Vampires aren’t much on home maintenance, I thought.
A Goth girl answered the door when I knocked. She looked to be twenty-five. She liked black. She wore three studs in her nose, ten in her ears, one in her bellybutton, five in her eyebrows. She probably had more you couldn’t see. She made you want to grab a kitchen magnet and plunk it on her. She had been pretty once, but now she wasn’t.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m Detective Poulchuk,” I said. “Does Alan Pemi live here?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Why not?”
“You’re a cop,” she said. “Cops suck.”
“Right,” I said.
“Don’t you need a warrant or something?”
“I’m not here to search anything. Just want to talk to Mr. Pemi.”
“He doesn’t talk to people until sunset.”
“Because he’s a vampire?”
She shrugged.
“But you’re not a vampire,” I said.
She shrugged.
“You must be in training,” I said.
“Shove it.”
She closed the door.
I drove over to Java the Hut’s, bought two coffees, then drove to Wentworth Park and pulled up next to the statue of a Boy Scout. The Boy Scout posed on one knee, his hands stretched out to give drinks to passing animals. During the summer, water dripped out of his hands into a drinking bowl for dogs. Now, without the trickle of water, the Boy Scout looked like a kid asking for a handout. Not the intended effect.
Wally Hoyle, my deputy, slid into the passenger seat.
“You don’t think it’s cold,” he said, “and then it is.”
“November in New Hampshire,” I said.
“Tell that to the freaking kids,” he said.
He pushed his chin at the usual collection of kids, early high-schoolers, pre-drivers. Girls and boys. They smoked cigarettes and played Hacky Sack and sometimes did drugs. They asked older kids to pick them up a six-pack or two. They didn’t do much that other kids didn’t do, except that they did it in the center of town with the municipal bandstand as their headquarters. Today, from what I could see, they seemed determined to kick their skateboards into the air and slide on them along a sidewalk railing. Nothing new there, either.
“Coffee for me?” Wally asked.
I nodded. I stirred my coffee with a wooden stirrer. Wally took a sip of his. He hardly looked much older than the kids collected around the bandstand. He wore a red mackinaw and musher’s fur cap. His pistol formed a small bulge under his jacket, but you wouldn’t notice it if you didn’t look for it.
“Anything?” I asked.
“They’re not talking,” Wally said. “When I mentioned the vampire, they all shut up. They’re scared of him.”
“They admit he’s been down here?”
“They don’t say yes or no. You know kids. They don’t want to give anything away.”
“The vampire is still sleeping,” I said.
Wally glanced at the late afternoon sky.
“Of course he is,” he said.
“Do what we said then,” I said. “Tell them someone sold Ricky Adelar some dirty Ecstasy and that Ricky’s brain may be scrambled. Tell them that Ricky said it was the vampire, but that we’re still investigating. Tell them to be smart. If they want to turn anything in to us, no questions asked, we’d appreciate it. Tell them Ricky’s parents are completely devastated.”
“Okay,” Wally said.
“And try to sound like Jimmy Stewart when you do it,” I said.
“Okay,” Wally said.
He climbed out of the car. He took the coffee with him.
I swung by Speare Memorial, got Ricky’s room number from a young nurse in a cardigan sweater, then went up in the hospital elevator. As soon as the door opened I spotted Mr. Adelar. He sat in an easy chair reading a Farmer’s Almanac someone had left in the waiting room. The TV behind him broadcasted Granite State Challenge, a quiz game that pitted one New Hampshire high-school team against another. I heard Manchester’s Trinity High School mentioned, but then Mr. Adelar looked up.
“Afternoon,” I said. “How’s Ricky doing?”
“Better,” Adelar said.
He put the almanac aside and stood. He was a tall, thin guy with an outsized Adam’s apple. You couldn’t look at him without thinking about blue herons. He worked for the state’s agricultural department. Something to do with lumber production, out of the Fish & Game Department in Plymouth.
“Still disassociated,” Adelar said. “Really it’s just wait and see. He recognizes us, knows where he is, but he’s not sure of the day of the week, the President, stuff like that.”
“Does he still maintain he took Ecstasy?”
“He isn’t that precise. Have you talked to this vampire fellow he mentioned?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you going to search his house?”
Trinity High School buzzed in on a question. What Caribbean country’s volcano recently erupted, causing the population to evacuate?
Trinity’s team captain said: Bermuda.
The quizmaster buzzed. Wrong answer.
“Guys like this fellow,” I said, “never have the stuff in their houses. A guy up in Rumney buried a school bus in a retired stockbroker’s field. Turned it into a pot factory. Little generator, the whole thing. Grow lights. Made it through three seasons before someone finally spotted him going through a manhole cover into the ground. Most we’d get if we searched the place would be a little pot, if that.”
“So then what do you do?” Adelar asked.
The other team buzzed in, said, Barbados, and got buzzed, too.
Montserrat, the quizmaster said.
“I’m going to see him right after this,” I said. “We’ll make it uncomfortable for him.”
Mrs. Adelar stepped out of Ricky’s room and nodded at me. If Mr. Adelar was a heron, Mrs. Adelar was a trout. Her ankles and neck had about the same thickness. She was as balanced as a throwing knife. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt that had a black dog on it. The black dog promoted beer and a certain bar.
“He’s asleep,” Mrs. Adelar said. “He drops off so suddenly it terrifies me.”
Mr. Adelar slipped his arm over his wife’s shoulders.
I reached down and picked up the Farmer’s Almanac. Sunset, according to the chart, had already happened five minutes ago.
The Goth girl opened the door.
“Is he awake yet?” I asked.
“He’s awake but he says you need a warrant.”
“Tell him he watches too many TV shows about cops. Tell him he doesn’t really want to make this more difficult than it needs to be.”
She looked at me. The streetlight caught the speckle of her studs.
“Stay there,” she said.
I did. I turned around and looked at the street and thought about vampires. If I were a vampire, I figured, I’d live someplace warmer. Maybe Florida. Maybe Louisiana. New Hampshire seemed like a hard place to be a vampire. People stayed indoors in winter and wore turtlenecks.
I turned back to the door when I heard it open.
“Come in,” she said, “but he hasn’t fed yet.”
“Fed?”
She nodded.
“You don’t want to anger him,” she said.
“I wouldn’t want that,” I agreed.
She shrugged.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Wolf,” she said.
“Wolf?” I asked. “Like the dog?”
“Like the wolf.”
“As in ‘bay at the moon’?”
She nodded.
“Got it,” I said.
I followed her down a very ugly hallway, past two doors that might have led to sitting rooms when the house had a different spirit, then into a large ell kitchen. The kitchen, in the dim light, looked as though it had last been renovated during the 1950s. Linoleum floor, vinyl counters, red plastic kitchen chairs. It was retro without having a clue what retro meant. A chicken-shaped clock clicked above the sink. Or clucked. The chicken hadn’t cleaned the dishes below it in some time, and neither had anyone else in the house.