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“I don’t think you want to go in there with smoking hands that smell of blackened Jiffy Pop,” he said.
“I think I’ll just stay in the car,” I said meekly.
“Probably for the best,” Zeb said, nodding and pressing his lips together in a resigned line.
I stayed huddled behind the heavily screened windows, napping, while Zeb ventured inside. I was tired, drained, all of my being focused on my raw, healing skin. When your mortality is taken out of the equation of life, you tend to take certain things, such as paralyzing agony, for granted. Is that what it would feel like to go out during the day? I imagined it was only a fraction of the pain an unprotected vampire would suffer in full sun. And even that small portion was torture. Of the few ways vampires could die, death by suntan was definitely at the bottom of the list.
A short time later, my partner in crime startled me awake with a sharp knock on the window.
“I just barely convinced them that I was the great-grandson of the oldest guy there, whose name I did not know. I had to keep calling him Pappy.”
“What did he say?” I asked, rubbing my tired eyes. “Had he heard of Wilbur Goosen?”
“No, he was far more interested in a rerun of Matlock than talking to me. And then some other guy heard me say Wilbur’s name, and he made the weirdest, wrinkliest face I’d ever seen. Then he cursed at me in Lithuanian and whacked me with his cane,” Zeb said, rubbing his arm gingerly. “He then switched to English and suggested I perform various sexual acts on myself.”
“If you could do that by yourself, we would never see you,” I said, despite the glare Zeb sent my way. “How did you know it was Lithuanian?”
He seemed offended. “Like you’re the only smart one around here.”
“Sorry I put you through all of that for nothing.”
“No, on the way out—while I was dodging the cane—a much nicer lady stopped me. She apparently had her hearing aids turned all the way up and heard our conversation. She was an old flame of Wilbur’s.”
“Say what now?”
“When Wilbur Goosen lived at Sunnyside, he was quite the Don Juan. Ila Faye Pogue, the lady in question, was one heart torn asunder in the swath he cut across the Shuffleboard Circuit. At one point, there was a catfight in the rec room among three of his interests. Wigs and walkers and glass eyes flying everywhere …”
“I don’t need to think about that.”
“Mrs. Pogue had photos in her album. The administration was on the verge of asking Wilbur to leave when he just passed away in his sleep. It was very sudden.”
“He died? Are we sure she had the right Wilbur Goosen?”
“How many Wilbur Goosens could there be?” he pointed out. I nodded. “Besides, she had pictures of the two of them. Kissing.”o;Give me a minute.” He cut me off with a slicing gesture.
We sat in silence, with me staring into the distance, wondering what to do with my hands. Finally, he said, “I’ve been scared to say anything to Gilbert because I didn’t want him to be afraid of me or to turn away from me. It’s one thing to read about vampires and ghosts, it’s another to find out that you’re related to one.”
He studied the creases on his jeans. Unsure of my place in this exchange, I sat and waited.
“I knew Eugenia had the baby. My parents paid to keep her away while she was pregnant. When she had him, most of the town whispered about him being mine, but I didn’t do anything about it. I knew my parents were sending her money every month, and I figured that was all she needed from me. Don’t make that face at me, Jane. I was young and mortal … and stupid. I was sent away to handle some contrived piece of family business, and by the time I came back, my parents had sent the baby to an orphanage over in Murphy. They wouldn’t hear of bringing him to our home. The scandal, they said, the shame—even though I know for a fact my Daddy had several scandals of his own growing up around town. And then my parents died, and I lost the house to the jackass—”
“Gabriel,” I corrected.
“Right,” he said. “I told myself Albert was better off living at the orphanage, in a safe place, instead of bouncing around with me, living off card games, sleeping in a fine hotel one night and a ditch the next. That was just an excuse, of course. I didn’t know anything about kids. I wouldn’t have known what to do with him if I’d had him. I was a terrible father but a fun uncle. I’d visit Albert, give him penny candy and whatever money I could scrape together. But as soon as it came to real problems, the kid getting sick, getting into trouble at school, I was out of there.”
He grimaced. “When I got turned, I realized I shouldn’t be around him. It would be too confusing for him, a mysterious uncle who never aged and only visited at night. I was a piss-poor role model, anyway. And the people I did business with, they wouldn’t have minded roughing up a little boy to make a point. I stopped showing up for visits, and he ran away a couple of months later.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Part of me was almost relieved,” he admitted. “I didn’t have to worry. I didn’t have to bother. And then he came back, full-grown and the spitting image of me, especially in some of his less legal habits. And it was … nice. It was nice to be able to watch him, to see him running his business, being a man. I couldn’t always agree with some of his decisions, but at that point, I was supposed to be about sixty years old and still looked thirty something. I couldn’t exactly come back to give him a spanking and fatherly advice. He married, had a son. His son married, had a son. And I watched over them, all of them, watched them live their lives, enjoy their successes, make their mistakes. And most of their mistakes were a lot like mine. It’s sort of the Cheney family curse.”
“Good with women, bad with money?” I suggested.
He shrugged and smiled. “I never made contact,” he said. “I was still hanging around with the same type of people, and the less likely they were to connect me to the family, the better. I couldn’t stand it if any of them got hurt because of me. I thought I’d gotten rid of the paper trail when I set the fire in the courthouse.”
“Why do you tell me these things?” I huffed. “You know I have a Girl Scout complex.”
“I never made contact with them,” he said, ignoring me. “Not until Gilbert.”
