American Gothic (21 page)

32

Investigation

O
PHELIA WAS WORKING on the Web site when the doorbell rang. She looked up, scowled, then went back to work on the new photos she was placing on the Hauntings home page.

The doorbell rang again.

It wasn’t as if her father would answer the door, even if he had been home, instead of away on one of his ill-defined errands. He rarely left the house, but when he did, Ophelia had no idea where he went. Certainly not to the grocery store. Marketing had become her responsibility by default, not that either of them ever cooked. He didn’t have to leave to buy liquor; they delivered it once or twice a week in boxes brought to the back door. It would have been a relief of sorts to think he was seeing someone, but Ophelia knew that wasn’t where he went when he disappeared. It was a mystery. She was just glad he went
somewhere.

Whoever was downstairs began to pound on the front door.

“If it’s another Realtor I’ll rip his lungs out,” Ophelia said. She shoved herself away from her desk and went to the window. Parked on the hill in front of the house was a midnight blue four-door Ford Crown Victoria sedan with too many antennas and the sort of absurdly cheap-looking mini-hubcaps you see only on government vehicles.

Ophelia’s immediate thought was that something had happened to her father. He had given up driving, so at least he could not be arrested again for driving while intoxicated. (The BMW was parked in the garage, not drivable after his accident.) But his color had been exceptionally bad lately, and Ophelia was worried about his heart. She went down the stairs two at a time and opened the door as the policeman was about to knock again. There were two of them: a man and a woman, each unsmiling.

“Can I help you?”

“Miss Warring?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

The policewoman showed her badge. She was the one in charge.

“I’m Lieutenant Minelli. This is Sergeant Packer. Could we come in?”

Ophelia’s anxiety made her more agreeable than she would have been otherwise. She opened the door and stood out of the way. The two cops looked around the foyer at the piles of newspapers and mail and exchanged a look.

“Is it my father?”

Lieutenant Minelli and Sergeant Packer glanced at each other again.

“No, Miss Warring. Is your father home?”

She shook her head.

“We’d like to ask you about last night.”

“What about it?”

“Where were you?”

“I was home until after ten.”

“Alone?”

“I suppose my father was home, but I didn’t see him. I was playing a computer game.”

“And after ten?”

“I went for a walk.”

She didn’t tell them that she’d followed the man from across the street, the man she’d seen earlier at the cemetery, crying outside the Peregrine mausoleum. She’d lost track of him down by the wharf. Ophelia half suspected he had known she was following him, but it was only a hunch. After that, she’d gone on to the Cage Club, where there were a few people hanging out, but she didn’t want to mention that to the police. The club was sacred territory.

“Alone?”

She nodded.

“Would you mind taking a ride with us, Miss Warring?”

“To the police station? Am I under arrest?”

“What reason would we have to arrest you?” Sergeant Packer said, speaking for the first time.

“None whatsoever.”

“You’re not under arrest. There’s just something we’d like you to see.”

Ophelia hesitated. She was more curious than concerned, since she had not done anything illegal, at least not anything the two detectives were likely to care about.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Do you want to leave a note for your father?”

“No, that’s okay.”

Lieutenant Minelli looked at her with something close enough to concern for Ophelia to feel a spike of anger, but the moment broke as soon as the lieutenant turned and reached for the door.

Sergeant Packer opened the back door of the car for Ophelia and shut it after her before climbing behind the wheel and starting the motor.

“How long have you been a Goth?” Lieutenant Minelli was sitting sideways in the front seat, looking back at her.

“I don’t know.”

“I understand that you and your friends like to play at being vampires.”

“Shouldn’t you put your seat belt on?” Ophelia said. “It’s the law.”

“Do you believe in vampires?”

“What we choose to believe or disbelieve is irrelevant to what is real.”

“That’s what I would call an ambiguous answer.”

Ophelia shrugged. They were driving in the opposite direction of the Cage Club. A good thing. There was no telling what bits of this and that the police might find lying around if they decided to have a serious look at the Brood’s party place.

“Is it all pretend?”

Ophelia glared at the detective.

“What I mean is: Do you just play at drinking blood, or do you ever really—well, you know.”

“What is this about?”

“I think you know,” Sergeant Packer said without taking his eyes off the road.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Ophelia said. She sat back, crossed her arms, and looked out the window. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Lieutenant Minelli watching her, but after a few minutes the policewoman turned around to the front of the car and left Ophelia alone, though she never did fasten her seat belt.

Ophelia guessed where they were heading when they were still nearly a mile away. The streets were familiar enough, and by the time Sergeant Packer turned the Crown Vic onto Magnolia Avenue, it was obvious they were heading for the cemetery. The car slowed to a crawl and Lieutenant Minelli turned around again and gave Ophelia a close, appraising stare. Ophelia could see Sergeant Packer’s eyes on her in the mirror.

“What are we doing here?” The officers did not answer. They drove into the old part of the cemetery on a road that ran along the base of a hill that had a memorial to World War I at its crest. A dozen or more police cars and other vehicles, including an ambulance, came into view only when they got to a little valley that fell away from the hill on its back side.

“You like to hang out in this cemetery.”

“It’s not a crime to visit my mother’s grave, Lieutenant Minelli,” Ophelia said, her eyes on the group of people gathered around a waist-high sarcophaguslike monument, one of the many ornate nineteenth-century oddities in the graveyard. The bone white marble seemed to have been defaced with black paint, but Ophelia realized in the next moment that it was in fact covered with dried blood. As they drove nearer, the inchoate pile perched on the bier turned out to be two bodies, limbs hanging at odd, uncomfortable-looking angles, slack in death.

Sergeant Packer stopped and shifted the Ford into park. He was looking at her in the rearview mirror, Lieutenant Minelli again turned sideways, as Ophelia stared at the macabre tableau. The fascination on her face transformed the moment she recognized the half-hidden, blood-matted faces on the corpses. It was Damien and Pendragon, the fledgling vampires from the Cage Club.

“There’s a third victim you can’t see from here. Rebecca Miller.” Lieutenant Minelli glanced down, evidently consulting her notebook. “Although her vampire name is Letitia. She’s behind the tomb thing where the other two are. At least her naked body is.” The lieutenant’s eyes met Ophelia’s again. “We haven’t found the rest of her head. We thought maybe you could help us out with that, Ophelia.”

33

The Truth

O
PHELIA WAS LATE getting home, delayed first by her appointment with Dr. Glass, and later the side trip to the San Francisco Public Library.

She had to put her shoulder into the door to push the day’s mail out of the way. The foyer was getting out of hand. It was past the time to step in, even if it was to throw away the newspapers and junk mail. That much was plain from the way the police officers had reacted to the embarrassing chaos inside the house. But Ophelia had far more important things to think about.

The house across the street was dark. She checked this again as she locked the door behind her. Lights in the old Peregrine mansion were the first thing she looked for when the taxi turned up her street. But there was no one home.

Ophelia went upstairs without checking on her father. She turned on the shower and stripped off her clothes, leaving them where they fell in a pile on the white tile floor in her bathroom. Her sessions with Dr. Glass always made her feel dirty. It was not so much his questions about how often she masturbated and had she ever experimented with lesbian sex—Ophelia didn’t mind talking about these things—but rather the way he
looked
at her. Dr. Glass was the one who needed a therapist to pry into his dark, damp fantasies. She had thought about throwing back in his face the fact that she knew he was prescribing Vicodin to Zeke, who was selling it at the Cage Club.

Dr. Glass had demanded that she tell him everything about the gruesome scene in the cemetery. Ophelia was a connoisseur of the macabre, but it gave her the creeps to see the delight he took in hearing about the way Damien’s intestines had been wound around his neck like a bloody scarf. He admitted the police had been there to question him about Ophelia. He claimed that he’d told them he sincerely doubted she had anything to do with the triple murder.

There were two things he said that ate at Ophelia. The first was whether she thought the homicides had anything to do with the Ravening, since Letitia, Damien, and Pendragon had all been involved in the role-playing game. The second irritant was the question of where the blood had gone. Each of the trio had bled to death, and though there was plenty of blood at the scene, there wasn’t enough.

The police had asked Ophelia the same two questions. Her answer to them, and to Dr. Glass, had been the same: no and no. But the truth was she knew—as everyone certainly did—that vampires had
everything
to do with the deaths and the missing blood.

And now she knew it for certain.

Ophelia stood looking up into the shower’s steaming water, letting it beat down, driving the tension out of her. The old house had a huge water heater, and there was enough hot water for Ophelia to stand there until she couldn’t stand it anymore.

She walked across the bedroom in the dark, drying herself with her towel, and looked out the window. He was still not home. It took a while to get her long hair dry. She brushed it out and left it to hang loose.

The bras and panties in her underwear drawer were all black silk. Instead of her usual long skirt, Ophelia found a black leather micromini to wear. She put on a black blouse that was cut in front in a way that nicely displayed her breasts, which were of a size and shape that tended to make men stare. She retrieved her ankh and crosses from the bathroom, pulling her long hair out over the chains as she put them on.

There still was no light on across the street when she checked again, but then she noticed the faint golden light flickering on the floor. Someone had lit a fire in the fireplace in the front parlor.

Ophelia pulled on a pair of knee-high boots that zipped up the back, grabbed the Prada backpack containing the crimson file folder, and ran down the stairs.

“I know you’re in there,” Ophelia yelled through the brass letterbox opening.

The door swung open, and there she was, on her knees, looking up at him.

He stood looking down at her for a moment, his face unreadable. He offered her his hand, which felt warm, even feverish, when she accepted it and got back on her feet.

“May I help you, Miss Warring?”

“I would like to…” She paused. “You know my name.”

“I may not be very social, Miss Warring, but I do know my neighbors.”

Ophelia took a deep breath before plunging on. “And I know who you are.”

One of his dark eyebrows shot up.

“Would you like to come inside, Miss Warring? I was just about to make myself a cup of tea.”

He stood aside for her, not waiting for her answer, as if he already knew that she would accept his invitation. And she did.

After looking through the contents, he closed the folder on his lap and sat looking down on it.

“You’re not even going to bother denying you’re Nathaniel Peregrine, are you,” Ophelia said.

He looked up at her, and she could see danger in his dark eyes. But that did not matter to her. One way or the other, she would get something she wanted from him, even if it was death.

“Of course I am Nathaniel Peregrine. But I’m not that Nathaniel.”

“Don’t embarrass yourself. You saw the copy of the Matthew Brady portrait from the Civil War. And the time you came back after World War One—it is obvious that it’s you under that beard. I know who you are, and I know what you are.”

“No, my dear, you do not. You are mistaken.”

“I think I’ve always known that vampires exist, in one form or the other. I’ve always been fascinated with them. They are sensual monsters. They don’t kill their victims so much as seduce them. And, of course, they do not always kill the humans who give them what they need. If they choose to, they can change them, bring them across, make them immortal.”

“I have more than a passing awareness of this group you are associated with, the Ravening,” Peregrine said. He shook his head more with sadness than disapproval, she thought. “It is not healthy to be preoccupied with darkness and death.”

“And why not? We’re all dying from the moment we’re born. Happiness, life, a future—those are all illusions for mortals, comforting lies we tell ourselves to help us pretend we do not see the rot and decay that is our true fate.”

Peregrine looked at Ophelia in a way that made her feel like squirming. It was as if he was looking directly into her soul.

“The day you saw me at the cemetery.”

“I didn’t think you noticed me,” she said.

“I notice
everything,
” he said, and smiled. “You were visiting your mother’s grave.”

“So?”

“It is hard to suffer the loss of a mother. I know what it is like to lose those closest to you. It can warp you. It can make you hate the world. If you’re not careful, it can destroy you.”

“When?”

Peregrine’s eyes narrowed. “Your flippant attitude tries my patience.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

He glared back at her but said nothing.

“You could kill me,” she said. She knew that touched something, because he had to look away. They were sitting in the parlor in wing-backed chairs facing the fireplace. Even if she tried to run, she knew she couldn’t get more than a few feet from him before he would have her.

“Or you could make me like you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You could turn me into a vampire.”

“I am not a vampire.”

“Nathaniel, you’re nearly one hundred and seventy years old. You are not as invisible to history as you think. I found some of the old newspaper accounts from New Orleans in 1863, where you were in the hospital before supposedly dying at Gettysburg. And that bloody spree in Haiti in 1914.”

The look he gave Ophelia filled her with satisfaction.

“You didn’t even know they wrote about that, did you? It was in the Port-au-Prince newspaper. And yes, I do read French. I read and speak it rather well. My mother went to a great deal of trouble, when she was alive, to ensure that I had a first-rate education.”

“And now it is nearly time for you to go away to school.”

She felt herself sag and tried to hide it by sitting up straight and looking the vampire directly in the eye. “I was going to go to Smith.”

“To study poetry.”

She gave him a curious look. “How do you know such things? Did you read my mind?”

He smiled for the first time, and the expression gave an entirely different dimension to his personality.

“You look like a poet, Miss Warring.” His smile broadened. “And I read your poem about poppies in the
Western Review.
”

Now it was Ophelia who smiled. “You read the
Review
?”

“I have to confess that poetry is one of my passions. Poetry and music.”

He handed the folder back to her and stood.

“I would like to offer you another cup of tea, but I’m afraid I have a previous engagement. Perhaps another time.”

She stood and looked up at him.

“Will you help me?”

“Help you how?” he said.

“Will you change me?”

“You are playing a very dangerous game, my dear. Besides, you’re completely mistaken. The Nathaniel Peregrine you take me for has been dead for more than a century. But I would like to talk to you again. We could discuss poetry.”

“That would be nice,” Ophelia said, trying to decide whether or not to believe him. The research, hasty as it was, seemed obvious enough. She was very good with a computer, and the work she’d done on her Hauntings San Francisco Web site had taught her the tricks she needed to know to be a good historical researcher.

“I would only ask that you do one small thing for me,” he said, leaning forward a bit.

They were standing very close to each other. Ophelia could feel the heat coming off Peregrine’s body. The way he was standing over her, he looking down, she up, their faces near, she thought he would kiss her—either that or sink his teeth into her neck. She had the sense that they were sharing the same moment, each wondering what the next move would be, when he spoke in his low, patrician voice.

“Promise me you will not tell others you think a Civil War general has come to live across the street from you.”

Ophelia could almost see herself reflected in his dark eyes. It was as if she were dreaming. She felt light-headed, even high. It was the effect he had on her. She suspected he could get women to say or do anything he wanted.

“I promise. But think about giving me the help I need.”

He looked down on her, nothing changing in his expression, betraying not a hint of what his intentions were about his Gothic visitor.