Laura’s lip curled back in a sneer. It wasn’t how she’d expected this meeting to go. She looked at Vesta, but the older woman didn’t correct or even tsk her daughter.
“I suppose that’s accurate,” Clara said, refusing to be taken aback. She looked at Urie. “Maybe this isn’t my place, but I’m not sure this is going to be appropriate for a little girl. Couldn’t you get a sitter?”
Urie Polder grinned broadly. “Little Patience ain’t been under the care of no one else, not since she was born. We don’t look to break that streak now.”
“Oh,” Clara replied. Without another word she put the car in gear and got them back in the road.
The funeral was to take place in a cemetery outside of Bellefonte—not much farther away. They passed the main campus of Penn State, then rolled into the quaint little Victorian town. The road took them along the shore of a frozen pond ringed with gazebos and houses decorated with gingerbread-like carvings.
Laura always thought the town looked like the kind of place where a parade might spontaneously break out, with a full brass section and prom queens in the backseats of open cars. It was a glimpse of Pennsylvania the way it had been decades earlier, back before the coal mines all dried up and the steel mills closed down, unable to compete with foreign production. The Pennsylvania her grandparents had grown up in.
Arkeley had once had a house in Bellefonte. It had been his base of operations for nearly twenty years.
Now he was going to be memorialized in the same town.
The cemetery, just outside town, was a vast expanse of rolling yellow hills, the dead grass sparkling with frost even so late in the morning. Most of the snow had melted or been removed from the plots. Clara had downloaded driving instructions from the cemetery’s website, and she steered them confidently through endless lanes lined with obelisks and family crypts. Smaller, more modest gravestones stuck up in neat rows. She drove them deeper into a less populated region. A freshly washed pickup truck with an extended cab stood parked in the road and Clara took her spot behind it. Then the five of them clambered out and walked over the crunching grass to where three other people already waited for them.
An older man, dressed in an outfit very similar to Urie Polder’s, but more threadworn around the knees of his jeans—and two young people, the age of college students. Arkeley’s children.
Chapter 5.
“I still think this is a lousy idea. Is this supposed to give comfort to the family, or to mock them?”
Laura asked Vesta Polder.
It was Urie who answered, though. “This is for you, ahum.”
“What?”
“So’s you can get used to the idea he ain’t human anymore. So you won’t think, when you meet him again, that he’s the same man.”
Laura shook her head in bewilderment. She didn’t have the mental energy left to work that one out for herself. She would have asked more questions, but suddenly they were within earshot of the trio at the headstone.
She took off her sunglasses, as calmly as she could, and studied the marker. It was a simple stone with no complicated inscription:
JAMESON ARKELEY
MAY 12 1941–OCTOBER 3 2004
She was pleased, she thought, to see it didn’t read “Rest in Peace” or give some description of how he had lived or died or been reborn. Just the name and dates had some kind of dignity, and as desperate as she was to find Arkeley and put him down, she couldn’t begrudge him that. The stone’s cold shape, its solid physicality, calmed her a little. Enough that she could look up and study the people who were patiently watching her. The oldest of the three—Arkeley’s brother, Angus—had the same wrinkled face she knew so well, though there was a merriness behind his eyes that Arkeley had never possessed. He shook her hand and mumbled a pleasantry she didn’t catch. The two children were dressed more conservatively than their uncle, but their faces shared a certain family resemblance to the man memorialized at their feet.
“Raleigh, right?” she asked, and held out a hand. Arkeley’s daughter nodded but kept her own hands at her sides. She wore a formless black dress and a heavy winter coat that hung on her like a tent. She wore no makeup and her eyebrows and lashes were nearly as colorless as her dress. “We spoke on the phone.”
“Yes, Trooper. Hi. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.” Laura turned to look at Arkeley’s son. “And you must be Simon. I’m so very sorry for your loss.”
“My father isn’t dead,” he told her. “Can we get on with this sham? I have to get back to school tonight and it’s a long train ride.”
Simon Arkeley had sharp pale features, a long thin nose and eyes that were just narrow slits. His black hair was badly combed. He wore a powder blue suit that didn’t look thick enough for the weather.
She asked, “You’re a student at Syracuse, right? What’s your major?”
He stared hard into her eyes. “Biology.”
“We’re all here,” Urie Polder announced. Laura realized she was standing right in front of the stone. She would have been standing on top of the grave, if there had been one. Everyone else had formed a rough circle around her. She stepped back and stood between Clara and Patience. The little girl reached up to take hold of her hand.
Vesta Polder took a step inward and lifted her hands, her fingers decorated with dozens of identical rings. Slowly she reached up to take hold of her veil. Laura realized the woman hadn’t spoken a word since they’d picked her up. Everyone watched, even Simon, as she slowly lifted the veil up and away from her face. She smoothed it down on her shoulders, releasing her bushy blond hair so it bounced. Her eyes were closed.
When she opened them they looked wild—red and swollen, as if she’d been crying, but glinting with a feverish light. Her lips were pursed tight together. She turned to look at each of them, one at a time. She held their gazes until they looked away, even Urie and Patience. Then she began to speak.
“In the old days,” she said, in a loud, clear voice, “there were no winter funerals. When a man died in the winter his body was wrapped in a winding sheet and then put in the back of the larder where it was coldest, and left until the first buds appeared on the trees.”
Raleigh frowned. “Why was that? Was winter an unlucky time?”
Vesta Polder didn’t seem to mind the interruption. “No. The ground was just too hard to dig. Back then every grave was dug by a shovel. A man’s back could give out if he tried to upturn frozen soil. Now, of course, we have backhoes. Graves are dug all year round. There is no grave here, however. Just a stone—not even a gravestone, but a cenotaph.”
“What’s a cenotaph?” Patience asked.
Vesta did not smile at her daughter or even look at her. “It is a monument to a man whose bones lie elsewhere. This stone reminds us of a man who has died. A man well worth remembering. Jameson Arkeley devoted his life to our protection. To the protection of all mankind. We can memorialize his sacrifice here.”
His sacrifice. Laura bit her lip to keep from speaking. Arkeley had been crippled in life, unable to drive a car or tie his own tie. He’d received those wounds fighting vampires. He had made himself whole again, and strong, when he took the curse. At the time maybe he’d thought of that as a sacrifice, too. By now he was probably thinking of it as a gift. He’d had a chance to prove that his death had meaning. After he saved her life, he could have returned to her. He could have let her put a bullet through his heart. That would have been a real sacrifice.
Instead he’d run away, into hiding. Maybe he’d thought he could beat the curse, somehow. Maybe he’d thought he could stay human. The man she’d worked with would have known better, but the curse could be very persuasive. His sacrifice had been lost to greed, greed for blood.