his gaze, nothing sleazy or secretive or even remotely salacious, only an open, honest interest, and although he did not take his eyes off her, she found that she didn't mind the attention. 'Aren't you going to introduce us?' he asked Rich.
The editor shook his head. 'My manners again. I guess I should have gone to finishing school. Pee Wee, this is Sue Wing, the newest addition to our newspaper family. Sue, this is Pee Wee Nelson. I don't know if you rem em her, but he used to be police chief before Robert.'
The big man smiled at her. 'Pleased to meet you, little lady.
There was SOmething about Pee Wee that put her at ease, that made her feel comfortable in his presence. She smiled back at him. 'Hello.'
'He's retired now,' Rich explained. 'Lives alone in the desert, spending his time living off the land and making mirrors like some leftover overage hippie.'
Pee Wee laughed.
'He's very talented, though,' Rich said. 'And a great feature story. I think we tap him for an interview and photo essay at least once a year.'
The big man squinted at Sue. 'You know, you look familiar to me. I don't know how, but it seems like I met you before somewhere.'
'I don't think so,' she said politely.
'Maybe I'm just getting senile.'
'Sue's writing an article on Chinese vampires,' Rich said. He cleared his throat. 'She thinks that's what we have here in Rio Verde.'
There was silence. Spoken at a different time, in a different tone of voice, those words would have been cruelly mocking, dismissively condescending, but Rich had said them straight, seriously, with respect, and that was how they were taken by the other two men. She was acutely aware of the fact that she was not embarrassed by the revelation, but proud.
'She's the one who told me about the jade,' he explained.
'I was doing some reading yesterday,' Robert said, ''and in the Basil Copper book I checked out of the library it talks a little bit about Chinese vampire legends. It didn't say anything about using jade for protection.'
Sue turned to him. 'So?'
'Well, are you sure you got your story straight on this?' Sue's jaw muscles tightened. 'Are you going to believe a paragraph in some book about vampire /egends or my grandmother, who's had firsthand experience with the cup
'Just calm down there, hon.
'My name's not 'Hon.' My name's Sue.'
Rich grinned.
'I didn't me ann
'Believe it or not, there are things that weren't told to Western writers about the cup hugirngsi. Western scholars don't know everything there is to know about my culture. I know a little something about it myself.'
'I was just asking,' Robert said humbly. 'I believe you.' He held out his right hand. 'i'm wearing a jade ring, see?'
Pee Wee laughed. 'I like her,' he said to Rich.
The editor grinned. 'I'm just glad she's on our side.' There was silence among them for a moment. Robert scratched his stub bled chin.
'Have you asked your grand mother where she thinks the vampire might be? I assume Chinese vampires hide during the day like American vampires. He has to have a place somewhere.'
'There are no 'Chinese vampires' or 'American vampires.' Those are only different ways of looking at the same creature, the cup hugirngsi.'
'Whatever. Do you know where he is?
Sue paused. 'I felt it at the school,' she said. 'The high school.'
She looked at Rich. 'The night I tried to sign up for your class.'
He licked his lips. 'At the school?'
She nodded.
'Did you notice anything about it?' Robert asked. 'What did it look like?'
'It's old,' she said quietly. 'That's what stood out the most to me.
It's very, very old.'
'Where did you see it?'
'I didn't see it, exactly. I felt it. I sensed its presence. It was like... I don't know. I just knew that it was there. And I knew it was ancient.' She met the police chief's gaze. 'It was by the lockers, at the end of the main corridor.'
'That's a place to start.'
Rich stared at the blade of his X-acto knife, turning the knife in his hands. 'What if it is as old as you think? What if it is centuries old? How can we right something like that? Our little lives pass by in a blink of its eye. We're nothing to it; we're no threat.'
'My grandmother is.'
Pee Wee shook his head. 'If it's always been here, how come it didn't start killing until now? I don't buy this invincible stuff. That's crap.' He nodded toward Sue, smiled at her. 'I'm with Sue here. I think we can right it.'
'I hope so,' Rich said.'
Robert nodded. 'Me, too.'
Robert and Pee Wee went into the paste up room with Rich, while Sue finished typing her article. Robert and Pee Wee left soon after, and she went into the back to help Rich and Fredricks put the paper to bed.
Robert returned alone a little after noon. Fredricks had gone home nearly an hour before, and she and Rich were alone in the back room. It was Rich's turn to pick up Anna from school, and Robert offered to accompany his brother on the trip. It was obvious to Sue that the police chief had something he wanted to say to Rich alone, so she declined Rich's invitation to join them. The editor promised before they left that he would bring back tacos and a Coke for her lunch, and she gratefully and hungrily accepted.
They'd been gone only a few minutes, and she was still looking through her desk drawer for a blue correcting pencil with which to go over the pages, when the front door to the office opened and she heard Carole's cheerful greeting. 'Good afternoon, sir. May I help you?'
The visitor had the pained, gruff voice of an older man. 'I need to talk to Rich.'
'What does this concern?' the secretary asked.
'I have an item to put in the 'Upcoming Events' column
'Then you need to speak to Miss Wing. She's out of the office right now.'
'Who's Miss Wing?'
'The chink that Rich hired.'
Sue felt her stomach drop and her chest tighten. She had to remind herself to breathe. The secretary's voice was just as saccharine sweet as always as she continued to talk to the man, but Sue heard only the tone, not the substance. The wordmthat word--was still echoing in her mind.
Chink. It was the fact that Carole knew her personally and still chose to refer to her in such a degradingly depersonalized way that hurt her the most. In that telltale moment, she had been granted a glimpse behind the facade, and she knew now that Carole's grandmotherly niceness was only a show, a front.
It felt to Sue as though the ground had been pulled out from underneath her. A moment ago, this newsroom had been her home, a place as known and comfortable to her as the restaurant, but now she felt like an intruder, her surroundings suddenly alien.
In high school, she'd never encountered any overt racism, but she'd heard the jokes out of the corner of her ear. 'Her pussy's sideways, too,' Bill Catfield had said once to his friends. She'd wanted to tell him that her eyes weren't 'sideways,' that her mouth wasn't
'sideways,' and that even a pinhead could deduce from that that her vagina would not be 'sideways' either, but she'd walked by and pretended not to hear, trying to ignore the snickers of Bill and his friends.
She'd done a lot of ignoring over the years. And she'd hought all that was done with.
But apparently not. She closed her drawer, walked over to Rich's desk and looked through it, and went back
