An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3) by Fred Saberhagen (the two towers ebook txt) 📕

with it, rather as if she were something that he had long coveted and had just allowed himself to buy. She wouldn’t like it if Joe behaved so possessively. But this was different…of course.

   The elevator let them out in the subterranean garage, and there was her Lancia, keas and all. Kate slipped into the driver’s seat, Enoch waiting till he was invited to get in on the right. There was no doorman to be seen, but gates opened ahead of them and out they went, into the cold and up the curving driveway.

   Kate drove, without having to think of where to go. As before, Enoch talked, and it seemed to her that she could not understand a word. White needles filled bright globes of air around the streetlights. In some clear corner of Kate’s mind the thought occurred that nothing she had ever smoked before had hit her this way. Once the situation struck her as so ridiculous that she began to laugh, and laughed so hard and so wildly that it was difficult for her to see where she was steering. Enoch spoke sharply to her and she calmed down. Then it was his turn to laugh, loudly and heartily evidently at something Kate had just tried to say. The trouble was that something in his laughter hurt Kate’s ears, so she wanted to put her fingers into them, but instead she had to go on driving.

   They had already turned inland, away from the lake, leaving the Outer Drive and the Gold Coast behind. Was this Diversey she was following now? She wasn’t sure. Probably they were farther south. Presently she turned again, going where she had to go. Here the street lamps were fewer and gave a different light, wan and wintery. It was surprising how in the city the neighborhoods could change from one block to the next.

   Now here was where they were to stop. Certainly no doorman here, in fact not even a break in the row of dull vehicles parked along the frozen curb. Near the end of the block a fireplug-space at least was open, and Kate halted just ahead of it and started to back in.

   A car just behind them turned into the same space headfirst, jounced to a halt there just as Kate also hit her brakes. At the moment both vehicles had a tirehold on the precious space but neither could occupy it.

   She turned to Enoch helplessly. There was an abstracted expression on his face; he opened his door and got out. His head vanished from Kate’s view, but from the attitude of his body it was plain that he was facing back into the glare of their challenger’s headlights. Cold air swirled in through the open door to paw Kate’s legs. An engine gunned behind them; the other car was backing away. Enoch slid beside her again and closed the door, the look on his face unchanged.

   Kate parked the car—must have parked it though the next thing she was aware of was walking along the cracked and narrow sidewalk beside Enoch, whose arm encircled her but brought no warmth. The footing was treacherous, half uneven pavement, half blackened ice in old refrozen mounds, all under a powdering of new snow. When had she ever felt cold so intense before?

   They passed beneath an ancient neon sign humming to itself and sizzling with unplanned flashes. A man went by them, his face as hard and his clothes as grimy as the street itself. Suddenly there were two wooden steps, a narrow door that yielded to Enoch’s shoulder, and now at least the wind was gone.

   The cold kept pace, though, as they walked up stairs, bare wood creaking underfoot beneath the gritty crunching of a layer of grime. It would be terrible to have to face a night like this one alone, but she would not, no, she would not. She clung hard now to Enoch’s arm.

   He used a key, then brought her through a door into a room of utter cold, a wretchedly furnished room, dark but for pale streetlight coming through an undraped window. Kate saw smeared glass, one broken pane with rags stuffed into it.

   “You’ll have to hold me,” she whispered, shivering violently. “I’m here and I can’t help myself, you know. At least hold me so I won’t be so cold.”

   He laughed. When he spoke now she could hear him plainly. “Oh, I’ll hold you, okay. You’ll get to like it here. Think of it as home, maybe, even. Wise little rich-bitch.” He had closed the door and was standing right in front of her. “You think you know just what is gonna happen now. But you don’t know at all, at all.”

   Then he seemed to descend upon her like a great slow wave from the black lake.

CHAPTER TWO

   In the rather more than thirty years since Clarissa Southerland had come to live in Glenlake, this was almost the first time that anyone on the village police force had spoken to her in the line of duty. And it occurred to her to wonder now, somewhat belatedly no doubt, whether this aloofness from the cops was after all not a continentwide American peculiarity, but simply the result of living in a wealthy suburb. In England as a girl and young woman she had chatted with the constables routinely; but England, of course, was different.

   Detective Franzen, a balding, sad-looking young man, was listening to Clarissa’s account of Kate’s last phone call home with every appearance of totally absorbed, sympathetic attention. His behavior was not at all like that of the New York detectives, years ago, that time the jewels were taken at the hotel. Meanwhile Kate’s mother Lenore, was standing behind Franzen and worriedly eyeing her mother-in-law as if Clarissa were some undependable child who might not perform creditably for the nice policeman. Behind Lenore was the closed door to the study, and