Vampire Blood (15 page)

“That should be appropriate compensation to initiate the project.”

Her father’s eyebrows shot up as he looked at the amount. “Should do just fine, Mister Michelson.” He rummaged in his overall’s pocket and found one of the simple, one-color business cards he’d had printed at Quicky Print on Second Street. It read:
Lacey & Lacey, House Painters & small repairs
.

Her father had thought all lower case letters in
small repairs
clever.

“Our telephone numbers, home phones, are there at the bottom, in case you need to get a hold of us. Anytime. Mine is the first one. And I have one of those message machines.”

“Thank you, Mister Lacey, but we won’t need to, I assure you. We trust you explicitly.”

“Well, then, we’ll just say good night,” her dad concluded, his face wrinkled with exhaustion. “It was nice meeting all of you.”

“Then good-bye, Mister Lacey. Jenny. We’ll drop in one day after you’ve started to see how things are going.” Mister Michelson smiled directly at Jenny.

Her mind seemed to tingle and it spread through her whole body and came out her fingertips. In the candlelight, Mister Michelson’s eyes seemed almost luminous. They drew her in, like sparkling jewels scattered at her feet in beach sand.

“Then, Jenny dear, we’ll have that discussion about your lovely books. For now, I can tell your father is extremely tired, so take him home. We can talk another time.”

Jenny was touched by his consideration.

“I will. Perhaps you would play the violin for me?” Jenny coaxed as Annie smiled at her from behind her husband’s broad shoulders, and the candles licked at the emptiness around them.

A dog barked somewhere far away.

Mister Michelson laughed softly.

The rest of the family had simply evaporated.

“Good night,” Jenny murmured. Her exhaustion finally caught up with her. Her legs felt like Jell-O suddenly, her body a heavy weight.

Outside in the moonlight, she felt as if she were coming out of a trance. All the way home, as she sat quietly beside her dad, she kept hearing that laugh, kept seeing their eyes. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something wasn’t right about those people. Something.

Chapter Six

August 20

“Dad, I tell you, no one’s home.” Jenny repeated, as she stood in front of him, hands postured stubbornly on her hips. “I’ve looked in every window, tried every door. Everything’s locked, but their car is still in the garage. I called until late last night. No answer. They haven’t been around in two days. It’s not like them!”

“Well,” her father retorted, the paintbrush poised halfway to the wall in front of him. “What do you expect me to do about it?” His face was sweaty, but had more color in it, Jenny thought, than it’d had in weeks. This morning when she had picked him up, he’d almost been his old self. He hadn’t fallen asleep once.

At least she didn’t have to worry about him up and dying on her any longer. Now all she had to worry about was where in the hell the Albers had gotten to.

“Help me pick the lock on their back door so we can get in.”

“Jenny!”

“Dad! I know something’s wrong. I need to get inside and see if anything looks unusual.”

“What would be unusual?”

“You know what I mean.”

“That’s breaking and entering.”

“Dad!” her voice rose hysterically. “Aren’t you worried about where your friends are? Maybe they’re inside that house, sick, or mugged, beaten up and lying in a pool of their own blood in the living room!” She was getting angry.

“You writers with your vivid imaginations.” He shook his head.

She glared at him.

“All right,” he conceded, throwing his hands up in capitulation. Apparently her worrying had finally gotten through to him. “Let me fetch some tools from the trunk, and we’ll break into their house.” He stalked away towards his car.

She was impatiently waiting at the Albers’ back door when he returned.

“I was a thief in my last life, did I ever tell you that, Jenny?”

“Forget the jokes, Dad, just get us in.”

“There.” A few clicks later and the door swung open. Jenny charged into the kitchen.

There were half filled teacups on the table and a plate of homemade cookies with crumbs on the tablecloth. All the lights were on. It was bright daylight. Dirty dishes were in the sink. It was as if they’d merely stepped out a moment ago, but when Jenny picked up one of the cookies, it was as hard as a rock.

She roamed through the kitchen and through the other rooms, baffled.

In the living room, the television was playing.

In the bedroom, a nightgown was laid out, ready to be put on and the bedcovers were turned back on the bed.

Jenny methodically searched every room, even the bathrooms.

“Where are they?” she asked when she rejoined her father, now with a look of shock on his face, in the living room.

“It’s a mystery, for sure, Jenny. Maybe, you’re right. This don’t make no sense at all.”

“I think we should call Sheriff Samuels, Dad. Now. Report them missing.”

“Maybe, him bein’ a friend of theirs, he’s seen ‘em, or knows where they might be at?”

She studied her dad’s anxious face. “Maybe he has.” That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

She let her father make the necessary phone call, and they waited in heavy silence for the sheriff to arrive.

Jenny let the sheriff in and told him what she knew. She felt terrible about picking the lock, but since Sheriff Samuels had known Jenny since she was a baby and her dad even longer, he knew they wouldn’t have done it without good cause.

It seemed that Sheriff Samuels hadn’t seen the Albers in a few days either; he’d run into a few other people who’d been wondering about them as well. They hadn’t shown up for an old friend’s birthday dinner party the night before.

He poked around the house and grounds for a bit and took notes for the report he’d have to fill out later at the station.

“You say you saw them last on Monday afternoon, the eighteenth, Jenny?” Sheriff Samuels questioned her.

“Yes.”

“Seems peculiar no one’s heard from or seen either of them since.” He eyed the kitchen table. He was a tall man, over six-four, with short cropped gray hair, and steel colored eyes. A smart man. He’d been sheriff for over twenty years in Summer Haven and a darn good one. “That they’d go off and leave things like this is an enigma in itself. Maude was a neat housekeeper. Why’d they leave the car? Since George’s last heart attack, he wasn’t one for much walking.”

Her father sat slumped in a chair, listening. Bewildered looking.

“What are you going to do?” Jenny asked the sheriff. The same thing she’d asked him Tuesday morning when he’d come out to investigate the horses’ deaths.

“For starters, I’m going to ask around and see if anybody’s seen them then run by a couple of their other friends. Make some telephone calls. The usual things.” He leaned up against the kitchen sink. His light brown sheriff’s uniform was wrinkled from the heat, his badge dull and smudged. A cigarette hung loosely in the fingers of his left hand. He’d light one and let it burn down to a stub without hardly smoking it.

He seemed disturbed.

“They have any relatives out of town that you know of?”

“None.”

You couldn’t tell by his poker face what he was thinking. “You suspect foul play?” Ernest Lacey breathed, a helpless note in his voice.

“Too early to tell.” The sheriff put his cigarette out in a nearby ashtray. There was something he wasn’t telling them. Jenny could feel it.

When Samuels walked out to his squad car, she discreetly followed. Her dad had gone back to painting the back of the house, as if nothing had happened. His way of working out his frustration and concern.

“What aren’t you telling us, Sheriff Samuels?” She cornered him before he’d closed the car door.

The cool respite they’d had in the weather for a day or two was only a sweet memory. The sun was burning, and heat waves radiated off of the metal of the dark blue and white car, the kind of vehicle that really looked like a police car.

He seemed to be weighing something in his mind, tilting his head so she couldn’t see his strained face as he stroked his gray mustache nervously. “What makes you think I’m hiding anything, Jenny Lacey?”

“I can read people, especially people I’ve known all my life, pretty well.”

“Yeah. I guess you can. Being a writer and all,” his voice was respectful.

Jenny’s fingers drummed on the car door. She gave him a cynical frown, capturing his evasive eyes. “What is going on in Summer Haven? First those animal mutilations around town, then our horses found dead and now the Albers have disappeared. What next?”

“I wish I knew.” He seemed reluctant to discuss it, and a terrible thought occurred to her.

“Are the Albers the only
ones missing?”

The question must have caught him off guard. His mouth opened, and he gulped air as if he were about to choke. For a moment or two she believed he wouldn’t answer her.

In the end, he admitted, “It’s police business, Jenny; the investigations are ongoing. Right now, we can’t prove anything. No bodies, except for the animals. No, the Albers aren’t the only ones missing.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “Do you have any leads?”

“No. Not a one. That’s the worst thing about the whole mess.” He started the car up and gave her a somber nod good-bye.

Jenny watched as the squad car pulled away and into the street. Then she walked around to where her father was quietly painting.

“Dad, how can you go on painting as if nothing were wrong?” her voice was quivering. She was frightened for the Albers, frightened for herself and those she loved.

“Because, Jenny, dear, we have a job to do, we were paid well for it and do it I will. When they come home,” he said in a low voice, “I want them to return to a beautiful, freshly painted house. Because they will come back
,
Jenny. Safe. I know it. Let the police do their job, child. There’s nothing else we can do, but pray.”

It was only then that Jenny saw the tears on her father’s cheeks.

She shook her head. “We can go looking for them. If they aren’t back by the time we finish today, that’s what I’m going to do. All night, every night, until I find them or the police do.”

To that her father remained silent.

She sighed, her eyes searching off into the distance as if she were looking for something or someone, and then she, too, picked up a brush, dipped it into the paint can and went on painting in broad, forceful strokes.

* * * *

That night when she got home, after looking for the Albers until she was too tired to drive and talk, Rick Chalmers telephoned her with the results from the lab on their dead horses.

“They were drained of every last drop of their blood, Jenny, just like I’d suspected,” his voice full of astonishment. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She was stunned. “What would do that and why?”

“Nothing natural. I just don’t know,” he replied softly. “Somebody better find out what and why pretty soon, cause it’s an epidemic from what I’ve seen. I’ve had to cart away more dead animals in the last week than I have all year to date. It’s crazy. I’ll do my part. I’ll talk it over with the police and keep my eyes and ears open.”

Jenny was silent for a while, her mind troubled over what Rick had said. She was sitting at the kitchen table in a short green flowered robe, nothing underneath, a belt drawn tight at her slender waist. Her long brown hair was still damp from the shower she’d just stepped out of and brushed away from her pale, strained face. She had no idea how young she looked, almost a girl.

“Rick, do me a favor, would you?” she finally asked, her eyes were staring at the ceiling when she wasn’t rubbing them. She was exhausted, still sick over the horses’ brutal deaths. Tired of worrying about the Albers and what might have happened to them and how her poor father was taking it.

“Sure. What?”

“Don’t tell Dad about this, would you?”

Silence.

“For you, Jenny, I won’t tell him.”

“Thanks, Rick.”

She hung up and dragged herself to bed, not bothering to take off the robe and put her lightweight teddy on. Too distracted, too weary.

She prayed that tomorrow morning the Albers would have come home, and she’d not have that to agonize over. She was suddenly angry. She wanted to be happy again. She wanted to be able to smile and laugh again. Go on with her life. It was time.

She sighed and hit the pillow to flatten it, how could she be happy as long as her friends were missing? As long as these terrible things kept happening to her and those she loved?

Again, she had no answers. Sleep was her escape.

Chapter Seven

August 23

“Why are we doing this?” Jenny questioned hotly for the tenth time. “We should still be out looking for them!”