Robert closed the door. "What do you make of that?" "Is that officer a religious man?" "Didn't used to be."
Woods put the unlit cigarette in his mouth. "Wrath of
God. That scares me."
"You buy it?"
"No. But it scares me that other people do." He examined the map of Rio Verde on the wall opposite the window. "It scares me a lot."
Sue stood uncomfortably in the middle ofiJanine's living room, waiting for her friend to get out of the bath room, acutely conscious of Janine's mother lying passed out on the couch.
"One more minute!" Janine called.
Sue did not answer, not wanting to wake the snoring woman. She glanced slowly around the room. The interior of Janine's house looked like the office of a cut-rate travel agency, the paneled walls decorated with posters advertising the sightseeing attributes of various countries, the posters tacked up at off-center angles that were supposed to be artistic but instead looked sad. "Early white trash," Shelly called the decor. Sue could not bring herself to be quite that harsh, but she had to agree thatJanine's mother would not win any awards for interior decorating.
Janine walked in from the hallway, adjusting her tasseled cowgirl jacket. "Thanks for coming. I don't know what I'd do without you.
"That's what friends are for," Sue whispered.
"So says the song." Janine nodded toward her mother. "And you don't have to whisper. She's out like a light."
"We'd better get going. I have a busy day ahead of me. I have to drop the car off for my father. I work at the newspaper in the morning and the restaurant in the afternoon. What time do you want me to pick you up to night?"
"I'll get a ride." Janine straightened her hat. "God, I hate car problems."
"Who doesn't? "They're talking about laying people off at the ranch, you knows. That's why I'm filling in today, to earn some brownie points."
"Laying people off?
"They said it's because of the stories in your paper."
Sue bristled. "That's stupid. The paper printed an article about a murder, and now the Rocking D's immediately going to start firing people because the bad publicity might scare some people away next summer? That doesn't make sense."
"No," Janine admitted. "But it sounded logical when Hollis talked to us. I mean, he has a point. Why does the paper always focus on bad and negative things? Why doesn't it ever show some of the positive aspects of our town?"
"The paper focuses on bad things? Since when? All the Gazette's ever had in it are ads and fluff stories about old people. You've said so yourself. Now people are being murdered, the paper's reporting it, and you think the coverage is too negative?"
"You're getting awfully fired up about the responsibilities of the newspaper lately."
"Yeah, well." Sue felt her face flush. She looked at her watch. "We'd better get going. Or else we'll both be late."
Janine followed Sue out the door, closing it and locking it behind her.
She put the keys in her right front pocket, and there was a clanking rattle as they fell through a hole in the pocket and down her pants leg onto the ground. She picked the keys up, putting them into her other pocket. "So what are you going, to do with the extra money you're making at the paper?" "I'm saving it for college." "Still?"
"It's expensive." /" "Why don't you break down and do something fun for a change? Celebrate. All you have is that old record player. Why don't you buy a new stereo? Put a CD player on layaway at Radio Shack."
"Radio Shack? You expect me to trust that place? It's an electronics store, and they don't even know how to use a cash register. They still write everything out by hand."
"I'm just saying do something fun for once. At least with your first paycheck."
Sue shook her head. "I'm not getting any younger."
Janine nodded slowly as they walked out to the car. "That's true.
Neither of us are."
There was a resigned sadness in her friend's voice that made Sue think of the unborn baby, and she found herself surreptitiously glancing at the other girl's abdomen. Had she made a decision yet? Had she told her mother?
Maybe that's why her mother had gotten drunk last night and passed out on the couch.
Sue unlocked the passenger door; walked around the front of the station wagon. From down the street came the sound of a souped-up engine, roaring, growing louder. A red Mustang sped by.
"Go back to China" a male voice yelled.
There were hoots of encouraging laughter, and then the Mustang squealed around the curve of the road and was gone.
"Assholes," Janine said.
"Who was that.
It looked like Bryant Taylor's car."
"God, he's twenty years old, and he's still cruising around yelling insults at people?" Sue shook her head. "When's he going to grow up?"
"He and his buddies are probably looking for a high school couple walking to school now, so they can yell, "Fuck her! I did!" "
Sue laughed. "I remember that one."
The two of them got in the car, and Sue started the engine, put the car into gear, and made a U-turn in the middle of the street.
Janine pulled down the sun visor to examine her face in the small makeup mirror. "Have you talked to Shelly lately?"
Sue shook her head. "Not since last week. She never seems to be home when I call. Why?"
"She's never home when I call either, but I saw her yesterday at Circle I'm worried about her. She's... I don't know. I think she's losing it."
"Losing it?"
"I went over to talk to her, and she started giving me all this church talk, all this stuff about blood and death and Jesus and I don't know what all. It was creepy."
"Shelly?" Sue said, surprised.
Janine nodded. "Shelly. And, I don't know how to put this delicately, but she smelled. Bad. Like she hadn't bathed for a long time, you know? It's hard to describe, but you'd understand if you were there.
It was weird. Scary. The way she looked and the way she was talking, I kept thinking--I know this is cold, but I kept imagining her morn, dead, in the kitchen or something, stabbed.
Shelly hates her morn, you know."
"I don't think she hates her."
"I think she does, and the way she was acting yesterday .. ." Janine shivered. "I don't even want to think about it."
"A lot of strange things have been going on lately." "You can say that again."
Sue drove for a moment in silence. "What would you say," she said finally, "if I told you there was a vampire in Rio Verde?"
"I'd say I've heard that one before."
Sue did not take her eyes off the road, but she reached into the open purse next to her. Her fingers found what she was looking for---one of the small jade stones that her grandmother had given her--and she offered it to Janine, opening her palm. "Here. This is for you."
What is it? This is a stone!
"What is it?
Jade. It will protect you from vampires. '
"I thought crosses did that."
"Not according to my culture."
Janine said nothing, looked at the jade. "You're serious about this, aren't you?"
Sue nodded, feeling a little embarrassed but not as much as she'd expected. "These people who were killed, the man at the Rocking DID, they were killed by a vampire, or what we call a cup hu #rngsi."
Janine licked her lips. "One of the maids said she saw a vampire," she admitted.
"What did she say he looked like?"
"A she."
"The vampire was a woman?"
"Yeah. La Verona."
The flesh prickled on Sue's arms. La Verona, the wailing woman of the canals, was an Arizona legend that had been used by more than one mother to ensure that her child did not venture too close to open waterways. In the version Sue had heard, La Verona had been tall and wraith-thin, with white skin and long black hair. In Sue's mind, La Verona had always had vaguely Asian features, and it was that image that chilled her now, made her feel so frightened.