Helens-of-Troy (17 page)

“You?” Tara said indignantly. “You have
no hair.”

“I’m a guy with a family history of
receding hairlines,” Ryan shrugged. “I’m just speeding up the
process.”

Sensing he had hurt her feelings, he
tried to think of something to say to make her feel
better.

“I like your earrings.”

Tara remained sullen.

“What’s up, Tara?” Ryan asked, knowing
those three words could lead him into dangerous territory. Tara
would either go mental on him and be done with it, or she might
drag the inevitable fight out all night long. Sometimes it was best
just to get it over with.

“Thanks a lot.”

“This isn’t about your hair,” he
sensed. He had been through several styles with her, and several
emotions because of them. Sometimes it took until things began to
grow back before their relationship began to settle down. If that
was true, this one might take a while.“The search group,” she
whined. “Why didn’t you pick me to join your group of three this
morning? Jacey wasn’t there. Why did you pick that new
girl?”

Ryan winced. At the time he hadn’t
thought about that choice coming back to bite him. “Oh that. You
know Tom. He’s a player. He wanted to get to know
Goth-Chic.”

“Tom didn’t pick her. You did. I heard
you.”

Ryan had to think quickly. “We had it
pre-arranged.”

“Liar.”

He knew he was caught. “Okay, you got
me. But I couldn’t ask you to come with us. Your dad was standing
right there. You must have heard him telling everyone what a
deranged piece of society I was. I’m personal non gratis with
him.”

True, Tara knew. Ralph would have had a
fit if she had gone with Ryan, Still…

“You mean persona non grata,” she
corrected him.

“Whatever. Hop in the car and I’ll take
you for a drive.” He leaned over to the passenger door and opened
it from the inside.

“A drive?” Tara smiled. The stars were
aligning perfectly. It was a rare Saturday night when Ryan didn’t
want to hang out with Tom and Jacey. Finally, she thought, a chance
to get some alone time with him. “That’d be great! Where do you
want to go?”

“I was thinking we could drive around
for a little while and then go get romantic down by Stillman’s
Creek. How does that sound?”

“Stillman’s Creek is a cesspool, and it
happens to back onto our farm. We can’t go there. If my dad catches
us, he’ll kill you.” She looked at him like he had completely lost
his mind. “Why would you want to take me there?”

“Well, Goth-Chic said...”

The switch in Ryan’s brain that should
have told him to shut up, had just malfunctioned.

Tara slammed the car door shut. “You,
Ryan Lachey, can go to hell. Or you can take Goth-Chic to
Stillman’s Creek. I really don’t give a shit.”

“It sure seems like you do. You keep
mentioning her. Why is she up your ass? Are you worried I’m going
to ask her out or something? Because I’m not. Goth-Chic’s a little
out there, you know.”

Ryan didn’t know if he could save the
situation, but he was going to try. Tara being this jealous of
another girl was something new to him. An interesting turn of
events. He could have told her not to worry, that Ellie had a thing
for Tom, but he was finding it all kind of amusing.

“What do you mean?” Tara
asked.

“Well, she thinks a vampire took Brooke
Quinlan.” He used his index finger to make a loony signal around
his head. “How’s that for starters? She’s checking out the
seat-sales to Mars as we speak, trust me.”

“Why? What did she say?” Tara re-opened
the door of the Toyota herself and slipped into the passenger seat.
If the new girl really was as crazy as Ryan was making out she was,
then she maybe she didn’t have anything to worry about after all.
This little tidbit of news intrigued her.

“She said she had a dream where she saw
this vampire-dude take Brooke off into the night.”

“A vampire? She told you this?” Tara
laughed. She might have found it hysterical except when she waited
for Ryan’s laughter in return, it didn’t happen. “Wait a minute. If
you really think she’s crazy, then why do I get the feeling your
sudden need to visit the swamp at the back of our farm has
something to do with her? Did she say the vampire was at my
place?”

“Maybe,” he admitted
sheepishly.

“Ryan, you are so gullible. She’s just
messing with your head. Girls like her are like that.”

“All I know is, she’s not talking to
Tom or me right now,” he shrugged.

“There’s some good news. So why don’t
you just forget about it? I can think of plenty of things we can do
that don’t involve her.”

“Because it’s been my experience that
when chics give you the silent treatment after they tell you
something, they weren’t joking around.”

Tara tried to read Ryan’s face. She
couldn’t get an accurate read on whether he was making this whole
story up or not. At the moment, Ryan just looked perplexed. Did
Goth-Chic really have a crazy dream complete with a blood sucker
living at the edge of the Wildman farm? “Why do I get the
impression that as much as you’re sitting there telling me that you
don’t believe her, you actually do?” she questioned.

“I don’t. I mean, I think I don’t,”
Ryan sighed. “Okay, I really don’t know what I think. Here’s the
problem. Goth-Chic, she’s new here, right? She couldn’t make her
way to the park without someone having to show her where it is. But
in this dream she had, she talked about that old wooden bridge out
by your place. The one over Stillman’s Creek. She even saw the
crappy old schoolhouse down the sideroad. You have to admit that’s
kind of freaky.”

“So, let me see if I have this right.
You want to take ME on a romantic drive to my OWN backyard to see
if we can find Goth-Chic’s vampire?”

“It doesn’t sound so good when you say
it that way, but yeah. That and some other stuff. I thought maybe
we could finish off what we started last weekend.”

“Does it not register in that thick,
bald head of yours, that I can’t stand the new bitch?” Tara asked
angrily. “Maybe I don’t want to have anything to do with her, or
her dream.”

“Goth-Chic’s not a bitch, she’s
just....”

“Drop dead, Ryan.”

Tara threw the car door open again and
climbed out. Ryan had been thick-headed before, but this time he
was going too far. She might not have had any plans for Saturday
night, but even if she did, there was no way they’d involve that
new girl.

She stormed off down the sidewalk,
without a glance back to Ryan.

“What? What did I say?” he yelled, as
he threw the car into gear and spun out onto the road. “Chics,” he
screamed out the window to startled passersby. “One’s as nutty as
the next.”

He reached over and turned on the car
radio. He had left it on the country station. Somehow, listening to
the top-ten countdown didn’t fit the mood he was in. Despite what
other people might think, it wasn’t the best music to listen to
when you’re about to go looking for a body in a swamp. He switched
it over to the oldies station, knowing it wouldn’t be long before
something moody hit the airwaves.

“Next up, Jan and Dean with Dead Man’s
Curve,” the deejay promised. Ryan liked that song. He found it
ironic, how Dean Torrence was killed in a car crash after writing
the tune. Not that it was a good thing. It wasn’t. But it got him
thinking about what would happen if every song a songwriter made
up, wound up coming true.

“It’d probably wipe out every blues
singer on the planet,” he realized as he thought about the ballads
he had written himself. The ones that no one had ever heard. Like
the song he wrote about Betty. He laughed. “Won’t come back from
Stillman’s Creek,” Ryan sang in falsetto as the station went to a
commercial.

There was surprisingly little traffic
in town for a Saturday night. It was as if a curfew had been put in
place keeping everyone at home behind locked doors. All because of
the missing girl.

Ryan stopped for an orange super
guzzler then headed out the highway towards Tara’s farm. Other
people might have been afraid of whatever sinister thing had taken
up residence in Troy, but he wasn’t going to let it get to him. If
luck was on his side, Ralph had gone home, got into some of the
homemade hooch Tara said he made, and was now passed out in the
barn with the heifers. He didn’t really feel like another
confrontation with the crazy old fart tonight.

His own plan was to get to the creek,
check it out for vampires and go home. Just to ease his mind about
the whole crazy story. It was a simple plan, but a plan all the
same. He liked plans. Tom always let him do the planning when they
hung out, because as smart as Tom was, he over-thought things and
as a result, his plans were lame. Someday the chics would figure
that out. Someday they’d learn that Tom’s good looks were as useful
as an unloaded gun. But probably not until they were
forty.

He turned onto the county road that led
past the Wildman’s farm and out towards the old covered bridge,
dimming the headlights on his car as he did so. There was no sense
drawing attention to the fact that he was heading out towards the
water. Having just experienced his own ridicule with Tara over the
whole “is there or isn’t there a vampire out there”, he knew why
Ellie had been so upset with the jokes he had made earlier. This
was something that had to be done alone.

“Just keep your mouth shut, Lachey,” he
said to himself.

Within the boundaries of the isolated
area he could hear what he thought were a million bullfrogs,
croaking in the background. Weird, he thought.

“It’s a fucking frog-fest. The coyotes
that are eating all the stray cats around town should just head out
here,” he surmised. “Frogs taste like chicken. You’d think that’d
be pretty appealing to a canine.”

With the bridge now a few feet ahead of
him, Ryan slowed down and drove the Toyota slowly onto the wooden
slats. They creaked as he edged his car across them.

“Creepy,” he said, as he noticed how
dark the darkness really was inside the old structure. The walls
were restricting the reach of his headlights, and throwing the high
beams on only made it worse. They bounced back and blinded him. He
decided to park right where he was.

“Where’s the flashlight?” he asked
himself, exiting the car and heading towards his trunk. Thankfully
it was in its usual spot in the hub over the left wheel.

A small brown bat swooped down from the
rafters, startling him. He shone the light in the direction from
where it came.

“Looks like I’ve got company,” he said,
as three more of the mammals darted down towards him before their
internal radar sent them flying out into the night. “What are you
guys still doing here in November? You should be down in Cabo by
now sipping tequila from half-empty tourist glasses.”

A foul smell wafted through his
nostrils, forcing him to plug his nose with one hand and hold the
flashlight with the other. He shone it around the floorboards until
he found the source of the smell. At his current vantage point, he
could only tell that whatever it was, it was about half the size of
him and definitely dead. He needed to get closer to identify it. He
suppressed an involuntary gag by moving his hand from his nose to
his mouth as he cautiously took a few steps towards whatever the
hell it was. The flashlight’s beam soon revealed to him the
half-mangled head of a bear cub. Judging from the pile of bat feces
and maggots in and around it, Ryan figured it wasn’t a fresh
kill.

“Okay,” he gasped. “I didn’t need to
see that. All the same, I hope mama bear’s not going to put in a
guest appearance around here anytime soon.” He took a deep breath
before taking another look at the carcass. “The skull’s all in one
piece, so it probably wasn’t shot. What the fuck happened?” he
wondered.

While the head looked like it had been
partially devoured, the body of the bear was mainly
intact.

“Maybe the bear got hit by a truck and
crawled away to the corner of the bridge to die. And then the
coyotes came along and mangled his brains,” Ryan pondered. “Or
maybe it was some bear-ball nut job who killed him, panicked and
ran.”

He couldn’t tell from the position of
the bear whether this was what happened or not. Either way, he
didn’t feel like sticking around any longer to figure it
out.

He exited the other side of the bridge
into what he hoped would be fresh air, but the smell by the creek
was nothing short of skanky. He couldn’t take a deep breath even if
he wanted to. Something seemed to be sucking the oxygen from his
every breath. He found himself wheezing, just like Stan often did.
His heart began to beat rapidly.

“This is whacked,” he acknowledged.
“It’s like I stepped through a time portal into the dead
zone.”

The story Ellie had told him began to
replay itself over and over in his mind, with the vampire getting
bigger and nastier each time the scene played out.

He stood still for a moment to calm
himself down, wishing he had a sports drink chocked full of
electrolytes to put his metabolism back together. The area was
suddenly eerily quiet. No bullfrogs croaking. No bats flapping
their wings overhead. The creepy animal convention had packed up
and gone home in less than five minutes. He wanted to do the same.
“Get a grip, Lachey,” he told himself.