Nothing in the room was familiar. The place must have been rented already furnished. The walls were bare, but here and there I saw picture hooks.
When he finally sat up, my father’s eyes were dark, and I couldn’t read his mood. “Well,” he said. “It’s all rather complicated, isn’t it. Where to begin?”
I opened my mouth to say, With your death?
But Mãe spoke first. “Did Malcolm tell you about taking me away?”
His mouth twisted. He stared at her, hearing her thoughts.
I heard them, too. She told him about the night I was born, about Dennis helping her into Malcolm’s car, about the house in the Catskills and all that followed.
He listened. When she stopped, he looked as if he wanted to put his head in his hands again. “It’s worse than I’d thought.” The words sounded even starker because his voice had no feeling in it.
“But it’s better to know, isn’t it?” Mãe leaned forward. The ceiling lights made her long hair glisten.
I haven’t mentioned how exciting it was to see them in the same room, even if they weren’t — how do I phrase this? They weren’t together. Of course I’d entertained a soppy fantasy of them embracing, all the years of estrangement falling away. I hadn’t believed it would actually happen, but I’d indulged myself in that fantasy many times.
Even if I couldn’t read his eyes, I sensed that my father’s feelings ran deep.
He looked from my mother to me. “I suppose,” he said, “that we’d better go to dinner.”
Chapter Seventeen
We sat outside at a restaurant called Ophelia’s, down the road from Xanadu. We ate oysters and red snapper and drank red wine by candlelight. Sarasota Bay lapped a few feet away. We must have made a pretty picture, I thought: a well-dressed, good-looking American family.
Our server said as much. “Special occasion?” he’d asked, when my father ordered the wine. “What a lovely family.”
If he’d known what we were thinking — or what we were — he would have dropped his tray. I felt happy that he didn’t know, that someone thought we were ordinary.
My father let us know that he wasn’t shocked by what he thought of as “the betrayal of my best friends,” and he thought the word friends with dark irony. (When I hear thoughts, sarcasm and irony sound deep red or purple, depending on the degree. Is it the same for you?)
“I might have deduced it, from the way Dennis behaved,” he said. “I suppose that I chose not to figure it out. It was more convenient for me not to know.”
My mother twisted a napkin between her hands. She wanted him to forgive her for leaving, for becoming other. Even if her thoughts hadn’t been loud, her feelings were plain on her face. The couple at the next table gave her a curious look as they left.
But my father instead turned to me. What about these murders? he thought.
Without saying a word, we discussed the death of Robert Reedy. I killed him, I thought. But I didn’t cut him up. And the other murders — I had nothing to do with them.
The server asked if we wanted anything else. My father looked at Mãe and me. “Bring more oysters,” he said. “And another bottle of mineral water.”
By this time we were the only party left on the veranda. “It’s safe for us to talk now,” Mãe said. “I like to hear your voices.”
“I’ve never seen you eat before,” I said to my father, feeling shy. “You’re not a vegetarian.”
“No.”
“Then why did you raise me as one?”
“I wanted to give you as much chance as possible to grow into a normal human.” He spoke the words as if part of him were listening and disapproving of his phrasing. “I feared that meat might over-stimulate your appetite.”
The candles flickered in the breeze from the bay. A crescent moon hung low in the sky. “A fine setting for a talk about blood and murder,” my father said.
“How did you know about the murder?” I knew he wasn’t likely to have read the newspapers.
“My friend Malcolm told me all about the deaths.” My father ate an oyster with astonishing elegance. By contrast, Mãe and I slurped ours down.
“How did he know?” I didn’t picture Malcolm as a newspaper reader, either.
“He knew because he was there.” My father lifted another shell to his lips and deftly ingested its contents without pursing his lips. “He’s been following you for years, Ari. You sensed his presence, remember?”
Mãe said, “Wait a minute. You knew he was stalking her, and you let it happen?”
“Hardly.” He refilled our wine glasses. “Malcolm told me about it when he turned up last week to talk business.”
“You’re doing business with him?” Mãe shook her head.
“Wait, let’s get back to the stalking,” I said.
“Thank you, Ari. Yes, let’s try to sort through this mess with a semblance of coherence.”
I didn’t like the tension between them. “When I sensed an other in the Sarasota house, that was Malcolm?”
“Most likely. But not necessarily. Vampires often look in on each other, you know. I don’t happen to be that sort —”
My mother made a funny sound, as if she were suppressing laughter.
And then my father did something so unlike him, so unprecedented, that I nearly fell off my chair. He winked.
So this is how they were, I thought. He exaggerated his mannerisms to amuse my mother. She pretended to be irritated. They were almost cute — a word I’d never used even once before. It made me uncomfortable.
“Malcolm told me about the murders,” my father said. His voice was deep and calm. “He said he saw you commit them, while he was invisible. He even commented on the delicate way you carved the bodies; he said he was reminded of ikezukuri, a technique used by Japanese sushi chefs he’d watched in Japan. A whole fish is carved live, reassembled on a plate, and consumed while its heart is still beating.”
“But I didn’t —”
“She couldn’t —”
“Do you think I believed him?” He sipped his wine. “My daughter capable of such barbarism?”
My mother was shaking her head again. “I’m confused.”
“Think it through, Sara.” Their eyes met and held steady. “Malcolm has created a narrative in which he’s the hero. For years he’s been voluntarily acting as Ari’s guardian angel, if you will, concerned only for her welfare. Now he comes to me with a proposal: he wants us to collaborate on developing a new oxygen delivery system. And by the way, he mentions that my daughter happens to be a serial killer, but that he certainly won’t tell anyone else. It’s a kind of blackmail, and he’s awfully good at it.”
“So you’re playing along with him?”
“I’m not sure I’d phrase it that way. Yes, I’m going along with his scheme, for now. I want to know where it leads.”
I pushed back my chair. “Father, who did kill those people? Do you think it was Malcolm?”
“I think it might well be Malcolm.” He looked at the white tablecloth, smoothed out a wrinkle near his plate. “He’s capable of killing without qualms. He has nothing but contempt for humans.”
“Then he killed Kathleen.” I said it softly, but inside I felt knives tearing at me. Mãe put her arms around me, and I leaned against her.
My father sat back and watched us. We didn’t need to talk further.
Back at Xanadu (I enjoy using the name whenever possible), my father showed me the room where I’d be spending the night. He said my mother would be across the hall.
“We’re going to talk a bit more,” he said.
My parents went into the room that served as my father’s study, and I walked out onto the balcony. Stars glittered in the night sky; I could see Polaris and Ursa Minor. Somewhere out there, I knew, were dark nebulae, dust clouds that absorb light and block our view of objects that lie beyond. I thought of asking for a telescope as a birthday gift.
A sound behind me made me whirl around. It wasn’t Malcolm, as I’d expected. Dennis stood there, his eyes bleary, holding a bottle of beer. His shirt was only half tucked into his jeans. His face wasn’t shaven, and he needed a haircut.
“So you found her,” he said.
It took me a second to understand. “Yes, I found her,” I said. “It wasn’t hard.”
He said, “Yeah?”
“One thing led to another,” I said. “And there she was. It wasn’t hard. You and my father could have found her any time.”
He came to stand next to me. We gazed down at the dark water and the lights of buildings on the other side of the bay.
“Ari, I need to ask you something,” he said. “I need your help.”
I waited. It was hard to remember how much I’d liked him, not so long ago.
“I want you to make me…” He hesitated. “Like you,” he said.
With effort, I kept my voice low and steady. “What makes you think I’d do something like that?”
He coughed. “Don’t pretend. I know you’ve done it. Malcolm told us about what you’ve done. Not just the ones you killed, but the kid in Asheville.”
So Malcolm had been around when I was with Joshua, too. “I didn’t make him a vampire,” I said. “He was a donor. A most willing donor.”
“Let me be your donor.” He moved closer to me, lifted his hand as if he were going to touch my hair, then changed his mind. “Even if you haven’t done it before, I can tell you how.”
Of all the oddities of my life so far, this one took the cake (an expression Mrs. McG had used on more than one occasion). I stared at his affable middle-aged face, at the muscles in his neck. For a second, I considered biting him. Then a wave of revulsion hit me, so strong that I had to hold on to the balcony railing with both hands.
“You okay?” His voice sounded oddly distant.
I pushed back my hair and looked up — at the man who had once carried me on his shoulders, who’d taught me physics and the facts of life. “You know all about it, don’t you?” My voice sounded hoarse. “You watched my father and Malcolm. So why don’t you have Malcolm do it?”
Dennis didn’t say anything, but his thoughts were easy to read. He’d asked Malcolm, more than once, and Malcolm refused.
“How could you have helped him take my mother away?”
“He made a good case for her leaving. She wasn’t happy, Ari.” But his thoughts went further. Malcolm had made a deal with him.