The Origin of Dracula (9 page)

Jenna didn’t hesitate with a solution. “Don’t worry about it. If you can’t make it back in time, I’ll be glad to run the party. Just tell me what needs to be done.” Her gracious offer was given with cheer.

I was so thankful that I almost said yes before remembering the reason Nate was staying with her. He couldn’t go back to the house for the party on Sunday—he’d be a sitting target for Dantès.

“Thank you,” I said, “but I can’t impose on you like that. I’m going to try like hell to make it back in time.” And if there was any chance of that happening, I needed to get on the road. It was time to excuse myself and say goodbye to Nate.

But just then, Jenna’s cheer dimmed. “How are you doing, John?” she said.

“Okay.” I didn’t want to open up about Lucy, so I just told her the only truth that mattered. “I miss her.” Even with that simple statement, I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up in my eyes.

She hugged me. “I’m so sorry.”

I accepted her embrace for a few seconds, but had to pull away for fear of breaking down.

She had tears in her eyes, too. “Every week since the funeral,” she said, her voice cracking, “I’d tell myself to call you, to see if you needed to talk, but I never did. I guess I didn’t know you well enough and thought I’d be intruding.”

“Don’t worry. I wasn’t much into talking.” And I still wasn’t. I wanted to change the subject. “Besides, helping me out with Nate means a lot more to me.”

“I’m glad I can help. But if you ever need to talk, please call me. I’m not a professional counselor, but nurses make pretty good listeners.”

She was a kind soul. No one—not my colleagues at work, nor my friends, nor my neighbors—had asked me how I was doing after the first couple of months. It was like everyone assumed that after the initial trauma, you stepped right back into your normal life as if nothing had happened. At that moment, I understood more than ever why Jenna was a good nurse. Not only had she thought to ask how I was doing, but the little wrinkles of concern at the corners of her teary eyes revealed she also cared deeply.

I felt compelled to tell her what was going on—that it had nothing to do with my grief, overwhelming as it was, and everything to do with a sin from my childhood, which, at least according to Lee, had literally risen from the grave.

But instead I said, “It’s all fine,” and covered up this lie with a feeble grin. Then I added, “I should hit the road.”

I joined up with Nate in the living room and knelt down in front of him. “So I’m taking off now. You set?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’ll come back before the party?”

“That’s right. Give me a big hug.”

He did, and I hugged him back, tightly, and tried to push away the thought that this might be the last time I’d ever see him. “I love you, honey.”

“I love you, too,” he said, then smiled. “Tell me what the surprise is.”

“Sweetie, there is no surprise. It’s just work, really.” I stood up. “I want you to listen to Jenna and do what she says. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be back soon.” I had to kneel down and hug him again. When I pulled away, I took a couple of seconds to take him in. He was smiling, and his blue eyes were sparkling with anticipation—about the surprise.

In the car, I sent out an email canceling the party. There was no way this was going to be wrapped up by Sunday. I also called the magician and canceled, apologizing for the late notice and offering to pay him for the gig regardless. He refused at first, but I insisted until he accepted.

When I pulled up to Lee’s house, he stepped outside, ready to go. He’d shaved, combed his hair, and changed into a denim shirt and dark jeans. Whatever battle lay ahead, he wasn’t going to march into it looking defeated.

As he climbed into my car, I also noticed that his skin, which had been pasty and lifeless, had gained a little pinkness, as if this mission had revived him. I should’ve guessed that kindling his anger would be a boon to his well-being.

“I never thought I’d be going back to Cold Falls,” he said.

“That makes two of us. Did you find out anything more about Quincy?”

“Yeah—it happened on Roanoke Island. He was vacationing with a girlfriend, and the couple of articles I dug up said that he went out for an early morning swim and disappeared.”

“I thought you said he drowned.”

“That’s what they think happened, but they didn’t find the body.”

“So he disappeared? From Roanoke Island?” I glanced at Lee to see if he’d make the same connection I had.

“If you’re getting at something, just spill it,” he said.

“The Roanoke colony—never heard of it?”

“No.”

He would have if he’d been a halfway decent student. “It was the first English colony in the New World. And to make a long story short, three years after it was set up, the entire colony—every man, woman, and child—disappeared without trace. It’s called ‘The Lost Colony,’ and there are all sorts of theories about what happened.”

“The fact that everyone disappeared… you’re saying that’s the connection?”

“Could be. Quincy disappears without a trace from a place infamous for that, and we’re searching for a body that disappeared.”

“And how does that help us?”

I glanced at Lee again. His hollow eyes, like his formerly pasty skin, had also joined the world of the living. They had the weighty look of thought behind them now. Lee was alert.

“I have no idea,” I said. “At least, not yet. But I have a feeling it’s all going to add up.”

And it would. But we’d have to follow a long and winding road of clues to find out how.

It was Friday evening, and rush hour traffic was terrible. It took us more than an hour and a half to get to Cold Falls. As soon as I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed the changes. The parking lot had been expanded, and the trees around it had been cut down to make room. Also, land had been cleared to make room for three sprawling picnic areas equipped with tables, barbecue pits, and trashcans. But the picnic areas and the parking lot were practically empty; the park was a daytime attraction.

I parked near a large, rectangular park map—a map made of wood and meticulously painted and carved, a work of art compared to the paper map under glass from the past. Painted yellow lines represented the trails; swirls of green and brown, in relief, represented the forest; and orange circles represented the campsites. The names of the trails and campsites hadn’t changed—the Gray Owl Trail still led to the Clear River campsite—though judging from the map, it appeared that the trails no longer stretched as far into the forest as they once had. I took that to mean that huge swaths of trees had been razed in the far reaches of this wilderness, just as they had been razed for the picnic areas and parking lot.

We started hiking to the campsite, and as we got closer, I noticed another change: the trail had been widened to allow for more pedestrian traffic. And when we made it to Clear River, I saw that it, too, had undergone a transformation. There were many more campsites, and they were grouped in clusters, as opposed to many years ago when each individual campsite had been isolated. Again, trees had been cut down for the expansion. There was also now a trail from the Clear River campsites to the Potomac.

Our first order of duty was to locate the campsite where we had spent that ill-fated night. Very few campsites were being used, and I suspected that since Cold Falls was now in the heart of Virginia’s expansive suburbs, rather than on the edge, the campsites were only in demand during the summer, when they provided a cheap place to stay while visiting D.C.

We headed over to the cluster closest to the Potomac, the most likely location of our campsite from that night. There were now half a dozen campsites there.

“Any idea which was ours?” I asked.

“Hard to tell.” Lee was staring at the one closest to us. “We’re going to have to check each of them out.”

And that’s what we did. We walked through each campsite—none were occupied—until we got to the smallest one. The one closest to the river.

“This is it,” Lee said immediately.

One side of the campsite was connected to the other campsites by a dirt footpath, but the other three sides were surrounded by untamed woods, woods that made my blood run cold. Though other parts of Cold Falls had changed, this part looked exactly the same.

I didn’t want to be here.

Lee began walking the perimeter of the site, checking it out more closely. “What do we do now?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Then tell me again why you wanted to come here?”

He was already agitated, so reminding him that we were here because of a Faulkner quote wasn’t going to help. He’d blow a gasket if I told him I’d resorted to a failed strategy to deal with this crisis—that even though novel therapy had failed me after Lucy’s death, I had latched on to a Faulkner quote as my lifeline.

Just then, the crackling underbrush caught my attention. Soft footsteps, measured in even strides, were approaching us from the woods, not the trail. The footsteps sounded like those of a lithe animal.

Both Lee and I turned. A beautiful woman was gliding through the woods toward us. Her stride was graceful and confident, and her beauty was striking: long and lush blond hair, radiant ivory sky with a touch of rose, and emerald eyes so vibrant I was mesmerized. She stepped into our campsite.

Neither Lee nor I said anything, and from the knowing smile that flickered across her lips, it was obvious that she knew how her beauty affected those who saw her for the first time. She was wearing slim-fitting blue jeans and a thin black T-shirt, both of which showed off her figure. Her thong sandals, which featured fiery red toenails, were a clue that she wasn’t a hiker.

“You’re clever,” she said, looking at me. “You followed the breadcrumbs like—”

Without warning Lee reached into his jacket and whipped out a gun. I was stunned, though I shouldn’t have been. Not only should I have suspected that he owned a gun, I should have also suspected that he’d bring it with him and would use it the first chance he got.

The woman wasn’t stunned in the least. She flicked her blond hair away from her face and shot him a sneer. “Your anger isn’t going to help. But it never does, does it?”

“It’ll help me end your goddamn life.” Lee trained the gun on her.

“You shoot me, and you’ll never find out who murdered the only good thing in your life.”

“Fuck you.” Lee started to squeeze the trigger.

“No!” I lunged at him. “We need her!” She was my only lead to Dantès’s identity—the only way to save Nate.

“That’s right,” she said calmly, then stepped up to Lee. “Listen to John. After all, isn’t he the one who got you this far? Isn’t he the one who followed the breadcrumbs? Isn’t he the one who discovered Grace was murdered?”

I couldn’t tell if Lee was convinced, but for the moment he wasn’t pulling the trigger.

The woman turned from him to me. Even with the gun trained on her, she was in control. Her captivating green eyes were pools of self-assurance.

“Who are you?” I said.

“Otranto.”

“That’s not a name,” Lee said.

“Oh, I think it is,” she said to me, not him. “What do you think, John? Does it sound like a name to you?”

It did. It was another clue, another breadcrumb.
The Castle of Otranto
was a novel from the 1700s, the first Gothic horror novel and the first modern work of supernatural fiction. She’d pulled her name from its title, and by using that name had immediately tied tonight to my first night here so many years ago. She’d tied herself to my unsettling apparition, the castle that had appeared on the precipice in the glow of the crescent moon.

“Are you Dantès?” I said.

“Is that what you think?”

Absolutely not.
She was the messenger.
“Tell me why he’s playing this game.”

She nodded toward Lee. “
He
chose the game.”

Lee still had his gun trained on her, but the urge to shoot her had passed. “I didn’t choose anything. You’re a goddamn nut job.”

“Hide and seek,” I said. Again she’d gone back to that night. We were still playing the game. And this time I was “it.” I had to find where Dantès was hiding.

She looked pleased with my deduction. “And the stakes are life and death. The only kind of game worth playing.”

Her knowing smile pranced over her lips again. She turned back to Lee and faced his gun with no fear. “Can you stay the course long enough to play the game? The guy who’s never held a job for more than two years? The guy who got a fresh start, a lucky break, when Duncan, his buddy, asked him to help run a new burger place? You did well for a little while, the place did great, and how did you repay Duncan? By skimming some of the profit off the top—”

“You don’t know shit,” Lee said, but the slight tremor in his voice said she did.

“I don’t know shit, huh? Then how about this? When Duncan fired you, you took it like a coward—you set fire to his place. But you got away with it. And then you got lucky again. Grace came along, and you promised you’d shape up. But look at you now. A loser with a gun in his hand. You can’t stay the course. You can’t even keep your promise to Grace, and that promise is the only thing you have left.”

Lee’s grip on his gun loosened, his resolve weakening.

Otranto turned back to me. “Good luck,” she said, and she started toward the forest.

“Wait!” I was desperate for a real clue. “Why did Dantès send you here?”

“To tell you to face your fear.”

“Is that the next breadcrumb?”

“Yes.”

“It’s too obscure.” And it was.

She glanced back. “You came back to the scene of the crime tonight. Isn’t there another scene of the crime?” And with that, she retreated farther into the wild, veiled by the trees as if she were an animal who had blended naturally into its habitat.

“I’m going after her,” Lee said.

Without having to think about it, I knew that following her was futile. But logic dictated otherwise. She was our link to Dantès, so when Lee started after her, I joined him.

“She’s headed toward the Potomac,” he said.