The Origin of Dracula (14 page)

Lee stepped up to the booth, and Macon let out an unfriendly, “Speak of the devil.”

Again, hell.

“Great to see you, too,” Lee said, without disguising his sarcasm. To the other man in the booth, he said, “Can you give us some space?”

The man looked to Macon for guidance. Macon waved his hand, shooing the man away. “Go on, give us a minute here.”

Displeased, the man snorted, grabbed his bottle of Bud, and slid out of the booth. Lee slid into the vacated spot, scooted down, then motioned for me to take a seat next to him.

I didn’t hesitate. Like him, I didn’t think this was a chance meeting. This was part of Dantès’s game. Whatever we’d learned from Dan T. was either bonus material or gobbledygook.

“Why’s he part of this reunion?” Macon said, nodding in my direction.

“Whatever you got to say, he needs to hear.” Lee wasn’t going to take any crap from his dad.

“I don’t got nothin’ to say.” The old man took a swig of his beer.

“Why are you here?” Lee was getting right to the point. “And don’t tell me it’s for drinking. I got that part.”

“I don’t gotta give you answers.”

“If you want me to leave, you do.”

Macon glanced around the Firegrill as if
he
was the one considering leaving.

“Don’t even think about running away,” Lee said. “You’ve done enough of that to last ten lifetimes.” He wasn’t pulling any punches. “You’re not going anywhere till you give me some answers. Now, why are you here?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Maybe something. Maybe nothing. Just spit it out and I’ll tell you.”

Macon put his bottle of Bud down on the table. “I got a goddamn gift certificate. Free drinks and food—”

“Free drinks are always a good motivator for you.”

“Yeah, but if I’d known they’d come with meetin’ your good-for-nothin’ family, I woulda stayed away from this shithole.”

They were both brutal.

Lee leaned back from that blow and took in a breath. Macon did the same. Time out.

I shifted uncomfortably and started to think that this was going to be a dead end, too.

“You still living on Route 50?” Lee asked, softening a bit.

“Nah—I got a mansion in McLean now.” Macon scoffed, picked up his bottle, and took another sip. “Yeah, I’m still there.”

“What about Mom? Do you know where she is?”

“The no-good bitch is long gone.”

Lee suddenly slapped the beer bottle from his dad’s hand—it smacked hard into the old man’s chest, splattering beer all over his shirt, then fell into his lap. He scrambled to grab the bottle, snatched it up, and put it back on the table.

“You goddamn punk,” he said, scooping up napkins. He started mopping his shirt and pants. “Since when do you give a crap about your mom?”

“You screwed up her life just like you screwed up mine.”

“When are you gonna learn? It’s the fucking Bellington curse.”

“That bullshit again? You’re blaming mumbo jumbo for your shitty life—but hey, I guess that’s your style, right? Blame someone else.”

“You don’t gotta believe me, but the proof’s in the pudding. How’s things been going for
you,
huh? Everything hunky-dory? Or did the shit hit the fan?”

Lee glanced at me. I saw unease flicker across his face and thought,
Score one for the old man
. And Macon knew he’d scored, so he rampaged on. “The Bellington curse caught up with you, huh? Outta nowhere, it smacked you right down, didn’t it?”

“We’re done here,” Lee said, then gestured for me to slide out of the booth.

I complied and stood up, but wondered if this encounter had ended too early. Had it generated our next lead, or was I going to have to make something out of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?

We snaked through the crowd and out onto the sidewalk. Cool, fresh air greeted us, and I was glad I’d emerged from the hot and crowded swamp that was Dan T.’s Firegrill. We headed toward the car, but Lee’s stride dragged, as if any confidence he’d had was gone. He was running his hand through his hair and staring down at the ground. The encounter with his dad had left him shaken.

“Where to?” he said.

“We have to figure out where the Allegory of the Cave is supposed to lead us,” I said, hoping the cool night air would bring with it some clarity.

“I don’t see how that’s gonna help us track down a killer.” Lee no longer sounded sure of himself. “I say we go back to basics: search the web for a lead about a missing man from that night. When was the last time you did that?”

“A hell of long time ago—maybe fifteen years.”

“Me too. Figured there was no need to connect myself to that. But who knows what’s online now? There might be an article or some police report from back then about a missing man.”

We decided to drive back to Lee’s place and scour the web, but I told myself that I would spend the drive there trying to figure out if there was a breadcrumb to be had from Plato. If I understood one thing, it was that Dantès’s game involved more than online research.

First I texted Jenna to see if Nate was okay. Though I tried my best to hide my worry from her, she must have picked up on it, because she texted me back immediately with details. She said she’d read Nate a story that she’d loved as a kid,
Big Mack and the Mountaintop
, and that Nate had loved it, too, and now he was sound asleep.

On the road, I racked my brain trying to connect the allegory to something we could follow up on—looking to novel therapy again, my default mode. But I couldn’t come up with anything. The only thing that resonated was that fact and fiction were a giant shake and bake.

“What about your dad?” I said. “Are you sure he didn’t give us something to go on?”

“He’s never given me anything to go on.”

“There’s always a first time.”

“The guy’s a loser. And I know what you’re thinking: that I was just like him until I met Grace. But that’s not right. I have one thing on my dad: he always blames other people for his problems. And if he can’t pin the blame on someone alive, he blames it on a three-hundred-year-old dead relative. You won’t catch me doing that. I never blamed my shitty life on anyone but myself.”

He was baring his heart, opening up again, and I should’ve responded to it, but his mention of a three-hundred-year-old relative triggered the quote
The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past,
and I responded to that instead.

“What do you mean, a three-hundred-year-old relative?” I said.

“It’s just bullshit. His excuse.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why? You think that’s going to get us somewhere? Believe me. My dad isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

He wasn’t going to dig into this unless I pushed. “What’s the Bellington curse?”

“I told you: an excuse.”

“I got that part. But what does it have to do with your relative from three hundred years ago?”

“It’s a dead end. Drop it.”

I was on the GW Parkway, headed back to Arlington. “If it gives me any chance of saving Nate, it’s not a dead end.”

“It’s a waste of time.”

“Dantès
wanted
us at that bar. I have no idea how he got a gift certificate into your dad’s hand and got him there tonight, and I have no idea how he could be so sure we’d end up there too, but as soon as you saw your dad, you knew that was Dantès’s plan.”

“I was wrong—it was a coincidence.”

“Like novel therapy? Dantès made breadcrumbs from what I hate. Well, it looks like he made breadcrumbs from the thing
you
hate, too.”

Lee cocked his head, then looked out to his right, at the Potomac. He stared at the dark oasis. I knew he was about to cave in. My logic wasn’t the greatest, but it was close enough.

“You know how you said the leads were about me?” I said. “Guess what? This one’s about you.”

He continued to stare at the river. Or maybe he was staring at he monuments of American history on the other side. They were lit up as if to say the past isn’t dead—you can bring it back to life by shining a spotlight on it and making it blaze brightly in the night.

After another minute or so, Lee opened up. “… My family goes way back,” he said. “All the way back to the Plymouth Colony. Our ancestors came over here on the Mayflower. You wouldn’t know it to look at us, right? We never got any special privileges as far I can tell. Hell, I don’t really know if
any
Mayflower descendants did, but a lot of them hit it big. You got John Quincy Adams, FDR, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Alan Shepard, and too many rich businessmen to even count—like Eastman, the film guy.

“But my family… We’re descended from John Bellington. Mayflower passenger, original colonist, but what he’s known for…” Lee glanced at me, then looked back at the Potomac. “He’s the first murderer in American history.”

Lee took a breath, and I said, “Never heard of him.”

“Why would you? He’s a footnote. An answer to a
Jeopardy!
question. John Bellington was hanged for killing someone who trespassed on his property—at least, that was the charge. The case was murky. Uncle Harry told me that some historians think Bellington was provoked into shooting the trespasser, or maybe even framed. On the other hand, good ol’ John Bellington already had a track record. It turns out he’d been a troublemaker from the get-go. On the Mayflower, he led a mutiny that failed.”

“A mutiny? He must’ve been pretty pissed off about something.”

“He was. The way Harry tells it, the Mayflower passengers were divided into two groups: the Puritans and the Strangers. The Puritans were coming over to start a new religion. The Strangers were basically everyone else: families looking for a new start, servants of rich passengers, workers on the ship, Catholics, et cetera. Anyway, Bellington was one of the Strangers. A guy looking for a new start. But the trip was nasty. He suffered, and so did his family. People were dying left and right. Harry said historians think that that’s why some of the passengers mutinied. But other historians had a different theory. And Harry liked one of those theories: the Puritans were pricks and they bossed the Strangers around, until the Strangers got fed up.”

“Sounds like Harry did his homework.”

“It made for a damn good story—and the man loved stories.”

“So the mutiny was a bust?”

“Yeah, but that didn’t stop Bellington when he got to Plymouth Rock. He didn’t let up—he was always getting into trouble. A few years after the colony got going, the leaders accused him of being part of a group that wanted to overthrow them. But Bellington somehow talked them out of arresting him.”

I was listening for any connection between Lee’s story and Dantès, but even though my instinct was telling me that this was the right trail, following it in search of a clue was beginning to feel as futile as following the Allegory of the Cave trail.

“After that,” Lee said, “Bellington kept out of trouble. Until he shot that trespasser. For that, he was tried and hanged. But according to Uncle Harry’s version of American history, Bellington was railroaded—because the other settlers didn’t like him.”

I turned off the GW Parkway and glanced at the speedometer. I was speeding and realized this was because I was impatient—so I got to the central question: “What exactly is the ‘Bellington curse’?”

“It turns out that a lot of Bellington’s descendants ended up being troublemakers. Swindlers, con men, and outright criminals. So the Bellingtons started to believe that our entire line was cursed.”

“But—”

“Don’t say it. I’ll say it for you: being a troublemaker and having bad shit happen to you are two different things.”

“Exactly.”

“Evolution,” he said and shot me a grin.

“What?”

“The curse. It evolved. It went from Bellingtons doing bad things, to bad things happening to the Bellingtons. And then you start to look for examples. Like your baby girl gets hit by a car—that’s what happened to my grandma’s first kid. Or you get married and two days later your wife runs off with your best friend—that’s what happened to one of my great-great-uncles, Jeremiah. Or you drown in a lake even though you’re a damn good swimmer—that’s what happened to one of my great-aunts. Or just nothing at all goes your way at all, like my dad.” Lee let out a little chuckle. “But the most famous example is James Garfield.”

“The U.S. president?”

“Yeah. He was a direct descendant of John Bellington.”

“And he was assassinated.”

“You got it—the Bellington curse.”

“But he was president. That’s not bad luck.”

“That’s how Uncle Harry sees it, too. And you know what? I’ve always liked that about Harry. He never blamed his legs getting blown off on the curse. He says bad shit happens to everyone.”

I was in Harry’s camp; I didn’t believe in curses either. But as I pulled off the GW Parkway and onto Lee Highway, I could identify with Lee’s dad. Nothing was going our way. For one thing, a psychopath—who knew way more about us than was possible—had murdered both our wives. But the idea that this was the result of a curse was still too far-fetched for me.

On the other hand, it was no more far-fetched than everything else that was happening. And I should’ve made a connection based on that. But I wasn’t ready yet. I hadn’t traveled far enough yet. My view of the world was still limited, just like the prisoners in Plato’s cave.

Without any other leads to go on, the idea of scouring the web was looking better and better, so I proposed going to my place instead of Lee’s. On my computer, I already had open access to research sites provided to librarians and not available to the general public. At Lee’s place, I’d have to find those sites and remember my dozens of passwords.

Lee agreed, so I headed for home. Still, I didn’t give up trying to tease out a lead from Lee’s story. It’s just that I was coming up with zilch.

As I rounded the corner onto my street, I saw flashing red lights pulsing across lawns and houses. Down the block, fire trucks and police cruisers were clumped together in front of one house.

My
house. Ablaze in flames.

Dantès had struck again.

I slowed down and gaped at the sight. It didn’t take but another few seconds for Lee to figure why I was in shock. “I’m sorry…” he said.