Free The Origin of Dracula by Irving Belateche Page B

landed a good job, and received a promotion. I had assumed Nate was too young to have picked up on how proud Lucy had been of Jenna.
    I kneeled down beside him. “You’re going to be spending a couple of days with her.”
    He looked up from the TV show. “What about my birthday party?”
    How stupid could I be? Naturally that’d be his first question, and because I wasn’t prepared for it, I doubled down on my stupidity.
    “You’ll be back for that,” I said, instead of warning him in advance that the party might have to wait until another weekend. Now he’d be even more disappointed if Sunday came and he was still with Jenna, with no party on the horizon, which was the mostly likely scenario.
    He cocked his head, narrowed his eyes, and shot me a curious look. “I know what you’re doing.”
    My pulse quickened. Had he been eavesdropping on Lee and me before turning on the TV? I braced myself.
    “You don’t want me around, so you can get me a surprise for my birthday!” he said. He was so excited that he abandoned the TV show and turned his attention to me. “Tell me what the surprise is!”
    I’d managed to make things even worse. His expectations were now sky high.
    “Please tell me, Dad!” He couldn’t contain himself.
    “Honey, there isn’t a surprise. I just found out that I have to be at work for most of this weekend, and I don’t want to leave you alone.”
    “Okay…” he said, grinning, as if he was still expecting a surprise. “I can hardly wait until my birthday party.”
    I felt awful, but there was no time to fix this. If I had any chance of ensuring he’d have many more birthdays to celebrate and that he’d grow up to lead a full life, I had to focus on the real horror I’d brought into his life: Dantès.
    “Go ahead and finish watching your show,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll go home and pick up some of your clothes, then head to Jenna’s.”
    When I walked back into the living room, Lee was just stepping out of the hallway. “Quincy is dead,” he said. “A drowning accident a few days ago.”
    I didn’t quite feel the shock I should’ve, nor sorrow. Probably because I was still reeling from the revelation that Dantès had murdered Lucy. My reaction was cold and analytical. “It’s another clue from Dantès.”
    “How?”
    “I don’t know.” And I didn’t, but I was sure it was.
    “So, do we go down to North Carolina and check it out?”
    “We need to find out more about it first.” I already had the sense that the web of clues I’d have to follow to uncover Dantès’s real identity would be dense, so no stone could be left unturned. On the other hand, we also didn’t have time for a wild goose chase to North Carolina.
    “While I’m taking Nate to Jenna’s,” I said, “will you find out everything you can about Quincy’s death? I’ll be back in less than an hour, and we can head to Cold Falls.”
    He nodded, and our unlikely partnership was born.
    *
    At the house, I packed some clothes for Nate and asked him to grab a couple of his toys and books. Then we headed to Jenna’s.
    I didn’t take the most direct route in case Dantès was watching us. My circuitous course took us into the parking structure for the Ballston Common Shopping Mall and through a neighborhood that was packed with dead end streets. If you didn’t know the neighborhood well (and I did), even with navigation in your car it was almost impossible not to get to lost.
    But the whole ruse made me feel like a fool. Lee had summed it up best. Did I think I worked for some kind of covert ops outfit? Did I think I could outwit a killer who knew so much about me? And even those thoughts themselves seemed absurd. How could things in my life have changed so much in the course of a couple of hours?
    The past isn’t dead . It isn’t even past. That’s how. My long ago transgression had come back to haunt me.
    Nate didn’t say anything about the long and winding route