Return of the Wolf Man (41 page)

He seemed at peace.

She couldn’t leave him here—not in this place of evil. Slipping her hands under Talbot’s arms, she pulled him from the foyer onto the portico and then down the steps. The fire had broken through the rear wall of the house and threw an orange glow against the low clouds. She heard hoofbeats in the distance.

Caroline still had no idea where she was. For the moment, it didn’t matter. She dragged Talbot toward the dirt road and then sat on the cool earth, his head in her lap. She used her sleeve to wipe the blood from his closed eyes.

The night breeze brushed around them and stirred the sugar cane in the fields beyond. And then Caroline heard what sounded like whispering. She listened carefully; it was the voice of a woman speaking softly, comfortingly:

“The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own. But as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears surround your predestined end. ”

Caroline looked up. There was no one there. But she felt a spirit soothing and encouraging her. As men galloped up in odd-looking clothes, the young woman felt something else. For the first time in her life she felt a sense of purpose, felt it right down to her heels. And as she thought of Talbot and her aunt Joan, of the amazing events that had brought her to this point, Caroline knew that she had finally found her own predestined place in the world.

THIRTY-FIVE

S
tephen Banning, Jr., finished patching the opening in the basement wall of the castle. He looked over the bricks then set his trowel on the tarp. Slowly he unbent his old knees and rose.

“She’s all finished, Dr. Cooke,” he said.

Dressed in jeans, a loose-fitting white blouse, and red sneakers, Caroline Cooke turned from the open front door. She crossed the sunlit foyer of the Tombs to where the basement door used to be. She was followed by Trooper Matt Willis, who had been standing beside scaffolding that was being erected by Banning’s assistant “Pig” Jenson and his helpers. They were getting ready to replace sections of ceiling beams that had been damaged by the fire.

“You’ve done excellent work, Mr. Banning,” Caroline said. “Wouldn’t you agree, Trooper Willis?”

The officer took off his hat, removed his sunglasses, and dropped them into his shirt pocket. “No one ever accused Stephen Banning of not being the best stonemason in the Southeast,” he said.

“Thank you both very much,” Banning said. After admiring his handiwork for a moment more he took a long, slow look around the foyer. He shook his head. “I’ve gotta tell you. Even on a bright, sunny morning with a bunch o’ people around, this place still gives me the willies.”

Caroline smiled. “There’s no longer any reason to be afraid of the Tombs,” she said. “No reason at all.”

“I believe that you believe that,” Banning replied. “But for me this will always be a place I’d rather not be.” His eyes came to rest on the woman. “Nothing personal, you understand.”

“I do understand,” she said, still smiling.

“Anyway,” Banning went on, “I’m gonna go over an’ help Pig an’ his fellas. I want ya to be happy with the way we fixed up yer place.”

“I’m sure I will be,” Caroline said.

Banning excused himself to join Jenson and his crew.

Caroline watched him go then turned to Willis. “I assume the place has a cleaner bill of health from you?”

He nodded. “The team from Naples dragged the water down there, checked the secret room, and looked over every square foot of the place before Tom Stevenson’s funeral. If there are any monsters left, they’re invisible.”

Caroline studied him for a moment. “You still don’t believe there were any monsters to begin with, do you, Trooper Willis?”

“I believe that some pretty unusual things happened here,” he said. “And there’s still a lot I can’t explain.”

“Like?”

“Talbot having been here fifty years ago, for one,” he said. “Dr. Mornay’s reappearance. Though the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that there was some kind of conspiracy going on. Something to play off LaMirada’s past.”

“A scam of some kind?” Caroline said as she watched Stephen Banning pick up a router.

“That’s right.”

“To what end?”

“Oh,” said Willis, “to get you to sell the Tombs so it could be turned into a hotel or a nightclub. To create rumors of monsters to make LaMirada a tourist attraction again. Or maybe to get other LaMiradans to sell their homes and move out. Tear the whole damn city down and rebuild it as a Gulf Coast Las Vegas. There’s been talk about all of those things before.”

“I’ve heard some of that talk,” she admitted. “But that still doesn’t explain Lawrence Talbot.”

“No, it doesn’t.” He seemed uneasy about something and gestured toward the front door with his hat. “Say, Dr. Cooke. It’s a little noisy in here. Would you mind stepping outside?”

“Not at all,” Caroline said.

Willis extended his arm and Caroline preceded him out. They walked through the great door, which was dark and discolored from the smoke. It was propped open with a can of wood stain. Stacks of lumber were piled on the left, along with bags of nails, toolboxes, and cleaning fluid. Further along the wall, a man was working over fire-ravaged telephone lines, which ran under the bay to the castle. To the west, past the drab-green hanging sheets of Spanish moss, the weeping willows and tall grasses of La Viuda glowed healthy and rich in the bright sunlight. Beyond them, the gulf waters glittered, the sky was a cloudless blue, and for the first time in a week Caroline felt rested.

She stopped beside a large rock. She leaned against it and folded her arms. “So. What’s on your mind?” she asked.

Willis was looking down at his wide-brimmed hat as he turned it over and over in his large hands. “Dr. Cooke—”

“I’m going to be living here,” she interrupted. “Please call me Caroline.”

“All right, Caroline,” he said. “Last night I read the findings of the inquest of the Marya Island authorities.”

“And?”

“Well, I just wanted to know if there was anything you wanted to add to it. Off the record.”

Caroline cocked her head to one side and squinted at Trooper Willis. “You mean, you don’t believe what the inquest on Marya Island determined.”

“I am having some trouble with the findings,” Willis admitted. “The judge empaneled a jury in a half hour. They heard testimony from you and the fire crew for exactly one hour. No one was cross-examined. And they handed down their decision by lunchtime. By the time I got down there to collect you and Stevenson’s body, it was all over. That’s awfully quick.”

“Things work differently in the Morgan Islands.”

“Not that differently, Dr. Cooke—Caroline. I’ve been a government employee for a long time, as soldier and trooper. And if I may be blunt, I know a cover-up when I read one.”

“You think I lied to them?”

Willis looked at her for the first time since they’d come outside. “Officially? No, ma’am, I do not. Privately? Since you’ve decided to live in your aunt’s castle and I want us to have a cordial relationship, let’s just say I don’t think you lied—but I’m not convinced you told the panel everything you know.”

“But you gave me a lie detector test when I came back to LaMirada yesterday. Isn’t that enough?”

“Yes—as far as it went. But your attorney Corrigan would only let me ask you about what happened here in LaMirada. Since the Morgan Islands are out of my jurisdiction, I had no right asking about what happened there.”

“But you
know
what happened there,” Caroline said. “Dracula’s dead. So is his giant henchman, the one everybody called the Frankenstein Monster. You saw the photos of their remains attached to the tribunal’s report. Dracula was burned to a pile of ashes and the Monster was torn apart by wolves.”

“Yes, I saw the photos and read the report,” Willis said. “You personally examined both bodies and were permitted to sign their death certificates.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Marya’s other two doctors were ill.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know,” Caroline said. “I didn’t examine
them.”

“Touché,” Willis said. “You also examined Talbot’s body before he was buried. You wrote on his death certificate that he died from—how did you describe it?”

“Massive craniocerebral trauma. His skull was caved in when he tried to save me from one of Dracula’s henchmen.”

“A different henchman from the one who killed Tom Stevenson.”

“That’s right.” Caroline pulled a blade of grass from the ground and began wrapping it around her index finger. “Trooper Willis, I’m pretty tired. Would you mind telling me where this is going?”

“I’m really not sure,” he said. “Neither Tom Stevenson nor Talbot has a family, so no one’s going to raise a stink. Deputy Clyde’s death is going to be blamed on Dracula, since you found the murder weapon on Marya Island and it checks out. But that doesn’t explain how Dracula got in and out of LaMirada. It doesn’t explain how the jail cell was torn apart. And it doesn’t explain the feeling I have that you know a lot more than you’ve said.”

“I swear to you, I don’t remember what happened in the station house,” she said.

“And on Marya Island?” he pressed.

On Marya Island,
she thought. Caroline kicked a stone and watched it clatter down the hill toward the dock. The truth was she’d been through two days of insanity down there. The Marya Island authorities were so terrified by Count Dracula—or Gentleman Singe, as they called him down there, Gentleman “Blood”—that even though he was dead, Caroline had to help the trembling governor himself dig a pit in the shed, cover the vampire’s ashes and ragged clothes with garlic, and bury them there. Then she had to suspend what little disbelief she had left, take a crash course in zombie lore, and accompany a small group of gun-and-machete-wielding islanders as they hunted down Dracula’s wolves and decapitated the
sarpe
workers who hadn’t been destroyed by the fire. What was she going to do—tell Trooper Willis all of that?

Caroline regarded the officer for a long moment.
Hell,
she thought.
Why not?
There was no one else here and she’d been a straight shooter all her life. Since the matter was out of his jurisdiction, there was no reason not to tell him what he wanted to know.

“All right,” she said at last. “I’m going to tell you what else happened on Marya Island. I’m going to tell you everything, and then I’m going to deny I ever said it. Fair enough?”

He nodded once.

“I don’t know whether the doctors down there were sick or not,” Caroline said. “My guess is they probably weren’t. All I was told by Governor Coldwater was that they wouldn’t be going to Dracula’s estate.”

“Wouldn’t?”

“Would not. As in ‘refused to.’ He told me that Count Dracula was over five hundred years old and that for fifty of those years he’d made life on Marya Island a living hell. As for the rest of the story, it’s true that the last thing I remember happening in LaMirada is passing out at the station house. Dracula showed up and then it was like a fog swallowed my brain—I can’t think of any other way to describe it. I awoke standing in the library of the mansion. Tom Stevenson was already dead, hacked beyond recognition by a pair of machetes. I later learned that the individual who did it was named Andre, a smuggler who had been killed in 1932.”

“Hold on. He was
killed
in 1932?”

“Yes,” Caroline replied. “Like I said, you can believe it or not. After his death he was turned into a zombie, a corpse reanimated by voodoo rites. The others from his band of smugglers were also transformed and all of them served Dracula. This zombie, Andre, was lying at my feet when I woke. I examined him then and there: he was dead. As totally cold and deceased as any cadaver I ever cut open in medical school. I picked up a flashlight that was lying on the floor and tried to find my way out of the mansion. A few minutes later Andre got up and came after me with his machetes. When he attacked, I accidentally set fire to the library with candles I was holding. Andre was burning up but he kept on coming until I smashed in his skull with the candelabrum. I later learned that I happened to do the right thing. Decapitation or destroying the brain is the only way to stop a zombie. It’s the one functioning organ they possess.

“As I ran from the house, another zombie attacked me. Talbot killed him. But it wasn’t actually Talbot. It was that carnivorous animal-thing he became, the Wolf Man. I honestly don’t think he knew that he was saving me. He just had to kill. When he realized that he couldn’t eat the zombie’s dead flesh, he attacked me. I was still holding the candelabrum so I struck him hard in the head.” Her eyes began to tear again. She wiped them with the side of her hand. “When—when that didn’t kill him, he asked me to hit him again.”

“He spoke?”

“Just two words: ‘again’ and ‘please.’ ”

“I thought you said he was an animal.”

“He was,” Caroline said. “Maybe the first blow had started to kill that part of him and freed his human side— Jesus, I don’t know. I closed my eyes and struck him again, then I pulled him from the house. As soon as he died he became Talbot again. I saw that happen, Trooper Willis. The fur just seemed to dissolve and his expression changed from pain and fury to something almost peaceful.