The Origin of Dracula Read online

  “Lee—I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t have to. Just hear me out.”

  “Nope.” Again, he tried to push the door shut, but this time I pushed back hard—my desperation taking over—and the door opened far enough for me to catch a glimpse of the living room. Dirty dishes covered the coffee table. Crumpled shirts and pants covered the couch. And vases, stuffed with wilting flowers, covered the end tables and mantelpiece. It didn’t take a genius to see that Lee was in bad shape.

  “What’s going on?” I blurted out. “Are you okay?”

  “What’s going on? Karma’s a bitch—that’s what going on.” His dead eyes flashed with anger. “It took a hell of a long time to catch up, but it finally did.”

  Had Dantès murdered his son or daughter? I glanced back at my car. Nate was munching on his sandwich.

  “Is that your son?” Lee asked.

  “Yeah—Lee, please tell me what’s going on?”

  His body slumped and his anger dissipated. “My wife was—killed.”

  “… Wow… I’m sorry…” I was overwhelmed with sympathy for him—the same crushing blow had felled me.

  Then the coincidence of it all hit me. Our wives had both been killed.

  “Now will you leave me alone?” he said. His body sagged even more, like a balloon that had just been deflated.

  For the second time in less than an hour, my mind was reeling. It wasn’t karma that had killed his wife. It was Dantès. This was the proof of the damage he could wreak. My legs turned wobbly and my mouth went dry as another horrible possibility washed over me:

  Had Dantès killed Lucy, too?

  “My wife was killed, too,” I said, and let that hang there, letting him make the connection.

  “What?” He stared at me for a full ten seconds without another word. Something was stirring in his dead eyes. Then: “You’re saying this was revenge for what we did—after twenty years.”

  “Dantès.”

  “What the hell is ‘Dantès’?”

  “The king of revenge—from The Count of Monte Cristo.”

  “Are you fucking crazy? You came over here to talk your brainy bullshit?”

  I pulled the letter out, no longer worried about fingerprints. If Dantès was getting away with murder, he was also doing a damn fine job of cleaning up after himself. “Read this.”

  “Why?”

  I looked past him into his living room, at the signs that his life had been shattered. “I’m not saying it’s going to help, but things might make more sense.”

  Lee hesitated for beat, then shook his head, as in What difference is this going make?, and took the letter. He unfolded it and started to read.

  Was it possible that Dantès had murdered two people to make his point? Or had he murdered Lee’s wife just so I’d make the connection to Lucy? Either scenario proved that Dantès was cunning and ruthless. Nate had been handed a death sentence.

  As Lee read the letter, the movie featuring Lucy’s death started playing in my head. I’d stopped it from playing three months ago and was proud of that. For a long while, it had been the only show in town. The film combined the facts from the police report with gruesome elements conjured up by my imagination, which in turn was fed by the many horror and supernatural books I’d read.

  As the film unspooled, I watched it with fresh eyes. The anomalies in her murder were suddenly clues, indications that the killing hadn’t been random, just as Nate’s instincts had told him. Lucy had been targeted.

  She had worked late that night. Other young attorneys at Brown & Butler often worked late, but she would stay much later than most. While the others tended to work late almost every day, staying until nine or ten, she’d put in her extra hours all at once, working until one or two in the morning a couple of nights a week. That was to make up for the other days when she left on time so she could spend her evenings with Nate.

  That night she’d been the last to leave, which was usually the case on her late nights. She’d taken the elevator downstairs, walked past the security guard, then down the back corridor and out into the parking lot. I’d often wished that the guard had offered to escort her to her car.

  Detective Wyler, the detective assigned to the case, had told me the killer was waiting for Lucy in the shadows, probably right up against the building. He’d wanted the keys to her Accord, which I later learned was the most stolen car in the U.S. That fact alone made the case open and shut. The killer’s motive was crystal clear, so everything else fell into place, regardless of the inconsistencies.

  But now those inconsistencies made sense. They made more than sense. Those inconsistencies revealed what really happened that night.

  From the evidence, it was clear that Lucy hadn’t struggled. And Detective Wyler said she’d made the right decision not to fight back. But the thief had decided to shoot her anyway. Wyler chalked this up to bad luck. Most car thieves don’t kill their victims.

  But that hadn’t been the only inconsistency. This thief hadn’t even waited for Lucy to get to her car. He’d shot her in the head when she was still yards from the car. Detective Wyler said most car thieves waited until the victim unlocked the car and opened the door—but not this thief. The theory was that he was either impatient or an amateur, or both. That’s how Wyler explained this inconsistency away.

  But now the way the tragedy had unfolded made sense. It hadn’t been a random and amateurish attempt to steal an Accord. It had been a targeted execution.

  Lee looked up from the letter. “Do you want to come in?”

  “Sure.”

  *

  I ushered Nate through the living room, toward Lee’s kitchen. He eyed the mess but didn’t say anything, probably because he was more interested in digging into his bag of chips, which he hadn’t opened yet. Chips were an even more special treat than eating in the car. I never bought them for the house.

  Lee’s kitchen turned out to be a disaster area, too. The counters were littered with dirty frozen-dinner trays and Styrofoam takeout containers featuring dried-up, half-eaten meals. Dishes were piled high in the sink.

  I led Nate over to the kitchen table, which was miraculously litter-free. The only thing on it was a small TV. Maybe this spot was Lee’s sanctuary. “Nate, can you wait for me in here? Or is it too gross?”

  Nate sat at the table, placed what was left of his sandwich down—he’d wrapped the remaining third back up—and asked, “Is it okay if I don’t finish the sandwich, Dad?”

  What he was really asking was whether it was okay to start on the chips before finishing his sandwich. He knew I liked him to first finish his proper food before starting in on his junk food.

  “Okay,” I said. “And you’re fine in here?”

  He ripped open the bag of chips. “Yeah.”

  “I’ll be in the living room. Come get me if you need anything, okay, sweetheart?”

  “How long you gonna be?”

  “Ten minutes or so.”

  He glanced at the kitchen counters. “I want to go soon.”

  “We will. I promise.”

  He pulled a chip from the bag, popped it in his mouth, crunched it, then took a longer look at the kitchen counters. His brow furrowed, betraying his anxiousness.

  “Don’t worry. Everything is fine,” I said, wishing I could sound more convincing. “I’ll be right back.”

  I entered the living room and found that Lee had cleared off the couch. The crumpled shirts and pants were now in a giant heap on one easy chair. Lee was seated on the other.

  “Did you go to the police?” Lee said.

  “No.” I took a seat on the couch.

  “But you’re going to.”

  “Of course. What choice do I have?”

  Lee’s eyes shifted from me to the dead flowers on the mantelpiece.

  I waited for him to say something more, and when he didn’t, I spoke up. “How long has it been?”

  “Two months.” His eyes watered, but his face was stoic.

  I wante
d to say something helpful, or comforting, or uplifting, but I didn’t have anything that fit the bill. When Lucy died, nothing anyone said to me helped. Still, I tried to think of something to say to fill the silence. But it was Lee who spoke first.

  “You’re thinking that this motherfucker—Dantès—killed my wife,” he said. “And yours.”

  “… Yeah. But I don’t know that for sure.”

  Lee looked down at the letter. “I’m going to hunt him down and kill him.”

  My pulse quickened, and I sat up straighter. I was shocked, but not as much as you might think. This was the Lee I remembered from childhood.

  “That’s not why I came here, Lee,” I said calmly, but my calmness rang false. “We have to—”

  “Don’t tell me what we have to do. I loved Grace, and that bastard murdered her. I want him dead.”

  Even though Lee had married and settled down to what looked like an ordinary middle-class suburban existence, he hadn’t changed. He was reactionary, impatient, and unreasonable. And most of all, he was angry—his natural state.

  Of course, it was possible he had changed, and that his anger wasn’t the kind of anger I remembered. Maybe this was raw grief channeled into a sudden anger—an anger that gave him a way out of his troubles. Rather than sitting in his house, paralyzed, unable to bring his dead wife back to life—the same insurmountable problem I had—he’d just been granted the opportunity to fight back. To mete out revenge on the person who’d driven him to such despair.

  “We have to go to the police,” I said.

  “I told you what I’m doing.”

  “But they can track Dantès down.”

  “Bullshit. You’re not thinking straight.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. Do you want me to play it out for you?”

  I didn’t respond immediately, so he pressed on.

  “You show them the letter, and then what?”

  “Then we have to tell them what happened at Cold Falls,” I answered, knowing that wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

  “And when they check that out, what are they going to find?” He took a beat to let that sink in. “They’re not going to find a damn thing. Zippo.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. We’d been lucky. As far as I knew—and I’d researched it a few times over the intervening years—there had never been any reports about what had gone down that night. That meant the police wouldn’t have any evidence from that night—nothing they could use to track Dantès down. Our good luck—that our heinous deed had never been recorded, except in our own lives—had suddenly soured into bad luck.

  “They can investigate the present crimes, the murders of our wives,” I said. That was right—I was thinking straight. “They might find clues to who Dantès is right there.”

  “What happened to your wife?”

  “She was killed when her car was stolen.”

  “And the police already investigated, right?”

  I was silent. I had a good idea where he was going with this.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “They don’t have diddly squat.”

  “They have a theory, but now I can show them it’s wrong. The letter changes everything.”

  “Come on, John. Give me a break. The letter doesn’t say this guy murdered your wife. It doesn’t say anything about her. And it damn well doesn’t say he murdered Grace. We know it’s him, but the police don’t. Sure, they’ll investigate the letter, but do you really think they’ll come up with anything? I’ll tell you this: Grace’s case is definitely closed. An accident. A hit-and-run driver. What about your wife’s case? It’s closed, right?”

  My eyes shifted away from his, which gave him his answer.

  He pressed on. “You really think you can convince them to reopen her case? To investigate? To look for new evidence?” He leaned forward in his chair. “And even if you could—and you can’t—how much time do you have? When is your son’s birthday?”

  I knew my answer would make his case, but I volunteered it anyway. “In two days.”

  “So you’re telling me that you’re going to convince the police to reopen the case and that they’re going to solve it—all in two days?”

  No, I thought. And I was sure of that. No matter how you sliced it, it would take months, if they were willing to reopen her case, which was a pretty big if. The only thing they’d investigate was the threat to Nate, assuming they believed the letter wasn’t a hoax. “What makes you think you can find the killer in two days?” I said.

  “I didn’t say I could. What I said was that I’m going to hunt him down and kill him.”

  I looked over at the chaos of clothes on the easy chair, then at the dirty dishes strewn across the coffee table.

  Lee saw that and said, “Don’t worry. Now I have a reason to get my shit together.” He stood up, and my stomach churned as I suddenly had an inkling of his plan.

  “You’re going to wait until he goes for Nate,” I said.

  “What?” His eyes went wide—he was genuinely surprised. “Hell no. I’m going after him now.”

  I believed him, but I also knew he’d be there on Sunday to take a shot at the bastard if he couldn’t track him down before then. And if he didn’t get him on Sunday, I had no doubt he’d spend the rest of his life tracking him down, if that’s what it took.

  “Lee, I can’t do this your way,” I said. Even if Lee and I could actually find this man—and that was another big if, since I certainly didn’t have those kinds of skills and I doubted Lee did either—I couldn’t kill him in cold blood. It was morally wrong. I didn’t have the psychological makeup to commit murder. I wasn’t a vigilante, and there was no way I could put myself in that frame of mind. Vigilante justice was only meted out in books and movies. It was fiction, not fact. The only way to catch Dantès was to go to the police.

  “I didn’t ask for your help,” Lee said.

  “I’m going to the police.”

  “Did you hear anything I said?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Okay, go to the damn police, but leave me the hell out of it.”

  “How can I do that?”

  “That’s your fucking problem.” He motioned toward the kitchen. “And like I said, you’re not thinking straight. What about your son? You go to the police and they don’t do shit for who knows how long, how are you gonna protect him?”

  “Send him into hiding.” From the moment I’d gotten the letter, I’d known I had to find a place where Nate would be safe—but as soon as I said it out loud, the absurdity of the idea became obvious, and Lee pounced.

  “Send him into hiding? Like you’re some kind of covert ops expert?” Lee’s lips were curled in a smirk, another of his traits: a cocky arrogance.

  I ignored it. “While the police track down Dantès, I was going to send Nate to his grandmother’s in Illinois.”

  “It’s not going to work,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t it goddamn obvious?”

  It was if I wanted to admit it to myself. And since I didn’t, he did it for me.

  “You’re not going to get away from this guy—you’re not gonna be able to ‘hide’ your son from him. Who knows how long he’s been tracking you? At least long enough to coordinate killing our wives and maybe a hell of a lot longer. He knows what he’s doing, and you don’t. There’s an old phrase for what’s going on, John: you can run, but you can’t hide.”

  His smirk disappeared and his lips tightened as if he was thinking about the implication of that himself. He ran his hand through his messy hair and sat back down. In a softer tone, he said, “Do you remember that night?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Do you really remember it? Everything?”

  I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he was referring to some of the strange surreal elements from that night. We had never talked about those. There’d been no reason to. Instead we had talked about covering up our transgression and going our separate ways. But now I
wanted to remember every detail from that night. I needed to. One of those details might yield up a clue to Dantès’s identity.

  Chapter Four

  Lee, Quincy, and I had talked our parents into letting us camp out by ourselves for one night in Cold Falls, a Virginia state park. This was a big deal because we were eighth-graders and we’d never gone on an overnight trip that wasn’t supervised by an adult.

  We had picked Cold Falls because the state park held a special fascination for kids in Northern Virginia. The land had once been prime Native American land, and word was that it hadn’t changed since those days. Kids, including Lee, Quincy, and me, believed that this land was mysterious and magical. That somehow the Native Americans reached out from the past and glorified it still.

  Lee’s parents didn’t care one way or another whether he spent the night there. They didn’t give a crap about him, and even back then I knew they were awful parents. They were rednecks, but that wasn’t what made them awful parents. Back then, the Virginia suburbs weren’t totally gentrified, so there were plenty of redneck parents, and just like any other parents, the majority of them were good parents doing the best they could for their kids. What made Lee’s parents awful was the same thing that made any parents awful: how they treated their kid.

  They preferred doing anything else—especially heavy drinking—to taking care of Lee. So Lee ended up a rough-and-tumble kid, and he was well on his way to becoming a delinquent by the time I met him in middle school. His parents were always leaving him with his uncle while they headed off to get drunk or high with their friends. Lee would spend Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays with his parents, and then they’d drop him off at his Uncle Harry’s for the rest of the week and the weekend. So whether he was at Uncle Harry’s or at Cold Falls for this particular weekend didn’t matter to them.

  Quincy’s parents were more like mine. They paid attention to what their son was doing. But Quincy was a forceful kid, and he convinced his parents to let him go with a straightforward argument: It’s not like I’m going camping far from civilization. It’s not even far from home. Cold Falls was twenty-five miles from D.C., mostly a place for picnics and day hikes. And though the park was called Cold Falls, there weren’t any falls, so that wasn’t a danger.