He took in a lot of air. We were down to our last few minutes. Already I saw the guard watching us. He would be coming in any minute now.
Edward continued. "More than anything, I sensed a great...evil coming through her. As if something very dark was now calling her body home. Maybe she could have fought it. I don't know. But it was in her, and this thing didn't give a damn about her, or anyone."
"So you decided to kill her."
"I had to kill her. To kill it."
"So you used a silver butter knife?"
"Why not? A knife is a knife. It was heavy. Had a thick handle, long blade. I thought it had been pure silver."
So one day, with the kids in school, he had come home for lunch from work. He had walked calmly into his bedroom, where his wife lay unmovingly on the bed, the curtains tightly drawn. When she slept, she rarely moved, and, in fact, rarely breathed, if at all. She was dead to the world, and he simply walked over to his nightstand, opened the top drawer, and removed the silver butter knife.
He had stepped to her side, where he looked down at the woman he had once loved with all his heart. He'd spent only a few seconds standing by her side, when he raised the knife, positioned it over her chest, and plunged it down as hard as he could.
Chapter Fourteen
The drive to and from San Quentin had taken all day.
It was late when I arrived back at Roxi's apartment in Hollywood. She curled her naked body around me, resting her hand on my bare chest and her cheek on my shoulder. Her tan leg slid over my thighs, sending a shiver through me. I automatically curled my arm around her.
These days I didn't have much interest in sex. But Roxi did. Enough for both of us. And even though she was only half asleep, I knew that she was giving me an opening. I patted her hip like I would a puppy and some of her electrified energy dissipated. A moment later she was snoring lightly.
Edward had gone on to describe some of the more gruesome details of his murder. Or attempted murder, as he put it.
His first stab didn't kill her. In fact, seventy-two stabs later and she was still kicking, still fighting, until most of her blood finally drained down into the bed sheets. The silver plating had done enough to incapacitate her, but not enough to kill her. Edward was certain that had he tried to stab her with anything other than a silver knife, she would have killed him.
But she had lost enough blood to appear dead, enough to satisfy a medical examiner.
"But that's not why you're here, is it, Spinoza?" he asked, as I saw a guard coming toward us. "You're here because she's gone missing."
"How do you know?"
"Call it a hunch. Be careful, Spinoza. Here be monsters."
And that's when the guard arrived and took him away. He went willing, but he kept his eyes on me until he was finally led out the heavy door.
I lay in bed with my hands behind my head.
I've been staying more and more at Roxi's apartment. We've been dating now for about three months and, surprisingly, things were going well. Somehow, someway she put up with all my melancholy, shyness, and sometimes impotency. It's a challenge to make love when your heart is shattered.
But Roxi was showing me something, albeit slowly and sometimes painfully. She was showing me how to love again, and for that I was eternally grateful.
Edward had told me something else, something he had overheard his wife say one night when she was talking to a group of her weird friends...friends, he suspected, that may or may not have been entirely human.
He had overheard his wife mention that another woman, another mother of two, had been attacked in Orange County, no doubt by the same vampire. Edward had vowed to hunt down this mother in Orange County, as well.
As I lay in bed, with Roxi curled up next to me, I briefly considered why a vampire would purposely turn two mothers into vampires. I decided rather quickly that I had no clue, but I made a mental note to keep an eye out for this mother of two in Orange County, whoever she was.
Times like these, I thought, are why people drink.
I rolled over and rested my hand on Roxi's naked hip, smiled, and finally drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Fifteen
I awoke with a gasp in the middle of the night, after dreaming that a creepy caretaker, the coffin maker, had been watching me from the dark shadow's of Roxi's room.
At least, I hoped it was a dream.
I looked now and we were alone. Thank God. I lay my head back down on the pillow and pulled Roxi's wonderfully warm body to me. She came willingly, mewing slightly in sleep, and I only grudgingly fell back to sleep with my eyes fastened on the far corner of the room. That is, until I could no longer keep my eyes open....
When I awoke in the morning, with Roxi still sleeping hard and the morning light creeping through the edges of the blinds, I knew where to go next.
To meet the one man who, I thought, might have heard the knocking, too. The one man who could have inconspicuously dug up Evelyn's body.
The creepy caretaker, of course.
The man of my recent dreams.
I got dressed and hit Starbucks and was soon on my way to Forest Lawn just as the morning sun appeared in the east, over the Eagle Rock hills, and shining its morning glory.
I was acutely aware that as I awakened with a reasonably fresh cup of coffee, there might be a hidden race of the undead slipping now into a very deep and dark sleep.
Traffic was surprisingly brisk.
Shortly, I was driving through the open gates of Forest Lawn and over to the maintenance building located on the east side of the sprawling cemetery.
It was a Tuesday morning, and a handful of cars were parked here and there. As I parked and exited my car, a nearby Latino woman was walking slowly between the rows of grave markers with a small bouquet of flowers. She looked lost and grief-stricken.
I knew the feeling well, and, sister, it doesn't go away.
The head groundsman was sitting at his desk, flipping through a thick stack of stapled papers. I caught the header of one such paper. It read "Lot 126" before he flipped to the next page. What he was going to do in Lot 126 was anybody's guess, but I figured somebody was getting buried.
He looked up, saw me, and nodded. I never did catch his name, and there was no placard on the door nor was there one on his desk. He was, in my mind, just the caretaker. The uncreepy caretaker, although that might be an oxymoron.
"Still working the Case of the Missing Corpse, huh?" he asked.
"Maybe I was a Hardy Boy in a past life."
He chuckled. "What can I do you for?" He sounded busy and rushed, and he wanted me to know it.
"Is Boyd around?"
He frowned at that, then jutted a thumb toward the back room. "He's in the shop."