An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3), Fred Saberhagen [best large ereader .txt] 📗

“Mom and Dad are just numb, I think. Gran seems more upset by this than they are.”

    “Oh. But I meant you.”

    “Me? I’m coping okay. You sound like you are, too.”

    “More or less. Look, did you hear from Dr. Corday this morning?”

    There was a pause on the line. “Why do you ask? Did he get back to his motel okay last night?”

    “Yeah, I dropped him off. Look, just hang in there, kid. I think I’m going to come over and see you.”

    As Joe hurried into his clothes, his mind was fixed on the remembered face of the old man who last night had been so intent on getting into the morgue. He turned the image from fullface to profile and back again, as if Corday were standing before the black-on-white hatched inchmarks of the lineup. Put on your hat, take it off. No, no face that Joe had ever seen before.

    Kate—gone. But that wasn’t accurate. Kate had really been gone for days. The body on the right slab or the wrong slab had been hers, but it was not her any longer, and he could feel no vital concern for anything that had happened to it. This morning’s bad dream wasn’t a new tragedy, only a new craziness.

    Dressed and shaved, he called the Shores Motel. Dr. Corday was registered there, all right, but his room didn’t answer.

    Joe decided to give himself time for one cup of instant coffee—after all, there was no way in the world that the old guy could have stolen the body last night, in the five or six or seven minutes he had been out of Joe’s sight. Joe dropped two slices of bread into the toaster. Of course, he could have returned to the morgue again later…

    He sat at the small table in the dining alcove of his small apartment, and tried to get his thinking back into a police track. In police work you couldn’t very often accept that strange happenings were just coincidence; last night the rather strange old man had prowled around the morgue, and this morning she was gone.

    In police work also, on the other hand, you had to start with what was possible. In fact, the old man could not even have got into the building there last night. Someone had, though—or did Judy have the story garbled?

    Still chewing toast, Joe picked up his phone, dialed a number in Homicide, and asked for Charley Snider.

    “Charley? This is Joe Keogh. What is it, what’s the story?”

    “Oh yeah, the story. I’ll give it to you straight, man. I know what this must be like for you.”

    “Just tell me.”

    “The thing is, she was there as of about ten P.M. last night. Everybody swears all was in order then, at least. Then, man, as of six-ten this A.M., when one of the junior pathologists decides he wants a preliminary look, she was just not there. Empty bin’s correctly labeled. All the paper work’s in order, as near as we can find out. No bodies were officially removed from the morgue in those eight hours. The only other funny thing is the lockers where the clothes and other personal effects of the, uh, customers are kept; somebody had been digging around in there, it looks like. No locks broken, but the stuff’s all scrambled, and we don’t know yet if Kate’s property is missing or not.”

    “Family hadn’t claimed her things?”

    “Not yet they hadn’t.”

    “No signs of a break-in?”

    “None we’ve discovered, it’s a big place. We got our men still swarming through there. We’re checking out everyone who was on duty there last night. So far’s we know no weirdos among them.”

    “That’s something.”

    “Hey, man, one more thing. Remember, we found Kate’s Lancia in the pound? It had been towed away from that hydrant.  Anyway someone left a big fat thumbprint right on the rearview mirror, angle seemed to show it was someone reaching from the right seat. It’s being checked out in Washington now.”

    “It’s probably some garage man’s. No, it’s probably mine; I’ve ridden in that car a lot.”

    “If you got any ideas we can try, I’d like to hear.”

    “No, no ideas.” His suspicions of the old man, if they really were suspicions, had to settle into some kind of a sane pattern before he threw them out as a tip. An old friend of Clarissa’s, after all. “Thanks, Charley. I’m going over to the Southerlands’ for a while, in case you want to reach me.”

    He sat there for a minute staring at the cradled phone, but seeing the old man. Then he took a jacket from the closet and went out the door.

* * * * * * * *

   Snow, gentle-falling, soft as white night, dimmed the scorch of day to muted gray for the old man, dulled for him the multicolored windows of stained glass that in bright sun would have been explosions of discomfort. He needed rest and sleep. Not, as yet, to the point where his survival was in question, so he stayed on his feet and active. Tomorrow, though, he was certainly going to have to sleep.

    Besides dulling the sun, another eminently satisfactory effect of the snow was that it seemed to discourage visitors to Lockwood Cemetery. Or perhaps Americans were just not as enthusiastic as Europeans about visiting their dead. Anyway, during the whole morning he had heard no more than three or four vehicles whispering around the gravel roads of the cemetery, one of them a pickup truck with snowplow attached, that seemed to make but little progress in getting the drives clear.

    Gently, but very insistently, the snow continued to fall. By two o’clock it lay ankle-deep on the broad lawns and