“I’ll tell you what, you get in your car and get the hell out of here, and I’ll keep my girl here from kicking you in the goods, too.” Dick smirked. “She’s done it before. She’ll do it again.”
Todd look one look at my size-nine boots. I smiled, my fangs fully extended over my lip. Todd ran for it. The crowd groaned in disappointment and dispersed.
After I handed over cash to cover the broken stools and pitchers, a more forgiving Norm allowed us back into the bar to press ice to our rapidly healing faces.
“You should know better,” Norm told Dick.
“Hey, Jane threw just as many punches as I did!” Dick cried.
Norm shook his head. “She was hitting in self-defense. You started it.”
“Todd hit me first. Besides, how was I supposed to know he was dumb enough to head all the way to Memphis without even looking at the stupid tickets? I thought he would have figured it out weeks ago.”
Norm pointed a fatherly finger at Dick. “You know what I mean. If you didn’t do your backalley deals at my bar, I wouldn’t have all that many fights. Why did you even come tonight, anyway? You knew Todd would come looking for you, and you know he loves Cover Band Night.”
“I forgot all about it,” Dick said, avoiding eye contact with me. Norm muttered something under his breath and turned his back to help another customer.
I stared at Dick, who busied himself pouring the remaining ice from his face pack into my water glass and stretching his freshly healed jaw. “Dick, what’s the third thing?”
Dick stared at me, his face blank. “Did you get a concussion, Stretch?”
“The third thing that men do to get over a break-up. Drinking, not talking about your feelings, and then what?” I said, growing suspicious. “It’s fighting, isn’t it? You set this up.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dick said, still not making eye contact.
“You set this up,” I repeated, poking him in the sides.
“Yes,” he mumbled in the tone of a little boy who’d burnt his Mother’s Day breakfast in bed. He smirked. “I didn’t arrange for him to hassle me, but I figured, you’re sad, you’re angry, you didn’t get to hit anything the other night. Todd was going to be there anyway, so why not let you get some stuff out of your system? I always feel better after a good cathartic tussle.”
“You did all this for me?” I laughed.
He shrugged. “You feel better, right?”
I thought about it for a second and realized that I did. That beating the tar out of a Bruce Springsteen fan with poor attention to detail had made me feel better than all the liquor and ice cream and Bette Midler in the world. “I sort of love you, Dick.”
“While my heart and all my other parts belong to a certain adorable redhead, I love you, too, Stretch,” he said, giving my shoulder a brief squeeze. “You’re the sister I never really wanted.”
“Nice.”
7 When you’re having relationship problems, channel your energy into productive projects. Join a charitable group, or volunteer with an animal shelter or a soup kitchen. (It’s best to avoid the temptation of blood drives.)
—Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less Destructive Relationships Once I decided not to let moping take over my life, it was a lot easier to get up and going in the evenings.
I cleaned the house from top to bottom, something I’d neglected during the busy months before the shop opened. I did a total inventory of the valuables to make sure Jenny and Grandma Ruthie hadn’t managed to sneak into the house while I was out of town. I reorganized my library, and found about fifteen paperback copies of Pride and Prejudice.I also found a few titles that Mr.
Wainwright had sent home with me from the shop to help me “acclimate to my new culture”:Love Customs of the Were,a few volumes on exotic were species, and The Spectrum of Vampirism. Mr. Wainwright loaned it to me the year before to help me find my way through the subtle levels of vampirism. Honestly, it’s like Scientology. I boxed them up and set them in Big Bertha’s trunk, so I’d remember to return them to the stock.
And finally, I packed up everything associated with Gabriel: the ticket stubs from our first movie date, the little platinum unicorn necklace he’d given me for Christmas, the travel guides I’d pored over before we left on our trip. I put them in a cardboard box and took them down to the root cellar. Maybe one day, I’d be strong enough to take them out again or even throw them away, but for the moment, I just wanted them out of sight.
In the wake of our repetitive bonding experiences, Andrea, Dick, and I developed a new schedule at the shop. Andrea and I would open, brew coffee, go through mail, and prepare orders for shipping for about an hour before customers started showing up. Andrea generally needed a nap around midnight, so Dick would show up and give me a hand until closing. In the interest of keeping Andrea from being completely nocturnal, she got Wednesdays off, and Dick helped me open. The routine was relaxed but organized enough to suit my compulsive librarian’s soul.
So, imagine our surprise when we arrived on a Wednesday night to find a man in wrinkled khakis sleeping against the front door of the shop. Sadly, it wasn’t all that odd to find a drunk sleeping it off in our doorway, so Dick rousted him with a few shoves to the shoulder, while I gathered the delivery parcel Rip Van Winkle was using as a pillow.
“You’re going to have to find some other place to rest your head.” Dick sighed, pulling at the man’s shirt. “Come on, buddy.”
Rip snorted and yawned. “Jane Jameson?”
“I told you not to put it on the door!” Dick exclaimed, pointing at the little sign that read, “Jane Jameson, Proprietor. You have enough problems without giving the crazies your name.”
“I’m looking for Jane Jameson,” the man said, yawning and scratching at two days’ worth of beard growth. “I’m Emery Mueller, Gilbert Wainwright’s nephew.”
As advertised, Mr. Wainwright’s nephew, Emery, was both milquetoast and mealy-mouthed.
Emery was the son of Mr. Wainwright’s only sister, Margaret, who had moved to California in the 1960s and married a radio evangelist. Mr. Wainwright had only seen Emery on rare visits to the Hollow before Emery moved to Guatemala to teach English at a mountain seminary. He’d described Emery as an odd little boy who’d grown into an odd little man. And considering the level of oddity in Mr. Wainwright, that was saying something.
The cherry on this sundae of genetic improbability was that Emery and Mr. Wainwright also happened to be Dick’s descendants. Dick had watched over the Wainwright family, the illegitimate product of a prevampirism dalliance with a servant girl, for generations. He considered Mr. Wainwright to be the “pick of the litter,” stepping in to pay for his college tuition and proudly watching as Mr. Wainwright became one of the first Hollow boys to volunteer for duty in World War II. Dick was afraid that his less-than-upstanding connections might put the family at risk, so he’d only confessed to the relation the previous year, after Mr. Wainwright died. Watching those two bond, a vampire who appeared to be in his thirties giving fatherly advice to a ghost in his seventies, was as mind-boggling as it was touching.
Dick was obviously not as impressed with the latest branch of the Wainwright family tree. I thought living in South America was supposed to make you all tan and scruffy-sexy, like Harrison Ford. Emery just seemed pale and clammy, like gone-over cheese. He wore hornrimmed glasses and a permanently constipated expression. His skin was pitted with old acne scars, which might have remained unnoticed if not for his tendency to flush and blush at the slightest provocation. His hair and his eyes were the same color, which I can only describe as “dust.”
Ever since Emery had responded to Mr. Wainwright’s death with a telegram telling us to proceed with the funeral without him, Dick and I had a running bet about when Emery would show up. I guessed four months, Dick guessed six months, and Mr. Wainwright guessed a year. We still had no idea how we would collect a wager from a ghost.
“Four months!” I cried triumphantly to Dick, who slapped a twenty-dollar bill into my hand.
“Hi, Emery, I’m Jane,” I said to a clearly confused Emery. “This is my friend Dick.”
“You sent the e-mail.” Emery yawned. “To let me know about Uncle Gilbert.”
“Yes, several months ago,” I said, smiling in that overly sweet way only Dick knew was insincere. “Why don’t you come inside?”
“Oh, thank you. I drove that rental car all the way from Louisville without air conditioning. It was terrible,” he said, heaving himself off the ground.
My lips quirked involuntarily at his pronunciation of Louisville. Not because he had an accent or anything. One’s Kentucky street cred can be determined based on how one pronounces Louisville. Luh-vul, you’re from west Kentucky. Louie-ville, east Kentucky. Louis-ville, you’re from Illinois.
“I know it seems odd to show up unannounced at this time of night. And it’s so nice to meet you,” Emery simpered as we led him into the shop. “While I dearly love doing the Lord’s work, I’m so glad to be back here. I spent many hours as a child in the store, poring over the books.”
“Really?” I said, arching a brow. “It’s just that they’re all, you know, occult books. Mr.
Wainwright said you were very devout, even as a child. He said you tried to baptize him with bottled water when you were nine.”
Emery flushed pink and cleared his throat. “Yes, well, spending time here was a taste of the forbidden fruit. I was fascinated by the books because they were so different from anything in my house. It drove my mother crazy.”
Mr. Wainwright appeared behind Emery and nodded. “He did spend a lot of time here. And it was his predilection for the woodcarvings of the nude rituals practiced by eastern European vampire clans that upset his mother. I had to hide all the books that bared what his mother called
‘lady bumps.’ It was horrifying.”
Dick excused himself so he could go out to the parking lot and laugh. I was stuck chewing on my lip and praying for a straight face. I flipped on the light switch, and Gilbert gave a loud gasp at the appearance of the shop. “It’s so different!”