The Origin of Dracula (4 page)

Lee looked up from the letter. “Do you want to come in?”

“Sure.”

I ushered Nate through the living room, toward Lee’s kitchen. He eyed the mess but didn’t say anything, probably because he was more interested in digging into his bag of chips, which he hadn’t opened yet. Chips were an even more special treat than eating in the car. I never bought them for the house.

Lee’s kitchen turned out to be a disaster area, too. The counters were littered with dirty frozen-dinner trays and Styrofoam takeout containers featuring dried-up, half-eaten meals. Dishes were piled high in the sink.

I led Nate over to the kitchen table, which was miraculously litter-free. The only thing on it was a small TV. Maybe this spot was Lee’s sanctuary. “Nate, can you wait for me in here? Or is it too gross?”

Nate sat at the table, placed what was left of his sandwich down—he’d wrapped the remaining third back up—and asked, “Is it okay if I don’t finish the sandwich, Dad?”

What he was really asking was whether it was okay to start on the chips before finishing his sandwich. He knew I liked him to first finish his proper food before starting in on his junk food.

“Okay,” I said. “And you’re fine in here?”

He ripped open the bag of chips. “Yeah.”

“I’ll be in the living room. Come get me if you need anything, okay, sweetheart?”

“How long you gonna be?”

“Ten minutes or so.”

He glanced at the kitchen counters. “I want to go soon.”

“We will. I promise.”

He pulled a chip from the bag, popped it in his mouth, crunched it, then took a longer look at the kitchen counters. His brow furrowed, betraying his anxiousness.

“Don’t worry. Everything is fine,” I said, wishing I could sound more convincing. “I’ll be right back.”

I entered the living room and found that Lee had cleared off the couch. The crumpled shirts and pants were now in a giant heap on one easy chair. Lee was seated on the other.

“Did you go to the police?” Lee said.

“No.” I took a seat on the couch.

“But you’re going to.”

“Of course. What choice do I have?”

Lee’s eyes shifted from me to the dead flowers on the mantelpiece.

I waited for him to say something more, and when he didn’t, I spoke up. “How long has it been?”

“Two months.” His eyes watered, but his face was stoic.

I wanted to say something helpful, or comforting, or uplifting, but I didn’t have anything that fit the bill. When Lucy died, nothing anyone said to me helped. Still, I tried to think of something to say to fill the silence. But it was Lee who spoke first.

“You’re thinking that this motherfucker—Dantès—killed my wife,” he said. “And yours.”

“… Yeah. But I don’t know that for sure.”

Lee looked down at the letter. “I’m going to hunt him down and kill him.”

My pulse quickened, and I sat up straighter. I was shocked, but not as much as you might think. This was the Lee I remembered from childhood.

“That’s not why I came here, Lee,” I said calmly, but my calmness rang false. “We have to—”

“Don’t tell me what we have to do. I loved Grace, and that bastard murdered her. I want him dead.”

Even though Lee had married and settled down to what looked like an ordinary middle-class suburban existence, he hadn’t changed. He was reactionary, impatient, and unreasonable. And most of all, he was angry—his natural state.

Of course, it was possible he
had
changed, and that his anger wasn’t the kind of anger I remembered. Maybe this was raw grief channeled into a sudden anger—an anger that gave him a way out of his troubles. Rather than sitting in his house, paralyzed, unable to bring his dead wife back to life—the same insurmountable problem I had—he’d just been granted the opportunity to fight back. To mete out revenge on the person who’d driven him to such despair.

“We have to go to the police,” I said.

“I told you what I’m doing.”

“But they can track Dantès down.”

“Bullshit. You’re not thinking straight.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Do you want me to play it out for you?”

I didn’t respond immediately, so he pressed on.

“You show them the letter, and then what?”

“Then we have to tell them what happened at Cold Falls,” I answered, knowing that wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“And when they check that out, what are they going to find?” He took a beat to let that sink in. “They’re not going to find a damn thing. Zippo.”

I shifted uncomfortably. We’d been lucky. As far as I knew—and I’d researched it a few times over the intervening years—there had never been any reports about what had gone down that night. That meant the police wouldn’t have any evidence from that night—nothing they could use to track Dantès down. Our good luck—that our heinous deed had never been recorded, except in our own lives—had suddenly soured into bad luck.

“They can investigate the present crimes, the murders of our wives,” I said. That was right—I
was
thinking straight. “They might find clues to who Dantès is right there.”

“What happened to your wife?”

“She was killed when her car was stolen.”

“And the police already investigated, right?”

I was silent. I had a good idea where he was going with this.

“Let me guess,” he said. “They don’t have diddly squat.”

“They have a theory, but now I can show them it’s wrong. The letter changes everything.”

“Come on, John. Give me a break. The letter doesn’t say this guy murdered your wife. It doesn’t say anything about her. And it damn well doesn’t say he murdered Grace.
We
know it’s him, but the police don’t. Sure, they’ll investigate the letter, but do you really think they’ll come up with anything? I’ll tell you this: Grace’s case is definitely closed. An accident. A hit-and-run driver. What about your wife’s case? It’s closed, right?”

My eyes shifted away from his, which gave him his answer.

He pressed on. “You really think you can convince them to reopen her case? To investigate? To look for new evidence?” He leaned forward in his chair. “And even if you could—and you can’t—how much time do you have? When is your son’s birthday?”

I knew my answer would make his case, but I volunteered it anyway. “In two days.”

“So you’re telling me that you’re going to convince the police to reopen the case and that they’re going to solve it—all in
two days
?”

No
, I thought. And I was sure of that. No matter how you sliced it, it would take months,
if
they were willing to reopen her case, which was a pretty big if. The only thing they’d investigate was the threat to Nate, assuming they believed the letter wasn’t a hoax. “What makes you think
you
can find the killer in two days?” I said.

“I didn’t say I could. What I said was that I’m going to hunt him down and kill him.”

I looked over at the chaos of clothes on the easy chair, then at the dirty dishes strewn across the coffee table.

Lee saw that and said, “Don’t worry. Now I have a reason to get my shit together.” He stood up, and my stomach churned as I suddenly had an inkling of his plan.

“You’re going to wait until he goes for Nate,” I said.

“What?” His eyes went wide—he was genuinely surprised. “Hell no. I’m going after him now.”

I believed him, but I also knew he’d be there on Sunday to take a shot at the bastard if he couldn’t track him down before then. And if he didn’t get him on Sunday, I had no doubt he’d spend the rest of his life tracking him down, if that’s what it took.

“Lee, I can’t do this your way,” I said. Even if Lee and I could actually find this man—and that was another big if, since I certainly didn’t have those kinds of skills and I doubted Lee did either—I couldn’t kill him in cold blood. It was morally wrong. I didn’t have the psychological makeup to commit murder. I wasn’t a vigilante, and there was no way I could put myself in that frame of mind. Vigilante justice was only meted out in books and movies. It was fiction, not fact. The only way to catch Dantès was to go to the police.

“I didn’t ask for your help,” Lee said.

“I’m going to the police.”

“Did you hear anything I said?”

“Of course I did.”

“Okay, go to the damn police, but leave me the hell out of it.”

“How can I do that?”

“That’s your fucking problem.” He motioned toward the kitchen. “And like I said, you’re not thinking straight. What about your son? You go to the police and they don’t do shit for who knows how long, how are you gonna protect him?”

“Send him into hiding.” From the moment I’d gotten the letter, I’d known I had to find a place where Nate would be safe—but as soon as I said it out loud, the absurdity of the idea became obvious, and Lee pounced.

“Send him into hiding? Like you’re some kind of covert ops expert?” Lee’s lips were curled in a smirk, another of his traits: a cocky arrogance.

I ignored it. “While the police track down Dantès, I was going to send Nate to his grandmother’s in Illinois.”

“It’s not going to work,” he said.

“Why?”

“Isn’t it goddamn obvious?”

It was if I wanted to admit it to myself. And since I didn’t, he did it for me.

“You’re not going to get away from this guy—you’re not gonna be able to ‘hide’ your son from him. Who knows how long he’s been tracking you? At least long enough to coordinate killing our wives and maybe a hell of a lot longer. He knows what he’s doing, and you don’t. There’s an old phrase for what’s going on, John: you can run, but you can’t hide.”

His smirk disappeared and his lips tightened as if he was thinking about the implication of that himself. He ran his hand through his messy hair and sat back down. In a softer tone, he said, “Do you remember that night?”

“Of course I do.”

“Do you
really
remember it? Everything?”

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he was referring to some of the strange surreal elements from that night. We had never talked about those. There’d been no reason to. Instead we had talked about covering up our transgression and going our separate ways. But now I wanted to remember
every
detail from that night. I needed to. One of those details might yield up a clue to Dantès’s identity.

Lee, Quincy, and I had talked our parents into letting us camp out by ourselves for one night in Cold Falls, a Virginia state park. This was a big deal because we were eighth-graders and we’d never gone on an overnight trip that wasn’t supervised by an adult.

We had picked Cold Falls because the state park held a special fascination for kids in Northern Virginia. The land had once been prime Native American land, and word was that it hadn’t changed since those days. Kids, including Lee, Quincy, and me, believed that this land was mysterious and magical. That somehow the Native Americans reached out from the past and glorified it still.

Lee’s parents didn’t care one way or another whether he spent the night there. They didn’t give a crap about him, and even back then I knew they were awful parents. They were rednecks, but that wasn’t what made them awful parents. Back then, the Virginia suburbs weren’t totally gentrified, so there were plenty of redneck parents, and just like any other parents, the majority of them were good parents doing the best they could for their kids. What made Lee’s parents awful was the same thing that made any parents awful: how they treated their kid.

They preferred doing anything else—especially heavy drinking—to taking care of Lee. So Lee ended up a rough-and-tumble kid, and he was well on his way to becoming a delinquent by the time I met him in middle school. His parents were always leaving him with his uncle while they headed off to get drunk or high with their friends. Lee would spend Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays with his parents, and then they’d drop him off at his Uncle Harry’s for the rest of the week and the weekend. So whether he was at Uncle Harry’s or at Cold Falls for this particular weekend didn’t matter to them.

Quincy’s parents were more like mine. They paid attention to what their son was doing. But Quincy was a forceful kid, and he convinced his parents to let him go with a straightforward argument:
It’s not like I’m going camping far from civilization. It’s not even far from home.
Cold Falls was twenty-five miles from D.C., mostly a place for picnics and day hikes. And though the park was called Cold Falls, there weren’t any falls, so that wasn’t a danger.

Though Quincy convinced his parents with that argument, it didn’t quite work when I used the same argument on
my
parents. They wouldn’t agree to let me go. So as that weekend approached, I resorted to temper tantrums, which was unusual for me because I was an easygoing kid. I yelled at my parents, over and over again,
You don’t think I’m brave enough!
You don’t think I can handle it! You don’t think I can take care of myself for one night!

After a couple of days of that, my dad started to see it my way: this camping trip was an important test of my independence. Letting me go would prove that he had faith and confidence in me. Keeping me home meant he thought I was a baby and a loser. So basically, I was able to guilt him into taking my side.

Then he tried to convince my mom that the trip would be good for me. After all, wasn’t Cold Falls the perfect place for such an important life lesson? The Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other youth groups often camped there for that exact reason. In addition to the trails and picnic areas, Cold Falls had two small campgrounds near the Potomac River. Those campgrounds offered a good introduction to the wilderness without the risk of being stranded in the middle of nowhere should something go wrong. Hospitals, police, et cetera, were all close by.

By Friday, my dad had talked my mom into it.

To this day, I wish he hadn’t.

We spent Saturday morning getting ready. I packed a change of clothes, a flashlight, and a radio. My dad went out and bought me a sleeping bag while my mom made sandwiches. In the early afternoon, my dad drove me out to Cold Falls.

When we pulled into the parking lot, Lee was already there, with a backpack, sleeping bag, and grocery bag by his side. He said he’d ended up taking local buses to the park and that he’d shopped for his own food. Even though his dad had promised to swing by Uncle Harry’s and pick him up, he’d never showed, and Uncle Harry didn’t have a car.