Wolf turned around and left.
The vampire sat at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette. He wore black. He had a horse-head, a long, thin skull that made his chin hang too far out from his chest. He had as many studs in his face as Wolf. He looked slack and thin, but, I considered, maybe he would look better after he fed. He might have been thirty. He resembled a guy who came back to the high-school reunion and still couldn’t figure out why everyone still wanted to shove him in a locker.
He stood. He was short, maybe five nine. He wore a chain around his waist. Someone had bolted the chain into the wall behind him. A leash. He offered a chair. I sat. He sat. The kitchen table sat between us. The vampire jabbed out his cigarette and folded his hands.
“We have a kid named Ricky Adelar who says you sold him Ecstasy,” I said. “The kid’s in a hospital acting a little unglued.”
“Kids says the darndest things,” the vampire said, “don’t they?”
He smiled. Now I got the full dazzle. His upper teeth had been filed into points. He had a shark mouth. If you were fifteen years old, and escorted into this room, the combined vampire effect would have been pretty good.
“Kids do say funny things,” I said. “But he says he bought it from you and that’s not all that funny.”
The vampire spread his hands.
“Yippee,” he said.
“If the kid died, it could be murder.”
“Everyone dies,” he said.
“Not vampires.”
“Christians drink the blood of Christ for eternal life. We drink other blood. Different strokes.”
It was a prepared speech. I bet he gave it all the time.
“You always wear the chain?” I asked.
“Always,” he said. “Except when I don’t.”
He smiled to say I couldn’t ruffle him. And to show me his teeth.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I could get a warrant and come back and search the place and maybe I’ll still do that. Or maybe I could hear that you stopped coming around the kids and that maybe you even decided to leave town. Either way, you’re on notice. If you decide to stay, it will probably be a matter of time before you get picked up. Meanwhile, Ricky may remember more about what went on with his purchase. We may even get a few other kids to remember a few things. It might take a little while, but your string is going to run out. That’s the way these things go.”
He looked at me. Smiled.
“And your name is Alan,” I said. “Alan Pemi. And you come from Berlin, New Hampshire, where your dad is still a logger and your mom does hair. They said to say hello and wondered when you would be home to visit.”
He nodded. If having his true identity presented to him made any impact, it didn’t show.
“Your problem is,” he said, “trying to link me to the kid. And you can’t do that. So buzz off. As to the rest, it’s police harassment. So buzz off again. I don’t sell dope to kids.”
“Maybe I’ll give the kids crucifixes.”
“Maybe you should.”
We sat for a while. He lit another cigarette. He had me and he knew it. I couldn’t prove much. Ricky Adelar, especially in his current condition, wouldn’t make much of a witness. He leaned back and crossed his legs. The chain rattled a little.
“Anything else we need to talk about?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Do you think you’re a vampire?”
“I am a vampire,” he said.
“How about Wolf?”
“Not yet,” he said. “These things take time.”
“If I took a mirror and held it in front of you, would you see your reflection?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m not Bela Lugosi.”
I nodded and stood.
“Up here in New Hampshire,” I said, “the turtlenecks get in the way?”
He shook his head.
“Not too bad,” he said.
I picked up Wally from the town square.
“You give the kids the talk?” I asked as he climbed in, the cold air following him.
“You bet.”
“They buy it?”
He shrugged. Ice had formed on the top of his hat and on the collar of his mackinaw. He rubbed his hands together in front of the heater vent.
“He hangs around the cemetery,” Wally said. “That’s kind of his big thing. Hanging at the cemetery.”
“The kids tell you that?”
He nodded.
“Could have the stuff buried there,” he said. “Not a bad place to stash things.”
“The dead keep their secrets,” I said.
He looked at me.
“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” he said.
“Maybe issue garlic to the kids,” I said. “And wolfsbane.”
Wally stopped rubbing his hands. “How’d your talk with him go?” he asked.
“He’s not stupid. He knows we have to connect him to Ricky Adelar somehow.”
“Won’t be easy.”
“He’s a small-time pusher. Maybe if we could figure out who supplies him, they would put the vampire out of business. Wolfsbane him.”
“Do you know what wolfsbane is?” Wally asked.
“No idea,” I said, “but I like saying it.”
“Does it work against vampires?”
“It must,” I said. “Garlic can’t be the whole protection system.”
“You’re having fun with this,” Wally said.
“Always wanted to hunt a vampire,” I said. “Now I can.”
Two days later I saw Steve Sweeter pruning trees. He stood on an apple ladder in front of the Simons’ yard. A sign on Sweeter’s red truck gave his phone number. He didn’t have a company name or a yard-service rig. You only called Sweeter if you wanted the best and you only got him if he felt like your plants merited his attention. Apparently the Simons had an interesting tree.
I pulled over and stepped out. The weather had turned colder. The noon sun did what it could. Sweeter wore a fleece, jeans, and a pair of earmuffs. He nearly always wore earmuffs. This day he wore bifocals, had saggy khakis tucked into a pair of outsized boots, and wore a black back brace the size of a heating pad across his beltline.
“Wolfsbane,” I said.
“Monkshood,” he said, not looking at me.
“Keep vampires away?”
“Poisonous,” he said. “Keep just about anything away. Hooded flowers, look like a monk’s hood. Aconitum genus. Also known as aconite and wolfsbane.”
“Why wolf?”
“Why elm? Why birch? Who knows?”
“Werewolves?”
He stopped trimming and looked at me over his bifocals.
“You’re a strange man,” he said.
“Given the source, I’ll count that a compliment.”
He went back to picking at the tree.
“Monkshood probably had various uses. Abortion. Killing your mother-in-law. Love charms. I’m not an expert on its uses. Might work against vampires and werewolves.”
I watched him work for a while.
“What kind of tree?” I asked.
“Metasequoia. Cousin of the coastal redwoods. Also known as a dawn redwood. They thought this was extinct until about nineteen thirty-eight when a Chinese biology professor wandered into a valley and found a shrine built below one. Big race to bring back the seeds. Harvard versus California.”
“Harvard win?” I asked.
“Depends who you ask,” he said. “Tree came back from the dead. Propagated all over the world. This one isn’t happy this far north.”
“Can you save it?”