“You can count on me,” said Annelise.
“I always do,” I said, and returned to the kitchen to cut up vegetables to put in with the roast.
After dinner, Annelise took the twins upstairs for their baths, then settled them in the living room with crayons and drawing paper.
Bill and I spent their bath time in the kitchen, clearing the table and
22 Nancy Atherton
devising a game plan for the big talk. We decided that I would start the ball rolling and Bill would follow my lead.
We entered the living room to find Will and Rob kneeling at the coffee table, drawing pictures of their favorite subjects—their gray ponies, Thunder and Storm. Annelise sat quietly by the fire, reading a novel, but she closed the book and set it aside when we came in.
Bill had to evict Stanley from his armchair before he could take possession of it. As usual, Stanley waited until Bill was seated comfortably, then leapt gracefully into his lap, where he curled into a purring black ball. I sat on the chintz sofa, facing the boys across the coffee table.
“Daddy and I were at your school this morning,” I said to them.
“We had a little chat with Miss Archer. She told us that you’ve been telling stories to the other children at school.”
“Uh-huh,” Will agreed, adding strands to Thunder’s tail.
“Daddy and I know that most of your stories are true,” I said, “but we wanted to ask you about one of them.”
“Okay,” Rob said equably.
“Did you . . .” I looked uncertainly at Bill, who gave me a supportive thumbs-up, and then I got down to the business at hand.
“Have you been telling your school friends that you saw a vampire at Anscombe Manor?”
“Yes,” said Will as he filled out Thunder’s mane. “We saw Rendor, the Destroyer of Souls.”
I don’t know if Bill’s jaw dropped, but mine did, almost to my knees.
“You saw who?” I asked, sitting bolt upright.
“‘Whom,’ ” Bill corrected automatically.
“Oh, Lord,” said Annelise with a tired sigh. “I should have guessed.”
I turned to her, round-eyed, wondering what she should have guessed.
Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
23
“It’s a comic book,” she explained, reading the question in my eyes. “Or a graphic novel, as they’re called nowadays. Rendor, the Destroyer of Souls. I’ve seen it at the bookstore in Upper Deeping.
It’s not meant for young children.” She turned her attention to the twins. “Did someone bring a comic book to school, Rob?”
“Uh-huh.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “Clive Pickle did, but it’s Nigel’s comic.”
“Who’s Nigel?” I asked.
“Clive Pickle’s big brother,” Rob replied, sitting back on his heels. “He’s at university. Clive goes into his room and takes his things when he’s away.”
I made a mental note to telephone Mrs. Pickle in the morning and ask her to put Nigel’s belongings under lock and key, then began the painstaking task of piecing the boys’ story together.
According to them, Clive Pickle had sneaked his older brother’s comic book out of the house and brought it to school several times over the past few weeks. He’d shown it freely to his pals, but he’d been clever enough to conceal it from Miss Brightman and every other adult at Morningside.
Rob and Will had regarded the comic as just another kind of storybook until they’d seen the Destroyer of Souls with their own eyes.
They insisted that they’d seen Rendor in the flesh, lurking in the woods above Anscombe Manor, during their most recent trail ride.
“That would have been on Sunday,” Annelise deduced. “Kit took them on a trail ride after church.”
Kit Smith, the stable master at Anscombe Manor, was the boys’
riding instructor as well as their trail guide.
“Clive Pickle said we didn’t see Rendor,” Will told us darkly, “but we did.”
Further questioning revealed that Clive had made his accusation on Monday and that the twins had argued the point with him in the presence of several other children, including the highly impressionable Matilda Lawrence, who, Bill and I knew, had relayed the boys’
24 Nancy Atherton
eyewitness report to her mother after awakening from a nightmare in the wee hours of Tuesday morning.
“Did you tell Uncle Kit that you’d seen Rendor?” Bill asked.
“Uh-huh.” Rob shrugged. “He didn’t believe us.”
“He said we saw a tree,” Will clarifi ed.
“But it was Rendor,” Rob concluded placidly. “He swooped.”
“Swooped?” Bill said.
“Like this.” Rob pulled an afghan from the sofa, wrapped it around his shoulders, and twirled in a half circle toward Annelise.
The afghan swirled around him.
“Then he turned into a lot of little bats and fl ew away.” Rob let the afghan fall to the fl oor and returned to the coffee table.
I gazed in fascination from his face to Will’s. “Weren’t you afraid?”
“No,” answered Will nonchalantly. “We were on Thunder and Storm.”