“Further, we may read this stone as a warning. A warning that he is still at large.” Vesta turned to face Caxton. She held out her ringed hands and Caxton took them both. Vesta looked right into her eyes. “It is a warning, and an admonition to you, Trooper. We’ve made a place for him to rest. We’ve made a very nice grave for this man. Now it’s up to you to fill it.”
Caxton’s heart sank in her chest. She opened her mouth to reply, but what could she say? There was nothing, no words—“I’m working on it” would have been grossly inappropriate. “I’ll do my best”
sounded inadequate.
“No!” Simon said, and grabbed Vesta’s arm, pulling her away from Caxton. The older woman reeled as if she’d been smacked across the mouth. Caxton felt light-headed for a second, then came back to herself. She jumped between Simon and Vesta and dragged the boy away from the grave, away from the circle of mourners.
“What was that?” she hissed, marching him down a hill and out of earshot.
“How could you let that woman talk about my father like that?”
“She’s a friend of mine. And she was right.”
“I don’t want you to kill my father,” he said, as simple as that.
Caxton shook her head. “He’s not your father anymore. He’s a vampire. I don’t know if you understand what that really means—”
Simon let out a curt laugh that had no humor in it at all.
“—but it’s my job to hunt him down. And I’m going to do it. He’s a danger to the community. To everyone!”
Simon brooded for a moment before replying. “Tell me something. No opinions, just facts, alright? Do you have any evidence that my father has harmed a single human being? Have you found any bodies?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Then leave him the hell alone.” He turned to head back to the grave. She grabbed at his arm but he broke free easily. She half expected him to assault Vesta Polder on the spot, but instead he walked right past her, headed to the cars. “I have to go now,” he shouted, and folded his arms. It was all he had to say.
Chapter 6.
The mourners were already breaking their circle and heading for the cars—it seemed no one wanted to go on with the dubious service. Caxton hurried on to where Angus and Raleigh were climbing into the cab of the pickup. “I’d like to talk to all of you,” she said. “You might know something that could really help me find him.”
“Now, I doubt that highly,” Angus said. “Seeing as I hain’t visited with my brother in twenty years. Still,”
he said, and stopped in midthought. He looked Caxton up and down, from her legs to her chest, failing to look as far up as her eyes. “I was gonna go wash up and take myself a nap. You want to have a drink with me tonight, that I can accommodate. I’m staying at a motel near Hershey. Figured if I came all the way up here I might as well take in the theme park. What about you, honey? You want to talk to the policewoman?”
Raleigh looked down at her feet and blushed. “Please, Trooper. Don’t be offended. My uncle’s a good man, he just grew up poor. He’s not really as…” she scrunched up her shoulders and looked up at the sky, searching for the proper word and eventually coming up with “ignorant as he seems.”
“I grew up pretty poor myself,” Caxton said. “The daughter of the sheriff of a dead-end coal patch just north of here. It left me more than capable of handling a good old boy or two.”
Angus chuckled at that.
“But you didn’t answer the question. Do you mind speaking with me? I know it might be difficult to talk about your father right now.”
The girl pulled in her shoulders and rubbed her hands together. “No. No, it’ll be okay. Just maybe not here. Cemeteries kind of creep me out.”
“That’s fine,” Caxton said. “We can set up an appointment for later—you live in Emmaus, right?”
“Near there.”
With that Caxton was ready to go. It didn’t seem likely that Simon would consent to an interview, so she figured she would just leave him alone. He wasn’t done causing her grief, however. He spent a long time talking quietly but animatedly with Clara, who eventually sighed in exasperation and came over to Caxton with her arms folded across her chest. “He wants to be taken right to the train station,” she said.
“I’m sure we can do that,” Caxton said, looking at Angus. The older man lifted his arms and let them drop again.
“He wants me to take him. Because he doesn’t know me and that means he doesn’t hate me yet. He says he doesn’t want to ride with his family anymore. He says they’ve betrayed Arkeley. I mean Jameson Arkeley,” she said, glancing at Angus and Raleigh. “He says, just by agreeing to talk to you they’ve betrayed him. He also doesn’t want to ride with you, because you want to kill his dad.”
Caxton narrowed her eyes. She failed to see how any of this was her problem. She thought of Officer Glauer, though. He was constantly telling her she needed to be more sensitive to the public’s needs, and to the feelings of civilians.
“Okay. We can work this out. Does he have a problem with Vesta?”
“Yeah,” Clara said, “but not as much as with you. Or his family. He says.”
Caxton looked across at Angus. “Can you give me a ride as far as Harrisburg? If you can, Clara here can take your nephew to the station and drop off the Polders on her way.”
“You mind riding in the backseat, honey?” Angus asked Raleigh, who shook her head.
This was tedious, Caxton thought, just a waste of time. She had work to do—a meeting of the SSU that afternoon—and it would take her time to get ready. Simon’s temper tantrum was cutting into her work time. But this was what everyday life was made of for most people, these little negotiations and obligations and impositions. All the things Jameson Arkeley had brushed aside in his pursuit of the vampires. It had made him look like a jerk to everyone who met him—including Caxton. Maybe she should try to be a little more understanding. She said her good-byes to the Polders. Urie and Vesta gave her warm smiles, but their little girl, Patience, grabbed at her hand and wouldn’t let go until she made serious eye contact.
“Trooper, I would like to thank ye most sincerely for allowing me to come to thy service,” the girl said, rattling off the words as if she’d memorized them. “’Twas a great pleasure.”
“You’re—welcome,” Caxton said.
The girl offered her hand and Caxton shook it.
“It is my most avid hope,” Patience said, “that ye should slay the fiend, afore he slays ye. Even if the odds look bleak.” Then she went and climbed into the car.
Little girls shouldn’t be that honest, Caxton thought.
Clara leaned out of the driver’s window and blew her a kiss, and then they were off, Simon sitting in the front passenger seat and failing to look over his shoulder at her once.
She sighed and turned back to the two Arkeleys waiting for her. Angus already had a foot up on the running board of his pickup, while Raleigh waited patiently to climb in behind Caxton’s seat. As Caxton jumped up into the shotgun seat and pulled down her seat belt she tried to clear her mind of everything that had happened. It was time to get into interrogation mode, where she just asked questions and listened closely to the answers and tried not to make any judgments at all. She honestly doubted that the Arkeley family had anything serious to tell her, but you never knew—that was the first rule of police investigations. The last person you expected was the one who always had the best clue.
She got her first surprise when she settled down and looked around her. The pickup’s cab was immaculately clean—even the floor mats looked freshly shampooed, though the vehicle must have had upward of a hundred thousand miles on it. Angus was the kind of man who would show up to a funeral wearing a white T-shirt and jeans fraying at the knees—yet he clearly took immense pride in his truck.