Page 75 of My Vampire Plus-One

TWENTY

Telegram sent from Maurice J. Pettigrew, Treasurer of The Collective, to the Board of Directors

Quarry has attached note to door of apartment. Stop.

Says “GONE FISHIN’ ”. Stop.

Apartment door locked. Stop.

Surveillance from outside suggests he is not inside. Stop.

Coward is clearly trying to hide. Stop.

Tell group to search Lake Michigan. Stop.

Do not see what appeal “fishing” has for vampires. Stop.

But we already knew our brother was odd. Stop.

Amelia

Kissing you was probably amistake on my end, too.

Reggie’s last words to me before he left my bedroom played on a loop in my head as I tried, to no avail, to fall asleep.

Why should him regretting kissing me keep me up half the night? I regretted kissing him, too, didn’t I? Out of all possible outcomes, this was the cleanest one. It was much better that he agreed we’d made a mistake than for him to be pining away for me.

Or, worse, for me to be pining away for him.

And yet there I was, staring sleepless up at the ceiling, feeling pangs of something I refused to name, as the taste of his lips on mine lingered like a delicious mistake.

The storm outside wasn’t helping. Everything that seemed terrifying about stormy winter nights when I was a child seemed possible now. Monsters lurking under the bed. Witches who would cook your bones into a stew. It was probably because I was exhausted. Or maybe it was just the fact that I was stuck here all alone with a vampire, but I was suddenly anxious, in a way I hadn’t been in many years and that probably should have embarrassed me, about being alone.

“This is ridiculous.” I threw off my covers and climbed out of bed. It was nearly two in the morning. If I couldn’t sleep, I might as well accomplish something. I pulled the old bathrobe I kept stashed on a hook in my closet over my pajamas and shouldered my briefcase.

I set up my laptop on the kitchen table. No need to fall behind on work while I was stuck here. However long that might turn out to be.

There was an email from the Wyatt Foundation waiting for me as soon as I logged into my work account.

To: Amelia Collins ([email protected])

From: John Richardson ([email protected])

Dear Ms. Collins,

The Wyatt Foundation greatly appreciates your assistance with our tax matter and we appreciate you setting up a time to meet with us in person. As such, we will reach out very soon about when it might be convenient for me to come by. Incidentally, does your office ever hold meetings in the evenings? If not, I am sure we can make a daytime arrangement work; I just wanted to double-check, as evening usually works best with my schedule, my circadian rhythms etc.

Let me know. And once you have done that, then I will letyouknow. And so on and so forth.

In the meantime, I have attached another set of documents to this email for your perusal.

Very truly and sincerely yours,

J.H.C. Richardson, Esq, PhD

ps: Do you know what a “tax bracket” is? Someone on our board saw the term online but none of us know what it means.

The attached documents included a nearly indecipherable firsthand account of what I thought might have been a 1952 Tunisian fabric store opening and a medical journal piece calledInexplicable Exsanguination: A Path Forward. I closed my eyes, groaning. Evelyn wanted me to present on the Wyatt Foundation to the partners in a few weeks, but my sense that we should close this damn file instead was growing steadily.

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