A Girl, a Murder, and Twelve Dreadful Children

Chapter XXI: Black and Red

Author's Note: Approximately half-way through this chapter I gave up any hope of ending the story properly and decided to just finish it here. Yes, it leaves plot threads hanging. Yes, it makes no sense. Eventually I'll come back and edit or continue it, but for the time being this is the end.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds. -- George Eliot, Adam Bede

A pit seemed to have opened in the bottom of Dani's stomach. Nothing could have prepared her for an uninvited guest appearing at the window. Especially this uninvited guest. Was she never to see the last of Claire?

"What are you doing?" she asked, pressing her hand against her forehead. "Why are you at my window?"

"I couldn't open the door," Claire said, as if climbing through windows was a perfectly normal hobby.

Dani suppressed an absurd urge to burst out laughing. "I see. And why are you here at all?"

Claire pouted, laying to rest any doubt Dani might have that she had any emotional maturity at all. "Beatrice wouldn't believe me. So I thought you would."

"And what did you think I'd believe?" Dani prompted when it became clear Claire wouldn't say anything else. Really, talking to this vampire would give anyone a headache. "Please tell me you haven't set fire to any more washing machines."

Claire's pout intensified. Dani almost facepalmed. She'd seen more mature behaviour from Max. A grown woman -- and a vampire, no less -- should know better.

"Will no one ever let me forget about that?" Claire complained. "I came to tell you about the empty grave."

Those words conjured up images of another newly-turned vampire rampaging around somewhere. Dani's heart jumped into her throat. She could just imagine what sort of chaos it was causing. People drained of blood, attacking anyone who got in its way, clumsy attempts at finding a place to live -- er, dwell -- and hunt...

She forced herself to stop panicking. An empty grave did not necessarily mean anything supernatural was on the loose.

"Where was this empty grave, whose was it, and how did you find out about it?" she asked, sounding like a teacher trying to get the right answers out of the class dunce.

Claire brightened up as if she'd never pouted. "It's in Ballinamallard, it's Courtney's, and I wanted to be a detective too."

Good lord. Could this case possibly get any more complicated? Now she had an empty grave to wonder about as well as everything else?

"I'd never have thought you would be interested in being a detective," Dani said, which was true enough. She would have expected Claire to lose interest the minute she tried it and found solving crimes was harder than she thought. "Why did you decide to look at the grave at all?"

Claire had climbed through the window, and now she was examining the pictures on Dani's walls. She leaned up close to a photo of great-great-grandmother Anne and peered at it as if it was some exotic curiosity. "I felt like visiting it. And I saw the ground had been dug up recently."

This mystery kept gaining new facets that had no business being there. Why would anyone bother to dig up a grave at all?

Dani's first instinct was to tell Claire to investigate it herself, if she was so interested in it. She quickly suppressed this with a certainty it would be disastrous. The last thing anyone needed was Claire poking around graveyards. She'd get arrested as a suspicious character, she'd attack the policemen, and who knew what would happen then?