Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

He looked at me. Smiled.

“And your name is Alan,” I said. “Alan Pemi. And you come from Berlin, New Hampshire, where your dad is still a logger and your mom does hair. They said to say hello and wondered when you would be home to visit.”

He nodded. If having his true identity presented to him made any impact, it didn’t show.

“Your problem is,” he said, “trying to link me to the kid. And you can’t do that. So buzz off. As to the rest, it’s police harassment. So buzz off again. I don’t sell dope to kids.”

“Maybe I’ll give the kids crucifixes.”

“Maybe you should.”

We sat for a while. He lit another cigarette. He had me and he knew it. I couldn’t prove much. Ricky Adelar, especially in his current condition, wouldn’t make much of a witness. He leaned back and crossed his legs. The chain rattled a little.

“Anything else we need to talk about?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Do you think you’re a vampire?”

“I am a vampire,” he said.

“How about Wolf?”

“Not yet,” he said. “These things take time.”

“If I took a mirror and held it in front of you, would you see your reflection?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m not Bela Lugosi.”

I nodded and stood.

“Up here in New Hampshire,” I said, “the turtlenecks get in the way?”

He shook his head.

“Not too bad,” he said.

I picked up Wally from the town square.

“You give the kids the talk?” I asked as he climbed in, the cold air following him.

“You bet.”

“They buy it?”

He shrugged. Ice had formed on the top of his hat and on the collar of his mackinaw. He rubbed his hands together in front of the heater vent.

“He hangs around the cemetery,” Wally said. “That’s kind of his big thing. Hanging at the cemetery.”

“The kids tell you that?”

He nodded.

“Could have the stuff buried there,” he said. “Not a bad place to stash things.”

“The dead keep their secrets,” I said.

He looked at me.

“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” he said.

“Maybe issue garlic to the kids,” I said. “And wolfsbane.”

Wally stopped rubbing his hands. “How’d your talk with him go?” he asked.

“He’s not stupid. He knows we have to connect him to Ricky Adelar somehow.”

“Won’t be easy.”

“He’s a small-time pusher. Maybe if we could figure out who supplies him, they would put the vampire out of business. Wolfsbane him.”

“Do you know what wolfsbane is?” Wally asked.

“No idea,” I said, “but I like saying it.”

“Does it work against vampires?”

“It must,” I said. “Garlic can’t be the whole protection system.”

“You’re having fun with this,” Wally said.

“Always wanted to hunt a vampire,” I said. “Now I can.”

Two days later I saw Steve Sweeter pruning trees. He stood on an apple ladder in front of the Simons’ yard. A sign on Sweeter’s red truck gave his phone number. He didn’t have a company name or a yard-service rig. You only called Sweeter if you wanted the best and you only got him if he felt like your plants merited his attention. Apparently the Simons had an interesting tree.

I pulled over and stepped out. The weather had turned colder. The noon sun did what it could. Sweeter wore a fleece, jeans, and a pair of earmuffs. He nearly always wore earmuffs. This day he wore bifocals, had saggy khakis tucked into a pair of outsized boots, and wore a black back brace the size of a heating pad across his beltline.

“Wolfsbane,” I said.

“Monkshood,” he said, not looking at me.

“Keep vampires away?”

“Poisonous,” he said. “Keep just about anything away. Hooded flowers, look like a monk’s hood. Aconitum genus. Also known as aconite and wolfsbane.”

“Why wolf?”

“Why elm? Why birch? Who knows?”

“Werewolves?”

He stopped trimming and looked at me over his bifocals.

“You’re a strange man,” he said.

“Given the source, I’ll count that a compliment.”

He went back to picking at the tree.

“Monkshood probably had various uses. Abortion. Killing your mother-in-law. Love charms. I’m not an expert on its uses. Might work against vampires and werewolves.”

I watched him work for a while.

“What kind of tree?” I asked.

“Metasequoia. Cousin of the coastal redwoods. Also known as a dawn redwood. They thought this was extinct until about nineteen thirty-eight when a Chinese biology professor wandered into a valley and found a shrine built below one. Big race to bring back the seeds. Harvard versus California.”

“Harvard win?” I asked.

“Depends who you ask,” he said. “Tree came back from the dead. Propagated all over the world. This one isn’t happy this far north.”

“Can you save it?”

He looked at me.

“Do you have anything else to do?” he asked.

“Not this minute. Where would I find some wolfsbane?”

“On the Internet, where else? The entire world is on the Internet, didn’t you know?”

“Any Web site?”

“Google wolfsbane, you’ll find it. You could check the health-food store.”

“I’ll let you know if it works against vampires,” I said.

“Is there one hereabouts?”

“Some say.”

“Well, well, well,” Sweeter said. “Vampires don’t like dogwoods, either. Christ was executed on a dogwood.”

“You see why I stop to talk to you?”

He looked at me. His glasses flicked light at me as he returned to his work.

The temperature turned twelve degrees at 9:37 P.M., one minute before I saw the vampire in the graveyard. I knew the time because I checked it on my Timex Expedition watch. It has a glow feature. I knew the temperature rang down at twelve because I used my night-vision glasses to check the tiny L.L. Bean thermometer on the zipper of my parka. I sat against Caleb Potter’s headstone without much else to do. My haunches had frozen and my back felt the thick click of cold dropping into my spine. And I was bored, because after sitting up for six nights in a row, the vampire hadn’t shown.

Until now.

You could not film it better. He came from the south end of the graveyard, moving slowly through fog and mist, headstone to headstone. Without the night-vision glasses, I wouldn’t have spotted him. He wore black. No surprise there. But I hadn’t been quite prepared for the precision of his movement, the graceful way he glided through the mist.

I reached in my pocket. Garlic, wolfsbane, a small crucifix. I took out my cell phone and called Wally.

“He’s here,” I said softly.

Then I turned it off.

Alone in a cemetery with a vampire. I had to smile.

I watched. I sat in the old part of the cemetery, up where the founding families had been buried. That section had been built on a small rise. From Caleb Potter’s grave I could watch most of the newer portion of the cemetery. The newer sections had a dozen mausoleums, attractive, I figured, to the living dead.

I felt pretty good, pretty smart watching him — until he disappeared.

Just like that.

I stood. He hadn’t moved behind a mausoleum, nor had he slid down behind a gravestone. From all appearances he had been walking along and had suddenly vanished. I couldn’t help admiring him. It had been a neat trick.

But when you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains must be the truth. He wasn’t a vampire. He hadn’t flown or turned invisible. That meant he had slipped into a hiding place. The fog and mist had made it more convincing than it would have been on a clear night. I pushed up the glasses. They didn’t help much in the fog.