“We have a vampire here!” she said, sounding whiny to her own ears.
“Yes. The good people of Gettysburg know that. They’re terrified. They wanted you to get up there and tell them that they’re safe and that you’ll clean up the mess for them.” His voice changed, grew more weary. “They just wanted some reassurance. They wanted a symbolic father to tell them everything was going to be alright. It’s why you were welcomed so warmly in the first place. The chief there doesn’t know what to do next and he asked you in so he could pass the buck.”
“I thought it had more to do with my experience and skills.”
Arkeley grunted. It almost sounded like a laugh. “Well, you’ve now demonstrated exactly what those skills are worth.”
She frowned. He couldn’t see it, but it wouldn’t have bothered him anyway. “I don’t remember you having to do any press conferences, last time.”
“That was only because I bullied my way out of them. Listen, Trooper, I have to go now. We’re nearly at the museum. Maybe I’ll have something for you later—if the bones here really do date to 1863, they must be related in some way to our suspect. I’ll have my phone on me, so keep me posted, please.” He broke the connection without another word. Caxton flipped her phone closed and shoved it in her pocket. Arkeley had been a jerk, as usual, but talking to him had made her feel strangely better. He hadn’t dismissed her from duty or told her to let the local cops handle the case. On some level he still believed she was the right woman for the job.
The job—she checked her watch and saw she just had time to make her appointment with Geistdoerfer.
She checked her annotated map of the town and started up the Mazda. It wasn’t far to the college campus—nothing in Gettysburg was very far from anything else—but traffic was thick. It was late, almost sundown, and she cursed the tourists around her as they crawled through green lights and blocked intersections.
She was heading up Carlisle Street when she realized that the tourists in their cars were headed away from the center of town. Always before, the traffic had flowed toward Lincoln Square. They were leaving the borough, heading out in great flocks. Had her press conference gone out live? Or maybe people were just smart enough to get their kids away from a town haunted by a vampire. She could only hope.
She pulled into a parking lot near a classroom building and headed inside. The Civil War Era Studies department had classes on the third floor overlooking a student area with a fountain. Through the windows she could see the campus lit up and golden in twilight. It reminded her of her own year and a half in college, a time she’d spent learning who she was, if she hadn’t learned much else. She found the door she wanted and knocked politely, then stepped inside. The classroom was all but deserted, row after row of black metal chairs lined up facing a whiteboard and a long table littered with books and bags. Three female students—they looked so young to Caxton, who was barely out of her mid-twenties herself—had congregated around a very tall, very striking man who could only be Geistdoerfer.
“Running Wolf,” they called him, and she finally understood why. He was of average build, but his height made him look lean. He had a sharp nose and sharper eyes, and his head was crowned with a thick shock of silver hair that turned darker in the back. His mustache was thick and bristly, but he didn’t look like one of the Pennsylvania cops she’d seen back at the station. He looked far more distinguished, like some European aristocrat maybe, but with a real streak of wildness. When he spoke to the girls he tilted his head back slightly and looked down at them along his long nose. The gesture didn’t look haughty, however, but almost conspiratorial. He looked as if he were sharing dark secrets with them even as he discussed the topics for their term papers.
“Professor,” Caxton said. “I hate to interrupt, but—”
“Trooper, ah, Caxton,” he said airily. “Oh, yes, the police called to say you were coming over. You young ladies had best leave us.” He smiled down at his students and one of them actually giggled. “And do be safe tonight, won’t you? Lock your doors so the beasties don’t get you.”
The students promised to be good and left, shouldering their bags and giving Caxton a once-over as they passed her. It was only when they were gone that Caxton saw that Geistdoerfer’s arm was in a sling.
“Shall we go to my office, where we can sit down?”
“Sure,” Caxton said.
He started loading books and papers into a satchel with his one good hand. Caxton helped him and somehow ended up carrying the bag as well. He led her down a long hallway that was starting to get gloomy as the sun fell. His office was at the far end, a cozy room lined with books. He sat down behind a big desk piled with student papers while Caxton took a padded chair on the far side. She glanced around, taking in her surroundings, the way any cop would, but the room offered few secrets at first glance. A cavalry saber hung on one wall, its scabbard mounted just beneath it. The blade was polished to a high shine but still spotted with rust.
“A horseman of J. E. B. Stuart’s acquaintance dropped that about half a mile south of where we stand,”
he told her, “one hundred and forty-one years ago. His head had just been taken off by a cannonball, so he no longer needed it. He was good enough to let it fall in the mud, where it was quickly buried, and in the heat of July the mud hardened to something like cement. The sword lay there for quite some time, almost perfectly preserved, until I had the pleasure of digging it up when I was just a lad. I was a tourist, you know, dragged here by my parents from Nebraska, where we lived. I thought this place was boring until I saw that sword. Now I can’t imagine anywhere more exciting, anywhere else I’d rather live. It is funny, isn’t it, the path things take through history? The way the past intersects with and shapes our so modern lives?”
Caxton knew a few things about how the past could catch up with you. She didn’t have time for chitchat, though. The sun was down and the vampire would be waking up—hungry. Best to get this interview over with quickly.
“I apologize for taking up your time,” she said. “I’ve already spoken with Jeff Montrose—”
Geistdoerfer’s eyes went wide for a moment. “A promising student, though a bit bizarre looking.”
“Yes,” Caxton agreed. “He showed me the cavern, and the bones inside. I’m pretty sure the vampire I’m chasing came out of the empty coffin down there. Montrose said you were the first person to enter the cavern, and I thought you might have seen something everyone else missed. That you might have some idea how the vampire got out.”
“You thought, perhaps, that I might have actually seen the vampire leaving the cavern?”
Caxton squirmed in her chair. “I hardly think that’s likely, no, but I need to check up on every lead. I’m sure you understand, as an archaeologist.”
“Oh, absolutely.” He tried to gesture with his hurt arm, but the sling wouldn’t allow him much freedom of motion. He grunted and closed his eyes for a moment, as if the pain of his injury had caught up with him.
He opened a drawer with his good hand and took out a bottle of pills. After fiddling with the cap, he knocked two of them back into his mouth and swallowed them dry. He grunted them down his throat, then sat staring at his desk for a long minute while she waited for him to recover enough to talk.
He leaned back in his swivel chair, leaned all the way back and looked up at the ceiling. “Well,” he said, finally, “I suppose there’s no point in trying to lie now.”
“I’m sorry?” Caxton asked.
“I could feed you some line, and believe me, I’m enough of an orator to probably sell it. I could tell you the coffin in question was already ruined when I found it. Empty and…all that. But there’s hardly any point. You’ve caught me, copper. Red-handed.” He looked down at his arm. She studied the sling closely for the first time and saw a drop of red welling up through the bandage around his wrist. “Oh, that’s kind of funny, isn’t it?”