The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (32 page)

Joachim called once to see how I was doing and to tell me he had no idea who’d attacked me, but it was awkward and weird and he didn’t suggest hanging out, and neither did I. I understood—I’d become one of
them
. A wendigo. I was still Bonnie, sure, but I was also something else, and he couldn’t see me the same way anymore. Oh well. You can’t become immortal without breaking a few hearts. (Willy Noir didn’t drop by to play Xbox with Dad anymore, either, but either Dad wasn’t too broken up about it or he was just being manly and not showing it.)

Ah, but I know what you’re wondering: What about Principal Levitt, my would-be murderer? How did
he
take the return of my vampire family and my own obvious-to-him transformation? I like to think he sat up every night with a shotgun in his lap waiting for me to come murder him. As if I’d be so
direct
. He didn’t come to school, that’s for sure—health problems, everyone said, and the assistant principal took over as acting principal—but he didn’t leave town. He should have. Not that leaving town would have saved him, but at least he would have had the pleasure of annoying me slightly before getting what he deserved.

I began laying the groundwork for my plan with lots of long sighs in Edwin’s presence. “What’s wrong, darling?” he finally asked.

“It’s Rosemarie,” I said. “There’s still all this tension between us. She’s my family now, and I just want the two of us to be friends—or, at least, not enemies.”

Edwin was quiet for a while, then said, “Perhaps Hermet and I could sit down with you and Rosemarie—”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Forcing her to play nice, to pretend? It wouldn’t mean anything, and would just make her resent me more. No, I’ll just have to wait, and be nice, and hope she realizes I’m not so bad, really. If we talk when other people are watching, she’ll just lie to make you and her husband happy. I want to talk to her
honestly
—promise me, Edwin, that if she ever does come to talk to me, you won’t watch through her eyes?”

“I respect your privacy,” he said, and I believed him, even if he did have a history of being a vampiric Peeping Tom.

“Maybe someday she’ll come see me,” I said wistfully, “and we can talk things over, girl to girl, but it wouldn’t work if we tried to
force
it…”

I knew, of course, that Edwin would try to force it. He just wants me to be happy. He’s wonderful, really. Not too good for me, of course, but
almost
good enough. He could be powerfully persuasive, and Rosemarie cared for him deeply—that was, ironically, why she’d tried to kill me at least once and probably twice, because she thought I was bad for him—so I wasn’t surprised when, two days later, I heard a voice from my bedroom window.

“Bonnie,” Rosemarie said, climbing through the window in a swirl of fog. She wore a sort of ninja woodsman outfit, with leather pants and a tight black top that showed off her arm muscles and her boobs. Like dressing in black could do anything to hide her in shadows when she had that radiant blonde hair. Still, the girl knew how to make an entrance, I had to give her that.

I’d wondered why Edwin hadn’t come over to pass the night with me in secret, and now I knew.

“I think we should talk,” Rosemarie said. “Privately.” She seemed bored, but then, she always did.

“Is Edwin watching us, do you think?” I said.

“I made him promise to give us our privacy,” she said. “So you and I could talk… honestly.”

I glanced around. “My dad is downstairs. Do you mind if we go for a walk, talk outside? No reason for, you know, a
mortal
to overhear our business.”

She shrugged. I could tell she didn’t even begin to give a crap. She dropped back out the window, and after a moment, I followed. I hadn’t done a lot of jumping out of second-story windows, but I’d done enough to know I liked it. Remember when you were a kid at the playground, perched up high on a jungle gym or hanging at the apex of the swing’s arc, and you make the decision to jump? That delicious moment of weightless freedom, right before gravity gets a hold on you and pulls you down? I feel weightless like that so much more often now. As if I’m beyond even the reach of the laws of the natural world.

I landed on my feet in a catlike crouch. Rosemarie was already leaning against a tree, looking like the world’s most jaded Norwegian supermodel. I gave her my best smile—it would have made a mortal melt and offer their throat to me, I knew
that
, but she just rolled her eyes.

I thought about what Mr. Levitt had said. About how two tigers can’t share the same territory. Which, okay, is dumb: how do they get together and make little tiger babies then? But it works as a metaphor for, what, serial killers? And maybe also for bitchy vampire women. Pleasance was a harmless flake (for a blood-drinking apex predator), and Emily was the closest thing to a warm and cozy earth-mother in all of vampire-dom, but Rosemarie had almost certainly sabotaged my brakes and had definitely tried to smash my head in with a hockey puck and arranged to draw my blood at the birthday party. She was, well… dangerously close to being a lot like
me
. And, thus, a threat.

“Listen,” she said, walking along the lane just ahead of me, following the winding, snowy path into the woods. (Also awesome about being a vampire: fuck snow. Nothing’s colder than I am.) “I never liked you, okay? You probably noticed that. I thought you were all wrong for Edwin. Just a soppy live girl, tempting him with an admittedly pleasant smell. He’s prone to these fits of romanticism, putting women on a pedestal, and—”

I’d never heard so many words out of Rosemarie. Her voice was surprisingly nasally and unappealing, which was odd, because it had seemed like smooth cold glass when I heard it as a real live girl.

Anyway, I didn’t listen, really. When we passed the tree I’d had in mind, I pulled one of Harry’s handguns (he has, like, four, and rifles, too) from where it was hidden in the waistband of my pajama pants. For a cop, Harry was a surprisingly deep sleeper, and anyway, gunshots weren’t exactly uncommon out here, so I didn’t worry too much about being overheard. I was tempted to get off some pithy one-liner before firing, but Rosemarie has vampire reflexes—sure, I do, too, but she’s also got a whole lot more practice
using
them. So I passed up the chance for a zinger and just shot her in the back of the head.

She fell forward like a toppled statue, face into the dirt, not even trying to catch herself. I knew I only had moments before the wound would heal and she’d leap up and start trying to kill me in a rather more direct fashion than she’d used previously, but I was prepared: I’d put Harry’s second-best wood axe behind a particular tree, and I picked it up and chop, chop, chop, off went Rosemarie’s head. Didn’t even take forty whacks.

Even decapitation won’t necessarily kill a vampire—or so I’d learned in my little “Know your limitations!” orientation course at the Scullen home after I got turned. You have to keep the parts separated, and, ideally, burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes. I put the axe down and picked up her torso. Nice thing about cutting off a vampire’s head: no bloody mess. I would indeed burn her body… but I had other plans for her head, once I dug out the bullet and threw it away to foil any future ballistics.

Killing Rosemarie was, of course, a worthy goal in and of itself. But I’m a big believer in working smarter, not harder.

“No,” I said thoughtfully the next day. “No, she never came over. Are you sure she was coming here?”

Edwin paced up and down in my bedroom, chewing on a ragged thumbnail. Nervous Edwin was not cute. I preferred languid, in-control Edwin, but I was beginning to realize a lot of his coolness had been a result of me viewing him through the eyes of enthralled prey. “Yes, at least, I think so. She told me she was going to come see you and make peace. She told Hermet the same thing.”

“Maybe she decided to take a long walk and think it over?”

“It’s possible, but I’m worried.”

“I wonder…” I said slowly. “I wonder if whoever killed Jimmy… but, no, it can’t be.”

Edwin’s head snapped up. “Jimmy? What about him?”

I frowned. “You didn’t know? I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I guess vampires don’t have, whatever, a newsletter. He was killed, his body was in the woods, all shot up and stabbed and… Well. Then later his body disappeared.”

“Start at the beginning,” he said, in that peremptory voice that I’d once found so hot.

So I told him about taking a walk with Joachim, finding the body, how the corpse disappeared, and all that. He looked increasingly troubled. “Vampire hunters,” he murmured. “You should have told me earlier, Bonnie.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t think about it, I mean, with all that’s happened, being attacked…” I widened my eyes. “You don’t think whoever killed Jimmy was the one who attacked
me
, do you? That they knew I, ah, consorted with vampires?”

“I don’t know,” he said grimly. “But I intend to find out.”

After Edwin left to powwow with his family, I puttered around the house until Dad got home. His face was as pale as mine… almost. “Are you okay?” I asked.

He just shook his head, then sat down at the table and held his head in his hands.

“Dad? What is it?”

“I shouldn’t say…” He murmured. “I just… I just got back from the Scullen house, talking to Edwin’s family, but Edwin wasn’t there—”

“He left a few minutes ago,” I said. “What did you have to go see them about?” Like I didn’t know.

“It’s Rosemarie Scale,” he said. “Bonnie, I’m afraid she’s been killed.”

I made the appropriate noises of shock and horror. Harry didn’t want to give me details, but I drew them out of him. Someone had left an anonymous note at police headquarters. It was a strange note: the writer claimed to be a burglar, said he’d broken into Mr. Levitt’s house in order to steal whatever he could get, and he’d looked in the chest freezer out in the garage because sometimes people hide valuables in there, you know, but instead of a bundle of cash or a cache of gold, he’d found a human head. The burglar was obviously unwilling to come forward publicly, as he’d been there during the commission of a crime, but he thought somebody should know. Harry had been willing to write it off as a joke, but thought he should investigate. He didn’t have cause to get a warrant, so he just asked Mr. Levitt if he could look in his freezer, and the old man said knock yourself out, and… there was a head, in a plastic bag, on top of some frozen venison steaks, next to some frozen walleye filets.

Right where I put it. Before I wrote that anonymous note. Breaking and entering is so trivial when you’re a vampire, and I’d been good at picking locks when I was alive. Screw cat burglars: bat burglar all the way.

“I have to say, he looked stunned,” Harry said, drinking his fifth cup of coffee. “Makes me wonder if he was even in his right mind when he did it.”

“
If
he did it,” I said. “What if someone just, you know, put the head there?”

“Well, a head in a freezer is pretty damning, but it’s still just circumstantial evidence,” Harry said. “But we got a search warrant, of course, and brought in some crime scene techs from the state police, and we noticed some disturbed earth in the basement, and got to digging, and… Heck, Bonnie, you don’t need to hear all this.”

“You found more bodies?” I said, putting all the appropriate horror in my voice. I hadn’t
counted
on this part—I didn’t need Mr. Levitt getting convicted in a court of law, that was hardly necessary, I just needed him to look guilty—but I’d wondered if he had incriminating evidence of his
actual
crimes in his house.

“Graves,” he said. “Drifters, it looks like. Hikers. Runaways. Some of them old, real old. When I think that he was a school teacher, and then school superintendent, and even your
principal
, I just… How can evil like that hide in plain sight for so long, Bonnie? I just don’t understand it.” The distress in his voice was so profound, like he’d realized the world was a dark and rotten place.

Well, duh.

“He’s in jail?” I said.

Harry nodded. “Not here. State police took over. I know on TV the local cops get mad whenever someone tries to mess around with their jurisdiction, but I’ll tell you, Bonnie—they can
have
this. I’ll do my part, of course, but Lake Woebegotten having its very own Ed Gein… it’s out of my league and beyond my resources and I don’t mind saying so.”

I stood up. “Oh gosh,” I said. “Edwin must have heard by now, I—”

“Go on,” Harry said. “I know you care about him, and that family. Go see him, see what you can do for them, tell them I’ll do everything
I
can.”

NO CELL STRONG ENOUGH

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

M
ost of the family was upstairs with Hermet, who was kind of a wreck, as you might imagine. I heard a lot of crashing and thumping up there, but Edwin sat with me, his eyes kind of glazed-over. “Mr. Levitt,” he said, for maybe the eighth time. “The principal?”

“It must be such a betrayal,” I said, “having him turn on you.”

Edwin turned his head to me slowly, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“Mr. Levitt. He was your family’s, you know. Liaison? Your go-between, your human agent?”

Edwin shook his head. “No, he wasn’t.”

Huh. “Oh. I just assumed, since he was a human who knew about you, who knew about vampires I mean…”

Edwin stood up from the couch. “No, he wasn’t our agent. But I wonder if our agent
told
him about us. Sometimes humans become vampire hunters, no treachery on the part of our agents is necessary, it happens, but this is a small town, we thought our agent was discreet, but perhaps… Thank you for coming, Bonnie, but I think I need to be with my family now. I’ll be in touch soon.” He rushed upstairs.

I sat on the couch and drummed my fingers on the armrest. Muffled voices drifted down from the second floor, audible to my heightened sense of hearing but not comprehensible. I guess they were discussing their plans and plots and so on. I was a little miffed that I hadn’t been included, but I wasn’t technically part of the family yet, and they probably wanted to spare me the grisly details anyway, lest they offend my so-recently-mortal and therefore delicate sensibilities.