Night Feast (14 page)

On night, when Bobby was passed out drunk, Alice went back to the place where they had hidden the money and dug it up.  She put it into the trunk of her car, and didn’t stop driving until she was well out of State.  Then she found a public phone booth and called the cops.  With chapter and verse she told them that Bobby had robbed the bank.  Then she gave them his address, and told them that he was keeping the fire arm under his bed.  Bobby hadn’t shot anyone during the robbery, but he had shot a hole in the ceiling of the Californian Bank.  Alice knew that it was going to be so easy for the forensic team to match the bullet with the gun, that had his finger prints all over it.  Meanwhile she was long gone, and she was not in a hurry to be found or recognised.  So when the police officers from the Portland police department had asked her if she had seen anyone matching the description of Amberlee Robinson, she had shook her head and gone about her business.  The police had then concluded that the young teenage girl had indeed vanished, without a trace.

Lia closed the door behind her quietly.  She didn’t want Jay to know that she had gone out, and she intended to be back before morning broke.  She flew back to the woods, and landed purposely outside the little antique shop.  Abe and Dalia Jackson greeted her warmly, as she entered their place of business. The couple thought that the vampire looked very different now, because she was wearing modern day clothes.  However they did not fail to remember her exceptional beauty, which could know no disguise.  Lia wasn’t carrying any bags or sacks of any sort that they could see, so they immediately knew that this time she had nothing to sell. Then she told them the reason why she had come to see them.

“I need your help, I will pay you of course.”

“What is it dear, what can we do for you?” asked Dalia.

“Have you heard about the missing girl who goes by the name of Amberlee Robinson?”

Abe liked to keep his eye on what was going on in the outside world.  He had a small television set, from which he watched the news.  Sometimes when he observed it he thought that human beings were far more deadlier than some of his scariest supernatural customers.  He wondered why the vampire was so interested in the missing girl.

“Sure” he said, “we know all about that.  What’s your interest?”

“I want you to find her and when you do I want you to tell me where she is” was Lia’s answer.  There was a note of steel in her voice when she made her demand, that was not lost on the Jacksons.  Her determination to have what she wanted at the time when she wanted it, was still a big part of her natural make up.  The recent change of scenery and her love for the Jay Patterson, had done nothing to defuse that.  Dalia nodded and said that she would see what she could do.  She was sure that it wasn’t going to be a problem.

“I will pay you fifty thousand dollars” said Lia “I’ll give you twenty five thousand now, and you’ll get the rest of the money when you bring me the information okay?”

She removed the money from a purse with shoulder straps, that she had kept hidden under her coat.  Then she placed the payment onto the wooden counter and said:

“You have one week from now, don’t disappoint me.”

Lia then turned on her heel and left the shop.

The thinly veiled threat in her last words sent a shiver down both spines of Abe and Dalia.  Abe did not object however, to the large amount of money that she had given them, he just hoped that it was possible for them to earn it.

“What if the girl is dead?”  he said to his wife anxiously.  “We can’t find her if she’s dead.”

Dalia kissed him on his stubbly cheek and smiled.  Abe could be so naive sometimes.  She would have thought that he understood the true nature of their supernatural clients by now.  Dalia, on the other hand knew that if Amberlee Robinson was indeed deceased, the vampire would know it.  She was absolutely right in her assumption about Lia.  Her vampire status meant that she was part of the undead community, and this entitled her to special privileges in the non-physical world.  Since seeing the  missing posters in the supermarket, Lia had used this particular power.  She had temporarily closed down the active, thinking part of her mind.  By sitting down and doing this she could explore the deeper part of her psyche, and search amongst the spirits who had left their physical bodies.  This she had done on many occasions, and had ignored the spirits of all the people she saw, who had been killed by her and her family.  She had even seen Elena Hudson, frail and unhappy in death but this had not evoked any sympathy in the vampire because this was who she was.  However no matter how hard she tried, she could not locate the spirit of the girl who was causing so much anxiety for Jay.  Lia’s sharp instincts told her that Amberlee Robinson was alive and well, in a well chosen hiding place.  She also knew that Dalia Jackson would find her.

Lia returned to her house, and slipped back into bed next to Jay.  She could hear his soft breathing, and as she rubbed her finger along his cheek happiness welled up inside of her.  As she barred her teeth while smiling her vampire smile, she thought how he was hers now ,in his beautiful human form.  But soon he would belong to her forever.

Jay had started to sleep much more soundly now, without having the strange, reoccurring dreams about Elena.  The change had come when Lia had burst into his life, like a much needed breath of fresh air.  He found her quite mysterious in many ways, she was a far cry from Amberlee and some of the other girls from Claremont.  They would lay themselves bare at any given opportunity.  Lia had somehow put a magic spell on him, she had really got under his skin, in a way no one else ever had, or could.  Lia watched with pleasure as she saw a smile play on his lips, while he was still in a state of slumber.  She laid her head down beside him, and joined him in a dreamless sleep.

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Dalia had gone straight up to bed leaving Abe in the shop, when Lia had left.  She needed to get some sleep, so that she could go into town the next day, to make the appropriate inquires about the missing girl. Dalia had no doubts that she would get the job done, in the short time she had to do it.  She had an old school friend who she intended to go and see.  She was bound to know something.

“Hello Fay.”

“Dalia, Dalia Jackson? Well hello there stranger!” said Fay Carter brightly.  She was obviously pleased to see her.  “What brings you here?”

Fay was in her front garden, carrying out the trash to be collected.  She rushed up to Dalia and hugged tightly and with affection.

“I’ve just come into town to pick up some supplies” lied Dalia. “And I thought I’d come and see you.  How are you Fay?”

“Fine, fine so I take it you’ve got time for a cup of coffee?”

“Gee I thought you’d never ask!”

They both laughed, and went into Fay’s small but warm and welcoming house.  They chatted for a while over coffee and a few of Fay’s homemade cookies, and reminisced about the time when they were kids.

“Hey, are you still using the tarot cards and Ouija boards?  I remember when we were doing a séance at your house, and Beth got really scared and started crying.  Do you remember that?  Your Mom went crazy!”

Dalia did remember ,and with a secretive smile she told her friend that she had moved on from all of that.  She took the short silence that followed as an opportunity to mention the missing teenager.

“Hey I hear that a young girl has gone missing.  Isn’t that the second one in what, a few weeks?”

“Uh-uh that’s right” replied Fay solemnly, “and I know the family of the latest one, I work for them.”

Even as a little girl Fay had loved to clean and keep house.  When all her friends had said that she was crazy, she had just shrugged and said that cleaning made her feel relaxed.  Her mother thought that her actions were the result of her little brother death.  He’d had a heart defect, and had died when she was very young.

"It’s a terrible situation” Fay continued, shaking her head sadly.  “Amberlee wasn’t very happy at home, she was always fighting with her Mother.”

“Really? Oh that’s a shame, but what about her Father, didn’t she get on with him?”

“Oh yeah, I guess, it sure looked that way.  He was always trying to defend her when the fights started, but you know he wasn’t her real Father.”  Fay paused to take another sip of her coffee.  “I know that because the girl was really upset when her Mother made her change her surname to Robinson.  Yeah that’s right, her real father was called Clayton, Herb I think her mother called him, amongst other things.”

Dalia’s ears had pricked with interest.  This was the sort of information she was looking for.

“It sounds like they must have had a very acrimonious divorce” she surmised.  “So where is he now?”

“Oh he’s in Philly, that’s where they are originally from”

''Well maybe she's with him'' Dalia volunteered.

“No, the police have contacted him already, but he says that he hasn’t seen his daughter since he divorced her mother.” answered Fay and Dalia could tell that she believed that statement.  She said nothing else about the matter, but unlike Fay, Alexis Robinson and the whole of the Portland police department, she was not going to be so easily fooled.

With day one of the allotted seven over, Dalia returned home to her husband.  After making sure that their son was asleep, she sat chatting with Abe about the day’s events and what she had discovered, care of Fay Carter.  They both agreed that it was very possible that Alexis’ ex-husband was lying, when he said that he had not seen the daughter that he had lost, when his marriage had ended.   It was clear from the added information she had obtained from Fay, who had always been a notorious gossip, that the previous Mrs Alexis Clayton had preferred champagne to beer.  So therefore she had jumped from blue collar to white collar, leaving her husband alone with his severely battered pride.

Dalia had been very thorough after she had said goodbye to Fay.  She had called the airline, and inquired if there had been any flights to Philadelphia on the date of the evening that Amberlee Robinson vanished.  The customer service person had readily informed her that there had been no flights to Pennsylvania on that day at all, due to unforeseen circumstances.

“That means the girl must have stayed somewhere that night” said Abe stroking his chin.  “My guess is it was one of them airport motels.”

“But the police have already questioned everybody there” said Dalia, thinking that she may have hit a brick wall.  It was Abe’s turn now to smile at her naivety.  It surprised him though, his wife was usually so suspicious.

“Well you know as well as I do darlin’ that people lie for all sorts of reasons.”  Abe reached for his pipe and lit it.  He always smoked it before he opened his shop at nights.  “Dalia I think that the best thing for you to do now is to go to those old airport motels and ask some questions, because somebody knows somethin’ and you may find they are more willing to talk to you, because you’re not a cop.”

“Now that’s a very good point Abe” she said with renewed enthusiasm, and she rose from her chair and left the room.  A few minutes later she came back.  Abe could see that she was wearing her outdoor coat and shoes.

“Hey where do you think your goin’ woman?” said Abe sitting up in his chair.  “Shouldn’t you be goin’ to bed now?”

Dalia buttoned up her coat and put on her gloves.

“I’m going to speak to the people at those airport motels.  It’s best that I go now.  If someone knows something about the girl and is not saying, they must have something to hide, and someone like that probably prefers to work the night shift.”

Abe thought his wife was a genius.  That extra twenty five thousand dollars had his name on it, he could sense it.

“Okay, now you be careful darlin’ won’t you?

Dalia told him not to worry and assured him that she would.

‘If I were a runaway teenage girl, I would probably choose a small motel rather than one of the bigger hotels, that way I could keep a much lower profile’ she told herself, and she narrowed down her search in an instant.  She went to a couple of the more appealing looking motels, and spoke to the night receptionists at their desks.  One person said that he hadn’t been working that night, and the other one said that she had never set eyes on the girl.  There was something in the way they said it, that made Dalia believe them both.  Then she came to a place called the Shipway motel.  It looked very shabby compared to the others, and the ‘p’ in the motel sign was hanging off the wall.  Dalia went into the dark and musty smelling reception area.  Joyce Miller looked up from her newspaper and quickly stubbed out the cigarette that she had been smoking.

“Yeah,  d’yer wanna  room lady?” she asked feeling irritated by the woman’s intrusion.

“No thank you” replied Dalia politely  “I would like to ask you a few questions though.”

Joyce immediately looked shifty and a little scared.  She thought that she had been finally caught, that now she would have to pay the karmic debt, that had been hanging over her head for the last three years.  She thought about knocking the woman down and running, but where would she go, she had spent most of the robbery money, there wasn’t enough left to set her up in another part of the United States.  It was then to her surprise to see the woman in front of her reach into her purse, and place a large amount of dollar bills on her desk.

It was obvious to Dalia that this woman had the information that she needed.  She could tell by the frightened look in her eyes, and she could see that the woman was considering  making a run for it.  The money was a real sweetener because the rigidness, had left Joyce’s body as soon as she saw it.