Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (47 page)

With a groan, Ed pulled the laptop out of the rain and crawled back inside his room.

E
d pushed the clothes and bags of chips and newspapers off the bed and put his laptop there. It was gritty with mud. He wiped that away with part of the bedsheets and studied the computer. The left-side hinge was busted so that the monitor and keyboard wouldn’t close correctly. He opened it as carefully as he could, but the plastic casing was broken, and he had to prop the monitor up against a pillow to keep it in place. The screen was spiderwebbed with cracks, and the space bar had popped out. He tried to snap it back into place, but it
wouldn’t fit. Ed tried typing a few words on the keyboard, but every time he hit the space bar it popped out of the housing.

Frustrated, he threw the long key across the room.

His side ached where the thief had kicked him, but the sudden sense of defeat and malaise that washed over him was worse.

He’d written eleven books on this machine.

Eleven fucking books.

Marsh
, he thought.
You miserable goddamned bastard.

Ed’s whole professional life was in this laptop. He had nearly everything backed up to Dropbox, and he had duplicates on memory sticks scattered all over his office and his apartment and in the glove box of his Suburban, but the laptop itself was his life. He’d put more miles than he could count on that keyboard, and now it was just a piece of junk.

Ed leaned forward and took the laptop’s cracked display in both hands.

His feelings of defeat and bootless frustration vanished. What was left of him, his recalcitrant pride, caught fire and turned to anger.
Marsh
, he thought,
you will not beat me. I won’t let you.

A
peal of thunder shook Ed from his thoughts.

He turned toward the door. Marsh’s goons had shattered the frame, and it wouldn’t close right. Every time the wind blew, it yawned open. Ed stood up, careful of his aching ribs. It was getting dark outside, and at some point while he’d been lost in the Internet, the rain had stopped and a second wave had come in, threatening to roll over the little town of Cuero.

He went to the door and stood there, thinking about what he’d learned. The air smelled of wet asphalt and grass. He looked across the parking lot to the crumbling two-lane road that ran through the middle of town. Steam was rising from the roadway, even as a glowering sky the color of a fresh bruise rolled in from the south.

A flash of lightning made him jump.

He closed the door and faced his wrecked room.

Marsh
, he thought. The bastard had tried so hard to break him. He’d put a gag order on the cops, and when that failed to keep information out of Ed’s hands, he’d sabotaged his vehicle, robbed him, and even sent his goons to beat him up. But he hadn’t won.

Not yet.

Ed took out his phone and dialed Deputy Kohler’s number. He was pretty sure the deputy was in Marsh’s pocket, but Ed required information he couldn’t get anywhere else. He needed a local, and Kohler was the only one he could possibly turn to.

“You got a lot of nerve, calling me at work,” Kohler said in a low whisper.

“I want to know everything you can tell me about Anna Aguillar de Medrano,” Ed said.

“What?”

“You heard me. The woman who lives in the ranch house down by the crossroads. What’s her story?”

“What makes you think I’m gonna tell you anything?”

“Two reasons,” Ed said. “One, Charles Marsh has you bought and paid for—”

“Excuse me?” the deputy said, clearly angry. But that was okay. That was what Ed wanted.

“You heard me. Either Charles Marsh owns you, in which case you’ll run to him with everything we’re about to talk about—”

“Or?”

“Or, you’re an honest cop who wants to know who killed those five little kids, in which case you’ll tell me all you know about Anna Aguillar de Medrano.”

There was a long pause before the deputy spoke. “What is it you want to know?”

That was a good question, because Ed didn’t really know. He’d spent most of the day trying to work on his mangled laptop. He’d
learned that the ruined ranch house he’d seen down on FM 474, and the three thousand acres of prime South Texas grassland that it sat on, was worth a mere eight hundred thousand dollars. Hardly the true value of a prime piece of real estate in the heart of ranching country.

The owner was listed as Pedro Medrano, who, according to an obituary Ed had found from September 2009, had been one of the leading advocates for Texas cattlemen up until his untimely death from a heart attack at the age of forty. He’d left everything—his house, his land, and his numerous business affairs—to his thirty-eight-year-old wife, Anna Aguillar de Medrano, whom Pedro had brought to Texas from Mexico, and who apparently knew absolutely nothing about running a ranch.

Within two years, Mrs. Medrano had sold off nearly five thousand head of prize-winning cattle, allowed her once-glorious home to descend into a tumbledown wreck, and all but resigned from society. If she was still alive—and Ed had no proof of that beyond what the old woman from the migrant worker village had told him—she had become a shut-in.

“Tell me what happened to her house,” said Ed. “I checked the county tax assessor’s website and it looks like it’s only worth a fraction of what it should be.”

“You’ve seen the place. It’s a trash heap.”

“Yeah, but even so, with that much land, it should be worth a fortune.”

“It used to be,” Kohler said. “Before her husband died.”

“Heart attack. I read about that, too.”

“That’s right. You get that from the obituary?”

“Yeah.”

“It left out the part about her being pregnant when he died, didn’t it?”

That caught Ed by surprise. “She was pregnant?”

“Doña Anna has had it pretty rough these last few years.”

“Doña Anna?”

“It’s what we call her around here. It’s a sign of respect. A woman like her, who’s had the bad breaks she has, deserves a little consideration.”

“What kind of bad breaks?”

“Health issues, mainly. She got sick after her husband died. Started losing weight, wasting away. You know how people can get when they’re heartsick.”

“Yeah,” Ed said. “What about the baby?”

“Oh, well. She, uh, she lost the baby. It’s buried on the property.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. She lost the baby.”

“No,” Ed said. “The other part. You sounded like there was more to that story. What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing but local gossip and superstition.”

“That’s where I live,” said Ed. “Tell me.”

“It’s the wetbacks over in that little village down the road from her property, mainly. They’re the ones who say it. Respectable people don’t believe it, of course.”

“Believe what?”

“Well, like I said, it’s those wetbacks, mainly. But they say she carried that baby for four years before it finally came out stillborn.”

“Four years? That’s impossible.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Kohler said. “It’s just ignorant people talking about stuff that ain’t their business.”

“But . . . how does a rumor like that get started? How come I didn’t hear about it when I was here last year?”

“ ’Cuz it only happened about six months ago.”

“You’re joking.”

“I told you. Nobody believes it. Nobody respectable anyway.”

“But what’s the story?” Ed asked.

“About six months ago, one of them wetbacks from the village come
into town in one of Doña Anna’s pickups and bought a headstone. Paid cash. He didn’t make no secret it was for Doña Anna’s dead baby. Said she’d delivered her baby stillborn and wanted to bury it on her land.”

“I didn’t see any reference to that. If she had a stillborn child, there should be records, right? A death certificate?”

“Well,” Kohler said, and Ed could almost picture the man shrugging his shoulders, “nobody really bothers Doña Anna. We did pay her a visit, shortly after that, but she didn’t answer when we knocked on the door and we didn’t push it.”

Ed let that sit for a moment, trying to take it all in.

“What about her dogs?” Ed finally asked.

“She used to raise champion Weimaraners. Back in the day.”

“Does she still?”

“I don’t think so.” Kohler paused for a long moment. “Why do you want to know about Doña Anna anyway? ’Round here, we just leave her alone.”

“I think it was one of her dogs I dissected last time I was here.”

“No,” Kohler said. “No, that ain’t possible.”

“I think it was.”

“I thought you said it was some kind of dog-and-coyote hybrid with mange.”

“It was. But the dog part of it . . . I think it was one of
her
dogs.”

Kohler didn’t say anything, and Ed could almost hear the wheels turning in the man’s mind, like he was trying to figure out what to do with the information he’d just learned.

Ed didn’t feel like waiting for him to come around.

“I’m going out there,” he said. “Tonight.”

“What for?”

“Answers,” Ed said. “And you can tell that to whoever wants to know.”

E
d didn’t see anybody following him while driving out to the ranch, but that didn’t surprise him. This was the big reveal. Ed could sense that. Whatever the answer to this riddle was, he was close. And Marsh knew it, too. He’d be careful. Hang back. Wait for Ed to do the dirty work before swooping in to claim the credit and the glory.

So Ed took his time.

He stopped in front of the Medrano home and waited for nightfall. Storms rolled in from the south, and soon it was raining hard again, but that didn’t bother him. It would work against Marsh and his crew, and that was good for Ed.

What he wanted—what he needed—was some kind of link that connected Doña Anna to the murdered children. As it was, he had the word of an old woman whose name he didn’t know, some local gossip, a dead dog-and-coyote hybrid with mange, and a lonely, heartbroken, middle-aged woman, but no real proof of anything. He couldn’t even say the five dead children had been murdered. Ed required something tangible, some sort of affirmative link that tied it all together.

A through line.

Ed grabbed his flashlight and walked around the house, taking in its faded glory and slow collapse as he made his way to the backyard.

Ed stopped when he saw the gravestone.

It was a white marble cross under a sprawling live oak. There were other crosses too, lashed together from oak twigs, huddled around the marble one.

The rain was beating down, but Ed didn’t hurry. He walked to the white marble cross, knelt in front of it, and wiped the mud from it with his thumb. The inscription read:

Baby Girl

February 21, 2014

So that part was true, he thought.

Ed rose from the grave and studied the other crosses. Fresh earth. No grass on the mounds. None of the graves were marked, but from the sizes of the various mounds, he knew what they contained.

The poor woman had buried her dogs out here, next to her baby.

Some people treat their animals like humans. But this was the first time he’d ever seen them buried alongside a child. Crazy.

Then, from the house behind him, he heard the sound of a screen door slamming.

Ed backed under the live oak and watched the house. In the dark and through the rain, it was hard to make anything out. He could sense movement somewhere, but little else.

Then he saw her, Doña Anna, standing bare-ass naked at her back door. In a flash of lightning, he saw that she was almost bald. What little hair remained was hanging in clumps from her diseased scalp. There was something wrong with her arms. From the elbows down to her fingertips, they looked white and swollen, her hands thick like the meaty end of a baseball bat. Her breasts looked darker than the rest of her, and in the blue glow from another flash of lightning, he saw why. She’d drawn a ghastly, skeletal-looking face on each sagging breast. And as she walked out her back door and around the side of her house, her grotesquely swollen belly rocked from side to side. Ed watched her trek across the yard and gain the road. Even with the rain slashing at her face and naked body, she paused and scanned one way and then the other. Then she turned toward the crossroads, toward the little tarpaper village, and started walking into the night.

Ed followed after her.

S
omebody, years ago, had tried to board up the church. There were still a few slats nailed across the windows, and there was one rotten two-by-four still holding on above the front door, but over time,
teenagers and varmints and thieves had done their work. Ed had no trouble ducking through the doorway, and when the lightning flashed, he saw the nude woman kneeling at the altar at the far side of the abandoned church.

It was so dark he figured there was no way he could shoot video, but he didn’t have any other choice. He took out his phone and started shooting, careful to stay in the shadows at the back of the church.

A familiar voice spoke behind him.

“You know what you’re looking at, don’t you?” Charles Marsh said.

Ed lowered his phone and turned around.

Marsh walked past him, a few feet into the darkened church, and stopped. He turned and smiled at Ed. “You know what she is, right?”

Ed shook his head.

“
Civatateo
. The mother of vampires.”

“What?”

Ed’s first thought was that Marsh had lost his mind. He was about to say as much when Marsh waved away his objection.

“Watch this,” Marsh said, and gestured toward an unseen crewman somewhere in the dark. Instantly the whole church flooded with a glare from spotlights mounted on metal racks against the walls.

“Excuse me,” Marsh announced. He cleared his throat and advanced on the kneeling woman. “Mrs. Medrano, my name is Charles Marsh. I host a television show called
American Monsters
. I’d like to ask you some questions, please.”

Doña Anna shrank from the glare, one white, badly deformed hand coming up to shield her eyes.