CHAPTER 5
I had to admit that Jordan was right. Given this morning, and now that call from my mother, I needed to get away from things, at least for a little while. Since the Arkansas River was only a ten-minute drive from downtown, that actually seemed to be a good idea. Sometimes you just need to get away from all the work and problems and relax. The thing is, most of the time that doesn’t work out so well for me. But for once, it worked.
I had left my car at the Twenty First Street parking area and hiked along the river until I came to a small cove on the shore near the end of Riverside Drive. It’s really just an indention in the shoreline, not an actual cove, but it is out of the main current and cuts into the earth a little, making a natural bench and a place that you can just hang your feet in the water. Of course, the latter all depended on how clean the river happened to be at any given time. This afternoon it was a little brownish-looking, and cold, so I elected to keep my tootsies out of said liquid environment.
The location also let whoever was here be totally out of sight of the sidewalk and road, which are only thirty or forty yards from the river, anyway. Some of the cops I work with would be the first to point out just how dangerous that is, a fact that I knew and didn’t care about at that moment.
Okay, I could still hear the sounds from the road, but I couldn’t see anything, and that was the whole idea. I had discovered this place a couple of years ago. Just across the street is an old studio/home that was built in the 1920’s. It’s now been converted into a theater and has been the home for a charity melodrama production for more than sixty years.
A good friend of mine performs in this show; she has done all four women’s roles at one time or another, and I had decided to come one evening and see her perform. Unfortunately, I got there an hour before the theater opened, so I had some time on my hands and started exploring along the shore when I found the cove.
I know that other people come here; an old Pepsi can and a crumpled-up page from the edition from last Sunday’s newspaper were proof of that. There are places that I have been that I would be willing to bet a lot of money that few if any people had been, and then I’ve found something to prove otherwise, like the ripped off cover from an issue of TV Guide jammed into a crevice on the side of a mountain, or a McDonald’s paper cup in the depths of a forest we were racing through.
That’s all right; I didn’t care that other people came here. Right now it was mine and mine alone.
A minor offshoot of one of the major ley lines that honeycombed the eastern part of Oklahoma ran along the Arkansas River. In fact, a piece of it came almost directly under where I was sitting. So it was not a problem for me to reach out and tap into the power that I could feel throbbing around me. After that, a mild compulsion spell was all I needed. Anyone who knew about the place, or suspected it might be here, would feel no urge to come down here for the next hour or so.
My eyes roamed over the water, watching a flock of ducks that had settled down and were coursing along in a V formation. They seemed intent on chowing down on whatever fish might be below the surface, which I’m sure was better than coming too close to the shore in search of treats thrown down by human beings.
It took me a little while to spot the distant forms of three kayakers that I had noticed going into the water near the parking lot I had used. Normally, these guys use the current and move downstream at a fairly rapid pace. But this group had apparently decided to do it the hard way. They were going upriver.
One of them, a blonde-haired guy about my age wearing a life vest and a lime green tee shirt, seemed obsessed with the idea of zigzagging his vessel. I know only a little bit about the sport, but I don’t think that the hulls are meant for that, so it occurred to me that this fellow might just end up putting his kayak upside down and himself into the water.
His buddies would, of course, have to rescue him, but if they didn’t, I suppose I might have to resort to rescuing him. I suppose, then, he would be grateful to me for saving his life and …
I stopped my imagination right then, not that I had any problem with where it was going. The biggest problem I had was the fact that I don’t swim worth a damn, and if that scenario was to come to pass, I would probably be the one that needed rescuing, along with Mr. Athletic, there. That whole thing was beginning to sound a bit too melodramatic for my taste.
“I was wondering if I would stumble over you.”
I turned and found myself staring into the face of DeLinda Hardeman.
✽✽✽
I let a long sigh out. I really wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone right then; that was the reason I had come out here. But it looked like I didn’t have too much of a choice in the matter.
DeLinda had made her way down to my perch from the opposite direction that I had come, the north side near the abandoned highway bridge. I was a bit surprised by that, since I didn’t even know that there was anything even vaguely resembling a path up there. Mostly, it just dropped off into the Arkansas River. But I have been known to miss things; at least that’s what Jordan tells me.
I just looked at her a moment. The thing that had me stumped was that she had gotten past my avoidance spell. A sorceress or a witch gives off a certain aura that another one can detect. Some people feel the tingling of power being channeled through someone else, usually because they aren’t trying to hide it; others just have an odd feeling when they look at someone else who is skilled in the craft. Mundanes give off an aura that is sort of blank. It’s not really, but that is the best way I have to describe it.
DeLinda fell into that latter category, or at least that’s what I had thought back there at the station. I was going to have to reevaluate that now.
She sat down on the uncovered root close to me. I caught a whiff of some sort of perfume, enough to think it had been hours since she had put any on and had not refreshed it since then.
“It’s nice to see you, Inspector,” she said. “May I call you Megan?”
There is the old story that knowing something, or someone’s true name gives you power over them, opens a window into their soul. That’s just one of those old wives’ tales and, you know, I never actually met one of the old wives who told those tales, along with throwing salt over your left shoulder and thirteen being an unlucky number. Okay, the latter does have some significance, but not nearly what everyone thinks.
“Certainly, Doctor; yours is DeLinda. Or is it Professor?”
The whole name thing may be a myth, but it never hurts to respect tradition, or take chances. There was a grand total of two people among the living who knew what my real name was, and I planned on keeping it that way.
She laughed and pushed her shoulder-length hair back into place. “I only use the titles to help me get good tables at restaurants. Since it’s an old joke, I’m guessing that you already know, of course, what PhD stands for.”
Piled Higher and Deeper. Yes, that was an old joke, although, given a few of the people who I’ve met in the course of my work that had PhDs, I’d come to the conclusion that it was actually a pretty accurate statement.
I laughed and then neither of us said anything for a good little while. Out on the water I could see a couple of long-legged birds drop down on a really narrow sand bar that stuck up near the pylon of a bridge. Just down the way there was a lone workman who seemed to be repairing something on the floating stage that was anchored on the west side of the river.
I began to toss a handful of pebbles out into the water, letting each one skim further and further; though most actually hit the water and sank with a dull thud. DeLinda watched me for a minute, then grabbed up a handful of her own. She let them sift through her fingers until only a fraction remained, then began to pick through those for certain ones before she let fly with one.
Her first attempt veered to the right and impacted a dark shape of something that was drifting with the current. My next two sank without even the dignity of a cool sound when they hit the water.
“So, are you going to tell me?” I asked after a good ten minutes of this silent contest.
“Tell you what?” DeLinda said and let go with three stones at once. The center one went the farthest, jumping nearly five times before it sank into the water; the other two did three bounces each before following the first one down.
This was going to be like pulling teeth. I looked over at her, expecting to see one of those “I know something you want to know and I’m not telling you right now” smiles. Instead, she was intently looking out on the water, watching it. I could see her head moving up and down slowly as if tracking the waves, themselves. I could do that; all it would take would be a simple spell, one of the first I had created on my own, but I preferred to rely on eye/hand coordination.
DeLinda fired again, a single stone that looked like it would skip farther than anything she, or I, for that matter, had thrown before. However, the best laid plans of anyone, even people skipping stones on the river, don’t always come to fruition. Because just as the stone reached a good twenty feet out from the shore, a duck came swimming into view and the stone slammed into the bird’s side.
The aforementioned waterfowl yelped, making the most ungodly sound, part pain and part indigent scream, then struggled into the air, darting toward a point out in the further reaches of the river. Apparently the bird was not hurt, other than its dignity.
I looked at DeLinda. Her eyes were wider than ones belonging to a Japanese anime heroine. For a moment neither of us did anything or said anything. Then both of us simultaneously burst out in laughter that had to have lasted for at least a full minute. At one point I had to grab onto a handful of ground to keep from slipping off into the water.
Finally I was able to gain enough control of myself to speak. “Madam, as a duly authorized representative of the law, I’m going to have to ask to see your duck hunting license, since I have my doubts that it is duck hunting season.”
“Of course it’s not duck hunting season,” she answered with a shit-eating grin. “Everyone knows its wabbit season!”
That was enough to set both of us off laughing again. I laughed until I was actually hurting, but it was a good hurt, the kind that were few and far between, and that today, for no reason that I could put my finger on, I had needed and realized now that I needed badly.
“So, come here often, or are you just in town for the hunting?” I said.
DeLinda shrugged. When I had first seen her she had been wearing a flannel shirt and jeans; after all, you don’t exactly dress in haute couture to go vampire hunting. She had traded those for a bomber jacket that had an old-World War Two Flying Tiger emblem on it.
“The hunting is what I normally do in my spare time. You know, between three ten and three fifteen in the ayem.”
“Sounds like your schedule is something like mine. You know, I’m hungry and in the mood for a drink. You up for it?”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
The Ricardo had started out as an open air café which was open during the spring and summer, usually closing by the end of September. It was a place for people to come enjoy the outdoors, the river and the season. However, a couple of years ago the new owners had the bright idea that if people like it in the summer, they might also like the place in the winter. So they built clear walls all around it and added heating and hot chocolate to their menu.
Frankly, when I heard about it, I thought this was a dumb idea and no one would come, but it had turned into a year-round hotspot for people. That shows you my business sense. I get it from my mother who says that, back in the 1970s, she once stumbled into an exhibit about a forthcoming movie and was totally unimpressed, figuring it would disappear into drive-in theater land about thirty seconds after it was released. That movie was Star Wars.
We found an empty table at the far end of the room, close to the shoreline. It still amazed me that you could sit inside this place and be perfectly warm while looking out at the river and knowing that it was January out there. I don’t know who did the magic work on the place, but whoever did it was good, very, very good.
“So,” I said after we had ordered drinks and a cheese stick appetizer. “Are you going to answer my question now? And let’s not start with that ‘what question’ retort. That’s amusing once.”
“Somebody turned on your professional attitude,” said DeLinda. “I’m really surprised you haven’t remembered, maybe a little hurt. Think back about three years ago to a little trip you took to Alaska, and I’m not talking about a vacation.”
That was not something that I had expected to hear from her. The only time that I had gone to Alaska had been to participate in the ten-day-long Eco-Challenge North adventure race. Adventure racing combined canoeing, climbing, biking and a whole lot of other things. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done, and I came out of it knowing a lot more about myself than I had when I went in. I had been part of a four person team, Team Poe. There had been twenty other teams.
I stared at her for a long time, and then it began to come back to me. Shorter, darker hair and just as cocky an attitude; no makeup and wearing survival gear does make a major difference in appearances. For a variety of reasons, I had put a lot of my memories of those ten days in a little closet in my memory that I really didn’t want to take out and look at.
“Team Northern Lights,” I said.
“None other,” she smiled as she drained her beer and signaled for a refill. There had been some close calls in that race. Some people from both of our teams had been injured and had to be air evacuated. The remaining members, including DeLinda, who I only knew as De during the race, had merged, even though we couldn’t win, just to be able to finish. We finished; it damn near cost us our souls and our asses, but we finished.
There were things about that race that I remember all too vividly and things that I didn’t want to remember, but it occurred to me that there were portions of it that I couldn’t remember. There are some forms of magic that take a toll on the user in the form of minor memory glitches. The kind that my skills lent themselves to was not one of them.
“I never knew that you lived here in Tulsa,” I said.
“TU made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Teach a couple of classes and the rest of the time I can do my own research. Cowboy Bob seems to think that my exploits and research reflect well on the university. Personally, I don’t care as long as their checks clear and they don’t try to put any limitation spells on me,” she said.
There were actually a half dozen universities in the area, some state run, some private, like The University of Tulsa. Cowboy Bob was the nickname people had given to the university president. No one knew if it was intended as a compliment or an insult. I guess that depended on who you were talking to at any given moment.
“Well, you have not gone without public notice,” I said. DeLinda was the darling of the news outlets, both local and national, when they needed a scientific expert to get quotes from. Of course, that meant she was also the darling of the trash tabloid news shows and supermarket newspapers.
“So, how did you get involved in vampire hunting? And you can’t really take it all that seriously, can you?” I asked.
She set her glass down between us and looked me square in the eye. “I take everything I do seriously.”
The vehemence of her words was a bit of a surprise for me; yet they seemed to fit her. I had the feeling that if DeLinda had grown up in Nowata, she and I would never have spoken, but we would have liked each other at a distance.
“I can respect that,” I told her. Very tentatively I reached out into the either and tapped into the ley line. The earth power that flowed through it was like a soothing shower, tinged with just a hint of the chill in the air. It was almost the end of December, after all.
“Thank you. I’m sorry I snapped at you, it’s just that I’ve had to fight all my life to get recognized for what I do and to be taken seriously. That sort of keeps you defensive and walking on the edge all the time.”
Oddly enough, I understood that quite well.
“So, how did you get interested in vampire hunting? I’ve always equated vamps with something along the line of Sasquatch.”
As we talked, I tried to probe DeLinda to see if she had any psychic shields. All I found were the natural ones that most human beings have. I’ve run into a few that don’t, but a portion of them are psychotic. Yet something didn’t seem right about her; something just seemed out of sync.
“Actually, it was because of Casey Leonard. I dated his son, Travis, for a while a couple of years ago. Casey was planning a book that would be a serious scientific look into Sasquatch legends, and he asked me to work with him on it. Two years ago we headed up to the northwest to begin looking at some of the traditional siting areas. His son went along and we found some fascinating evidence. Personally, I think there’s something to it; there’s too much physical evidence to think otherwise. What it is, I have no idea, but that’s not what you asked.
“It was during that first expedition that something happened. Travis was killed. The police put it down to a hiking accident, but the medical examiner either missed or refused to acknowledge certain evidence, such as the body being almost devoid of blood. Given a hiking death, bleeding out is possible; it was just that there was no sign of the missing blood at the scene. Plus, he had been convinced someone was watching us for the week before he was killed,” she said.
Given that this sounded like the bare bones plot to a paranormal romance, of which I admit I have read far too many, I had the distinct feeling that there was more to this story, and there was.
I watched DeLinda’s face as she spoke; her green eyes seemed intense, though far away. One thing my grandmother, as well as several of my sorcery teachers at university, always said was that sometimes a magic user can learn as much without using magic as they can using it.
“When we got back home, there was another autopsy, which didn’t give us any answers, just a lot more questions. Like, there were bite marks on his neck and wrist directly over his veins, and there was a lot of damage done there, as if someone was attempting to hide those kinds of wounds.
“During that second autopsy, they found some organisms in the wound that shouldn’t be there. The thing was, no one could identify them. Casey pulled some strings and got access to evidence that hadn’t been made public from some other deaths where these same organisms had shown up. Most of them were listed as either natural or accidental deaths. But when you got to looking at the details of these deaths, at least twenty per cent of them could be listed as so-called vampire killings,” she said. “Thankfully, none of the tabloids picked up on Travis’s death. I could have just seen my face on the cover of the Weekly World News or the National Enquirer.”
Vampire killings? I had trouble wrapping my mind around it, even if it was coming from someone who was as well respected a scientist as DeLinda. The first thing that occurred to me was some kind of disease that drives its victims to kill others and that kept passing it on. I suppose you could call that a vampire disease.
“Does the Center for Disease Control have anything on this? “I asked
“They are quite aware of it and have a couple of people working on the problem. It’s been going on for some years, at least cases that they can document, since it doesn’t crop up enough for them to devote a ton of manpower to it, though they are looking.”
“And you’ve been looking ever since,” I said.
“On the down low. That’s why I usually wear a wig and some thick plain glass glasses, to give myself a slightly different look. I wouldn’t really object if it became known what I was doing, but some of my colleagues might throw roadblocks in the way of my other research.”
“Cover your ass; boy, do I know that philosophy. It’s the same no matter what you do or what you’re trying to do.”
“You got that, girlfriend.”
A buzzing came from DeLinda’s coat pocket. It took me a minute to recognize the ring as being the theme from the Addams Family. She pulled out a mobile phone and swiped the screen open; there was obviously a text message waiting for her, because a few moments later her fingertips were flashing over the keyboard. Seeing something like that always amazed me, since I can do maybe twenty words a minute if I’m lucky and watching what I’m doing. Trust me, you don’t want to see some of the texts I’ve done. They aren’t pretty.
“I’ll come out with something when I’ve got some hard evidence. But that won’t stop me from looking.”