Not necessarily a tourist trap, though. She had seen plenty of those: soulless little towns comprised entirely of T-shirt shops and gaudy ice cream parlors. Instead Gettysburg was a well-preserved Victorian town, full of brick buildings with slate roofs that hadn’t changed much in a hundred and forty years. It was almost tasteful—at least at its center. She drove through a traffic circle called Lincoln Square, past small museums and antiques shops, banks, and hotels. The town was crowded with tourists, families with herds of children carrying plastic replicas of Civil War–era rifles and felt forage caps with plastic brims.
The real things were in evidence as well, in some profusion: it seemed every corner had at least one reenactor in blue or gray, clad in authentic but itchy-looking uniforms, most of them with beards and long sideburns.
She sighed as she stopped at a crosswalk to let a gaggle of schoolchildren pass. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll bite.”
“Hmm?” he asked.
“What’s here?” she asked. “What kind of horror could there possibly be in a place like this?”
He shifted painfully in his seat. “Something old. I got a call a couple days ago from a student at the college here. An archaeologist was digging up some old Civil War ruins and found some evidence of vampire activity.”
“No,” Caxton exhaled, “we got them all!”
He waved one impatient hand at her. “Old vampire activity,” he said. “More than a century old. They found the bones of a number of vampires, still in their coffins. It’s almost certainly nothing.”
“But you won’t rest easy until you check it out,” she said.
“I never rest easy,” he told her. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She didn’t want to have anything in common with him, not anymore.
Caxton stared straight ahead at the crosswalk, ready to get moving again. Eventually some adults herded up the children and moved them on. They drove in silence until she’d reached the far end of town. He had her turn off into the military park, up to the top of Seminary Ridge, a zone of quiet green hills studded everywhere by endless monuments—obelisks, arches, huge marble statues. There were fewer tourists out that way but a lot more reenactors, some of them having set up elaborate period-accurate tent camps. They drilled in formation or stood around polishing cannon and mortars that looked like they could actually be fired. Arkeley told her to turn off on a poorly marked gravel road, and the car rumbled along for about half a mile into a thick clump of trees. Three cars, late-model cheap Japanese sedans, sat in a crook of the road, and a foot trail led deeper into the woods. Caxton pulled up beside a red Nissan Sentra and switched off the ignition. She had no idea where she was or what Arkeley wanted there, and she told herself she didn’t care.
He cleared his throat again. “Aren’t you going to take off your seat belt?” he asked.
“No,” she told him. “I’m not staying.”
“Alright,” he told her. “If you’re determined to be unhelpful, so be it. Maybe you’ll do me one last favor, though.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and drew out a long length of rumpled knit cloth. It was soon revealed as a necktie that was probably twenty-five years old. “There is a way to tie one of these with only one hand, but I haven’t mastered it yet.”
She squinted at him. Did he really want her to tie it on for him? Did he really want her to touch him? It would certainly be a first.
“I’ve never gone into an official interview in my life where I wasn’t properly dressed,” he explained. “I’m not allowed to wear my badge anymore, but I can at least look like a cop.”
She stared at him for a long time. Jameson Arkeley, vampire killer emeritus, needed somebody else to tie his tie. She fought back the wave of bitter sadness that gave her but she couldn’t quite swallow her pity.
“Alright,” she said. She unfastened her seat belt. It was easy enough to get the tie on him. She’d tied Clara’s tie plenty of times. When the knot was tight enough for him he grunted in satisfaction.
“Good. Now. Please help me get out of the car.”
She could hardly refuse him that. She got out of the car and gave him a hand climbing out of his seat and suddenly they were both standing there, just like they used to. Like partners.
“Tell me, honestly, that you aren’t even curious,” he said, looking at the trail.
She started to do just that. The words didn’t come easily, though.
“Tell me you don’t even want to take a look. What do you have to do today that is so much more important than this?” he asked.
She would have said no just on principle. She would have refused. But he was right—she was curious, even though her life wasn’t about vampires anymore. Especially not their moldering bones. He was right about another thing, too. She had nothing else to do.
Arkeley’s body might be ruined, but he still knew how to push her buttons. Then and there she knew she had to at least take a look.
She locked up the car and together they headed down the trail. It ran through a field of wildly profuse grass for about two hundred yards, then ended in a simple campsite with a cluster of nylon tents and a big fire ring. There were no reenactors around, but a man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans was waiting for them. He shook Arkeley’s hand eagerly enough, then turned and smiled at Caxton as if he was waiting to be introduced.
“Trooper, meet Jeff Montrose. He’s from the archaeology department of Gettysburg College.”
Caxton raised an eyebrow, but held out a hand for Montrose to shake. He was of average height, and maybe a little pudgy. His brown hair was thinning on top and he had a long and elaborate goatee that he had dyed so blond it was almost white. There was something weird about his eyes, she thought, which worried her—but then she realized he was just wearing eyeliner. “Civil War Era Studies is what we’re calling it, but we get our hands dirty whenever we can.”
“Hi,” she said. His appearance didn’t bother her, but it wasn’t what she expected from an archaeologist.
He didn’t recognize her or ask her for her autograph, which was one thing in his favor. “Are you a professor?” she asked. She’d never finished college, but she didn’t remember her professors wearing eye makeup.
“A grad student. Running Wolf ’s technically in charge here, but he had classes all day, so he asked me to help you out.”
“Who’s Running Wolf?” she asked, confused.
He laughed. “Sorry. That’s what we call Professor Geistdoerfer. He got the name because he jogs through campus every day. He’s a fixture around here—I forget sometimes that people in the real world might not know him. The whole college does.” Montrose could not mask the boyish enthusiasm on his face, though every time he looked over at Arkeley he stopped smiling, as if that scarred face had reminded him this was a police investigation. “I’ve sent all the diggers out for lunch, so we have the place to ourselves.” He turned and walked to the largest of the tents and lifted its flap. “This is so exciting.
We’d really like to get back to work, so if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just show you what we’ve got.”
The three of them entered the tent, an enclosed space maybe twenty feet by ten. Long tables had been set up inside and covered with white paper. Muddy-looking bits of metal and deformed white bullets were laid out for inspection, with handwritten notes penciled around them. They didn’t interest her as much as the hole in the ground in the middle of the tent. A wide pit had been carved out of the earth there with a bright yellow ladder leading down into the ground. The walls of the pit had been shored up with timbers. In some places the pit had been excavated down to the level of wooden floorboards. Had it been the cellar of a house long since demolished?