your pantry and fridge with a few basics and staples, bread, butter…”
She bustled them into seats and set out plates and cups and cut the brownies into squares, then brought the pot over from the filter machine. Ellen felt her nose twitch; there was some seriously good coffee in there, and if she couldn’t have a stiff drink, she could use a cup. Monica went on: “And I put a lasagna and a salad in the fridge too, in case you just want to throw something in the oven for dinner instead of cooking or going out. There’s laundry stuff and basic linens and so on, and a few clothes, jeans and sweats and underwear in the bedroom, and toiletries. You can get the rest of what you need anytime, of course, but we wanted to, you know, help.”
Ellen looked at her beaming smile and dazedly bit into one of the brownies. They were good.
It’s June Cleaver and the Welcome Wagon of Nosferatu Manor, she thought.
“Ah…” If resistance is futile, so’s tact. “You’re all…”
“Lucies?” Jose said cheerfully. “Yeah.”
I’m not surprised. You’ve all got something about the eyes, this haunted look. I think I probably do too, now.
“Lucy is an exclusionary stereotype. I prefer to think of us as helpers,” Monica said, a slight trace of primness in her tone for a moment.
Yeah, helper as in Hamburger Helper, Ellen thought.
“It’s not as much of a hard-and-fast distinction as the renfields like to think, either,” Peter said.
Ellen went on: “This place was empty? Who was here before?”
A ringing silence fell. Everyone looked away for an instant, except Peter, who coughed and explained: “Mmmm, there’s sort of a Lucy Code; you don’t ask questions like that, about people who are… gone. Though in fact Dave used to live here, before he got promoted.”
“He’s up at the Company Security barracks now, teaching unarmed combat to the rent-a-cops,” Jose said. “And the Do?a takes him along as muscle sometimes. Good riddance.”
A laugh. “Though Peter kicked his ass!”
She looked at the slight blond man with surprise. He smiled slightly and shrugged.
“Only because he was surprised I knew anything at all. I could never have taken him if he hadn’t gotten overconfident. He’s a professional.”
“That’s how he ended up here. Came to a tournament up in Paso Robles, and the Do?a was there. Decided Hey, I want some of that and what she wants she gets. No accounting for tastes, I guess,” Jose said.
“David could be difficult,” Monica conceded.
Her smile broadened and she leaned forward to pat the newcomer’s hand.
“I’m so glad there’s another girl here now! Some people in town are very nice, but some are a bit standoffish with people who, you know, live on this street. I’m sure we’ll be such great friends, Ellen!”
Yeah, Ellen thought. We can exchange recipes and do each other’s hair and compare fucking bite marks, maybe. “Can I borrow a cup of sugar? Or a pint of blood? I’m out.”
“So,” Peter said. “What do you think of our little town?”
Impulse made her honest: “It’s like Stephen King, illustrated by Norman Rockwell with ads from Town Country magazine.”
Peter coughed, apparently choking on a crumb of brownie. Jose pounded him helpfully on the back, looking puzzled but goodnaturedly so. He rose and went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer as an alternative to the coffee; it was some local microbrew with an Art Nouveau label that incorporated part of a Mucha poster.
“OK?” he said, raising it and glancing at her.
“Sure,” Ellen said, and he popped the cap and drank with a satisfied ahhh! “Norman Rockwell is right!” Monica nodded, apparently utterly without irony. “I love it here. It’s a wonderful place to raise kids.”
Ellen blinked. “You… have children?” she said neutrally.
“Two. Joshua, he’s ten, and his sister, Sophia, is nine. They’re the cutest kids! Adrienne… the Do?a, we usually call her… thinks so too and they adore her. I’m dying for you to meet them.”
Peter evidently heard the quiver in Ellen’s question and understood the sudden tension of her hand on the thick porcelain of the cup. He leaned close and whispered: “They don’t feed on children. The blood doesn’t taste right. Sour. Green.”
Ellen let out a little grunt of relief; it was a welcome alternative to starting a scream she wasn’t sure she could stop and trying to kill the other woman with the mug.
Monica went on without pausing; Ellen judged she was the sort of person who found it easier to talk than listen, anyway, in a pleasant-enough fashion: “I knew that it was the best place right away. Well, after a little while, I was a bit scared at first. It’s so quiet and pretty here, and there’s no crime, and the streets are safe for children and the schools are just wonderful. All charter, you know, with free preschool, and the best facilities in the state, no cutbacks. And there’s the health plan, too.”
The very best straw and turnout pasture, and the stable is so comfortable, and silver horseshoes, and kindly Dr. Duggan for vet…
“That’s… ah… why you moved here?” Ellen said aloud.
The lucies-the other lucies, let’s be honest, she thought-laughed.
“I ran out of gas!” Monica crowed. “Well, Tom left us after he lost his job and couldn’t find work, he wasn’t a bad man but he was weak, this was down in Simi Valley where we lived, and we lost the house, and Mother wanted to try and move in with her sister in San Jose but we just ran out of gas outside town. And this lady in a Land Rover pulled over, it was about sundown, and asked if we needed help. That was Adrienne. I thought it was so kind of her to put us up.”
“Until she dropped by your room that night for a snack, maybe a little hubba-hubba too,” Jose said with a grin.
“I thought it was all dreams at first. Nightmares. Everything was so strange. And it was kind, I still say. Just… there were other reasons, as well.” Coyly: “She says my blood smelled attractive.”
Ellen sat slowly upright. “Wait a minute!” she said. “You’ve been here eight years?” Monica nodded.
Then how old is she? How old is Adrian, for God’s sake?
She took another bite of the brownie.
Maybe these would be better with hash, she thought. Oh, Christ…
“Me, I was born here, went to school here, graduated Sangre High here,” Jose said. “Theresa, you met her, she travels with the Do?a? She’s my mother’s cousin, but she went away to Cal Poly for a while-she’s got most of the brains in the family and I got all the charm. We’ve been here since before the Br?z?s came-”
“1862,” Monica filled in helpfully. “That was Don Justin. He was from France. I’ve been doing a little local historical pamphlet for the library. I work there as a volunteer.”
“-yeah, we were vaqueros and all that good sh… stuff, before they bought the Rancho. Hell, the Indio part of us has been here forever. My uncle was a lucy here for a while on the lane; I figure with any luck it’ll be a couple of years for me; then I get a pat on the fanny and told to go get a girl and make some babies to work for the next generation. Meantime I work on the cars and stuff uphill, when I’m not, um, busy.”
He grinned. “Hey, you know, some of the girls, they sort of think it’s cool for a guy to be a lucy for the Do?a. Think you pick up stuff.”
His smile died for a moment and he took another swig of the beer.
“And no money worries making your stomach twist up so you shake every month. And then there’s the travel,” Monica went on. “I’ve been to, oh, London and Shanghai and Paris and Rome and Cairo and everywhere. On that wonderful plane.”
Taken along for snackies, Ellen thought. For those midnight cravings when room service is over and you can’t go out.
“I did my graduate degree at MIT. I was at the National Lab in Los Alamos when I started getting some anomalous results,” Peter said.
He grinned ruefully. “And I wouldn’t stop trying to get people interested, no matter how heavy the hints were. They sent Adrienne in to kill me with a nice little perfectly genuine heart attack or stroke or getting hit by a truck, since she was in the neighborhood on personal business-they’re informal about things like that, I’m told. But she decided to give me another option instead. You bet I said yes! Actually, I’ve done some more work here, for her. She can get me all the computer time I need and I’m mostly a theoretician.”
“Do you have any outside interests, Ellen?” Monica asked brightly. “I got married right out of high school,
