The Origin of Dracula (10 page)

Her movements were graceful and fluid, and she easily put distance between us. Though night had fallen, the going was easy for her, as if she could see in the dark. For us, it was like navigating an obstacle course.

“Let’s use that new trail,” I said. “We’ll get there faster.”

“No—we’ll lose her.”

Lee was determined to keep up with her, but she was so far ahead of us, moving with the speed of a winged creature, that we had no chance of catching of her.

Finally, he caved in. “Where’s the trail?” he said.

“This way.”

A minute later we were on the trail, hurrying toward the Potomac. We made it to the riverbank, but the trail hadn’t led us to the precipice. Instead we found ourselves on the rocky, muddy shore, downstream from the cliff of gray boulders. When I saw the precipice—the reality of it looming over me—it instantly resurrected my memory of it, and with that memory came a powerful vortex of fear and dread. While Lee scanned the shoreline in both directions searching for Otranto, I couldn’t pull my gaze away from the boulders, almost expecting the fictional castle of Otranto to appear and validate my fear.

“She’s not here,” Lee said, already hurrying back toward the trail. “Once she lost us, she must’ve doubled back.”

I didn’t believe that, but I followed him anyway, glad to get away from the precipice. When we hit the Gray Owl Trail, Lee started racing toward the park entrance. “We’ll catch up with her in the parking lot,” he said.

My bet was that this part of the game was over. We’d found what Dantès had wanted us to find: Otranto and the next breadcrumb. Now it was time to follow that breadcrumb—to face my fear.

When we got to the parking lot, there were still a few cars scattered about. Lee wanted to wait and see if any of them belonged to Otranto.

“She’s gone,” I said.

“She drove in. She has to drive out.”

“She did her job, and I guarantee you she’s not going to screw it up by letting us follow her out. Don’t you think Dantès thought of that?”

“I don’t know what the fucker thought.”

“You did before. You know he’s not going to make a stupid mistake.”

He didn’t respond. He turned his attention to the trailheads.

“I’ve got forty-eight hours,” I said, “maybe less, to save Nate, and I’m not spending them sitting in this parking lot.” I headed to my car.

Lee shook his head. “So if you don’t want to wait her out, what’s the next step?”

“Face my fear,” I said, and it was a fear I didn’t want to face. Wasting time following Otranto through the woods had been a way to avoid it. A way to avoid visiting another scene of the crime.

“We’re going to my wife’s office,” I said.

I drove out of Cold Falls and headed toward Lucy’s former office, a law firm in Tysons Corner.

“Do you think one of her cases was related to Dantès?” Lee said.

That thought had never crossed my mind. When Lee wasn’t angry, he was sharp. That was something I’d forgotten about him. It was one of the primary reasons we’d been friends when we were kids.

“It’s possible,” I said, but I wondered if he actually thought that was a possibility, considering he believed we were chasing down a man from twenty years ago who’d basically come back from the dead.

He took a couple seconds before asking his next question. “Do you want to tell me why you’re scared to go to her office?”

I took a couple seconds myself. “She was murdered there.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding as if he understood.

But he didn’t understand, so I explained. I figured he should know that I’d developed a psychological block about going to her office. A block Dantès obviously knew about. He knew my psychological state, which seemed like something he couldn’t possibly know. But he did.

“A month after she died,” I said, “her firm asked me if I wanted to come down and pick up her stuff. They hadn’t asked me to come down earlier because they’d wanted to give me time to mourn—they hadn’t touched anything in her office. I said yes and scheduled a time to go, but I never went.

“After about another month, they called again. That time, I got as far as loading up my car with empty boxes, but I never pulled away from my house. I told myself I didn’t want any more reminders of her around. I already had a house full of reminders… But the truth was that I didn’t want to pack up her office because I had this ridiculous idea that her office was waiting for her to return. And if I packed everything up, she couldn’t return. I mean, I’d already packed up her stuff in our house and stuck it in the basement—so she wasn’t coming back home.”

I was like one of those kids who didn’t understand that death was permanent. I had expected Lucy to walk right back into her office as if nothing had happened.

“Anyway, when her law firm realized I wasn’t ever going to show up, they packed up her stuff and sent it to me. I carried those boxes down to the basement and stacked them up next to the rest of her stuff.”

I stared ahead into the traffic, which had thinned out, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Lee glance at me. He didn’t say anything, as if he was waiting to see if I’d finished my tale of woe.

“You probably went through the same thing,” I said.

“Yeah, and I’m still going through it.”

Me too
, I thought. But his loss was recent. I had no excuse. I should’ve stabilized by now, instead of turning into a distant dad who couldn’t build a new life for his son or himself.

“If that bitch—Otranto or whatever her real name is—had told me to face my fear,” Lee said, “I wouldn’t know where the fuck to begin.”

I’d never thought of Lee as a person who’d open up about his feelings, but he’d just done it. Only for a second though. “Who do you think Otranto is in relation to Dantès?” he said.

Good—at least one of us was sticking to facts. I hadn’t told Lee where the name Otranto had come from because that would’ve put us in the realm of fiction. On the other hand, I wondered if he should know, because it once again confirmed just how much Dantès knew about us. Not only did our enemy know intimate details about our lives, as Otranto’s diatribe had proven, he knew about my Achilles’ heel, novel therapy, and he was exploiting it.

“Maybe
she’s
Dantès,” I said.

He shook his head. “You’re not getting who he is, are you?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to argue with him.

“It’s
him
,” he said, raising his voice, arguing with me anyway. “And the sooner you get that, the faster we find the bastard.” He took a breath, then continued in a calmer tone. “She’s too young to be his sister, but she could be his daughter. Or she could be a hired gun. Not related to Dantès at all.”

I tried to come up with an answer based on the source of her name, but then told myself to stop—no novel therapy—and that led to another question.

“Why are we doing what they want?” I said, hoping to escape the world of fiction.

“You mean following their breadcrumbs?”

“Yeah. We’re playing his game, but isn’t it going to take a lot more than that to have a chance at beating him?”

“It’s all we got,” Lee said. “That’s why I went along with your lead back at the house. My uncle was in the army, and he said the army taught him a bunch of ways to fight the enemy. But he always remembered one tactic because it came in handy in his own life—especially when things are going against you. He said, ‘Play the cards you’re dealt.’ If you don’t have a good strategy to fight the enemy, you go with what you got. But you don’t just do nothing. If you got crap, you use crap. If you got bad targets or bad leads, you use ’em. Sooner or later, the tide will turn.” He looked over at me. “We keep going, and we’re gonna find the right trail.”

“I need the right trail by Sunday,” I said. “What do you think your uncle would say about that?”

“He’d have some story to tell you.”

“What?”

“My uncle made his points by telling stories.”

I supposed that could’ve been the end of that conversation, since Lee didn’t go on. But he’d hit too close to home for me to not follow up. His uncle made his points by telling stories, and though stories didn’t necessarily mean novels, it was damn close. It was like Dantès was forcing my hand—so I followed this breadcrumb.

I asked Lee about his uncle, wondering if there was a clue there, and Lee obliged my curiosity.

“I spent a lot of time at his house,” he said. “My parents would drop me off when they wanted to go out drinking. Uncle Harry was in a wheelchair, so it was a two-fer: they’d get rid of me, and I’d take care of Harry so my dad wouldn’t have to. He was supposed to take care of him, but he always snaked out of it. He got my mom to do it, or one of Harry’s neighbors, or me—whoever he could rope in.”

“Harry is your dad’s brother?”

“Yeah, but much older. When he and my dad were kids, my dad worshipped him. Absolutely thought he was the greatest. Until Harry got his legs blown off. When Harry came home from Walter Reed, a cripple in a wheelchair, my dad didn’t like him so much anymore. And my dad was the one who had to take care of him. Their parents were in bad shape and were barely able to get around themselves. Problem was, my dad couldn’t even stand the sight of him anymore. Harry went from hero to zero for my dad. So when I was old enough, my dad started taking me over to Uncle Harry’s place and showing me how to wash him and change him and do all sorts of shit for the guy. I was the answer to my dad’s prayers. I’d take care of Harry.”

“How old were you?”

“Six.”

Wow.
That was an eye-opener—rough-and-tumble six-year-old Lee with this huge responsibility. “You never said anything to us back then.”

“Why should I’ve?”

“No reason, I guess.”

After a couple of minutes without Lee volunteering any more information, and the lights of Tysons Corner—home to Lucy’s office—almost upon us, I piped up again. “Do you remember any of your uncle’s stories?”

“Yeah—some of them. But the guy had thousands of them. War stories, civilian stories, stories about himself, stories he’d heard.” Lee turned away and stared out the side window. “You know, taking care of him was hard. Especially those first years when I was a little kid. But I liked the stories. He used to say that stories tell you all you need to know.”

He stopped talking again, but this time I didn’t press him—I guess I thought he’d opened up more than he’d wanted to. I sure wanted him to go on; I sensed he was leading us down the right path—that he’d mentioned stories for a reason—and my instinct would turn out to be right. But the time had come to face my fear.

The building where Lucy had worked was almost completely dark. The only light came from the east end, from the vestibules where the elevators were located. I drove around to the back of the building and parked in the lot. I was within yards of the spot where Lucy had breathed her last breath and thought her last thought, which must’ve been about leaving Nate alone, forever, abandoned without the love of his mom.

I looked up to the floor where Brown & Butler, Lucy’s old firm, was located. Not one light burned there tonight. Apparently this was one of the rare nights when no one was working late.

Lee climbed out of the car and started toward the building, but I stayed put. When he saw I wasn’t going anywhere, he walked back.

I swung my car door open, but still didn’t make a move to get out.

“If you want, I’ll snoop around and see what’s up,” Lee said.

That’s exactly what I wanted, but I got out of the car, ready to face my fear. I had to—if I didn’t, it meant I was already conceding the game, and Nate’s life. I should’ve come here months ago. I should’ve weathered the storm of emotions the visit would have unleashed. I should’ve cleaned out Lucy’s office. I should’ve been a better father to Nate. Instead I had sought shelter from the storm. A shelter I never found.

We stepped up to the glass doors at the back of the building. They didn’t slide open. “It’s locked for the night,” I said. Through the doors, I saw the dark hallway that ran to the lighted lobby out front. “Let’s see if the security guard is still on duty.”

I headed to the path that ran along the south side of the building.

But Lee glanced to the back of the parking lot like he’d spotted something, so I took a look, too. Two parallel rows of privacy hedges separated the lot from the back yards of the houses on the other side. A bulky man wearing a grimy knit cap was pushing his way through a gap in the row that bordered the lot. When he stepped onto the blacktop, I saw that he was bearded—a scraggly nest of steel wool—wild-eyed, wobbly, and covered in layers of ragged and dirty clothes.

Lee and I continued around the southern corner of the building without commenting on him. Over the last two decades, the homeless had become as big a part of the Northern Virginia landscape as the relentless sprawl of homes, shopping malls, and business parks. Nate was terribly frightened of the homeless. When we’d pass a homeless man or woman on the sidewalk, he’d avert his eyes and circle as far around them as the width of the sidewalk would allow. And if he was holding my hand, he’d squeeze it more tightly.

Lucy had patiently explained to him who the homeless were, hoping to ease his terror. I remembered her compassionate descriptions. They were pour souls down on their luck, or they suffered from mental illness, which she explained to him as the inability to distinguish between make-believe and reality, or they were addicts, which she said was another illness, one where a person couldn’t stop doing things that made them sick.

But I never said a word about the homeless to Nate. Because, in a way, I felt the same way he did. Not that I was afraid of the homeless—but I was afraid of what they represented: the reality that life could easily descend into despair, as mine had.

We rounded the front of the building and headed to the lobby. Through the large glass doors, I spotted a heavyset security guard, late thirties, with thinning, sandy hair, sitting behind a marble counter. He must’ve been engrossed in something because he didn’t look up until Lee and I had been standing there for a few seconds.