Helens-of-Troy (35 page)

“I really don’t know what’s going on,
Stan-man,” Tom admitted. “But when I figure it out, you’ll be the
first to know, I promise.”

“You’re smart, right?” Stan asked,
pointing his index finger defiantly at him. All the Lachey’s did
that when they wanted to make a point, Tom had noticed.

“Uh-huh," Tom nodded cautiously. “Where
are you going with this?”

“Then you should be able to figure
something out to help me kill it.”

Tom could have lied to Stan, he could
have told him that everything was going to be fine, and no one was
going to do any killing, but he sensed that Stan wouldn’t believe
him even if he tried to cushion it.

“
I think we should let Ryan
kill it,” Tom answered honestly.

“From jail? How’s he supposed to do
that? We’re gonners.”

Tom sighed. “That is a bit of a
problem, but that’s where you can help me. Go start up the computer
in the basement so that I can do a bit of web surfing.”

“I’m not supposed to be on the computer
when Ma’s not around.”

“Dude,” Tom said, trying to keep a
straight face, “you’ve got to learn to live a little. Look, if it
will make you feel better, just turn it on and log in for me. I’ll
do everything else. She’ll never know, I swear.”

“Are you going to Google ‘jail
breakouts’?” he asked excitedly. “I can get the nail file from the
bathroom if we’re going to bake a cake.”

“Wrong kind of file, buddy. There will
be no cake baking. And no peeking at what I’m looking at on the
computer. That way if Betty starts to interrogate you later, you
can honestly be in complete denial.”

“I could help. Whatever the plan is.
I’m a minor. They can’t put me in jail.”

“True,” Tom said slowly, “even though I
don’t know how you know that.”

“You’re sixteen. They’ll toss you in
the slammer.”

“I won’t go to jail,” Tom assured him.
“Stop watching old movies so your vocabulary has a chance to meet
this century, okay?”

“They put Ryan in jail.”

“Okay,” Tom sighed. “See here’s the
thing, Stan. Ryan is in jail because he was in the wrong place at
the wrong time. That’s all. It will sort itself out without us
having to break him out of jail, trust me. I’ve just got to do...a
little homework on a project we’re doing together. So he keeps
caught up at school. We don’t want his marks to drop, do
we?”

The explanation seemed to satisfy Stan.
“Okay. Can I watch TV with you while you’re down there? I don’t
want to stay up here all by myself.”

Tom smiled. Betty never let Stan watch
television in the mornings, especially Sunday mornings. In the
Lachey household, Sunday mornings were strictly for sleeping in. No
noise was allowed.

“Sure, Stan. But no puppets. Or
anything that resembles a puppet. Or a sponge.”

“Can I watch wrestling?”

Tom laughed. “Only if you promise learn
a few gob-smacking moves.”

Finally, a full smile crossed Stan’s
face. “Where’d Jacey go? I can practice putting the moves on her
when she gets back. I think I can take her.”

“No way, little man,” Tom said, patting
Stan on the leg. “I’ll be the one putting the moves on the ladies
when they get backand they will be back.”

Their conversation stopped when the
side doorbell rang.

“I told you,” Tom smiled. “The girls
couldn’t stay away from us. We’re like liquid attraction. They
could put us in a bottle and call us perfume.”

Stan smiled too; glad to be a part of
Tom’s plans, if only for a few minutes.

“Liquid attraction,” he
echoed.

“Come on in,” Tom yelled towards the
hallway, playfully giving Stan an easy one-two punch to his
shoulders. “Your love-buddies are upstairs.”

Stan stopped smiling. He could smell a
musty aroma coming through the heating ducts in the floor. “You
shouldn’t have done that, Tom. Jacey would have come in by herself
if the door was open. Something’s wrong.”

“I locked the door, Stan. I promised
Ryan I’d take care of you. Jacey has a key. She came in on her
own.”

“No she doesn’t,” Stan insisted.
“Officer Purdy used the hidden key from under the flowerpot. He put
the key in his pocket when he left. I watched him do
it.”

“Stan, I hear her coming up the
stairs.”

Stan started to wheeze. “Does smelling
b.o. count as a power of observation?” he gasped. “Jacey doesn’t
smell like that. She smells good. I don’t think it was Jacey at the
door, Tom.”

Tom began to notice the smell himself.
“It’s probably just a dead mouse. It most likely died between the
walls and when the heat came on, the fan circulated the smell
through air-ducts. Just hold your nose for a bit until it shuts
off.” He noticed Stan was looking a little pasty. “Where’s your
puffer big-guy?”

Stan plugged his nose with his left
hand and pointed to the dresser by the door.

Or at least Tom thought he was pointing
towards the bureau by the door.

“I’ll grab it for you,” he offered,
turning halfway around.

He never knew what hit him.

“Hello, love-buddies,” the vampire
said, as he spun his left leg in the air and landed a drop kick to
Tom’s head. “So much for you being the smart one. We vampires don’t
need keys, so there’s not really much point locking the door. You
should have listened to the kid and checked who was there before
inviting me in.” He turned to Stan. “He must have missed ‘don’t
open the door to strangers’ day at pre-school.”

“What do you want?” Stan asked
breathlessly.

“I want you to want me,” he
sneered.

Stan started to
hyperventilate.

The vampire took no pity on the
youngster. “If you keep that up, this is going to be way too easy.
Why don’t you make me work for it, Stan-man? Stan-man. Is that like
your super-hero name?”

Stan continued to hyperventilate until
he lost consciousness.

“I guess not,” the vampire said. He
looked around the room. “You know, I’ve seen you staring at me from
this upstairs window for months now, Stan. You never even had the
courtesy to invite me in to read comic books with you. Some kind of
neighbor you turned out to be.”

He crossed over to the bedroom window
and opened it wide. The cold air immediately began to fill the
room, but no one, apart from himself, was conscious enough to
notice.

“You, Mr. Liquid Attraction,” he
sneered, going over to Tom and giving him a swift kick in the ribs
to ensure he was still out cold, “maybe you should spend more time
watching wrestling yourself.”

He walked back to the bed and hovered
over Stan. “Decisions, decisions. How do I remove you from this den
of nerdiness? We could take the stairs, but that would be so
anti-climatic,” he sneered. He heaved Stan’s limp body over his
left shoulder and moved towards the window. A moment later he
carried Stan effortlessly up onto the snowy roof.

“You’re turning into a human freezie,”
he laughed as he felt Stan start to involuntarily shiver. He leaned
him up against the slope of the roof. “Should I lick you till
you’re done, or crush you up and pull your juices out slowly
between my teeth? Which way gives me the migraine brain freeze? I
can never remember.”

There was no answer from the human life
form.

The wind and snow was picking up
considerably, hiding the sun behind a deep cloud cover. It didn’t
look like mid-afternoon. It looked like dusk.

“How does that song go? Da da da
beautiful morning, da da da beautiful day,” the vampire began to
sing to himself. “Da da da beautiful feeling…everything’s going my
way.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It had been nearly three hours before
Ellie and Jacey returned to the neighborhood, having succeeded in
their mission to obtain incense, holy water, consecrated ground and
two low-fat, non-dairy lattés to go.

Ellie was definitely looking forward to
warming up inside. The heat from the latté wasn’t making it past
her inner core. To add to her discomfort, the outer layer of skin
beneath her jeans was beginning to tingle. The tingle before the
numbness. Winter was a drag.

“I still disagree with you about the
sermon,” Jacey commented as she munched on an apple she had
purchased from the diner. It had quickly become apparent to her
that Ellie’s view of religion was contradictory to her own. “If you
want to be a doubting Thomas, go right ahead.”

Ellie had tried to turn their
conversation to safer territories; movies, bands, and whether or
not it was really necessary to pay hundreds of dollars for a purse.
Again, a split decision. But Ellie was quickly learning that Jacey
never really let any subject drop for long. “Says the girl eating
the forbidden fruit,” Ellie pointed out.

Jacey held the core of the Royal Gala
away from her body and examined it. “It’s not the same kind of
apple. It’s all in the interpretation, remember?” She tossed it
into an empty garbage can at the end of a nearby
driveway.

“That’s my point exactly,” Ellie
reminded her. “It’s all open to interpretation.”

“Father Franklin seems like an okay guy
though, right? Do you think he plays poker at night with the nuns?”
Jacey asked.

“Uh...I don’t know,” Ellie stammered.
“I wasn’t listening to him. I was too busy freaking out about the
dirt you put in the offering envelope, remember?”

“Consecrated ground. We needed it.
Don’t worry, I put some money in the plate. By the way, you owe me
five bucks.”

“That’s not the point. I think there
were more than flowers planted in that little garden we raided.
Unless the brass markers were really garden stakes, but the names
didn’t look very biological to me.”

“There was an Ivy Rose,” Jacey pointed
out.

“You know what I mean. People were
buried there. There’s probably a whole group of church elders mad
at us for disturbing their eternal resting place,” she sighed.
“Maybe we should have brought a coffee back for Tom. We have been
gone a while.”

“Look, if I got a little of Sister
Michaelangeline’s ashes in with the soil, it can’t hurt. It’s like
using a top-coat over your nail polish or summat. Think of it as
extra protection. She scared the hell out of me before she died.
She can scare the hell out of anything.”

Ellie raised her palm to her forehead.
It had been a difficult afternoon so far. She watched as Jacey put
the holy water in a little Buddha bottle she found in the dollar
store. The same store that sold her a box of incense complete with
Hare Krishna’s likeness on the box. Jacey was definitely pushing
the limits of karma in her search for religious
artifacts.

“Give me your phone,” Jacey said to
Ellie. “I’m going to put my number in it for you. Do you tweet?
I’ve got a great texting plan, so feel free to keep me totally
updated on your status.”

“I’m not hooked up with Twitter. I
already lose too much of my life to facebook.”

“You must tweet. We’ll set you up later
when we get back to Ryan’s. Tara and I do it all the
time.”

“I thought you hated Tara,” Ellie said,
handing Jacey her phone.

“Why do you think that?” Jacey
asked.

“Just something Ryan said.”

“Ryan probably said he doesn’t like her
either, but we all know that’s not true,” she said as she typed her
contact info into the memory of Ellie’s phone. “She’s not my
favorite person in the world, but sometimes I have to hang around
with her because Tom and Ryan are inseparable. Where Ryan goes,
Tara tends to turn up.”

“You didn’t want to sit with her at the
game,” Ellie reminded her.

“Tara’s easier to take when Ryan is
with her. She’s on her best behavior around him.”

“Aren’t you guys kind of being
two-faced about her? You like her, you don’t like her. Just so
we’re clear, I have no problem disliking her after what she said to
me at the football game. She was rude.”

“She is rude. She doesn’t really like
me either, but we try to fake it,” Jacey shrugged. She handed the
phone back to Ellie. “There. All done.”

“You put Tara’s number in there too?”
Ellie said, glancing at the contact list, and then putting the
phone back in the front pocket of her jeans. “Have you not been
listening to a word I said?”

“You might as well get used to her.
That’s all I’m saying. I wish I hadn’t been with her last night,
though.” Jacey shuddered at the memory of dropping Tara off at the
murder scene.

“Where was Tom last night?”

“Tom and I had gone to the Topaz for a
bite to eat when Tara came in all in a tizzy because she had a row
with Ryan. Tom wasn’t in the mood to listen to her, and she wasn’t
offering to leave us alone, so Tom bailed and I wound up with Tara.
I thought he went home.”

“That must have been when he came over
to my place.”

“Sod. He’s still so in trouble over
that. Thank God they had an all-nighter of flicks at the theatre,
or I wouldn’t have known what to do with Tara. We saw you at the
nine o’clock show, you and your mom and grandmother. We stayed for
the next one too. We finally left after that one and I drove her
home. Talk about scary. What if we had arrived earlier, when the
murderer was still there?”