The Stake

“That bad?” She pushed herself away from the counter and stepped toward the chair. Larry watched her breasts jostle the front of the sweatshirt. Obviously no bra, he decided.

He imagined Bonnie in her cheerleader outfit, the sweater jiggling just a bit with her movements. He saw the sweater rising above her belly as she leaped. When she came down, her pleated skirt billowed high.

“Larry.” Jean’s voice. “Are you with us?”

“Huh? Sure.” He felt a rush of guilt.

Jean was already sitting down. To Barbara she said, “It appears that our two geniuses, here, decided to do a book about the body we found in Sagebrush Flat. So they snuck back and brought it home with them. It’s in our garage.”

“Holy shit,” Barbara said.

Pete gave her a lopsided grin that lifted one side of his mustache.

She cuffed him high on the arm, and Larry watched the Alcatraz emblem swing.

“Hey! No need to get physical. It’s a brilliant idea, honey. I’m in for twenty percent of the take.”

She socked him again.

“Cut it out, huh? I’ve got a broken nose, for Christ-sake.”

“I oughta smack it for you. Shit! Are you outa your fucking gourd?”

“We knew it’d upset you ladies,” Larry said. “That’s why we tried to keep it a secret until the book was finished and we could get rid of the corpse.”

“Lane caught him in the garage with it tonight.”

Now Petelooked angry at him. “Jesus, man.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” Lane said. “He was walking in his sleep.”

“Oh, sure. Jesus, man.”

“You were sleepwalking?” Barbara asked. “That’s wild.”

Sensing an ally, Larry said, “Yeah, it was weird. Ever since we brought that body back with us, I’ve been having all kinds of strange dreams.” He decided not to mention the other sleepwalking incident. “It’s almost as if Bonnie’s been trying to communicatewith me. Like it’s telepathy, or something.”

“Bullshit,” Pete said. “You’re just obsessed, that’s all.”

“Bonnie?” Jean asked.

“That’s her name,” Larry explained. “Bonnie Saxon.”

“You know who she is?” Barbara sounded excited.

“She was wearing a school ring. She went to Buford High, graduated in 1968.”

“The yearbook,” Lane muttered.

“Yeah. I found pictures of her. She was a cheerleader and the Homecoming Spirit Queen.”

“Holy shit,” Barbara said. “That yucky corpse?..”

“And she was murdered the summer after graduation,” he went on. “Somebody thought she was a vampire.”

“Uriah Radley,” Pete added. “The guy who broke my nose.”

“What?” Barbara blurted.

He grinned at her, settled back in the chair and folded his arms across his chest. “We lied about target shooting.”

She didn’t punch him. She gazed at him. She looked astonished.

“We went out there figuring we might take him in for the murders,” Pete explained. “He also killed two other high school girls. Right, Lar?”

“It looks that way.” He turned to Jean. “You know all that time I spent at the library this week? I was studying up on her.”

“God, you’ve been lying about everything.”

He grimaced. “Not about everything. Just about this vampire stuff.”

“You went out gunningfor this guy?” Lane asked. She sounded just as intrigued as Barbara.

Larry nodded.

Pete said, “Yep. And we almost got him. Should’ve seen the bastard slinging arrows at us. He thought wewere vampires.”

“He shotat you?” Barbara asked.

“This is mad,” Jean muttered.

“He was about to pound a stake into Pete, but I managed to stop him.”

“Saved my ass. Or at least my heart.”

Barbara’s lips moved but no words came out. Pete gave her a martyred look. She stretched an arm toward him and rubbed his shoulder. “Oh, honey.”

“This is incredible,” Lane said.

Larry smiled at her. “Make a good book, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“The thing about the book, it’ll all be true.”

“It’ll sell millions,” Pete said. “Just like The Amityville Horror. We’ll be rich and famous.”

“Infamous,” Jean corrected him. “People read something like that, they’ll think you’re a couple of assholes. Like that guy who got ‘beamed up’ by space monsters.” She glared at Larry. “You want to be the laughingstock?” In a dopey, hick voice, she said, “ ‘Hey, there goes Larry Dunbar. Him’s the dork that believes in vampires. Yassir.’ ”

“It won’t be like that,” he said. “It’s just an account of what happened. I’ve got a lot of it written already, and...”

“God, I’ve gotta read it!” Barbara blurted, her hand going motionless on Pete’s shoulder.

“When it’s done,” he said. “It’ll just be a couple more weeks. But the thing is, I make it clear in the book that I don’tbelieve in vampires. I tell it exactly the way it happened... how Pete and I thought it’d be a neat idea for a book. Neither oneof us really believes it’s a vampire.”

“Not me,” Pete said.

“But it’s not really a vampire story anymore. It grew into a lot more than that. Now it’s a murder mystery. Those three girls disappeared in 1968, and nobody knows what happened to them. Nobody but us.”

“And Uriah,” Pete said.

“We know who killed them, and why, and we’ve even got one of the bodies.”

“In our garage,” Jean muttered.

“And you almost got yourselves killed,” Barbara said.

“But we’ve got the story,” Larry said. “We’ve got it. I didn’t think we had anything at first. It’s like you said, Jean. I thought we had nothing but a couple of nuts cart a body home ‘cause it might be a vampire, and they’ve got nothing else to do but pull out the stake to see if she comes alive. And then they do it, and she just lies there. Zip. Big deal. The whole thing falls flat. But it doesn’t matterif she’s a vampire. She’s a homicide, and we can name her killer.”

“Killed her because hethought she was a vampire,” Pete put in.

“Uriah’s wife and daughter were murdered,” Larry said. “Somehow, he got it into his head that they were the victims of a vampire. He had their bodies cremated so they wouldn’t come back. Then he went hunting. He got Bonnie and two other girls.”

Frowning at him, Jean said, “You guys didn’t make any of this up?”

Larry realized she had actually been listening. Though she didn’t seem fascinated like Lane and Barbara, her anger had melted. She was interested.

“Some of it’s speculation,” he admitted.

“More than some, I should imagine.”

“Not all that much,” Pete said. “Lar’s got a whole stack of newspaper stories.”