Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (10 page)

“Peg,” she said again. Peg wanted to pretend
that she heard some kind of pleasant surprise in her voice, but she
didn’t. “What do you want?”

Peg opened her eyes, reached into the case,
and pulled out a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

“Maybe I just wanted to call to talk.”

“You never call me and I never call you, so
just tell me what you want.”

She could tell her mother that Zoey was
alive. She’d want to know. She’d be ecstatic. The woman might even
physically leap for joy, or break down crying, or scream to God
above that she was so happy and grateful.

Peg didn’t feel inclined to give her mother
that. Instead she pulled a lighter and some gauze from the
case.

“I called because…” She almost said that she
had called because she wanted to say she was sorry. It was always
her first instinct every time she heard Anita’s voice. But she’d
apologized over and over again in the past, sometimes for things
that had actually been her fault and sometimes for things that had
not. Anita never gave her anything for her apologies other than a
grunt or a cold stare. “…I’ve been thinking about Zoey a lot
lately.”

“Well praise the Lord and pass the ketchup.
What a wonderful day this is. Peggy Sellnow has been thinking about
someone other than herself for a change.”

Uttech
, she thought.
It’s Peg
Uttech, mom
.

She reached in and grabbed the last item in
the case: a small box of single edge razor blades. She’d opened and
used them once. Otherwise they had been sitting in the hidey hole
for years.

“Mom, I was hoping we could have a civil
conversation. Can we do that?”

“Well, if we never have a civil conversation
that sure isn’t my fault. You’re the one that always pushes
me.”

Peg had spent the last several years of
therapy and AA meetings and quiet middle-of-the-night conversations
with Tony being told that she wasn’t the one that pushed. It was
all her mother. Nothing her mother had done or said to her was
Peg’s fault. But Peg, despite every kind and understanding word
from the people who knew and loved her, knew on some deep level
that her mother had to be right.

She’d tried numerous times to explain to her
therapist what talking to her mother, or even thinking about what
had happened to Zoey—since the first often resulted in the
second—felt like. Any description was inadequate and she never
believed that the person she was talking to truly understood. The
best she could do was call it a kind of pressure. She would say to
imagine a brick balanced on top of her head. It hurt, yes, but even
more there was the sensation of something relatively small but
still strangely substantial trying to push her down into the
ground. Except this was a purely mental feeling. At first it might
be a sensation that she thought she could live with, but as the
brick stayed there it only began to feel heavier. Pushing down and
deeper, deeper and down, until it was finally too much and she had
to quit balancing and let the brick fall.

But that was where the metaphor failed to
translate into real life, because there was no way to simply grab
the brick or let it fall. It would stay. And the pressure became
less about her head and more about her entire body. The heaviness
coursed through her veins, poisoning her heart, destroying her
organs.

Peg pulled a razor from the box. It had a
thin cardboard sleeve to keep it both sharp and from accidentally
slicing anyone. She removed the cardboard.

“I… I just had some questions. Can I just ask
a few of them? It won’t take long.”

“Of course it won’t. You never spend any
longer talking about your sister than you absolutely have to.”

Zoey held the blade up, watching the way the
polished metal twinkled in the light. She didn’t know anyone else
who could take a look at one and see pure beauty. She was also
aware that she couldn’t be a normal, good person if she had such
views. Others tried to tell her otherwise, but she knew better.

“There were just some things I was hoping you
could tell me about the investigation.”

“You should already know these things, Peggy.
You were there when we met with the agents in charge.”

I was?
Peg supposed she had a vague
memory of that, but she couldn’t be sure why her remembrances were
so hazy. The likely answer was that she was drunk or stoned at the
time, or maybe she’d been too lost in her own head to pay
attention.

“I know, Mom. I’m sorry.”

A snort from the other end of the line. Peg
felt that pressure building up in her body. It was behind her eyes,
in her chest, deep in her stomach. There was no physical pain,
which was part of the problem. A feeling so horrible, so dark,
should have been accompanied by real-world agony. That was the only
way the pain could make sense. In the end that was all she really
wanted, all she had wanted for the last eleven years. She wanted
the world to finally make sense.

She set down the razor long enough to roll up
the sleeve on her left arm. Her eyes felt watery, but she wiped
them away and did her best to keep her voice cool and neutral.

“Can you please just tell me what they said?”
Peg asked. She wanted to add that she hoped to hear it without any
more biting comments, but Peg knew she deserved them.

“Why are you making me rehash this, Peggy?
You think I enjoy reliving this? Every time we talk you force me
into that dark place again. Didn’t you already do enough?”

“I’m sorry,” Peg said. The brick didn’t just
feel like it was on her head now. It was on her chest, her
shoulders, even her lap. It was everywhere holding her down,
everywhere except her right hand, with which she picked up the
razor again.

“Whatever. So what then? What do you want to
know?”

“Just… did they say anything specific about
the investigation? Where they were looking? A profile of who had
taken her?”

“We still don’t know that anyone took her,
you know that.”

“I know.”

“She just disappeared.”

“I know.”

“Gone when you weren’t looking.”

Peg didn’t respond.

Anita waited a couple seconds. Her next words
sounded strangely smug, like she knew her words had had the desired
effect and now she could start giving Peg the information she
wanted. “If someone really took her, they said it was probably a
man, but they had a few other disappearances they thought might be
related and it wasn’t like on those cop shows.”

Peg forced herself to lower the razor back to
the table, but she didn’t let go. This might be something she could
work with. “What do you mean?”

“I had to really work them to get them to
tell me anything, but they finally said that there wasn’t a lot
that the… victims… had in common. Men, women, black, white, Asian.
Mostly straights, a few gays.”

“Nothing in common at all.”

“Are you even listening? That’s not what I
said. I said there wasn’t a lot. They did have one thing. All of
them were young. The oldest was twenty, the youngest was
fourteen.”

“I don’t understand. If they had so little in
common, how did the feds connect them all in the first place?”

“Why are you doing this to me, Peg? You
didn’t say.”

“I’m not doing anything to you, Mom. Please.
Can’t we just talk about this without you getting paranoid?”

“Don’t you call me paranoid. Don’t you dare
call me paranoid. I have a God-damned right to think that you want
to hurt me. That’s all you ever do.”

Peg lifted the razor blade again. She knew
she had to fight this. She couldn’t slip back into these ways. Tony
would get angry. V would be upset. And Peg would be the person who
had let everyone down again, the same thing she seemed fated to do
over and over and over. That was all she was good for. She had no
other purpose, no other reason for existence than to be a
disappointment and she couldn’t stand it.

She flicked the lighter and ran the flame
under the blade. A new blade would probably be clean, as close to
sterile as she probably needed, but she’d learned after a few bad
infections in the past that it was safer to be sure.

“If you don’t want to talk I can go,” Peg
said. She hoped desperately that Anita would say yes. If she did
maybe Peg could stop before she hurt herself. She could go up to
Tony and he would hold her and say that her mother was a bitch and
that she was not a bad person. She knew her mother, though. Anita
wouldn’t be finished yet.

“Now you’re going to get all huffy on me,”
Anita said. “Fine. What was your fucking question again?”

“What did all the disappearances have in
common that made police think they were the work of the same
person?”

“You know, they wouldn’t tell me that at
first,” Anita said. “They said they couldn’t share sensitive
information while we still had a suspect for Zoey’s killer in the
house.”

That was a blatant, bald-faced lie and Peg
knew it. The suspect in question was Peg herself, but some time
much later, when she had finally been able to look at the events of
the days and weeks following the disappearance with some measure of
detachment, she realized that the police had never actually done
anything that implied they believed Peg was a serious suspect.
They’d kept her at the station late into the night the day after
the disappearance, but that was because she had been the last one
to ever see Zoey. Only one person had ever actually accused Peg of
doing anything to Zoey, and Peg was speaking to that person right
now.

Peg let the lighter grow hot in her hand, the
metal thumbwheel causing a searing pain in her thumb. She kept it
that way for as long as she could stand then finally let it go.

“But they told you eventually,” Peg said.

“Yes, they did.”

“And what did they say?”

“It was the clothes that were found. They
kept that detail out of the paper. Sometimes they were dumped in
water or other times in dumpsters, but when they were found the
clothes were always intact. No damage to them like they had been
ripped off.”

As though they took them off by their own
volition
, Peg thought. If she remembered her vampire lore right
from her teenage days of reading Stephen King and Anne Rice, then
it seemed likely that whoever or whatever had taken Zoey had been
able to put some kind of whammy on her, a hypnotic spell or a
trance or something like that.

“Did they have anything else?” Peg asked.

“No, there was nothing else,” Anita said.

You’re lying to me again
, Peg thought.
I can hear it in your voice. I can always tell because you sound
like you’re proud of it
.

“Did they give any idea about whether they
thought it was someone local?”

“Are you deaf, Peggy? I told you there was
nothing else.”

The pressure built through Peg’s body, but
she thought maybe she could control this. The blade was a
temptation, but she could fight it. She was sure of it. She had to
be strong enough after all this time.

“Or maybe a pattern to the
disappearances?”

There was a long pause. “Maybe.” Anita
sounded a little deflated. Maybe just this once Peg had stood up to
this woman long enough to actually win.

“What was it?”

“All the disappearances were around a central
spot. The further from that area, the fewer disappearances.”

“And what was that spot?”

“Lake Winnebago.”

Lake Winnebago. Peg had hoped for something a
little more specific than that. Other than the Great Lakes that
bordered Wisconsin on its east and north sides, Lake Winnebago was
the largest lake in the state. There were at least four cities of
some significant size surrounding it and who knew how many smaller
ones. As a clue, it wasn’t a terribly helpful one.

“They weren’t able to pin it down any better
than that?”

“If they had, don’t you think they might have
found something? They’re the FBI. If they didn’t find anything else
then there wasn’t anything else to be found.”

On that one Peg finally got the impression
that Anita was telling the truth. The phone call wasn’t a total
wash, but what little she had gotten out of the woman wasn’t enough
to be very helpful. She supposed she should be grateful, though.
She could just hang up now, put the razors away without having
needed them, and she could go upstairs to snuggle with Tony.

“I guess that’s about all then?” Peg
asked.

“What, you got the little tidbits from me you
wanted and now you’re going to hang up?” Anita asked.

“No. Mom, I didn’t mean it like…”

“How do you even live with yourself?”

“Wait, what?”

“How do you do it? No, wait. I’ve got a much
better question, and I want you to answer me honestly, okay?”

“Mom, maybe I should get going…”

“Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?”

Peg closed her eyes and held her breath. The
pressure inside had started to dissipate without her even realizing
it, but now it was back, hitting her hard.

“What did you just say?” Peg asked
quietly.

“I’m pretty sure I didn’t stutter,” Anita
said. “I asked you why you haven’t killed yourself yet. You already
tried it once. I would think that practice makes perfect.”

Tears started forming even under Peg’s closed
eyelids.

“Because I’m pretty sure the world would be a
better place without you in it,” Anita said. “God saw fit to bless
me with two daughters, but the Devil had to be the one who took
Zoey and left you. He took the good daughter and all I had left was
a selfish, egotistical, lying little whore.”

Just hang up
, Peg thought.
Don’t
let her get her hooks in you again. You don’t have to listen to
this. You don’t deserve it.

But she did. After so many years of hearing
it on a constantly repeating basis, she knew that she did.