Chapter Eight
The next day Robin joined me for lunch at the Ghoul’s Diner, which proved just how much she appreciated my company. Even though the sign in the diner’s flyspecked window prominently announced YES, WE SERVE HUMANS!, nobody quite knew what that meant.
The menu didn’t have a lot to offer normal people with normal digestive systems. Strictly speaking, the menu didn’t have much to offer unnaturals either, because the food tasted so terrible, but many monsters don’t have acute taste buds and they eat whatever putrefying mass is put in front of them. They came to the diner out of habit, for the camaraderie. Certainly not the service.
“I’ll have the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, please,” Robin said to Esther the waitress, a metallic-plumed, pinch-faced, and bitter-as-grapefruit-extract-with-lemon harpy.
“What?” Esther squawked as if Robin had accused her of a crime. “No one orders a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!”
“I do,” Robin said calmly. “It appears to be the safest thing on the menu.”
“What?” Esther shrieked again. “Are you insulting our restaurant?”
“No, I am ordering a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” Robin had spent enough time in courtrooms with bombastic opposing counsel and unruly witnesses that she was not easily ruffled. “With a dill pickle, please. What are you having, Dan?”
“I’ll have the special,” I said, not wanting to provoke Esther’s ire. I didn’t know what the special was, but I knew it wasn’t going to be special. I also knew how easy it was to offend the harpy waitress, who chewed gum and cracked bubbles like small-caliber gunfire.
“Coffee with that?” Esther said.
“Yes, please. And in a clean cup.”
“No special requests!”
“I’ll have green tea,” Robin said.
“What? Nobody orders green tea.”
“I just did,” Robin said, then opened her briefcase to remove her yellow legal pad to review the notes her pencil had scribed for her.
Seated in the booth, I waved at Albert Gould back in the kitchen, where he mixed up orders and ponderously loaded plates with whatever seemed handy. Albert is a dreary, stinky, decomposing ghoul who doesn’t know anything other than being a short-order cook at his diner. He does a brisk business for breakfast and lunch, which means the Ghoul’s Diner is open 24 hours, since unnaturals eat breakfast and lunch at all different times.
Robin tapped her pencil on the paper. “I’ve tried to acquire the Board meeting notes from Talbot & Knowles, but since they’re privately held, the records are unavailable. They aren’t required to provide anything about the hostile takeover. Harry Talbot refuses to return phone calls, and I think that upsets Fletcher even more than being ousted from the company.”
“Do you think he has a case?” I rested my elbow on the flecked tabletop, hoping the speckles were a pattern, rather than maggot droppings.
“I’ll make one. I’m putting together a very strong legal challenge. Fletcher co-founded that company, and even though he’s dead, he’s still perfectly competent. Worst case, the new Board will need to pay him off substantially.”
“Wouldn’t he rather go back to working at the Basilisk Nightclub? He seemed happy there.”
Robin responded with a bright but hard smile. “A large enough payoff would let him open an entire chain of Basilisk Nightclubs, without interference from troublesome landlords …”
Esther returned to our booth where she set down a plate with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, sliced into two uneven pieces at an angle that was definitely not diagonal. The sandwich had been placed right on top of the juicy dill pickle. “PB&J,” said the waitress as if it offended her.
Next, she dropped a cup and saucer on the table with a hard rattle. The cup held a tea bag and tepid water with green algae floating on top. “Green tea.”
Then Esther placed a grayish bubbling mass on a blue plate in front of me. “Today’s special.” I watched the amorphous meal roil, saw a bubble rise up in the middle, then pop like a fart. “Enjoy,” she said, and it sounded like a threat.
“Excuse me, Esther. You forgot my coffee.”
“Didn’t forget it, hon. Just didn’t bring it.”
The door opened with a jingle and McGoo, in his blue beat cop uniform, walked in with the cute ten-year-old vampire girl at his side. He looked a little harried, and Alvina seemed unsettled. I waved, and they made their way over to our booth, walking past a round table where the Necromancer’s Club was having a business meeting. At an adjacent two-top, an Egyptian mummy and an Aztec mummy, apparently on a date, shared a milkshake with two straws to rehydrate themselves.
“Hey, Shamble,” McGoo said as he slid into the seat next to Robin, while Alvina sat politely beside me. “What’s a zombie’s favorite breakfast cereal?”
“I prefer pancakes,” I said, but I didn’t manage to derail him.
“Raisin brain!”
I gave Alvina an apologetic look. “McGoo, you shouldn’t be talking like that in front of the kid. You’ll ruin her expectations of humor for life.”
“I’m not a little kid.” Alvina sounded defensive. “I’m ten, and I just started puberty. Becoming a vampire made it worse, and I’m going to stay this way. This sucks.”
Robin’s brow furrowed. “I remember my teenage years. It was a nightmare.”
“Some unnaturals actually enjoy nightmares.” I was trying to sound reassuring, but I failed.
Esther came back to the booth, gave the newcomers an accusatory glare. “Now what?”
“I’ll have what he’s having, please,” McGoo said offhandedly, then took a look at my plate of gray goop and changed his mind. “No, I’ll have what she’s having.”
“We don’t serve peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” Esther said.
“Yes you do, it’s right there.”
“We’re all out,” Esther said.
McGoo didn’t back down. “Then make some more.”
The harpy waitress huffed.
Alvina said brightly, “Do you have Monster Chow?”
Suddenly the conversation in the diner stopped, as if a gunslinger had walked through the doors of a saloon in one of those old cowboy movies. “We’re a diner, young lady. We make fresh home-cooked food, not that packaged stuff.”
Behind the counter Albert wiped his hands on a rag, then tossed the rag into a soup pot before he marched out.
“I like Monster Chow,” Alvina said. “Do you have any breakfast cereal? That’ll do.”
“You’re eating breakfast cereal for lunch?” I asked.
“Your mother lets you do that?” McGoo added.
“I like how it turns the milk bright red,” Alvina said.
After a long, tense glower, Esther admitted, “I might have one box of Unlucky Charms in the back.” She strode off with a flair of her razor-sharp plumage.
Albert Gould shuffled around the corner and stood in front of the table. His face sagged and his skin turned various shades of green, purple, and yellow. “Monster Chow is gonna put me out of business. Take a look at this lunch crowd. It’s half what it usually is.”
I realized he was right. “It’ll pass, Albert. People still need to eat, and they come here to socialize.”
Albert made a slow turn to look at his clientele. “Would you want to socialize with any of these?”
“I see what you mean,” McGoo said.
“With all the new brands of Monster Chow, the flavor options and the pricing …” When Albert shook his head, grayish stuff dripped from his tangled hair and splattered on the table, on the floor, and in my food. Robin managed to hold up a napkin to shield her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “People would rather have convenient packaged lunches. They don’t respect good cooking anymore.”
I looked at the gray eldritch horror on my blue plate. “I guess they don’t.”
Albert shuffled back behind the counter, where he took dirty dishes from the tub and scraped the leavings into a stew pot for the beginnings of tomorrow’s Today’s Special.
I leaned closer to Alvina. “How was your first night in the Quarter?”
Alvina shrugged. “His place is a dump.”
“What were you expecting?” I asked.
Blushing, McGoo spread his hands. “I wasn’t ready for this. I would have cleaned up.”
“I’ve been to your apartment, McGoo. It doesn’t look better even when it’s clean.” I turned to Alvina. “But my place isn’t much of an improvement. It’s dusty as a morgue.”
“Actually, morgues aren’t dusty,” Robin said. “They’re very clean, once the blood and other fluids are cleaned up.”
“I’ll have to make changes and find a place for her to sleep, if she’s going to stay with me off and on,” I said, then looked closely at Alvina. “If you’d like that.”
“Yes, she would,” McGoo said, quickly adding, “but not all the time.”
“At home with my mom I always slept on the couch,” Alvina said. “I was pretty much raising myself.”
Knowing Rhonda, that might have been a blessing for the girl.
“I tried calling her mother,” McGoo said. “No answer. Voicemail greeting said that she’s dropped off the face of the Earth.”
“That’s preferable to actually speaking with her,” I said.
Robin frowned and looked at McGoo. “And you didn’t know you had a daughter until Rhonda asked for child support?”
Alvina chirped, “Actually, I don’t even know which one is my father.” She looked from McGoo to me, pointing fingers. “She says I’m their problem now.”
Awkward.
“The timing was … questionable,” I said. “It could be either of us.”
“Can’t you get a blood test?” Robin asked, then caught herself. “Ah, I’ve had cases like this before. After conversion to a vampire, DNA tests are no longer reliable.”
“She does look a lot like me,” McGoo said.
“No she doesn’t.” I leaned over to nudge the girl. “Don’t worry about what he says, honey. He wasn’t trying to be mean to you.”
“Is it better if she looks like you, Shamble?” McGoo sounded offended.
“I think so,” I said.
Alvina gave me a look of blunt honesty that only a child can manage. “You need to fix that hole in your forehead.”
“I’ve been meaning to get around to it.”
“If she’s going to stay with us in the Quarter, then Rhonda can’t ask either of us for child support,” McGoo said.
The girl was making the best of the situation, and she didn’t seem upset about the uncertainty. “It’ll be fun here. Lots of other vampires, people with shared interests.” Alvina grinned. “Want to know what I’ve been doing? I write a blog, and I have a very active social media presence. I’ve built up a following. People really like to read my stuff.”
“She sounds awfully smart,” McGoo said.
I agreed. “More evidence that she’s my daughter, not yours.”
Robin took a delicate bite of her sandwich just as Esther brought the two other meals. For McGoo, she had actually put the dill pickle in the middle of the peanut butter and the jelly. He didn’t mind, just picked it up and took a bite. The harpy set a cardboard box of Unlucky Charms Monster Chow in front of Alvina, who dumped it in a bowl and added milk. Sure enough, the liquid turned bright red like arterial blood. Grinning, the kid picked up her spoon and began wolfing down the meal.
“We want what’s best for Alvina,” Robin said. “I propose that we all help out. Since nobody knows who the real father is, Dan and Officer McGoohan will take turns, and Sheyenne and I will help out.”
I brightened. “It’ll be one big melded nontraditional family.”
“That’ll work,” McGoo said. “I’d be asking for your help with babysitting and daycare all the time anyway.”
“I don’t need babysitting and daycare,” Alvina huffed, then took a long slurp of her red milk from the cereal bowl.
“But you still need to clean up your apartment, McGoo,” I said.
“You too, Shamble.”
I wondered how long Rhonda intended to leave her daughter with us. As a vampire, Alvina would remain a little girl for a very long time, always stuck in puberty.
Esther finally brought a mug and set it in front of me, but I saw that she had given me another glop of green tea instead of the coffee I had ordered.
“Don’t forget to tip,” she said, then flounced away.