Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured? -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Good and Evil
Dani, in spite of agreeing to what she privately considered a disaster waiting to happen, had very little hope of solving the case. With or without the children's help, but especially with it. Still, she had agreed. She might as well keep her word and let them do something to help.
"I have a list of things each of you can investigate," she announced.
The children sat up straight and looked far too eager. Dani felt rather as if she'd walked into a room full of dynamite.
"I'm going to sort you into two groups and give each group a task."
They all nodded in unison. Dani now felt as if she'd walked into a room full of dynamite while holding a burning candle.
"Please work together. If you need help, come and ask me." She almost laughed when she realised how much she sounded like a teacher assigning homework. "Try not to get into trouble." Wait, that was asking the impossible. "I mean, too much trouble."
More nods. Less enthusiastic ones this time, accompanied with some frowns and unhappy looks. Dani pretended not to see this. As long as they followed her orders, she didn't care too much if they weren't happy about it.
"Cathy, Jack, Amy, Kevin and Julie will look through Courtney's old Facebook and Twitter posts. Take a note of anything you think might be important. Rosie, Imogene, Harriett, Noah and Elias will go through these newspaper articles about the murder and look for references to dates and places. And Max..."
The youngest member of the family practically jumped up and down with excitement. Dani paused. She'd meant to tell him he was too young to help. But she remembered how much she had hated being told she was too young to do anything, and he would be distraught if he was left out.
"Max will help me investigate the people who knew Courtney in Enniskillen."
There. She'd given him what he thought was a job, but in practice she would be the only one actually working. That way, everyone stayed happy.
~~~~
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The steady, rhythmical noise forced its way into the man's brain. He stirred, muttering under his breath, and pulled his quilt over his ears.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
It wouldn't stop. It reverberated through his head, seeming to shake him to the bone. Cursing, the man sat up and turned on the light. He rubbed his bleary eyes and gazed sleepily around the room. The light drove the shadows away to the distant corners, allowing him to see there was nothing there.
Tap. Tap.
And yet the noise continued. Now that he was somewhat awake, he realised it wasn't in the room at all. It came from the bathroom down the landing.
He got out of bed and traipsed to the bathroom, turning on the landing light. Finally he found the source of the noise. It was the cord that turned on the bathroom light. It swung to and fro in the draft, knocking against the mirror at regular intervals.
The man tied it around the towel rail. He waited a minute to be sure it wouldn't hit the mirror again. Satisfied, he turned and went back to bed.
His bedroom door had closed of its own accord. He pushed it open.
A hundred eyes glared down at him. The shadows writhed, undaunted by the still-glowing lamp. A hundred sharp teeth shone in the light.
He had no chance to scream.
~~~~
Dani and the two groups set to work on their assigned tasks. Perhaps they didn't make much process, but there were no major disasters.
The only thing Dani discovered was that Courtney had been well-known and well-liked by the church members. Yet for some reason her funeral had not been held at that church. Instead it was held at her parents' church. Perhaps there was something to be learnt from that.
She made a note of Courtney's parents' names and resolved to look them up in the phone book.
As she clicked out of the newspaper article she'd been reading, she saw a headline that made her shudder. "BODY FOUND CUT OPEN IN BELFAST", it screamed. In smaller text it added, "Police say wounds resemble animal attack".
Wait. That made no sense. How could a body be cut open in an animal attack? Dani clicked on the article.
"Man found dead... gruesome injuries... time of death estimated to be early hours of the morning... no sign of break-in... no sign of murder weapon... wounds appear to have been made with claws and teeth," she read, skimming over the unimportant details. "I suppose he was one of those idiots who keep dangerous dogs in the house."
The next line in the article cast doubt on that guess. "No animals were found in the house. The victim was forbidden from keeping dogs after being convicted of animal cruelty two years ago. Sounds like he was secretly keeping and abusing dogs, and one of them turned on him. The police found no animal DNA on the body. Hmm. That's odd."
Oh well. She had more than enough on her plate without investigating yet another murder. The police could deal with that one on their own.
~~~~
Claire had never been noted for common sense. Nor for patience, or consideration, or thinking before acting. When she felt like doing something, she did it. She reasoned that there was plenty of time for reflection later -- and indeed, she knew this from painful experience. So when she decided she wanted to go and see Dani, and properly introduce herself this time, she did it. At least she remembered to tell the Barbarys where she was going beforehand. What a pity she didn't think to tell Dani.
There was, strangely, no public transport available near the Barbary house. It turned out they were the only people within miles, except for a few scattered farms. The nearest bus or train station was in Larne, seven miles away.
"I'll drive you there," Patrick said as soon as Claire mentioned borrowing the car.
She had a niggling suspicion that he wouldn't have been so eager to drive her anywhere -- especially when the siblings were in the middle of preparing for their trip to Wales -- if he hadn't remembered the last time Claire had borrowed the car. It had been... a bit of a disaster. To say the least. Beatrix still grumbled under her breath when she saw those new scrapes and dents on the side of her car.
Somehow the idea of vampires owning cars was hard to accept. One would think that when Claire was a vampire, and knew firsthand what being one was like, she wouldn't be surprised by other vampires having modern conveniences. But most of her knowledge of other vampires was from novels and films. She'd gotten the firm idea that they were as a species stuck in the nineteenth century. The house the Barbarys lived in only seemed to confirm this idea. And yet, they had a car. Her mind boggled at this. Nor was it an old-fashioned car. It was an ordinary modern car like any normal person's. Her mind boggled even more at this.
The drive to Larne passed quickly and in relative silence. Patrick rarely spoke, and Claire never knew what to say to someone so old they had personally witnessed Queen Victoria's coronation. She knew that vampires were technically immortal, and unless she was particularly unlucky she had a good few centuries ahead of her, but learning just how old her hosts were was... disorientating.
So was the idea that she would still be alive -- in a manner of speaking -- when everyone she knew was dead. Claire tried not to think about that. She focused instead on the very Brontë-ish scenery outside the car window. Endless hills followed endless hills, only broken by a few houses as they neared the town. They arrived at the bus station ten minutes before the bus was due.
"See you later," Claire said as she climbed out of the car.
"Don't kill anyone unless you have to," Patrick said, which was really not the sort of goodbye she had expected.
Claire didn't reply. She couldn't think of anything to say to that.
~~~~
Dani made herself a cup of tea before phoning Courtney's parents. She suspected she would need it to calm her nerves. This was unlikely to be an easy phone call.
She finished her tea, took a deep breath, and picked up the phone. The dialling tone buzzed in the background as she dialled the number. Behind her, she heard the back door open. Dani didn't bother to look round. Whichever child it was, they would know to leave the room quietly when they saw her on the phone.
Whoever it was didn't leave. They apparently stood in the doorway for several minutes. Oh no. That meant they had something to say to her. Couldn't it wait until later?
Dani looked round. She promptly forgot the phone call and her planned introduction when she saw Claire standing there. Claire! Of all people!
The receiver began to slip through her fingers. Dani grabbed it just before it fell.
"Hello?" a voice said at the other line.
Dani tried to forget the inexplicable visitor standing behind her. "Hello, is that Mrs. Brooks?"
~~~~
It must be said that Dani paid far too little attention to what Mrs. Brooks said. She did her best to concentrate. But it was hard to focus on anything when a vampire was patiently waiting for you to speak to them.
She'd rarely been so happy to end a phone call before.
"What are you doing here?" Dani demanded as soon as she put the receiver down. A horrible possibility occurred to her. "You haven't... killed someone again, have you?"
Claire shook her head. "Beatrix insists on her or Patrick doing the actual killing until I'm older and better at hunting. I wanted to come and see you."
A grim feeling of foreboding took up residence in Dani's chest. "I... see. Why, may I ask?"
Claire grinned as if they were old friends. "I wanted to thank you for not stabbing me, and to properly introduce myself. We didn't have time to speak properly when we last met."
Well, that was one way to put it. Dani would have considered "being visited by a vampire with a stake in their chest and trying to get them out of the house as fast as possible" as something other than "not having time to speak". But it was hazardous to disagree with a vampire. Even a young and relatively harmless one.
"You had already been stabbed," Dani pointed out dryly. "Stabbing you again would have been overkill."
Claire laughed. That was generally a good thing. When people laughed at you, it generally meant they would be less inclined to attack you later.
"We're going to Wales soon, so I thought I'd come and see you now." Claire looked around curiously. "Why are there so many cupboards?"
Dani's brain needed a moment to process the abrupt change of subject. "Cupboards? ...Oh. Yes. We need a lot to store enough food to feed us all."
"How did you get so many children?" Claire asked. "Are they your cousins?"
Dani smiled wryly. "No, they aren't. They just..." She thought of the strange sequence of events that had led to her adoption of eleven children. "...appeared."
"I'm sorry about the washing machine." Apparently Claire had a mind that couldn't stay on the same subject for more than a sentence.
Dani's smile became more forced. "Yes. So am I."
~~~~
Imogene was used to odd sights. When you lived with a large number of excitable, eccentric children, you had no choice but to get used to odd sights. Nothing was likely to ever be stranger than the time she had found Hotaru glued to the ceiling. Still, some things had come close.
Now she was confronted with something that came considerably more than close. What on earth was Claire doing in the kitchen? Why was she washing the dishes? Why was Dani sitting at the table with a cup of tea and talking to her about the merits of one sort of instant coffee over another? What was happening?
Imogene rubbed her eyes. The scene didn't change. She shrugged and accepted it as one of the many unusual things that happened in this house.
"Dani?" she said when there was a lull in the conversation. "We've found some dates that don't match up. Rosie and Elias went over them a dozen times. We even used a calculator. They just don't fit."
Dani jumped to her feet so quickly she almost knocked her cup over. Claire stopped washing dishes and looked on with interest.
"What dates are they?" Dani asked, snatching up a pen and paper.
Imogene took her notebook out of her pocket and turned to the relevant page. "One of the newspapers said Courtney went to stay in Belfast on March twenty-fourth last year, and she didn't come back until April eleventh. But another newspaper said she attended a meeting in Enniskillen Town Hall on April third. And there's a picture to prove it."
Dani did not look impressed. "So she travelled down to Enniskillen for the meeting. Inconvenient, but not impossible."
Imogene wasn't finished yet. "On April fourth she was in Scotland for five days. But she said she got on the boat on April second, and it was a night crossing. She arrived on the morning of April third."
That got Dani's attention. "You're sure?"
Claire moved away from the sink and dried her hands on the dishtowel. That would have caused an explosion if Dani had seen it. She had very strict rules about what should and shouldn't be used as a hand-towel.
Imogene pretended not to notice. If Claire didn't say anything about it, neither would she. "We checked it again and again. Then we went to Courtney's Facebook, and it said the same thing."
"What are you talking about?" Claire asked.
Neither of them bothered to answer her.
"This requires more investigation," Dani said. "Good work."
Imogene stood up straight, feeling very pleased with herself. She quite forgot that she wasn't the only one to discover this discrepancy in the dates. She felt as if she had done all the work herself. This feeling was promptly driven away by Dani's next words.
"You've all done very well."
Imogene's self-importance deflated as if it was a balloon that had just hit a pin. "Oh. Yes."
Claire refused to give up. "Will someone please tell me what this is all about?"
Clearly, she wouldn't let this go until she got an answer.