After Dark (5 page)

Mom stopped admiring the view and turned to me. “Charlie, this isn't the kind of town where you just spit all over the sidewalk.”

“I'll make sure to do it in the road the next time I brush my teeth with toilet water.”

“Let's just get something to eat,” Johnny said, and we all filed into Romero's.

The place was filled with old-timers eating big platefuls of bacon and eggs and sipping from steaming mugs of coffee. Mom insisted we sit at the front counter, just like she and Hal used to do when they were kids. The locals stared at us as we made our way to the stools and took a seat.

A few seconds after we sat down, our waitress — a husky woman with gray hair and a name tag that read
Mabel
pinned to her white shirt — bustled over. She handed out the menus and filled our cups with coffee without asking if we wanted any.

“Back in a sec,” she said and left.

“Try the blueberry pancakes,” Mom said. “They're delicious.”

“I don't know,” I said, looking around. “I think we might get run out of town if we don't order the bacon and eggs.”

“I'll get both,” Johnny said, putting his menu down.

“Don't you have to watch your figure for your fans?” I asked.

“The producers want me to beef up a bit for next season, so I've got to increase my calorie intake.”

“They want you to beef up, Johnny, not pork up.”

“Don't worry about me, bro,” he said. “I've got some killer workouts that'll keep me a lean, mean, vampire-fighting machine. You should join me, Chuck, you're looking a little soft in the middle.”

“The Ping-Pong coach at Choke likes me to carry around a little extra weight, you know, for reserve energy, in case I get caught in an extra-long match.”

“We didn't have a Ping-Pong team at Choke, did we?” Johnny asked, but before I could explain, Sheriff Dutton walked in and strolled over.

“Morning,” he said, nodding at us.

“Good morning, Sheriff,” Mom said, swiveling around on her stool.

“Please, call me Rick.”

“As long as you call me Claire. Catch any monsters last night?” she said, grinning.

“Can't say that I did, but I had my hands full. There were plenty of calls. Some of the local kids were out celebrating the end of the school year.”

“Speaking of trouble, I'm not sure my brother, Hal, came back home last night. Do you think he's okay?”

“Well, you know Hal, he's a … little eccentric, if you don't mind my saying so.”

“It's just the truth,” Mom said.

“But he knows the woods around these parts better than most folks,” he added, and took a business card and pen out of his pocket. He scribbled a number on the back and handed it to Mom. “If he's not back by dinner tonight, give me a call and I'll see what I can do.”

“Thanks,” Mom said.

“What can I get you, Sheriff?” Mabel asked, wandering back with her pot of coffee.

“I'll have a big cup of joe and some blueberry flapjacks,” Dutton said. “You all have a good day,” he added and then took a seat at a booth in the back.

“He's a handsome devil, isn't he?” Mabel said, winking at Mom. “And he's single, too, if you can believe it.”

“Do you have any vegan options?” Lilith blurted.

“Eggs?” Mabel said, shrugging.

Lilith frowned. “I'll have a bowl of oatmeal, please — no milk.”

“I'd like the bacon and eggs — and could you put some extra bacon on the side?” I said, looking pointedly at Lilith.

“I'll see what I can do,” Mabel said, while Lilith glared at me. “It'll be a bit of a wait — we're a little backed up today. One of our waitresses called in sick. I think she came down with a bad case of celebrating the end of school.”

Mabel wasn't joking. It was almost an hour before we got our food. While we waited, Mom went over some of the renovation plans and assigned a few jobs. She'd hired some locals to handle most of the work, but we'd be helping out with a bit of the painting, the mowing and the general tidying up of the place. She said it was the perfect opportunity for some family bonding.

Spending my days doing manual labor with my family sounded like about as much fun as hanging out with Stanley Peck back at Choke for the entire summer, so when everyone piled into the truck after breakfast to go pick out paint, I convinced Mom I needed to peruse the shops on Church Street for some new clothes.

There weren't any of the usual clothing stores or fast-food joints along Church Street. They were all local operations with names like Frog Brothers Café, Rosemary's Roses or Eats Like a Bird Sandwich Shoppe. In fact, the only clothing store I saw was called Chaney's Fine Garments, and it looked like it sold clothes that were made sometime in the mid-1940s. I needed new clothes, but not that badly, so I decided to wait for my stuff to arrive.

The only place on the street that really stood out was a restaurant called The Opal. The front was all sleek steel and glass instead of brick, and it was twice as wide as the stores around it. More importantly, one of the cars parked out front was a shiny red Porsche. I decided to saunter over and casually press my face against the restaurant's front window to see if Elizabeth was inside, but before I had a chance to make myself look like a crazy stalker, she strolled out the front door with a tall man dressed in a gray suit and wearing a fedora.

“Hi, Charlie,” she said, smiling. She had her hair tied back in a ponytail and was wearing cut-off shorts and a white tank top.

“Wow, what a surprise,” I said. “I didn't expect to see you here.”

“This is my dad,” she said, gesturing toward the older man. He was probably a few inches over six feet and had the kind of tanned, chiseled face that you only expect to see on mountain climbers or people who have sailed around the world a couple of times. I could see that his hair under the fedora was black with streaks of gray.

“Dad, this is Charlie Harker. He's Johnny's brother.”

“Mr. Opal,” I said, shaking his hand, which was massive and looked like it could crush mine if he sneezed the wrong way. His grip was surprisingly limp, though, and his skin felt clammy.

“Charlie,” he said, staring down at me from behind a pair of aviator sunglasses.

“Dad's not feeling well. I'm sending him home.”

“It's nothing,” Opal said in a flat voice.

“Sounds like something's going around,” I said. “I just spent an hour at Romero's waiting for my breakfast because one of the waitresses called in sick.”

“Our maître d' is sick, too,” she said, looking a little concerned.

“It's just a head cold. It's nothing,” Opal said, still staring at me. I saw myself reflected in the silver sheen of his glasses and thought I looked like a person who'd been living on the streets for a few weeks.

“It's probably a migraine,” Elizabeth said, as Opal headed for a black Mercedes. “He could barely walk when he woke up this morning, but he seems to be getting better. At least he
says
he's feeling better.”

“I am feeling better,” Opal added drily, getting into his car.

“I'm going to follow him home,” she said, as he started up the car and pulled away, “just to make sure he makes it okay.” She was about to get into her Porsche but stopped and added, “Say hi to Johnny for me, okay?”

“Sure. Will do,” I said, smiling like an idiot and giving her a thumbs-up. This was the story of my life. In any town we'd ever visited, some girl (or girls) would fall for Johnny, and I'd end up relaying their messages to him. I'm not going to deny it was slightly annoying to be consistently overlooked for my golden-boy older brother, but what really cooked my craw was when they started cutting into my nap time, or my floating-in-the-pool time, or my lying-in-the-hammock-doing-nothing time to pick my brain about what Johnny was “really like” or ask if he'd been talking about them around the dinner table. I was hoping it didn't come to that with Elizabeth Opal.

She drove away, and I continued my walk along Church Street. I wandered past a few more stores and then spotted a knee-high chalkboard, propped up against a wall at the mouth of a narrow alley that ran between Brooks Books and R. Sterling's Fine Jewelry. Scrawled across the board in yellow letters were the words
Voodoo Juice Bar
. Under them, a yellow arrow pointed into the alley. I figured an establishment that was located in an alley was the perfect place for a fine young man like myself to escape family bonding time, so I headed down to check it out.

There were a few other arrows, drawn on the walls and along the ground, that pointed the way past the back of Brooks Books, around a corner and into another alley. That's where I found a green wooden door held open with a brick. There was no sign above the door, but there was an arrow on the ground, pointing inside. So, I followed it in.

The walls in the Voodoo Juice Bar were deep purple, and the only light in the place was coming from a bare lightbulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. There were three tables, surrounded by folding lawn chairs, and a ragged-looking couch pushed into the back corner. The bar was on the other side of the room, and there were shelves stacked behind it, packed with jars, boxes, shakers, vials and beakers. One of the larger jars had five or six tarantulas inside, floating around in a clear, thick-looking liquid. Above the shelves was a blackboard with about fifty different drinks scrawled across it in yellow chalk. The drinks had names like Pinpricks, Zombaid, Undead-Colada, The Vortex and my personal favorite, The Re-Animator. I was still scanning the list when a man's head poked through a set of red beads hanging from the doorframe of a back room. He had white hair that puffed off his head like a fluffy cloud and was wearing black-tinted goggles over his eyes.

“What are you here for?” he blurted.

“Uh … a drink, I think?”

“What? Why are you here? What's your name?”

“His name is Charlie,” a voice said from behind me.

I turned and saw Miles Van Helsing standing in the doorway. He looked like he was wearing the same black clothes as the night before, only now he had on a black baseball cap.

“He's okay, Dr. Vortex,” Miles added, coming toward me.

“I'm not sure you're qualified to make that kind of judgment call, Miles,” I said.

“Trust me, Doctor,” Miles said, pulling a twenty out of his pocket and laying it down on the bar, “he's clean.”

“What'll you have?” Vortex asked, stepping out from behind the red beads. He was lean and tall, and wore a pair of big black rubber gloves and a white lab coat.

“We'll take two Re-Animators,” Miles answered.

“That doesn't have any spiders in it, does it?” I asked.

“Just the fangs,” Vortex said, staring at me from behind those black goggles.

My eyebrows shot up.

“He's joking, Charlie,” Miles said, slapping me on the back. “Let's have a seat.”

“Good, because spider venom this early in the morning gives me a headache.”

Vortex pulled the goggles down and smiled. His eyes were a brilliant blue. “Me, too,” he said and started grabbing jars off the shelf behind him.

“Dr. Vortex is a genius,” Miles said, leading me to one of the tables in the back. I sat down in a lawn chair across from him. “He's a scientist, a brilliant inventor, and he makes the best drinks in town. On top of that, he could help us out of this mess.”

“What mess?”

“Were you not listening to me last night?”

“The sheriff said it was just some local kids blowing off steam.”

“He's wrong,” Miles said, as Vortex started a blender behind the bar.

“Is this just some prank you play on all the new kids in town?”

“This situation is as far from a prank as you can possibly get.”

The blender stopped, and Vortex brought over two large jars filled with a greenish-brown mixture. He put them down and left, disappearing behind the beads and into the back room.

I sniffed my drink. It smelled like dirt.

“It tastes better than it smells,” Miles said.

“Better than dirt? I find that hard to believe.”

He grabbed his, gulped back half the glass and slammed it back onto the table. “You'll just have to trust me.”

I nodded and took a sip. He was right; it tasted a whole lot better than it smelled.

“I'm not crazy,” he said.

“No, you're right. It kind of tastes like a Creamsicle mixed with —”

“I'm not talking about the drink, Charlie. I'm talking about last night. I'm not crazy — there's something highly irregular going on with our mutual neighbor, Mr. Ted Baxter.”

“I don't suppose he's connected with the antique dolls you told me about?”

“The antique dolls?”

“That stuff about the Holscombs. I didn't hear how it all turned out.”

“Oh, right. Well, they hadn't been seen for a few days, so the cops took a look inside. All the clothes were folded and put away, the fridge was full of food, the TV was on, et cetera, et cetera, but there was no sign of the Holscombs. They found the dolls tucked under the covers of Mr. and Mrs. Holscomb's bed … But forget about that. The Baxters are the immediate problem here.”

“So, you actually think the dolls murdered the entire Holscomb family? And then what did they do? Bury them in the backyard?”

“Forget about the Holscombs, would you!” Miles said. “We can go into the long and sordid history of antique doll murders some other time. Right now, I need you to focus on the Baxters.”

“Okay, fine,” I said, taking a bigger sip. “I'll stay clear of Mr. Baxter. Consider me warned.”

“No, no, no,” he said, “I'm not talking about staying away from the man. I'm talking about
doing
something about this situation. Do you understand me?”