The Traveling Vampire Show

Chapter Forty

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.

“Yeah.” I walked toward it.

“The front door’s the open one,” he reminded me.

“If someone comes in the front door,” I explained, “what you do is run out the back and shut it behind you to slow ’em down….”

“Or maybe so they don’t realize you went out,” Slim added.

“Right,” I said. I stepped up to the back door and opened it. A warm wind blew in against me. I pushed on the screen door.

It stayed shut.

Because its inside hook was fastened.

“Guess she didn’t run out the back,” I admitted.

“So much for that theory,” said Slim.

“She still could’ve gotten away.”

“Maybe she didn’t need to,” Rusty said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“So what do you want to do?” Slim asked me.

I shrugged. I had to do something, but didn’t know what. I felt miserable: confused, helpless, scared.

Even as we stood in the kitchen chatting about theories, Lee might be running for her life with Stryker or someone hot on her tail. Or maybe she’d already been captured. Someone might be taking her farther and farther away. Or torturing her. Or raping her. Or killing her. Or she might be perfectly fine. Maybe she’d walked over to a friend’s house for supper or gone for a stroll to enjoy the wild, windy night.

“I don’t know,” I muttered.

Bitsy raised her hand as if she were in a classroom.

“We know, we know,” Rusty said. “In your brilliant opinion, we should forget about Lee and go to the drive-in.”

“Shows how much you know,” Bitsy said.

“What is it?” Slim asked.

Bitsy frowned and opened her mouth, but no words came out.

“Spit it out,” Rusty said.

“Shut up,” I told him. Then I looked at Bitsy. “Is there something you want to say?”

She glanced around at all of us, then said, “Just that you shouldn’t be so worried about Lee. She just went somewhere, that’s all”

Rusty smirked. “Thanks for the news flash.”

Bitsy scowled at him, then looked at me and said, “Nobody’s after anybody. I mean, you’ve got it all wrong.”

“About what?”

“Everything. That guy you keep talking about… Stryker? From the Vampire Show? He didn’t do any of that stuff. You know, sneak into your houses and chew on the book and do things with the roses.” Blushing fiercely and looking ready to burst into tears, Bitsy said, “I did it.”