take in the theme park. What about you, honey? You want to talk to the policewoman?”
Raleigh looked down at her feet and blushed. “Please, Trooper. Don’t be offended. My uncle’s a good man, he just grew up poor. He’s not really as…” she scrunched up her shoulders and looked up at the sky, searching for the proper word and eventually coming up with “ignorant as he seems.”
“I grew up pretty poor myself,” Caxton said. “The daughter of the sheriff of a dead-end coal patch just north of here. It left me more than capable of handling a good old boy or two.”
Angus chuckled at that.
“But you didn’t answer the question. Do you mind speaking with me? I know it might be difficult to talk about your father right now.”
The girl pulled in her shoulders and rubbed her hands together. “No. No, it’ll be okay. Just maybe not here. Cemeteries kind of creep me out.”
“That’s fine,” Caxton said. “We can set up an appointment for later—you live in Emmaus, right?”
“Near there.”
With that Caxton was ready to go. It didn’t seem likely that Simon would consent to an interview, so she figured she would just leave him alone. He wasn’t done causing her grief, however. He spent a long time talking quietly but animatedly with Clara, who eventually sighed in exasperation and came over to Caxton with her arms folded across her chest. “He wants to be taken right to the train station,” she said.
“I’m sure we can do that,” Caxton said, looking at Angus. The older man lifted his arms and let them drop again.
“He wants me to take him. Because he doesn’t know me and that means he doesn’t hate me yet. He says he doesn’t want to ride with his family anymore. He says they’ve betrayed Arkeley. I mean Jameson Arkeley,” she said, glancing at Angus and Raleigh. “He says, just by agreeing to talk to you they’ve betrayed him. He also doesn’t want to ride with you, because you want to kill his dad.”
Caxton narrowed her eyes. She failed to see how any of this was her problem. She thought of Officer Glauer, though. He was constantly telling her she needed to be more sensitive to the public’s needs, and to the feelings of civilians.
“Okay. We can work this out. Does he have a problem with Vesta?”
“Yeah,” Clara said, “but not as much as with you. Or his family. He says.”
Caxton looked across at Angus. “Can you give me a ride as far as Harrisburg? If you can, Clara here can take your nephew to the station and drop off the Polders on her way.”
“You mind riding in the backseat, honey?” Angus asked Raleigh, who shook her head.
This was tedious, Caxton thought, just a waste of time. She had work to do—a meeting of the SSU that afternoon—and it would take her time to get ready. Simon’s temper tantrum was cutting into her work time. But this was what everyday life was made of for most people, these little negotiations and obligations and impositions. All the things Jameson Arkeley had brushed aside in his pursuit of the vampires. It had made him look like a jerk to everyone who met him—including Caxton. Maybe she should try to be a little more understanding. She said her good-byes to the Polders. Urie and Vesta gave her warm smiles, but their little girl, Patience, grabbed at her hand and wouldn’t let go until she made serious eye contact.
“Trooper, I would like to thank ye most sincerely for allowing me to come to thy service,” the girl said, rattling off the words as if she’d memorized them. “’Twas a great pleasure.”
“You’re—welcome,” Caxton said.
The girl offered her hand and Caxton shook it.
“It is my most avid hope,” Patience said, “that ye should slay the fiend, afore he slays ye. Even if the odds look bleak.” Then she went and climbed into the car.
Little girls shouldn’t be that honest, Caxton thought.
Clara leaned out of the driver’s window and blew her a kiss, and then they were off, Simon sitting in the front passenger seat and failing to look over his shoulder at her once.
She sighed and turned back to the two Arkeleys waiting for her. Angus already had a foot up on the running board of his pickup, while Raleigh waited patiently to climb in behind Caxton’s seat. As Caxton jumped up into the shotgun seat and pulled down her seat belt she tried to clear her mind of everything that had happened. It was time to get into interrogation mode, where she just asked questions and listened closely to the answers and tried not to make any judgments at all. She honestly doubted that the Arkeley family had anything serious to tell her, but you never knew—that was the first rule of police investigations. The last person you expected was the one who always had the best clue.
She got her first surprise when she settled down and looked around her. The pickup’s cab was immaculately clean—even the floor mats looked freshly shampooed, though the vehicle must have had upward of a hundred thousand miles on it. Angus was the kind of man who would show up to a funeral wearing a white T-shirt and jeans fraying at the knees—yet he clearly took immense pride in his truck.
The only thing that marred the interior was an open package of beef jerky shoved down into the area where the windshield met the dashboard.
“Hain’t finished that one yet,” he said, seeing her stare at it. He turned to look at her and smiled wide, showing off a pair of gums wholly devoid of teeth. “Nice thing about jerky is, it starts hard but if you keep it in your mouth long enough it loosens up. I bought about three packs for the ride up here and I hain’t had to eat one other thing the whole way.”
Caxton’s mouth opened, but she couldn’t seem to get any words to come out.
“I did try to warn you,” Raleigh said from the backseat.
Chapter 7.
For the rest of the ride to Harrisburg they made little more than small talk. Caxton was anxious to start interviewing the Arkeleys, but she needed to get them alone in controlled environments where she could record what they said and where she could think clearly enough to work out the questions that were worth asking. The pickup wasn’t built for a smooth ride—she felt every bump in the road and especially every pothole—and it was all she could do to ask the one question that bothered her the most.
“Raleigh,” she said, “your mother. She wasn’t at the funeral.”
The girl sighed deeply. “No. I begged and begged with her, but she wasn’t interested. She said she didn’t care to share any memories of Dad, not with strangers. Especially if Vesta Polder was there.”
Caxton frowned. “They know each other?”
“From way back. Mom introduced Dad to the Polders a very, very long time ago. That was back when we lived in State College. Then maybe ten years ago Mom and Vesta had some kind of falling-out. At least, they haven’t been in the same place together since and neither of them seems to want to change that. I don’t really know the details. Sorry.”
Caxton had always been possessed of a certain morbid curiosity concerning Arkeley’s wife, Astarte. She had never met the woman, nor seen so much as a picture of her. Arkeley had rarely mentioned her and never provided even cursory information about her background. Caxton believed she still resided in Bellefonte but didn’t know for sure.
“I’d really like to talk to her. Can you call her for me?”
Raleigh gave her a polite but negating smile. “I can…try.”
“Okay,” Caxton said, feeling a headache come on. “Can you give me her number, so I can call her?”
The girl nodded and recited the digits from memory. Caxton fed them into her cell phone and then pushed the call button. The phone on the other end rang again and again without going to voice mail or even an answering machine. Eventually Caxton ended the call.
It wasn’t very much farther to Harrisburg, to the state police headquarters. Caxton made an appointment to speak with Raleigh, then got out of the truck and headed into the building.
Her destination was a room in the basement. It had at one time been a classroom where rookie troopers had studied the finer points of interrogation and collar processing. There were no windows in the underground room, but it did have a pair of wall-length whiteboards and a couple dozen adult-sized desks, which Caxton had found useful. It also held a bookshelf that Caxton had bought for herself and installed near the door. The bookshelf held mostly three-ring binders full of photocopied documents—every police report on vampire activity, every news account they
