Vampire U (6 page)

"Can you access alumni records from these computers?" I asked.

"Yeah, we send them a newsletter every fall, supposedly to keep them up to date on college happenings, but really, it's just to ask for money."  His eyes narrowed.  "Why?  Were there alumni at Beta House last night?"

"Look, I promise I'll explain everything, but first I need to do some digging.  I want to make sure I'm not barking up the wrong tree.  Can you give me some space?"

He nodded reluctantly.  "You'll tell me everything, right?"

"I promise," I said, then ducked past him and sat down at the desk I'd been assigned.  The ancient computer whirred to life, and after several minutes and with a little guidance from Jacob, I found myself staring at the alumni records database, a storehouse of thousands of names, addresses, and phone numbers.  For a moment, I despaired.  Where should I start?

"Morgan would know what to do," I muttered.  I snatched my phone out of my bag and noticed several new texts from a number I didn't recognize.  Dismissing them, I called my roommate.  The phone went to voicemail, so I hung up and tried again.  Then again.

Finally, she answered.  "What is it, Dani?"  She sounded exhausted and not particularly friendly.

"I need to know if there's any kind of...  I don't know, a social register or something, for fraternity parties.  Something online?"

Morgan sighed.  "Go to the school's main website and click on Greek Life under the Community section.  There will be an events calendar."

"How far back does it go?"

Morgan snapped at me, all traces of charm and ebullience gone.  "How should I know?  Let me go back to sleep."  She hung up, and I flinched.  Whatever had happened to Morgan - 
you saw his fangs sink into her neck
 - it wasn't good.  In the space of a night, the warm and welcoming Texan I'd met a week before had vanished.  I needed to help her.  To help all of them.

Following Morgan's instructions, I pulled up a calendar full of events, scrolling backward in time, month by month, until I was searching five years in the past.  I scanned the entries and selected the first Beta event, a formal party in the Spring.

"Bingo," I said as a list of names appeared, who had brought whom.  Small black and white photos accompanied each couple, their names and majors listed below.  In each photo, a handsome Beta had an arm around a slender, pale woman who clung to him as though for dear life.  Hollow eyes stared above white smiles.

I jotted down the names of the women in the photos, women who should have graduated by now.  When I had a few dozen names, I went back to the alumni database.

My search was easier this time.  I knew which needles to search for in the haystack.  I wanted women who were still known by their maiden names and still lived in Baton Rouge.  Out of nearly fifty names on my list, I found three: Jennifer Kerner, Jessica Davis, and Kara Thompson.

I took down their phone numbers and called the first one.  It was a beautiful fall day, and I wondered if I was wasting my time.  But the phone picked up on the fourth ring.

"Hello?"  The woman's voice sounded flat and dull.

"Hi, Miss Kerner.  My name is Danielle Archer.  I'm a journalism student at Romanus University, and I'd like to..."

Click.
  She hung up.  I redialed the number, but it rang and rang.  Miss Kerner wanted nothing to do with me.

I tried the second number and got the same response, a wordless hang-up from a woman who sounded sapped of life.  I stared at the third name on my list, the last woman who had stayed in Baton Rouge after graduation.  Kara Thompson.  I clicked back to the events calendar and looked at her picture.  It was hard to tell from the black and white photo, but her dress sagged on her slender frame as though she'd lost weight.  Hollow cheekbones reminded me of Morgan.

I dialed her number, but hesitated with my thumb above the Send button.  If she hung up on me, I would be out of leads.  I needed more.  I tapped her address into my phone and stood up.

Jacob had once again lost himself in something on the computer, but now his neck craned up.  "Where are you going?"

"To talk to someone," I said.  "I'll be back in an hour."  My stomach growled.  "Want me to bring back lunch?  Fried chicken, my treat."  I'd only been in the south for a little over a week, but I'd learned to 
love
 fried chicken.

Like most young men, the thought of food distracted Jacob from whatever he'd been thinking about.  "Absolutely!  Make sure to get biscuits and honey."

I smiled and left before he could remember my promise to tell him everything.

***

Kara Thompson's rental house was in a shabby section of Baton Rouge north of Florida Avenue.  Low bungalow-style homes with cracked siding sat on narrow lots with patchy lawns beneath the sagging branches of unkempt trees.

I eased my Civic to a stop in front of one of these and killed the engine.  Rap music blared from speakers somewhere nearby, and I heard a woman screaming at her children in a shrill voice slurred by a deep Cajun patois.

Steeling myself, I locked the car and hurried to the front door.  I knocked and waited, looking around at the house.  Dark, heavy curtains hung in the windows, and a faint, unpleasant smell made me think of decaying flowers and unwashed dishes.

I knocked a second time, louder this time, and finally heard a woman call out from inside.  "Keep your pants on, I'm comin'."  The ragged voice sounded more like a fifty-something smoker than a recent college grad.

When Kara Thompson opened the door, I tried not to recoil, but this sallow woman with skin like yellowed parchment looked far worse than the still-beautiful girl in the photo.  Thin, lank hair hung around hollow cheeks.  Her mouth pursed in irritation as she glared up at me with dull eyes sunken too deep in their sockets.

"What do you want?" she said.

"To talk about what happened to you," I said.  "Can I come in?"

Kara's eyes narrowed, and she cast a suspicious glance over my shoulder.  "Better get inside," she muttered, then turned and disappeared into the gloom, leaving the front door to swing on its hinges.  I opened the screen and followed.

The smell was stronger here, the stench of a neglected home and a neglected soul.  I felt bile rising in my throat, but I forced it down, taking shallow, uneven breaths through my nostrils.  With the windows were covered, only dim light filtered in from beneath the curtains, barely revealing mounds of clothing, trash, and the debris of a human life scattered around a small living room.

Kara Thompson plopped down on a sagging couch as though unaware and unashamed of her surroundings.  There wasn't another chair in the living room, but she invited me to sit on an overturned plastic bucket.  "What do you want to know?" she said.

"You went to Romanus, right?"  I knew I had the right address, but this felt so wrong.  Kara Thompson looked far older than her twenty-six years.

Kara lip peeled back to reveal a set of yellowing teeth set in inflamed gums.  "Best four years of my life," she said, her ragged voice dripping with sarcasm.  "You can see it's gone to shit since."  She waved around at her cramped, filthy home.

"What happened?" I asked.

Kara shrugged.  "Nothing happened.  I just didn't felt like doing much after school.  It's like waking up after a big party, you know?  You get one of those killer hangovers that ruins lunch.  Only this hangover never really went away."

"You dated a boy in college from Beta House.  Can you tell me about him?"

Kara flinched.  "Don't remember much," she said.  I waited for more, but her posture of exhausted apathy had faded into tight-lipped defensiveness.

"It may be important," I said.  "What happened to you...  I think it's still happening to other girls."

"You with them?" Kara hissed.  Her scrawny fingers clutched the couch cushions, and she dug her nails into the cushions as she leaned forward.

"I'm not with anyone," I said.  "I just want to understand what's happening so I can..."

"Get out," Kara snapped, her voice rising with a new strength.  "Get out of my house!"

"Miss Thompson... Kara, please let me..."

"Out!  Now!" she screamed, pushing her frail body up off the couch.  She shambled toward me, waving her sticklike arms in a flurry of skin and bones.  "Out!  Out!  Out!"

I stumbled backward as I tried to rise and tripped over the bucket, which sent me sprawling into a pile of foul-smelling laundry.  Scrambling backward, I raised my hand as if to ward off a blow, but the madwoman only loomed over me, screaming, her yellow-rimmed eyes full of hate and fear.  "Get!  Out!  Of!  My! House!"

I found my feet just as panic found me.  I threw the door open and ran out into the street.  On the curb, my hands shook so badly that I dropped my keys twice before I could get the door unlocked.  I glanced back and saw Kara Thompson standing in the shadowed doorway.  She had stopped screaming and stood like a statue, unwilling to step beyond the shade of the sagging porch.

I wanted to get out of the car, to look her in the eye and tell her about Morgan, but I was afraid.  Afraid of what this crazy burned-out woman might do to me.  Face burning with shame, I jammed the car in gear and pushed the pedal to the floor, sending a spray of gravel up behind my car as I left the strange, sick woman in my rear view mirror.

***

I'd promised Jacob fried chicken, but the thought of his persistent probing made me feel ill.  Instead of going back to the 
Scryer,
 I drove aimlessly, trying to make sense of what I'd just seen.  Kara Thompson's wasting pallor was a terrible harbinger of Morgan's fate - a stage-four chemo patient compared to someone who'd just found a spot of melanoma.

My thoughts turned inward as I drove, mulling over everything I remembered from the night before.  So much seemed blurry, and some memories felt more like ghosts of something I'd seen on TV than actual experiences.  Deep in thought, I rolled through a red light without slowing, oblivious until a car horn blared, loud and frighteningly close.  Reflexes took over, and I stomped on the brake.  The wheels locked with the screech of squealing tires, and my little car lurched to a stop halfway into the intersection just as a big delivery truck roared across, inches from my bumper.  I sat frozen for a moment, staring at my bone white knuckles on the steering wheel.  A chorus of honking horns snapped me out of my daze, and I rolled across the intersection and into a convenience store parking lot, my whole body trembling.

Shaken by the near-death experience, my fatigue washed over me like a cold wave, threatening to pull me under.  I wanted to shut off the car and curl up in the driver's seat for a nap.  I wanted to go back to Chicago and curl up in my mother's lap, to listen to her tell me everything was okay, that this was all just a bad dream.

My phone buzzed, rattling in the plastic cup holder, a harsh reminder of the strange reality I'd found myself in.  I picked it up and saw another text from the unfamiliar number.  I frowned as I saw that nine other texts had piled up unread.  I opened the first one.  MEET ME AT THE TERREBONNE DRIVE-IN @ 3PM, COME ALONE - M

At first, I thought it was just a wrong number, but the next text was more urgent.  D - DON'T BE LATE, WE DON'T HAVE MUCH TIME. - M

I scrolled quickly through the remaining messages, each more insistent than the one before it.  Finally, the newest text glowed on my screen: DANIELLE, YOU ARE IN DANGER.  3PM.  TERREBONNE.  DON'T BE LATE. - MD

Mander Deslauriers.  No one else in Baton Rouge called me Danielle.  What was he up to?  I felt a surge of anger at the thought of the mysterious young Beta.  In a way, he was the source of all my problems, starting with that stupid paper airplane and ending with Kara Thompson's wild diatribe.  But a faint memory stirred, a deep, passionate kiss that had swept away a night of terror.  Had that kiss really happened?  Had anything?  I hardly knew anymore, but I had more than a few questions for Mander.

A quick Google search told me that the Terrebonne Drive-In had been a local landmark for decades, clinging to a tenuous existence as one of the last drive-in movie theatres in the state.  It was out of business now, but I found the address, a half mile off the interstate on the outskirts of town.  Still shaken by my brush with death, I let the GPS on my phone guide me as I gingerly steered my car out of the lot with shaking hands.

The Terrebonne was twenty minutes away, and a glance at the dashboard clock told me I had less than fifteen minutes.  My brush with death had shaken me deeply, and despite Mander's dire warning not to be late, I couldn't bring myself to drive faster than the speed limit until a grandmother in a long Cadillac gunned her engine and gave me an angry arthritis-swollen finger as she roared past.  I relented and sped up.

I could see the Terrebonne long before I got close.  The land around Baton Rouge is mostly flat, and the drive-in's massive screen stood like a monolith on a low, flat hill, facing away from the interstate.  A skeletal framework of steel girders laced the back of the screen, and it seemed to lean forward, as though it might fall and crush the audience.  TERREBONNE DRIVE-IN THEATRE stood in tall, black letters, mottled by flecking paint and streaks of mildew.

I turned off the interstate and onto a long drive that led to the theater.  A rusted chain blocked entry at the admission booth, so I parked the car and got out.  The abandoned lot had the stagnant quiet of an abandoned graveyard.  Someone had slapped fresh coat of bright pastel paint on everything several years ago in a last-ditch effort to save the place.  Sun and rust had taken their toll on the thin veneer, but it was easy to imagine a time not so long ago when teens had piled into big convertibles to come see the latest Hitchcock flick and make out in the back seat.

I peeked through the admission booth's shattered window, but no one was inside, only broken glass, beer cans, and a few discarded condoms.

My phone buzzed, and I checked the screen.  Another text:  COME TO THE SCREEN.  SERVICE DOOR IN THE BACK.

I climbed over the chain and looked up.  The movie screen had seemed large from the road, but here it looked colossal.  Its once-white screen was stained with streaks of rust where the smooth surface had begun to crack and peel.  The towering structure was surrounded by a crumbling asphalt parking area big enough for hundreds of cars.