“How mad?” Sergeant Lane prodded.
Oh, Lord. This was not the time for Danny’s unique interpretation of conversations. Using my vampire speed, I ran into the living room and stood behind Danny. My son was used to this by now and didn’t so much as flinch. Sergeant Lane, on the other hand, stood up so fast he nearly knocked over the rocker he was sitting in, and his fingers were already flipping the safety catch from his gun holster. I closed my hand around his wrist to stop him. “That won’t be necessary, Sergeant Lane.”
“Hi, Mom,” Danny said as the officer’s blue eyes narrowed at me. “This is Russ. He’s a policeman. But he won’t let you touch his gun. I already asked.”
“Trust me, baby, I would know better than to touch a gun in a room with a six-year-old in it,” I told him, releasing Sergeant Lane’s arm as he tugged away from me. “Danny, honey, why don’t you run upstairs and watch some SpongeBob before dinner? I need to talk to Sergeant Lane.”
“Really?” Danny asked. “You never let me watch cartoons before dinner.”
“So it’s a treat,” I said.
Danny went tromping upstairs before I could change my mind.
“I’ll just go into the kitchen and warm up Danny’s dinner,” Kerrianne said, practically sprinting into the kitchen.
I crossed my arms and dropped my fangs. I wished I could say that it was some attempt to be badass, but honestly, I was just pissed off, and I hadn’t eaten yet. Sergeant Lane winced at the sight of my dental aggression, making me smile.
“Have you been questioning my son without me being present or giving permission?” I asked him. “I’m not an attorney, but I’ve watched enough Law and Order to know that’s not OK.”
“I was just making conversation until you woke up,” he said, clearing his throat.
“So I’m assuming this has something to do with my in-laws?” I asked.
Sergeant Lane smirked at me. “You could say that. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about your in-laws?”
There were a lot of things I’d like to say about my in-laws, but this was starting to feel like a trap. “Is there something you’d like to tell me about my in-laws?”
He sighed. “Mrs. Stratton, it is my duty to inform you that your father-in-law, Les Stratton, was found dead this morning.”
For just a second, I was sure I’d heard him wrong. I damn near fainted as all of the bones in my body seemed to go liquid. “What?”
“Les Stratton was found outside the Cellar, that vampire bar on the other side of town, his blood drained, with severe wounds to his throat. The coroner estimates his time of death around two A.M. Can you tell me where you were at two A.M.?”
Ignoring his question, because I wasn’t about to tell him that I was recovering from a schoolyard chupacabra ass-kicking, I sat heavily on my sofa. My brain felt like it was moving too quickly from this current crisis to what it meant for my custody case with Danny to how to handle telling my son. It was like my brain refused to focus on one thought for too long, because the overwhelming emotion I felt at the moment was gratitude. I felt bad for Marge. And I felt terrible for Danny, who had adored his papa. But overall, I just felt relieved that I wouldn’t have to spend every minute of every day worrying about Les trying to take my son from me.
What was wrong with me that I felt such ambivalence every time a Stratton man died?
And suddenly, a thought occurred to me.
“Did you just question my son about his dead grandfather without Danny even knowing Les has passed?”
“ ‘Passed’ isn’t exactly the term I would use,” Lane told me. “It’s too peaceful. Your father-in-law was savagely attacked. He was barely recognizable.”
“Keep your voice down,” I hissed. “I don’t want this to be the way Danny finds out that his grandpa is gone.”
“Again, that’s a very peaceful word for it. ‘Gone.’ It’s odd, isn’t it, that you become a vampire and suddenly the man who was trying to take custody of your son is exsanguinated?”
“Yes, it does seem odd to me, since I can’t imagine doing harm to Les. And it makes even less sense to me that you seem to think that I, a recently turned vampire, would kill someone in a distinctly vampiristic fashion and leave him out in the open where anyone could find him. That wouldn’t exactly throw the suspicion off of me, now, would it?”
Sergeant Lane’s face went slack for a second, as if the blatant oversight of motive had just occurred to him. Sherlock Holmes he was not.
“And where were you last night around two?” he asked again.
“I believe that I’m going to refrain from answering questions until I’ve contacted my local Council representative, which is a right guaranteed under the Undead Civil Rights Act,” I responded.
An expression of extreme irritation flashed across Sergeant Lane’s features. I smiled sweetly, my lower lip dragging on my fangs.
“I’ve already called them and explained. They’re on their way,” Kerrianne yelled from the kitchen. I turned my head toward my babysitter, who beckoned me from the hall where Sergeant Lane couldn’t see. I nodded.
“If you’ll excuse me for a second.”
I crept down the hall to the kitchen, where Kerrianne was standing, wringing her hands.
“Kerrianne, what the hell?” I hissed.
“I didn’t know what to do, other than call the Council, but none of the reps was awake yet,” Kerrianne said.
“Sorry, I’m just being asked to absorb a lot of messed-up information at once. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. Badges just make me nervous,” Kerrianne groused. “Wade’s been calling me all day, asking me to check on you, even though I reminded him several times that you were kind of literally dead to the world. He also said to tell you that he went back this morning and put everything away so those PTA witches wouldn’t fuss at you. Only he didn’t say witches. I’m assuming you know what he’s talking about.”
I nodded. Wade had taken the time to put away the stupid Pumpkin Patch games in the midst of all the chaos I’d dragged him into. I was going to have to be careful, or I was going to fall head over fangs for that man.
I paced around the kitchen, watching Kerrianne cook and listening to Danny’s cartoons while Sergeant Lane cooled his heels in the living room. After what he’d done, I wasn’t about to make him any more comfortable in my home. How could this be happening? Les was dead, and I seemed to be suspect number one. What if I went through all of this only to lose my son when I went to jail for a murder I didn’t commit? Should I just run with Danny? Take him away from everything he knew so we could escape the scrutiny?
Maybe it would be better for Wade and Harley—and Finn, for that matter—if we did leave town. Maybe they would be better off if we just ran far away so my crazy didn’t contaminate their lives like some horrible movie virus.
I was considering escape routes to Mexico when I heard footsteps beating a staccato rhythm across my porch. Jane and Dick didn’t even bother knocking on the door. They just walked right in. They looked windblown, as if they’d run all the way across town to get to me because driving would have meant breaking several traffic laws. Aw. That made me feel loved, as did the heretofore unseen murderous expression on Dick’s face when he looked at Sergeant Lane.
I would not want to be Lane at this moment.
“Sergeant Lane,” Jane said, her tone supremely frosty. “How have you not been fired by now?”
The lanky officer looked less than thrilled to see my local Council rep. And that made me sort of happy. He bristled, drawing himself up to his full height, which was still about an inch shorter than Jane. “I don’t think—”
“That’s the problem, Sergeant Lane, you don’t think. From what I hear, you’ve been questioning one of my constituents without a Council rep present. And you compounded that dumbassery by questioning that vampire’s child without his parent’s consent.”
“You’re just peeing all over the Constitution from both sides of the Undead Civil Rights A
ct, aren’t you?” Dick growled.
“I’m going to need you to come downtown with me to answer some questions,” Sergeant Lane said, attempting to grab my arm. I sidestepped him, sliding between Dick and Jane.
“You do realize that our police station isn’t actually downtown, right?” I asked him.
“Just tell me where you were last night,” Lane spat.
“I was here, at home, with my son.”
“And I’m assuming that there’s no one who would be able to corroborate this?” He sneered. “That seems convenient.”
“I don’t know if it’s occurred to you, officer, but innocent people don’t need alibis. However, Wade Tucker and his son were here until about midnight, if that helps.”
Jane smirked and waggled her brows at Dick. He scowled and handed her a twenty-dollar bill.
“That still leaves you two hours to drive to the Cellar, kill your father-in-law, and get back to your house before the sun came up,” Lane insisted.
“Assuming, of course, that I would leave my son alone in the house, which I would not do. Ask Kerrianne. Ask anyone at Danny’s school. I don’t put my son’s safety at risk.”
“Oh, trust me, I’ve already talked to people at Danny’s school. And they had some very interesting things to say about your change in attitude since you were turned. You’re more aggressive, less patient, mean-spirited.”
“I see you’ve been talking to Chelsea Harbaker,” I muttered.
“No, a Mrs. McGee.”
“Figures,” I huffed.
“Do you have any evidence that Libby had anything to do with Les Stratton’s death, other than ‘I can’t think of anyone else’?”
“Not at the moment, but I’m sure we’ll find something,” Lane said.
“Well, until you do, you will leave Mrs. Stratton alone. You will not contact her or question her without myself or Mr. Cheney present. And you will not approach Danny Stratton, ever. If I find out that you have been harassing either of the Strattons, I will be on your supervisor’s front step faster than you can say ‘mall security.’ ”
“Fine,” Sergeant Lane said, shutting his little notebook with a snap. “Don’t leave town, Mrs. Stratton. I will be coming to see you soon.”
“Good evening, Sergeant Lane.”
As the patrol car pulled out of my driveway, all of my bravado melted, and I practically sagged against the front door. My hands were shaking, and I thought I was going to throw up what little I had in my stomach. I felt Jane’s hand on my back and heard some distant murmuring in the kitchen.
Dick was holding a mug full of synthetic blood in front of my face. I let him put it to my lips and drained the entire thing in one gulp. How was I going to explain this? How was I going to prove my innocence to the people who could keep me out of jail? Sure, Dick and Jane were supporting me in the face of law enforcement now, but what if there was some circumstantial piece of evidence that linked me to Les’s death? What would happen when supporting me was no longer in the best interest of the vampire community?
“Jane,” I said, wheezing, “I know this is going to sound cliché, but I didn’t do it.”
“I believe you,” Jane said, nodding.
I straightened, my shoulders slowly relaxing. “Really?”
“I’ve been accused of murder . . . how many times now?” Jane asked.
“Two or three times,” Dick estimated, flopping down on the couch.
“Right. And every time, I didn’t do it.”
“There was that one time,” Dick said.
“That was in self-defense, and technically, all I did was Taser her.”
Dick snorted. “While she was soaked in lamp oil.”
“My point is that it would be stupid of you to spend all of this time in mediation, battling your father-in-law, only to murder him. It would bring the police right to you. And you are not a stupid person. You would not risk your custody of Danny. So now you have to lie low and say nothing. We have to do some damage control and try to find out who, besides you, wanted to see your father-in-law dead.”
I shrugged. “Me, most of the U of L fans in town, the people who had heard his ‘caught a ten-pound bass on a kid’s Snoopy reel’ story more than once . . .”
“That’s a long list,” Jane said.
“Well, we’ll look into it. You just sit tight, and don’t do anything else to draw attention to yourself. No arrests for public intoxication. No shoplifting undies from Walmart,” Dick told me. “No swimmin’ naked with Wade in the memorial fountain.”
“Have you been talking to Mrs. McGee?”
“Now, before we start our Scooby-Doo routine, is there anything we should know about?” Jane asked. “For instance, why did you send me a maddeningly vague text right before bedtime about an ‘incident’ at the Pumpkin Patch Party and the paperwork it would require?”
“Oh.” I sighed, burying my face in my hands. “I forgot all about that. I was sort of attacked by a masked figure while I was cleaning up the Pumpkin Patch debris last night. I’m pretty sure it was the same guy lurking in the school parking lot a few weeks back. He tried to stake me, but I fought him off. With a rake. He ran away into the woods.”
Jane’s lips disappeared as she pinched her mouth shut and exhaled loudly from her nose. She nodded, jaw clenching and unclenching. “And you didn’t think that maybe you should have reported this right away instead of sending me a cowardly text right before sunrise?”
I winced and offered, “I was traumatized?”
“Dick,” Jane said wearily, “get my spray bottle.”
“Jane, no!”
Hours later, I sat outside Les and Marge’s house in my minivan with Kerrianne’s funeral potato casserole riding shotgun. While I’d loved the carb-based grief fuel when I was human, tonight I had to ride with the windows down just so I could tolerate the smell. This was what Southern people did in the face of death, no matter what their social class. They heard about someone passing. They threw together a casserole to sustain the mourners during their time of need, and they called on them to deliver the covered dish and their well wishes. And if they happened to pick up a tidbit of gossip about the bereaved or the strange circumstances of the death, all the better.
Just because I was a vampire now, that didn’t mean I was going to give up on tradition.
I hadn’t told Danny about his papa yet. I didn’t know how. He was so young, and he’d lost so much already. It seemed cruel to take something else from him. In addition to that stress, I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing contacting Marge. But I wanted to continue the tentative relationship I’d rebuilt with her. I didn’t want Les’s death or my being a suspect in that death to derail the progress we’d made.
My life was complicated.
I leaned forward and tapped my forehead against the steering wheel. “Please, Lord, please don’t let this be one of those decisions I end up regretting a lot.”
Balancing the warm Pyrex in one hand, I knocked on the front door, a formality I’d insisted on even when Rob was alive. I didn’t want Les and Marge to feel comfortable just walking into my home unannounced, or vice versa. Of course, they did it anyway, but I tried to communicate how I felt about the issue with this little quirk.
An older woman, a friend of Marge’s I vaguely recognized from my in-laws’ annual holiday party, opened the door. Her blandly pleasant smile evaporated as she realized who was on the front stoop. “Oh. It’s you.”
Without further response, she walked away, disappearing into the crowd of people milling around in the living room. Nice.
The house looked and smelled exactly the same, like Lemon Pledge and gun oil. How could so much about my life have changed but this place remain the same? The crowd parted as I walked through the living room, like Moses walking through a particularly gossipy sea. I could hear murmurs, snatches of conversation, “no blood missing,” “so torn up Marge wasn’t allowed to identify him.”
I also heard hissing whispers of “Who d
oes she think she is?” and “How could she?” from the other mourners. My memory flashed back to the days before Rob’s funeral, in this very room, being comforted by some of the same people. I’d sat on Marge’s couch, hands clenched together so tightly my knuckles felt bruised, desperately trying not to have some reaction, some moment of weakness that could be criticized later. Now these people were staring at me like I was something they wanted to scrape off the bottom of their shoes. And I could not give less of a damn. There was a real freedom in simply not caring.
I smiled at the lot of them, as sweet as pie, but without showing fang, because there were limits to what I could get away with in a group this trigger-happy. From what I understood, bullets couldn’t kill me, but they stung like hell.
Marge was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee clutched between her hands. She looked older, tired, and shrunken, as if she’d lost twenty “flu pounds” since the last time I saw her. She was wearing an old denim gardening shirt and no makeup, and her hair was slicked back into a bun instead of in its usual feathery helmet. Several of her friends from church sat with her, patting her arms and murmuring comforting platitudes, but she didn’t seem to hear them. She was staring straight ahead.
I put the funeral potatoes on the counter with all of the other dishes and approached her slowly. Her best friend, Joyce Mayhew, shot to her feet, vibrating with righteous indignation. “How dare you show your face in here, Libby Stratton? Rob would be so ashamed of you—”
“Don’t,” Marge said softly. “Give us a minute.”
“Marge, honey, you’re not strong enough to make good decisions right now,” Joyce told her, patting Marge’s hair.
Marge clearly didn’t like being told she wasn’t “strong enough” for anything, despite the fact that she’d told me the same thing almost every day while I was on chemo. “It’s fine, Joyce,” Marge insisted. “There are things we need to talk about.”
“I will be right over there,” Joyce said, glaring at me. “I’m watching you.”
I slid into the chair abandoned by Joyce. Marge stared down at her full coffee mug, rubbing her thumb along the handle.