The Traveling Vampire Show (30 page)

“It’s funny the lights are off,” I muttered.

“Maybe she’s taking a nap,” Rusty said.

“We tried to call a couple of times,” I told him. “I don’t think she slept through the ringing.”

“Might’ve,” Slim said. “But not likely.”

On the front stoop, I reached for the doorbell but Rusty grabbed my wrist. “Don’t,” he whispered. “What if somebody’s in there?”

“Like who?”

“You know. Like them.”

“You mean Julian?” I asked.

“Yeah. Or some of his gang.”

“Who’s Julian?” Bitsy asked.

Slim went, “Shhhh.”

When I lowered my arm, Rusty released my wrist. I stepped up to the screen door, put my nose against it, then cupped my hands on both sides of my eyes to block out the faint glow of light from the street.

I could just barely see in.

The main door was wide open. Beyond it, I saw only blackness and shades of gray.

“LEE!” I shouted, startling everyone.

Rusty gasped. Bitsy sucked in a quick breath, making a high-pitched “Uh!” Slim grabbed my arm but didn’t make any noise.

Only silence came from inside the house.

Though I hated to raise my voice again, I yelled, “LEE! YOU HOME? IT’S DWIGHT!”

After my shout, a long silence.

Rusty broke it, whispering, “Maybe she went over to a neighbor’s.”

“Maybe.”

“Who’s Julian?” Bitsy asked again.

“From the Vampire Show,” Slim said.

Bitsy did that “Uh!” again.

“Tell her everything, why don’t you!” Rusty burst out in an angry whisper.

“I’m going in,” I said.

Slim, still gripping my arm, gave it a squeeze. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” Then she let go, whirled around and ran back to her Pontiac. Bending over behind it, she opened its trunk.

“What’s she doing?” Bitsy asked.

Slim reached into the trunk, then took a step away from it and swung her quiver of arrows behind her back.

Rusty groaned.

“What?” Bitsy demanded.

“Nothing.”

Slim bent over the trunk again. This time, she came up with her bow in one hand. I couldn’t exactly see what she had in her other hand, but knew it must be the two knives.

She came running toward us, leaped up the stairs and lurched to a halt. “Here, you guys.” She held out the knives. Rusty took the sheath knife and I took the pocket knife.

“What’s going on?” Bitsy asked.

“Why don’t you go and wait in the car?” Rusty said.

“Fat chance.”

“Go on. It might be dangerous.”

“So?” Turning to me, she said, “I don’t have to wait in the car, do I?”

“Might be a good idea,” I said.

Slim gave a quick shake of her head. “We don’t really want her in the car by herself.”

“No,” said Bitsy. “We don’t.”

“If you stay,” Rusty told her, “you’ve got to do everything we tell you to.”

“I’m not taking orders from you.”

“Just stick with us,” Slim told her, then whipped an arrow out of her quiver, fit it onto her bowstring and drew the string back a few inches.

“Who’s in there?” Bitsy asked.

“We don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nobody.”

Rusty put his face close to Bitsy’s. “Maybe a vampire!” She straightened her back. “No such thing.”

“Keep telling yourself that, squirt.”

“There isn’t.”

“Let’s go,” Slim said. “Me first. Dwight, you wanta get the door?”

First, I opened the pocket knife. Holding it in my right hand, I used my left to pull open the screen door.

Slim walked in. Rusty followed, staying close to her back. Bitsy went into the house behind him. I took up the rear and eased the screen door silently shut.

In the foyer, we stopped moving. We listened.

There were a few quiet sounds of the sort that houses always make: creaks, clicks, humms and buzzes from some sort of appliances. I heard breathing sounds and hoped they came only from us.

Slim’s black shirt moved like a shadow in the darkness. She seemed to be swiveling slowly, scanning the living room, ready to shoot.

All of a sudden, my left arm got grabbed. I flinched and gasped, then realized it was only Bitsy.

Only.

She clung to my arm with both hands and pressed her body against it as if she’d mistaken my arm for a pole she hoped to climb. My upper arm was clasped against one of her breasts so tightly that the small, soft mound seemed to be mashed flat. My forearm was pressed to her belly. I could feel her heartbeat and breathing. She wore a flowery perfume so sweet I almost gagged.

It wasn’t exactly the same as if she’d been Slim.

I resisted the urge to push her away.

“Somebody get a light,” Slim whispered.

“Let go,” I told Bitsy.

She held on. I made my way toward a wall switch, anyway, with Bitsy clinging to me. When I got within reach of where a switch should be, I said, “Let go. Come on, I need my arm.”

At last, she released me.

Without her body mashed against it, my arm felt strangely cool. I raised it and flicked a light switch. Two lamps came on in the living room, one at each end of the sofa.

No Lee.

No strangers.

No one at all.

Everything looked just the same as usual.

“Okay,” Slim whispered, “let’s check the rest of the house.”

Again, she led the way, walking slowly, her bow partly drawn back, ready to let an arrow fly if we should come under attack.

We made our way through the entire house, turning on lights in every room, looking in closets, glancing behind furniture and drapes. In the bedroom, I dropped and peered into the space between the bed and the floor while Rusty checked the adjoining bathroom.

Lee was nowhere to be found.

Nobody seemed to be in the house except the four of us.

Done with our search, we returned to the living room. Slim swung her arrow over her shoulder and dropped it into her quiver. Rusty sank onto the sofa. I folded my knife shut and stuffed it into a front pocket of my jeans.

“Can we go to the movies now?” Bitsy asked.

We all looked at her.

She frowned. “What?”

“We’re worried about Lee,” Slim exlained.

“Don’t you think she just went someplace? I mean, people go places. We don’t want to miss the movies, do we?”

“Screw the movies,” Rusty said. “We were never gonna go to the movies anyway.”

“Were, too.” She gave me a betrayed look. “We were, weren’t we? You said so.”

I nodded to Bitsy, but spoke to Rusty. “We figured to head on out to the Moonlight and take in the first one, anyway.”

“Why not both?” Bitsy asked.

“We’re supposed to be back here by ten-thirty....”

“Dwight!” Rusty blurted.

“We might as well tell her the truth.”

“She’ll tell on us.”

“Will not,” she protested.

“Like hell.”

Slim said to Bitsy, “This has to be a secret, okay? We’ve let you come along tonight, but if you ever want to do anything with us again ...”

“Ever in your whole life,” Rusty added.

“... you’ll have to keep quiet about what goes on. We can’t have you going home and telling your parents about everything we do.”

“About anything we do,” Rusty said.

Bitsy raised her right hand as if taking an oath. “I promise.”

Looking disgusted, Rusty shook his head and muttered, “She’ll tell.”

“Will not.”

I gave Slim the nod.

She nodded in return, then said to Bitsy, “We think somebody’s after us. Maybe someone from the Traveling Vampire Show.”

“What for?”

“To shut us up,” Rusty said.

“We don’t really know what they’re up to,” Slim explained. “I saw them ... do something horrible to a dog today. Maybe they want to scare us into keeping quiet about it. The thing is, weird stuff has been happening ever since. Someone was in my house this afternoon. They chewed up a book in my bedroom....”

“Like a dog,” Rusty added.

“The book was Dracula,” Slim pointed out. “Which is about vampires.”

“Not that we think a vampire did it,” I said.

“But maybe someone from the show. Also, there was this flower vase in my mother’s room. It had yellow roses in it. Somebody broke the vase and took the roses. Then one of the roses turned up in Dwight’s room.”

“At your house?” Bitsy asked me, looking shocked.

I nodded. “They put it on my pillow.”

“Now we’ve got this with Lee missing,” Slim continued. “She and Dwight drove over to Janks Field this morning looking for me and Rusty, and they talked to the main guy of the Vampire Show.”

“Julian Stryker,” I said.

“Lee bought tickets for tonight’s performance, but she paid with a check. The check had her name and address on it. So Julian and his bunch had an easy way to find out where she lives.”

“You think they took her?” Bitsy asked.

The question made me go cold inside.

“We don’t know,” Slim said.

“She ain’t here,” Rusty added.

“But there’re no signs of foul play.” I wanted to talk myself and the others out of believing that Lee had been taken away.

“Not unless you count the open door,” Slim said.

“She might’ve left it like that for the breeze,” I said. “Anyway, she isn’t expecting us for a couple more hours, so maybe she did go somewhere.”

“Without her truck?” Slim asked.

“She might’ve walked over to ...”

“Without her purse?”

“Purse?” I asked.

“It’s on a counter in the kitchen.”

“I saw it,” Bitsy threw in.

Slim said, “I think Lee would’ve taken it with her if she’d gone off on her own.”

“You hardly ever take a purse with you,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, well ... I’m a little different. Most women take their purses everywhere.”

“Maybe she took a different one,” I said. “She has more than one.”

“Let’s have a look,” Slim said.

All of us followed her into the kitchen. Nodding at Lee’s brown leather purse, she said to me, “Why don’t you do the honors? You’re family.”

“Sure.” I moved Lee’s purse from the counter to the kitchen table, where the light was better. Then I frowned at Slim. “Do you really think we oughta do this? It’s sort of invading her privacy.”

“I’ll look,” Rusty volunteered.

“No you won’t,” I said. “We don’t need you going through her stuff.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s ... ?” He shut up, no doubt suddenly afraid I might tell what he’d done that afternoon in Slim’s mother’s bedroom.

Slim said, “We just need to see how full it is ... if maybe she went off with some other purse.”

“It feels pretty heavy,” I said.

“Would you rather have me look?” Slim asked.

“Yeah, maybe so.”

I stepped aside. Slim handed the bow to me, then opened Lee’s purse. As we all watched, she lifted out the billfold. Holding it out of the way, she bent over the purse and peered in. “Checkbook, lipstick, keys....” Then her lips moved, but she said nothing. She reached down into the purse.

Her hand came up holding four stiff red papers the size of postcards cut in half lengthwise.

The first time I’d seen them, they had been in the hand of Julian Stryker when he came out of the bus at Janks Field.

Then I’d seen Lee tuck them into her purse.

Slim studied one of them. Meeting my eyes, she said, “Tickets for tonight’s performance of the Traveling Vampire Show.”

“All right!” Rusty blurted.

Slim and I looked at him. He seemed delighted.

“The tickets, guys. We can still go.”

“Not without Lee,” I said.

“Go where?” Bitsy asked.

Rusty scowled at her. “To the Traveling Vampire Show.”

“What about the drive-in?”

“Screw the drive-in.”

Bitsy glanced hopefully from me to Slim and back to me again. This time, neither of us came to her defense. Her face turned sullen, lower lip bulging out.

Slim set the tickets on the kitchen table. “Guess Lee didn’t switch purses. This one has all the main stuff in it.” She put the billfold back inside. Leaving the tickets on the table, she closed the purse. Then she turned toward me. She looked worried.

“You really think they took her?” I asked.

“It’s a possibility. But maybe Lee just went off without her purse, no big deal. She might’ve gone for a walk, gone on a ride with a friend, whatever, and she’ll turn up before long. I mean, you guys had me kidnapped or God-knows-what this afternoon just because you couldn’t find me for a couple of hours. Lee could be anywhere, perfectly safe, planning to get back here in plenty of time to take us to the show.”

“We’re gonna miss the show if we don’t get going,” Bitsy complained.

“Not that show, you wad. The vampire show.”

Slim pretty much ignored them. “If she’d just gone off, though, she probably would’ve taken her purse and shut the front door. So maybe something happened that made her leave in a big hurry.”

“An emergency,” I said.

Slim nodded. “Maybe she ran out of the house to help someone. Or to get away from someone.”

“Maybe she did get away,” I said.

In my mind, I saw Lee fleeing out the back door of her house, Stryker and his gang in hot pursuit ... chasing her with spears as she ran through her yard and down the long embankment toward the river.

What if she didn’t make it?

“Another possibility,” Slim said, “is that someone came into the house and took her away.”

“Stryker?” Rusty asked.

“He’s a likely suspect,” Slim said. “But maybe he isn’t involved at all. Look at what’s happened to us. Like how that car came after us on the way home from the drive-in a few weeks ago. And that weird guy in the sheet on Halloween last year. And all the troubles we’ve had over at Janks Field before today. They had nothing to do with the Vampire Show.”

“Maybe,” Rusty said. “Maybe not.”

“Get real,” I told him.

“Who really knows?” he said, wiggling his eyebrows and trying to sound like Karloff. “Maybe it’s the ghost of Tommy Janks. He’s doing it all ... pulling all the strings.”

“Get bent,” Slim said.

“I want to take a look out back,” I said and handed the bow back to Slim. “If someone did come after Lee, maybe she ran off.”

“Out the back door?” Rusty asked, using his normal voice.