The Quill Pen Killer (Vampire DeAngeliuson Book 1) Read online

  Ickabod asks, “By the way, what ball are you wearing to the gown?

  Date laughs, "Don't you mean..." she starts to correct his grammar but instead she slaps his wrist, "O you tease!!!"

  "Infamy!!" Ickabod exclaims, "We've forgotten the dessert." He hands her a plate from the left side of the table. Then, he takes one for himself.

  "Now what is it that you'd like to talk about?" he asks. Date jumps at the chance to be inquisitive about the fraud, the art mystery, without seeming unsociable and tells him all about her discovery.

  "I've been researching and when I was at the DeAngeliuson's, I discovered, with a little digging, that the ghoul who hit Jessica in the coffee shop is in the employ of the DeAngeliuson estate. What do you make of that?"

  "I'm not sure," Ickabod says and takes a bite of cake.

  "Well," Date continues, "Jessica and Raven, when they discovered the replica, or possibly the authentic statue, as we've discovered now, were at a certain address... which I've had checked out recently... and..." She pulls out a piece of paper and lays it on the table. It says, Munchanson Ghoul.

  "Ain't that strange?" She looks at Ickabod. Ickabod picks up the piece of paper.

  He asks, "And DeAngeliuson employs him? You say."

  "Uh-huh," Date answers while taking a bite of dessert, then, can't help but blurt out, "O this is good!" Ickabod looks at the piece of paper again.

  "Ain't that strange", he says.

  "This is the address then?" he asks.

  Date swallows so as not to talk with her mouth full and answers, "Yes it is."

  "Okay," Ickabod says, "well, I guess it's time I looked into this myself."

  "Having DeAngeliuson do it for you, were you?" Date asks, fishing for more information.

  Ickabod smirks at her and then says, "You know, Date, you aren't the average tart type looking for the celebrity date here, are you? I'm glad you came by. I am. Have some more dessert. Tea? You seem a little more invested in this than I might have thought upon your mentioning this the other night."

  "Do I?" Date asks innocently, "I guess I've been there, to the house, and well, I'm very interested in finding the statue, you know, the actual statue."

  "It's not as if mine is made of play dough, Date,"

  Ickabod seems prideful, "I mean if it is a replica, it is probably one of the few and an extravagant piece of art on its own, you know, as collecting goes..." Ickabod hands over his dessert plate and watches as the plates are taken off the table by Gretchen, the maid.

  Date looks at her watch. "Elizabeth Snits!!" she cries out in surprise.

  "What?!" he asks.

  "It's late, I've gotta go!"

  "It's early," he purrs, "Stay."

  He grabs her hand, "Please."

  "No," she pulls her hand back, "I can't. I'd love to," she lies, "but I've got to go."

  Ickabod walks her to the door. She expresses her delight that she could dine with him and 'chat' about important matters, and he invites her to return at the earliest date, knowing full well she has her mind set on returning over the statue business and not to visit him per se. He shuts the door feeling, well, three things really.

  One, confidant that Date will get to the bottom of the tomfoolery over the statue immediately; two, a little lonely; and three, very thirsty.

  "Ah, well," he thinks, and shuts the door. Date walks out into the night, as determined to solve this mystery from the bottom up if she has to.

  That same night, at the D'Angeliuson mansion, Jessica decided to go to bed early for a change. She's had a wicked headache, probably from thirst, and she is feeling a little pale, even more than her usual vampire complexion, of late.

  As Date walks out into the night, three hillsides away, Jessica lays in her bed, and turns onto her side. She is asleep. She is dreaming. In Jessica's dream, she is walking toward a house, through a field. She enters the house. She walks up a staircase. At the top of the staircase is the statue Jessica recognizes. !is is not the statue from Ickabod's - she immediately feels the difference. There is warmth and attachment to this one, right away, although it looks like Ickabod's, it makes the statue at Ickabod's house seem cold and dead. Not this one. This one seems alive. Jessica feels as though she wants to help it. It is in the corner of a dark room. Jessica wants to take it home. Suddenly, the statue calls out to Jessica. Jessica wakes. It is the dead of night. A breeze sends the leaves of an outside tree branch into a shadow dance behind the window coverings. Jessica watches the shadow leaves rhythmically sway, trying to remember each part of the dream. After several moments of remembering, she draws a blank. She remembers the field, the stairway, the dark corner.

  She gasps, "Huh!" She remembers the statue. Thinking what that could have meant, she grows sleepy and falls back to sleep, quite quickly, before she can come up with an answer to her thoughts.

  The next day, at school, Jessica sits in class thinking of her dream the night before. She fiddles with the edges of her notebook and twirls her quill pen in her other hand. She raises her hand.

  "Can I go get a drink of water?" Jessica asks and then coughs to show her thirst.

  The teacher sighs, "If you really can't wait. Grab a hall pass."

  "Thanks," she says and grabs her notebook, stands up, and walks over to the side wall where she grabs a hall pass hanging from a hook. She leaves the room and walks toward the cafeteria. She enters the cafeteria and smiles at the cafeteria lady. Jessica reaches for the drinking fountain handle and just before she stoops to take a drink the cafeteria lady interrupts her.

  "Jess-i-ca?" the cafeteria lady begins.

  "What?" Jessica pauses, looking at the cafeteria lady, eyes wide.

  "Did you leave your umbrella in the cafeteria yesterday?" she asks in a thick accent.

  "I don't think so... I'm not sure..." Jessica says, slightly irritated that she is being interrupted, and growing increasingly thirsty.

  "Could you come over here and look at this umbrella... I've put it in the lost and found, here, please come see," the cafeteria lady insists. Jessica's vampire voice escapes her, but only a sigh.

  She looks at the water fountain and says, "Okay!" controlling her irritation to a regular voice, she adds, "But I really would like to get a drink first..."

  "Oh, this will only waist a minute," the cafeteria lady urges. Jessica, so thirsty she almost loses her temper over it, flies instantaneously over to the cafeteria lady, looks at the umbrella, looks at the cafeteria lady - who has a startled yet cordial expression on her face - then lunges for her neck. Concerto music reaches Jessica's ears and drifts eerily through the empty cafeteria as Jessica feeds.

  Down the hallway, into the office, the secretary drops her pen and touches her lips, "O my!" she whispers.

  "Where's Jessica?" the teacher asks a classroom full of heads, looking down at Pee-chee Readers so quiet they can hear their pencils draw across the page as they write. No one looks up. No one answers.

  She continues, "Has she returned ... yet, from getting a drink?" As concerto music reaches the classroom, the teacher looks toward the door. (Is the concerto music loud enough that humans can it too? Jessica's father has often wondered. Or is it just a 'sense' humans have that some one-of-them, somehow, has teetered in and out of the immortal world, like the sense humans have when a family member with whom they were close has just passed away; or like, the known mortal quotation ‘I feel as though someone just walked across my grave.’) Anyway, whatever it is, Raven doesn't like it. He covers his ears and tries to get back to his school work.

  In the lunch room, Jessica sits near the plump body of the cafeteria lady lying against the tiled floor. Concerto music quiets as Jessica dips her pen into the lunch lady's bite mark and begins to write. And write... until... concerto music at crescendo, the cafeteria door swings open and Jessica's teacher, the secretary, and Raven burst in through the door. A unwelcome sight! Raven gasps and shakes his head disbelieving the dreaded scene before his eyes that he has worried about but never thoug
ht his best friend would actually dip to - and at school! The teacher and the secretary both burst into flames of fury, hand-wringing, and shouts with shattered voices that bring helping hands running in. Despite that fact, the little 'matter' of Jessica's 'indiscretion' stays relatively quiet. The lunch lady is carried in to the nurse's room to 'recover' while Jessica is marched, by her upper arm held in a tight, pinchy grasp, down the hall to the office. Where she now sits, alone and fidgeting, wondering what is to become of her.

  The secretary arrives, back from the 'clean-up', and stands in front of her. A dramatic pause with an over-done little 'frown' expresses her concern and worry. She presses her hands together and places them against the fabric of the navy skirt covering her lap.

  "Your father is here," she says, "He will take you home now." Jessica nods her head, trying not look at her. Around the corner her father shakes the hand of the school's Head Mistress.

  "We remonstrate biting the staff, here, you must understand," the Head Mistress reminds him.

  "Won't happen again," he says.

  The Head Mistress pulls her hand back and points in the direction of Jessica and gives a curt, "Good day to you." Her father emerges around the corner and stops in front of Jessica. Jessica looks up and sighs. He stares at her. She squirms. He pauses.

  "I suppose you're ready to go," he says in a controlled tone of voice. Jessica nods and stands up. He motions Jessica toward the door.

  He looks to the secretary at her desk and waves, "Break speed and happy oats!" he says with a smile. She frowns in response, wondering if he has the right attitude to properly discipline, then instinctively, she runs her fingers along the base of her neck, as humans often do around a vampire.

  Once again, in the same week, the staff at the DeAngeliuson's mansion is assembled in her father's office. Jessica sits watching her father pace around the room. To this lot, his worry stems from the importance of how to raise Jessica to learn to 'control' herself properly, as a vampire and a member of a prestigious family; but to Jessica, she knows, he is angry that she has caused a stir, cast 'attention' upon his family, launched apprehension at his house, and cast a momentary shadow upon the (purposefully overlooked) ancient ways of a city steeped in the 'tradition' of vampire culture. Heads turn away for a reason, but heads could turn back if not careful; bringing to her father's mind, she speculates, images of lantern-carrying crowds gathered outside the house at night, shouting 'slurs' and indignations, crosses bared and, Jessica shudders at the thought, metal stakes held high. Jessica looks at her shoes, turning one then the other to the side, feeling very bad and very sorry that she'd allowed the lunch lady to unfetter her that day.

  That night, Jessica's sleep is restless, waking several times to remember only bits of vivid dreams. One of Jessica's dreams is recurring: she walks through the same field, toward the same house, up the same staircase, the dark corner, the statue bleeds three tears. Flowers grow at the cafeteria cook's feet. Jessica stumbles back and wakes. She sits up in bed remembering she has had this dream before.

  Days later, Jessica is being escorted by her father out of the schools office. Date runs into them as she is walking up toward the building from the parking lot, camera around her neck, pencil and pad in hand.

  "I'm sorry, Jessica," she says. "I'm here to cover the story." Jessica hides her face in her hands. Her father pats her shoulder.

  Her father says abruptly, looking at the camera, "See you around."

  "See you," Date says softly, knowing he is not pleased to have this 'information' about town. But Date continues in and on. She is used to having her job come between 'friendships' and she is not deterred by his terseness.

  "He'll come around," she thinks, with a cavalier toss of her head that says, "and I don't care if he doesn't." She knows who she is and she is, is, is, IS, she thinks, a journalist. Date is swiftly ushered by the secretary into the music room. The drained and zombied-out music teacher is propped up against the wall, amid music stands and chairs. Date's camera flashes rapidly as she snaps a series of photos.

  At home in the DeAngeliuson's mansion, Jessica is sitting at the kitchen counter. Mattressa brings in the newspaper and sets it on the counter of in front of her.

  "How bad is it?" Jessica asks and slowly picks up the slab of newsprint.

  The headline reads; "Second Victim Found at School: Girl Expelled." Mattressa looks at Jessica, moving her head from side to side - a very unoriginal gesture, Jessica thinks, from the number of adults she'd seen 'doing that' around her lately. Jessica flops the newspaper back down and holds her head in both hands.

  In Jessica's father's office, the headline sits on the desk. He is on the phone.

  "No. No that's not what I said," he pauses.

  "Well, that is strictly unprofessional," he pauses again, "can't you check?!" he asks, angrily. He sneers at no one out the window and hangs up the phone.

  "I am not cut out to raise a teen-age girl," he thinks to himself for the second time this week. "What kind of vampire raises a teen-age girl?" The next afternoon, Jessica is called into her father's office. Alone. There is no assembled staff, no 'pulling for you' looks from Mattressa, just her father and her; and he looks about like she is feeling. He has something in his hand. A folded paper, a colorful brochure, that he keeps flapping against one palm or another. He sighs.

  "You know," he explains, "it's Curb School."

  "Father, what is Curb School?"

  "A school, where you learn to curb your appetite, unhanker, trammel yen, suppress tankage, limit plasmic refreshment, restrain yearn, resist feed.."

  "Got it!" she looks down, "why can't I just stay here?

  Her father frowns, "All day?"

  "I could help you," she suggests.

  Her father opens the colorful brochure in his hands, "It looks very nice. Just what a girl your age would want."

  Jessica sneers, "O yeah, sure." She takes the brochure he hands her.

  "Ancenstral Academy of Obsequious Kinship. What does that mean?" she asks.

  Mattressa, who has poked her head inside the office, too nervous about this 'meeting' to have done any work anyhow, answers snidely, "Boot-licking, Spaniel boarding."

  "What?!" Jessica nearly yells.

  Mattressa covers her lips, "Just kidding," she says and Jessica's father tsk-tsks Mattressa back out of the room.

  "Well that was helpful," he sighs, "keep reading."

  Jessica wails, "I won't! I won't go! She said spaniel boarding!" and she points to the maid who is still standing at the door.

  "Out!" her father bellows and points her out of the room and into the other.

  Then, he yells out the door after her, "my shirts need dry cleaning!"

  He walks over to Jessica's side, "Here!" He grabs the brochure from her and reads, trying to be encouraging.

  "Self-Assured Consanguinity. Intimate setting. Peaceful exposure. Mer! Look, it's near the sea, at night, you can walk, on the water's shore. There 'ya go. Isn't that nice?"

  Jessica ventures weakly, a question, "And my old school?"

  "Won't take you."

  "Home school?" she asks.

  "Jess-i-ca..."

  The Quill Pen Killer

  Chapter Nine: True Sleuth At Last

  Jessica is at Ickabod's when he hires a detective. Together, they all go to Munchanson Ghoul’s and his ghoulish friend's house. Jessica watches intently while Mr. Ghoul is questioned about the theft of the statue. His Ghoulish friend is taken in for questioning when the statue is proven a fake. It is all so exciting, but something is missing. Jessica truly misses Raven.

  "He would have loved seeing this," she thinks. She calls him and urges him to meet with her at the coffee shop. He agrees. So, the next day, Jessica sits at a table across from Raven. She is so happy to see him, she almost doesn't notice the man in a black coat that stands behind Jessica. He is in Jessica's employ, and he is watching them eat. Raven sets his fork down.

  "Isn't this annoying you?" he asks. Jessica
looks back at the guy and then turns back to Raven.

  "Yeah," she signs, "but it's the only thing that could talk him out of sending me to that Kinship school."

  "But you did get him talked out of it, right?

  "Yes," she says, "I'm definitely not going."

  "So, what are you going to do?" he asks.

  "I'm helping Ickabod work on solving the mystery of where the authentic statue is, and detect whether he was sold a fake intentionally."

  "No, I mean, what are you doing about school?"

  "I'm studying, on my own, but I'm taking standardized tests at the end of the year."

  "O. Is Ickabod paying you?" Raven asks.

  "Sometimes. I'd like to set up my own detective's office. Help uncover and return missing things. I'm pretty good at it," she replies.

  Raven takes a drink of water, "Are you? What have you found?"

  Jessica points her fork at him, "O bats! I'm finding Ickabod's statue, okay?"

  "It might not be Ickabod's," Raven reminds her.

  "It is," she says. "Here's what I have so far: our eye witness testimony, the day we saw the statue, our photos of the differences of the statue and Date's article photo, the stocking cap left near the statue at Ickabod's party while the staff was returning the room to original state, my apprehending Mr. Ghoul in the office that day... you know, before..." Raven touches his neck.

  "Yeah, I know," he says. "Continue..."

  "The witch that was working here, asked by the ghoul to 'witch' my coffee, and here's something new: I called the crating company... that day we were hiding in the back yard, and he said they'd have it crated that night... well, I thought, that isn't a very normal time to have an art piece crated for shipping... and of the only two places in town that crate a shipment for shipping only one does night cratings, and, as turns out, there were two night cratings scheduled. One occurred five nights after the first.