouldn’t remember any of this. No, her memories would be replaced with one where she’d been sequestered by boring bodyguards provided by her father’s former friends. Tammy would go into adulthood without the burden of knowing there were things in the night no average human could stand against. She’d be normal. It was the best birthday present I could give her.

“You fought on the premises,” Verses stated.

Bones let out a snort. “You noticed that, did you, mate?”

“Maybe if you hadn’t stood there and done
nothing
while we were am-bushed, your precious
premises
would still be in one piece!” my mother snapped at Verses. “Don’t you have any loyalty? Bones said you were a friend!”

Verses raised his brows at her withering tone, then cast a glance around at the parking lot. Vampire bodies littered the area, one of the cars was still on fire, and various others were smashed, ripped, or dented.

“I am his friend,” Verses replied. “Which is why I’ll let all of you leave without paying for the damages.”

“He doesn’t sound like we’ll be welcomed back,” I murmured to Bones. “So much for coming here during the rest of our vacation to explore all those private areas.”

Bones’s lips brushed my forehead. “Don’t fret, luv. I know another club in Brooklyn I think you’ll
really
fancy . . .”

Daniel Stashower is a two-time Edgar® Award winner whose most recent nonfiction books are
The Beautiful Cigar Girl
and (as coeditor)
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters
. Dan is also the author of five mystery novels and has received the Agatha and Anthony awards. His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including
The Best American Mystery Stories
and
The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories
. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their two sons.

IN those days LifeSpan Books had offices in a three-story garden atrium building in Alexandria, Virginia. The building is still there. Across the street—in the middle of the street, actually—is a Civil War statue called
Appomattox
, marking the spot where seven hundred young soldiers marched off to join the Confederate cause in 1861. The statue shows a Confederate soldier with his hat off, head bowed and arms folded, facing the battlefields to the south where his comrades fell. Originally there was a perimeter of ornamental fencing and gas lamps, but over the years, as South Washington Street grew into a major artery, the fence came down and traffic in both directions simply jogged outward a bit to avoid the base of the statue. Every so often somebody clipped a fender, but the soldier stood his ground.

One night a van plowed into the base of the statue and knocked the soldier facedown into the street, opening the door to a vigorous public debate about whether a busy intersection was really the proper place for a symbol of the Confederacy. The city fathers ultimately fell back on a musty piece of legislation that the Virginia House of Delegates had passed in 1890. It stated, in part, that the monument “shall remain in its present position as a perpetual and lasting testimonial to the courage, fidelity and patriotism of the heroes in whose memory it was erected . . . the permission so given by the said City Council of Alexandria for its erection shall not be repealed, revoked, altered, modified, or changed by any future Council or other municipal power or authority.” So the statue went back up. Motorists beware.

I know all this because Thaddeus Palgrave told me. He was a senior editor for LifeSpan Books, and he made a point of knowing such things. Actually, Palgrave didn’t tell me directly, he just let it bubble out of him when I happened to be in the room. He had a way of leaning up against the tall window of his office, with his head resting against his forearm, giving impromptu disquisitions on matters of art, commerce, and history. He would usually wrap things up with a pithy moral, sometimes in Latin.
Aquila non captat muscas.
The eagle doesn’t capture flies. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

It never seemed to matter to Palgrave whether anyone was in the room with him when he made these learned remarks. At first it struck me as a sort of foppish affectation, like an ascot or an ivory-tipped swagger stick, meant to suggest a man of rare breeding set down among the heathens. I imagined him practicing at home, leaning against a bedroom wall, sighing deeply as he tossed off Latin epigrams. But in time I came to realize that he genuinely didn’t care what anyone thought of him—didn’t even consider it, in fact. There were a lot of people like that at LifeSpan Books.

You may not remember LifeSpan. They were the people who produced “multi-volume continuity reference works” on various subjects—low-fat cooking, home repair, World War II—and sent them to you in the mail, once every two months. You’d sign up for a series on, say, gardening, and soon the books would begin to arrive, filling you with optimism and resolve. They’d start you off with
Perennials
, followed two months later by
Flowering Houseplants
, then
Vegetables and Fruits
. You’d dip in here and there—do a little aerating, maybe visit a garden center—and congratulate yourself on making such a good start. Perhaps next year, you’d tell yourself, you might even be able to grow your own carrots and tomatoes. And the books would keep coming and coming.
Annuals. Ferns. Lawns and Ground Cover.
You never realized there would be quite so many. Still, some of them look quite interesting. Maybe a little more detail than you bargained for, but it’s good. Really, it’s good. And besides, you’ll be able to get back out to the garden after the Little League season ends.
Bulbs. Herbs. Evergreens.
It begins to dawn on you, at the start of the third year, that perhaps you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. For one thing, you’re running out of shelf space. You start stacking the books up on the worktable in the garage. You’ll sort it out in the spring.
Shade Gardens. Orchids. Vines.
One night around ten thirty, during tax season, you try phoning the toll-free number where operators are standing by, in an effort to take them up on the offer of “cancel anytime if not completely satisfied.” Your resolve crumbles as you spend forty-five minutes on hold listening to “Gospel Bluegrass Classics,” available now from LifeSpan Music.
Pruning and Grafting. Shrubs. Wildflowers.
The last of your children goes off to college. There will be time now for some serious gardening; you might even make a start on a pergola, if only your back weren’t giving you so much trouble.
Roses. Miniatures and Bonsai. Rock and Water Gardens.
Over the winter holidays a sudden snowstorm drives your grandchildren indoors. They use the stored cartons of books to build a fort.
Cacti and Succulents. Winter Gardens. Heat-Zone Gardens.
It is a beautiful day in late September and your eldest son is walking a real estate agent through the house. “Yes,” he says, “it was very sudden, in the garden. He would have wanted it that way.” As they’re signing the papers, they hear the soft thump of a package at the door:
Organics.

I applied for an editorial job at LifeSpan straight out of journalism school. They brought me in for an interview with the managing editor, the tenor of which had less to do with my qualifications than with the apparent rarity of the opening. “We haven’t had a vacancy here in nearly a decade, Mr. Clarke,” he kept saying. “Quite extraordinary, really. So I’m afraid I’m a bit rusty on procedure. We should have coffee, I suppose, yes?”

His name was Peter Albamarle, and he radiated a sense of wary befuddlement, as though someone kept hiding his stapler. “I don’t suppose you went to Princeton?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “NYU. It’s there on my résumé.”

Albamarle glanced down at the paper and placed his fingers on it as if it might crawl away. “A very good school. Very good. I only ask because so many of our old boys are Princeton men. With a few Dartmouth types here and there.”

He waited a moment as if I might suddenly recall that I had gone to Princeton after all. I shook my head.

“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” he continued. “We were most impressed with your application. With that piece you wrote.” He pushed a copy of a small academic journal across the desk at me. It contained an article I’d written: “Connected by Fate: Aspects of Dickensian Happenstance.” My debut in print. I nodded and tried to look appropriately modest, like a Princeton man.

“That’s how our recruiters found you. We rely heavily on our recruiters. And they were right about you. You have a fine sense of the balance of fact and narrative.”

“Thank you.”

“And it strikes me as remarkable that your article should have come across my desk just now. We occasionally take on a new photo editor or researcher, of course, but the writing jobs never turn over. Never!” His eyes widened at the wonder of the thing.

“How is it that the job became available, if I might ask?”

“Oh,” his face darkened. “Jane Rossmire. She was tremendously competent, really a most extraordinarily good worker, but she left us suddenly. A bit awkward. We won’t speak of it. I’m sure she’s doing much better now. And no one really blames Thaddeus Palgrave.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean to say, no one really believes—ah! Miss Taylor! Will you take young Mr. Clarke down the hall for his writing trial? Purely a formality, you understand, I’m sure the pashas upstairs will approve my decision, but there it is.”

He said nothing more as I was led away to an empty office. I had been warned about this stage of the interview process and had studied up at the library with some old copies of the
Ancient Worlds
series. As I understood the exercise, I was expected to take several bulky packets of material from the research department and turn them into a smooth, lulling sort of prose, in much the same way that blocks of cheddar are emulsified into Cheez Whiz. The tough part was writing transitions, which often marked huge shifts of time or geography.
Despite such intriguing glimpses from prehistory, students of archeology seem time and again drawn to a later period, to the sweep of centuries from about the thirteenth century B.C. up to the Christian era.
This stuff is harder than it looks. According to office legend, one writer had his contract terminated over the phrase: “Meanwhile, far across the Caspian Sea . . .”

Apparently my sample essay on the marriage of Hatshepsut met with general approval. By the end of the week I had signed on as a junior editor on the Civil War series. If all went according to plan, I would serve an apprentice period on the research staff, then ease into some small-scale writing assignments, like captions and sidebars, and finally ascend to the Valhalla where chapters were written.

There are some who would tell you that LifeSpan Books was no place for an ambitious young journalist. I would respectfully disagree. At that time LifeSpan was part of a vast empire of magazines, including
Styles
and
NewsBeat
. The books division was where they sent the career correspondents who needed a tune-up or a drying-out period. I learned a lot from those guys. I remember one afternoon—the day of the
Challenger
shuttle disaster—when I tagged along with a group of them to watch the coverage at the corner saloon. They sat around talking about the ledes they had written nineteen years earlier on the day of
Apollo 1
. It was a three-martini master class. You don’t get that in J-school.

At that time there were only two other people in the building who were under age thirty, a pair of photo editors named Brian Frost and Kate Macintyre. They scooped me up on my first day and taught me the rules of the road—the location of the supply closet, the proper operation of the balky Xerox, the kabuki ritual of the time sheets. After work they took me out for beer and nachos, insisting that it was a company tradition. “When you pass your research apprenticeship, you start making real money,” Brian explained. “Then the nachos are on you.”

“And on that day,” Kate added, “an angel gets his wings.”

It soon became understood that the three of us would spend our lunch hours together. In good weather, we picked up sandwiches from the cart in the lobby and took them down to a park bench overlooking the Potomac. Kate, a proto-Goth who spent her evenings creating “media collages,” felt that it was her duty to bring me up to speed on five years’ worth of office gossip. Brian, who played keyboard in a punk-jazz fusion band, did his best to inject a note of moderation.

“You’re giving the new guy the wrong idea about this place,” Brian said, toward the end of my second week. “You’re making it sound like some sort of French bedroom farce. You know, with slamming doors and people running around in their knickers. It’s not like that.”

“It’s not? Hey, New Guy? Am I giving you the wrong impression?”

“I find your candor refreshing,” I said.

“I know, I’m adorable. And did you notice that guy we passed in the elevator? With his glasses on a green cord? That’s Allan Stracker. He’s been having a sidebar with Eve Taunton for three years. She still thinks he’s going to leave his wife.”

“Allan writes a column for the
Alexandria Gazette
,” Brian added, judiciously. “On public zoning concerns.”

“Having a sidebar?” I asked.

Brian raised his eyebrows at me. “In office parlance, it refers to the enjoyment of certain intimacies outside the confines of marriage. The derivation is obscure, but it appears to date to an incident in which a certain managing editor’s passionate addresses were interrupted by the sudden arrival of his wife. His explanation, we’re told, was that he was merely researching a sidebar for
Healthy Lifestyles
. His wife’s response is not recorded.”

This is how people talked at LifeSpan. If you asked someone where the coffee filters were kept, the answer was likely to touch on the role of the coffee cherry in Ethiopian religious ceremonies.

“What about you, New Guy?” said Kate, crumpling up an empty bag of potato chips. “Any dirty details we need to know? Is there a string of broken hearts trailing back to Greenwich Village?”

“There was somebody in New York before I moved down here, but she—I got a letter.”

“We’ve all gotten those letters,” Brian said. “I keep a file.”

“Too bad Jane Rossmire isn’t here anymore,” Kate said. “She had a thing for anguished writer types. You’d have liked her. You could have been all dark and brooding together.”

“I’m not dark and brooding.”

“My mistake.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Jane Rossmire. Isn’t she the one who left? Didn’t I fill her job? Something to do with Thaddeus Whozits?”

Brian and Kate exchanged a look. “Thaddeus Palgrave,” Brian said. “LifeSpan’s answer to Heathcliff.”

“What’s the story there? Mr. Albamarle made it sound as if Palgrave had driven her off the premises with a pitchfork or something.”

“Nobody really knows,” Kate said. “I mean, considering we’ve got a building full of researchers, there’s surprisingly little in the way of hard data on Palgrave. And nobody’s seen or heard from Jane in six months. I’ve tried calling. The phone is disconnected.”

“I liked her a lot,” Brian said. “She’d seen the Ramones eight times. I made her a tape of Sham 69.”

“They never should have assigned her to Palgrave,” Kate said.