Corona wouldn’t let her kill herself on purpose, so Elyna settled for second best. She couldn’t kill Jack’s murderer, so she decided instead to kill Corona, who’d made her and not made sure that Jack was safe from her. So she’d learned to control the vampire, learned to be the best vampire she could, learned to be Elyna Gray instead of Jack O’Malley’s wife.
Four weeks ago, the time had been right. The ties that kept her loyal to her Mistress broke at last. Elyna’s stubbornness had been rewarded and she was free.
Elyna moved from the bathroom. Her hotel room was eleven stories to the ground and had a fine view of the Loop and the big lake beyond that.
In contrast to the thirst for vengeance that had driven her since her death, hope seemed such a fragile thing.
IN THE END, she paid a little too much for the apartment turned condo, but a lot less than she’d been willing to pay.
She moved into a furnished efficiency apartment whose greatest assets were its location a few blocks from her home, its basement entrance where no one would see her comings and goings, and a storage room with no windows.
She went shopping at a few thrift stores and then took her newly acquired laundry to the nearest Laundromat. Three middle-aged women eyed her as she sorted her laundry. When she put the first load in, a grandmotherly woman came up to her and explained the ins and outs of the neighborhood laundry.
By the time she’d folded the last of her towels, Elyna had learned a nifty trick to get lipstick out of washable silk; that there was a scary-looking man who washed his clothes on Tuesdays who was a retired Marine, horribly shy, and a dear, sweet man, so she wasn’t to let him frighten her; and that there was a local man, someone’s cousin’s sister-in-law’s nephew, who was a contractor.
PETER VANDERSTAAT WAS a neighborhood man, a police officer who ran remodel jobs with his partner and a half-dozen other people on the side. He’d agreed to meet Elyna at her condo and look at it, even though what she wanted wasn’t the kind of project they looked for. He usually bought a place, fixed it up, and sold it at a profit, but he was between projects.
He looked to be in his midforties with tired, suspicious eyes. Short and squat, Jack would have said—built like a wrestler. Peter didn’t talk a lot, just grunted, until they came back to the living room.
“Where is the money coming from?” he asked. “I don’t want to have my men put hours in and then not get paid.”
Elyna had money. She’d started by stealing a little bit from her victims and continued with investments. Investments she’d successfully hidden from Corona.
“My family has money,” she told him. “I can pay you.”
She had been painfully honest when she had been human. Lying was one of those skills she’d had to learn to be a successful vampire.
Vanderstaat bought her story, turning his attention back to the apartment. He frowned at the mismatched windows. “You want me to match the vinyl?”
“
He looked at her and lifted a shaggy eyebrow.
“Vinyl is good. I’m sure that would look terrific in a modern place, but . . .” She let her voice trail off.
“But,” he agreed. “What do you intend to do with the floors? Some of those boards can’t be saved, expensive to find replacement boards of the same quality. There are some very good laminates on the market; I can get you fair prices.”
“Can’t you fix the floors?” she asked in a small voice.
That time she got a grin. “A girl after my own heart,” he said. “Not the most profitable way to go—but we’re in it for fun, too. No fun slapping together crap no matter how much more money you make at it.”
Peter and his men worked evenings, he told her, five days a week but not on Saturday or Sunday. They’d stop at ten every night for the neighbors’ sake, which made for a long remodel—the reason they usually didn’t take on a contract like this. They shook hands on it and agreed that he would start in two days to give him time to put together his crew.
GHOSTS AND CATS don’t like vampires. Dogs, on the other hand, didn’t mind Elyna— which was good because more often than not, Peter brought his yellow Lab as one of the crew. Peter was initially dubious of Elyna’s need to help, but when she proved useful, he started ordering her around like he did the rest of his crew.
The first job was finishing the demolition, clearing out the old for the new. They started with the bedrooms and moved forward. Some nights it was just Peter and Elyna; other nights they had as many as eight or ten men.
“Hey, you guys,” said Simon, a twentysomething rookie cop and drywall man who had pulled down a chunk of plaster from the living room wall and held it up for everyone to see. “Look how this is stained. Do you think this is blood? My mom says that back in the late twenties a man was killed up here in this apartment. Or at least he left a lot of blood behind and disappeared.”
No one was looking at Elyna, which was a good thing.
“I remember that story,” agreed one of the other men. “Something to do with the gangsters, wasn’t it? And the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.”
“The massacre was 1929,” commented Peter.
“Yeah,” agreed Simon. “The guy who lived here was an architect just hired by John Scalise—one of Capone’s men. Story was that the architect’s wife went missing a few weeks before Valentine’s Day. Right after the massacre, the neighbor across the hall and several police officers broke down the door—”
Everyone, even Elyna, looked at the front door, which showed all sorts of damage. If it wasn’t the door that had been there when she’d lived here, someone had found an exact match. And then aged it for eighty-plus years.
“But”—Simon dropped his voice and whispered—“all they found was blood. Lots and lots of blood.”
There was a crash in the kitchen.
Peter whacked Simon upside the head. “Kid, Elyna’s going to be living here. You think she needs that in her head?” And then Peter tromped off to see what the noise in the kitchen had been.
“Sorry, Elyna,” Simon told her sheepishly. “Boss is right. I wasn’t thinking.”
“No worries,” Elyna said, straining her ears to listen for any more noises. “I’ve heard the story before. I did my research before I bought this place.”
She must not have been convincing, because he followed her around like Peter’s dog for the rest of the evening, mistaking grief and guilt for fear. Peter couldn’t figure out what had made the noise, but they decided it was one of the tools falling off some precarious perch. Even so, Peter’s crew was jumpy for the rest of the night.
Weeks passed without further incidents. They moved from tearing down to rebuilding the plumbing and electric. And Peter started to schedule times when he, his right-hand man Frankie, and Elyna would sit down with catalogs to choose what the apartment would look like when it was finished.
As soon as the bathroom and most of the electric was finished, Elyna put up blackout curtains in the master bedroom and moved in. She didn’t have much more than would fit into a pair of suitcases.
The first thing she bought after moving in was a twin bed. The second thing was a small bookcase, followed by a double handful of books. She kept the efficiency apartment for the coming summer days when the sun’s setting time meant Peter’s crew would be arriving in daylight. She encouraged Peter to assume that was where the rest of her things were, waiting for the floors to be finished so she wouldn’t have to move the stuff around. Peter, Frankie, and the rest of the guys had gotten quite protective of her.
Other than something falling in the kitchen while Simon was telling his ghost story, there had been no sign that the apartment was haunted, let alone haunted by Elyna’s dead husband. Sometimes, sitting on her bed and reading a book, Elyna would pretend that Jack was just in another room.
Reading was something they’d shared. It had started when he caught her reading E. M. Hull’s
