Bloodcircle - Chapters Ten and Eleven

[kalinara]

So, we made it to the penultimate chapter. I have to admit, I haven't been feeling this book as strongly as I did the first two. I still love Jack and Escott. And I think Jonathan is an interesting new element to the story. But I'm very uninvested in the Francher family drama.

It doesn't help that, while we have an idea who the villain is, it's a character who has never had a scene of dialogue since last chapter. And, while I didn't say this at the time in my reviews, I should have, I don't like how Jack describes her.



I mean, yes, vampire, physical age of twenty-three or so. Nineteen is an adult, I realize, and only five years or so younger than Bobbi. But the narrative keeps emphasizing her youth (likely in order to make the plot twist more surprising), so it is creepier. Youth isn't even Jack's thing! If anything, the one thing that both Maureen and Bobbi is, well, an "old soul". Maureen is literally a vampire. Bobbi was jaded by life as a mob moll. And we can see immediately why Jack is drawn to the latter, and by his own account, it's why he's drawn to the former.

He's never met Laura. And his reaction to seeing her naked in her room, which the narrative brings up again later, seems very out of character for a man who feels guilty hypnotizing a woman who tried to kill him and Escott over a stamp. If Laura's supposed to have that kind of personal magnetism that would make a man who we've known as fairly honorable, over the course of two previous novels, behave so out of character, then it's not coming off in her appearances. It's frustrating.

I still love Jack, he's still my favorite, but I'm disappointed in him in this book. I blame Ms. Elrod.

And for a story that's SUPPOSED to be about finding Maureen's killer, I feel a distinct lack of MAUREEN in the story. She felt more present in Jack's quiet, unacknowledged grief in Bloodlist, and Gaylen's wrathful ambition, then she does in the story where we find her murderer.

But we have two chapters to resolve this. So let's see where it goes.

--

We left off with a cliffhanger: Jack followed the lawyer Handley into his office to spot a shadowy figure lurking. We were meant, I think, to assume it's Jonathan. It's actually Escott, who isn't a slouch at stealth himself.

He was a perfect statue, standing exactly in line with a tall, potted plant. His subdued clothing blended with the darkness and made him as invisible to human eyes as anyone can get and still be solid.

The sight gave me a bad start and I had to choke back the surprise; then I wanted to belt him one for the scare. Escott read it all off my face easily enough and shrugged as though to say it wasn’t his fault that I was so jumpy. He was there to hide from the lawyer, not to frighten poor nerved-up vampires.

Jack recovers quickly and continues to press Handley on Barrett and Emily. Handley tries to downplay it, but Jack cuts to the matter really quickly: can Handley think of an errand that would keep Barrett away if he knew Emily was dead?

Handley kind of hems and haws, and basically calls him a shiftless gigolo without saying so specifically:

“Granted, but I can hardly supply you with the specific reason you seem to be looking for. Anything to do with the relationship of two people is bound to be complex, especially when such a disparate age difference is involved.”

“More than you think,” I muttered.

Hah.

Jack tries a different angle, pointing out that even if Barrett was only interested in Emily's money, why isn't he here with the rest of the vultures, waiting to hear about the will. Handley is pretty smug though, because Emily "was well aware of the kind of men who might prefer her money over herself, and allowed for it."

Handley gets his back up when Jack wants to know more, so he shifts again, and it is pretty fun watching Jack calculate his approach. Because he is clearly doing that. (The narration helps us along with things like "Watch it, I told myself"). He floats the idea of someone murdering Emily, but ends up hitting a wall again.

Finally, Jack loses patients and resorts to plan B. Hypnosis. And I really do like how Jack genuinely tries every other avenue first. And I like this bit too:

His eyes softened, the stubborn expression gradually went slack, and his world closed and centered on my words and will. I told him to shut his eyes because I hate that dull look, like what the animals get when I’m feeding.

I think one of my issues with this book is that it feels like there's a lot of filler. On one hand, I appreciate the character note that Jack tries many tactics before hypnosis, but I'm not sure we needed multiple pages of no actual result. Here's it's the same. We watch Jack play twenty questions with a man who doesn't know anything of use. (He does provide them with a copy of Emily's will.)

We get a full multi paragraph summary of what he did and what everyone was doing at the time that Emily was discovered. But that's it. Why did we waste this much time on Handley.

I should save this for the verdict, but these are stream of conscious reviews by style, so fuck it. There is too much divided focus in this book, and too much minutia. The focus is already divided between 1) Maureen and 2) the Francher's dysfunction. But neither plot feels present in the way that Paco/Morelli/the List did in Bloodlist, or Gaylen/Braxton did in Lifeblood.

Emily Francher is the central character of this entire plot, the woman whose safety and well-being is putting Jonathan Barrett at odds with his vampiric grandson/romantic rival/class warfare nemesis, and she's had one scene of dialogue herself.

But we've had pages and pages of dialogue from the cabbie or the gardener or the lawyer, who each have maybe one clue that's worth noting.

Elrod can do better than this. Look at Bobbi Smythe in Bloodlist. The woman isn't introduced until the last quarter of the book, but she is immediately a POWERHOUSE. Her motivations MATTER. Her actions MATTER. And perhaps its unfair to expect the lady of this book to have quite that much impact as the primary love interest. But still, Elrod can do better.

The next book, Art in the Blood, I remember a lot more clearly than this one. There's no Maureen plot. No emotional stakes for Jack. But I remember Adrian. I remember Celia. I don't actually remember the real murderer, so this will be fun. But I remember how I felt about these characters. And there's so much more there than here.

It's disappointing. I don't know if Elrod just hammered this one out to make a deadline, or if she just wanted to get the Maureen suspense out of the way so that Jack can focus on other things, but this could be so much better.

Escott tells us what the will says, and I do like this bit:

“True.” He skimmed the closely typed pages of the will. “I believe I see Barrett’s guiding hand in this.”

“Yeah?”

“There are some personal bequests, a generous trust for Laura, pensions for retired servants, and one most unusual arrangement. There is a long statement here by Emily concerning a close friendship she formed with one of her British in-laws. She had a special place in her heart for a young cousin whose name was also Emily.”

“You mean—”

He kept talking. “In the event of Emily Francher’s death, her secretary has instructions to contact this person. If she appears within one year after the reading of the will, the rest of the estate goes to her. This person’s fingerprints are on file with the Franchers’ bank manager and with Handley so that she may be correctly identified.”

Hah, that is pretty clever. Though I feel like we heard about this very tactic from Barrett (about Maureen) in an earlier scene, so either that or this feels redundant. Again.

They discuss Laura, and Emily, and again, I feel like we're wasting time. As much as I love Jack and Escott's dialogue. Elrod is usually not this repetitive.

Okay, finally, TOO many pages into it, we hit plot. They go to Barrett's office. Escott impresses his boyfriend with a set of skeleton keys:

“No key on that side,” I said. “I’ll just—”

“I think I can manage.” He pulled out an impressive set of skeleton keys and picks from a worn leather case. Crouching in front of the lock, he began to experiment.

“Aren’t you the regular Raffles,” I commented.

“Ah, but I hardly ever steal anything.”

“Look, I can just go down for a quick gander. If he’s really gone you won’t need to—”

“There!” He turned the knob and pushed open the door. “That was a bit of luck. Usually it takes much longer.”

“Where’d you learn to do that?” I was impressed.

“You acquire all kinds of skills in the theater.” He replaced his picks and shut the case. “We once had a leading lady prone to the sulks and locking herself in her dressing room. For the duration of her contract I was often required to get her door open so the stage manager could persuade her to go to work.”

Now this bit of Jack-Escott banter I like. Character beat and backstory. Thank you, Ms. Elrod.

There's also a really interesting note where Jack asks where he got the case and Escott dismissively says "they're sort of an inheritance". I feel like THAT is far more of a significant clue about Escott's story than the anecdote.

Jack enjoys watching Escott work, I enjoy watching Jack enjoy watching Escott work. They break in and the place looks a little like someone left in a hurry. Escott, of course, remarks on Barrett's reading habits. He also found a journal.

For all their clash in class and time period, approach and goals, Jack and Jonathan do have a few similarities. And I'm not just talking about the vampirism necessarily. Well, maybe a little. Jonathan's left behind his trunk. The oilcloth of earth is still in his bed.

I think it's more that the two are both romantics, in a way that Escott isn't. Jack is more practical. Barrett more classical in his romance. But they're both men who love their women very deeply. The idea that he'd leave now is wrong.

The narrative doesn't prove me right or wrong. Jack realizes he's been smelling blood.

I love the rhythm of this, so this is going to be an excerpt that is longer than it ought:

Bloodsmell.

“—plot of land in the area and could have gone there.”

I drifted over to the bath, opened the door, and looked in.

“But the journal in there bothers me…”

It was wrong. The whole damned world was wrong.

“Why should he risk leaving such a revealing document behind?”

And I was just another poor bastard with the bad luck to keep bumping face-on into the wrongness of it all.

“Jack?”

“Poor bastard…”

“What is it?”

Then he was next to me, staring at the awful thing on the cold tile floor.

“Oh, my dear God…”

The color left Escott’s face and he put out a hand to steady himself against the wall. A return wave of last night’s dizziness hit me and I backed from the doorway, staggering to the bed. The alien soil was no comfort.

Escott kept staring at it and I didn’t like the look in his eyes.

God, isn't that gorgeous?

When Elrod is on, she is ON.

Anyway, the look isn't self-recrimination like Jack fears. It's determination. See, he's seen this before.

So what ARE they looking at?

Barrett had been pulled in feet first so that his head was just inside the door. He wore plain blue pajamas, but the top had been partially unbuttoned. The expensive silk was soaked through with massive patches of blood, most of it concentrated on his chest. Some blood was drying on the floor, but wide smear marks and two or three wet towels wadded in the tub indicated a little preliminary cleaning had been done.

Escott knelt over the body, his long fingers delicately peeling back the stiffening shirt front. The skin around the inch-thick shaft of wood in Barrett’s chest was parchment thin and just as dry. He was like that all over. His handsome features had shriveled up like an old monkey’s; his teeth were locked into a false grin by the lips and gums shrinking back. I was very, very glad his eyes were clenched shut.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“To render first aid.”

“Charles, he’s dead. He’s probably been dead all day.”

He shot me a piercing look, as angry as I’d ever seen him. “Knowing what you know, how can you tell?”

That shut me up.

I love that both men are so emotional about this. Neither of them like Jonathan Barrett much, but he doesn't deserve this.

I also love Jack's squeamishness here. I don't think he's put together yet WHY Escott knows what to do here. But as I said. Escott has seen this before. This time though, Jack gets to be assistant rather than victim.

And this is fun, because now we get to see what poor Escott must have gone through during that chapter of Lifeblood. Because while Barrett's condition is worse than Jack's was (Escott will tell us that a little later in the scene, probably because he'd been staked longer. Possibly also because he's older than Jack is.) at least Escott knows that this worked once. With Jack, he had to have been frantically thinking on the fly.

So Jack mind whammies the groom ("He might have cooperated without my influence, but I couldn’t waste the time answering his inevitable questions. By now I was long past the point of worrying about the morals of using forced hypnosis; it was a tool and it worked. I gave him just enough time to pull on his boots and sent him down to the fenced yard to bring in the horses.") and gets a lot of quarts of blood.

There's a funny Escott character quirk here too, as the syringe/bottle contraption has a gizmo that can unscrew it for cleaning. Jack gets Haskell the groom to continue filling the bottles while he brings the first back to Escott.

They unstake him:

I pulled. The brittle body vibrated. The wood shaft sang against the ribs and came free. Unbelievably, there was more blood left in him to well up in the wound. We both looked to his mummified face for any sign of life. He never moved. Escott grimaced and placed the tube between Barrett’s teeth and fed it down his throat.

“Isn’t it supposed to go up his nose?”

“The tissues are too shriveled to attempt it. The problem we have here is that his glottis might be open and I could end up putting the blood into his lungs instead of his stomach.”

“You can’t tell?”

“Not unless he’s breathing.” He fitted the other end of the rubber tube into a stopper with a hole in the middle.

“How’d you get by for me, then?”

“I was lucky.”

Escott had shrugged off Jack's thanks, before. He's not going to want Jack to revisit that. But Jack now has a new appreciation for exactly how much his best friend (boyfriend!) loves him.

When Jack gets back, Haskell is still bleeding the animals. He's shaken off the hypnosis though. But he's still helping. He doesn't know entirely what's going on, but he figures Jack's helping Barrett. And well:

“You know about him?”

He glanced up and I could see there was a brain working inside his head. “Maybe as much as you do?”

“What do you know?”

He drew out the needle, detached it from the syringe, and carefully poured the contents into a bottle. “I know I got a steady job here, the pay is good, and I have a lot of free time. How many people can say that these days?”

“Then you’ve seen Barrett—”

He nodded, tapping in a final drop. “Yeah, he’s careful, but I seen him a couple times down in the yard.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

He shrugged. “It scared me at first, but not now. He don’t hurt no one, he don’t hurt the horses. This is a good place to work and he’s a nice man, you know?”

I feel like this is another beat for the clash of classes subtheme in this book. (Which I DO like a lot.) Because Barrett is a good guy. It's pretty obvious now. And he's good to servants. But...he's a gentleman. In the old school sense. And well, there's a reason servants hear everything. No one notices them.

And in a nice bit of pacing that I wish we saw throughout this book, Jack gets an important clue too. He asks about Laura. Who is all right, but a little full of herself. Not the type to think of others. But she's still young, yet.

Barrett starts to improve, which makes Jack and Escott genuinely happy. Jack grins as he gets more bottles. I like this bit too:

When I came back, there was a definite change in Barrett’s appearance. His face looked fractionally fuller and the skin was flexible to the touch. “It’s working, Charles.”

He nodded, but his own expression was still tight. “You were a long time.”

“I was having a talk with Haskell.”

“Yes?”

“He said he saddled a horse for Laura at one-thirty, and then she asked him to wash her car. He’d washed it earlier that morning, but she gave him some guff about dust and told him to wash it again anyway. It kept him busy on the opposite side of the house and he didn’t see where she went.”

“Interesting.”

So Hadley's one paragraph of useful information had given Laura an alibi, Haskell shredded it. And notice, Jack got this without a waste of pages. Ms. Elrod CAN do this. Why didn't her editor talk to her about this?

But I also am intrigued by Escott's tight expression. Is it worry for Barrett? Or was it worry for Jack? It occurs to me that while this situation is surprisingly NOT traumatic for Jack himself (unlike a shit ton of other things in his life), it might well be for Escott.

Barrett starts to gag on the tube. He's coming back. We get a nice transformative recovery:

In the end, Barrett drained away just over six quarts of the stuff, and I witnessed a faster version of the kind of recovery I’d gone through myself. The wrinkling smoothed, dry flesh-colored twigs turned into fingers, and stiff parchment filled out to became skin again.

Jack and Escott ponder how long he's likely to be there, and Escott suggests that it was "concurrent with the incident on the stairs". Both men realizing, of course, that Barrett didn't know about Emily and now really isn't the time to tell him.

They share some horror about Barrett being left like this all day. Escott tries to say that he might not have been conscious. But Jack's been there. No soil? He was. Eek.

So the chapter ends, with Jack going to talk to Laura, and there are little hints that...well...

Whether he could read anything else into that, I wasn’t ready to guess. The important thing was to say something that was halfway convincing so I could get out of there. He was distracted because Barrett was coughing and still needed help, otherwise I might have gotten more argument from him.

Escott finally nodded, and if he knew what I had in mind, he chose not to comment.

“This might take awhile,” I added, risking it anyway. A part of me hoped he would catch on and try talking me out of it.

So. Let's go to the last chapter and see what that actually means:

--

Jack heads for Laura's room, though he makes a quick stop in Emily's "pocketing what [he] needed".

Then it's time for Laura, who is dressed in all black. Her hair is covered by a black scarf. She's understandably terrified by a stranger in her room, but Jack acts quickly and gets the hypnosis out. No guilt, this time.

They go into the room. And Jack is calculating and thoughtful:

I followed her in. She chose to sit at her dressing table on a little satin stool much like the one in Bobbi’s room. I checked the place, keeping well clear of the veranda windows. The stables were at an oblique angle to them on this side, but there was a chance Haskell might look out and see my figure against her curtains. It was very important that she appear to be alone now.

She was—at least in the mirrors.

At the very beginning, in Bloodlist, I made a comparison between Jack and Escott: practicality vs. pragmatism. Jack has a methodical, step by step approach to things. He encounters a need, and he addresses it, in a clear eyed, straightforward fashion. Escott is pragmatic. For him, it's the end goal that matters. And he'll do what he needs to do to get there.

Because of that, Escott has always been colder than Jack is. Jack is a practical man, but he's also a romantic and an idealist. He has a very strong system of values. He feels the weight of his guilt and worries about going too far.

But what happens when a practical man encounters a situation where he can see only one solution. A situation where the idealist is saying, something has to be done. And the romantic is saying, it's the only way.

And for all that I complained about how Jack looked at Laura in this book, I do like this:

She was very still, waiting for me to speak. Her body rhythms were strong and even. After an active summer of swimming and riding, her skin was tanned and healthy. She was quite a beautiful girl and her youth attracted me even as it must have attracted Barrett.

There's a different tone here. It's not cold, per se. Maybe just...clear.

And this is an interrogation where we do want every word. So...let's hit the big mystery first?

“Laura, did you kill Maureen Dumont?”

“Who?”

And that threw me until I realized she might never have heard the name. “Remember the summer of the fire?”

“Yes.”

“Remember the dark-haired woman who came one night to see Barrett?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill that woman?”

She’d buried it deep and it didn’t want to come out. Her breath got short, and for a second, real awareness came back to her eyes. I steadied her down and soothed her, keeping my voice low, but pitched so she had to listen. I told her it was all right to answer and repeated my question, and then she said yes.

Now this. This is how it's supposed to work. The hemming and hawing is pointless when it comes from the gardener or the cabbie or the lawyer. But here, it matters. Because Laura doesn't want to admit what she did. THIS is when it counts.

But ouch. Poor Jack.

I felt nothing looking into her blank eyes. Her face ceased to belong to a person and took on the smooth, bland beauty of a mannequin. The lost years and the emotional racking and the physical trauma had taken all feeling from me. The worry, fear, and doubt that had once driven me were gone, and I was empty. We mirrored each other now. All I had left were questions, and they weren’t really mine, but Escott’s.

And it's interesting that he says that, because the next question is "Why did you do it?"

Jack is a practical romantic idealist and a woman that he loved dearly is gone. It doesn't matter why.

And I love the mirror motif in this scene. It's so...clear.

(Pragmatism is murky. Practicality is clear. I might have a few motifs of my own.)

The why is simple: she wanted Barrett. She thought Maureen was a threat. That's it. She'd run to Barrett for help. She'd left Jack, trying in vain to protect him from her monstrous sister, only to meet her end at the hands of an obsessed fangirl.

There is an interesting bit here:

“Did you kill Violet that summer?”

“No, the fire did.”

It was an odd answer and I picked a subtle change in her tone of voice, as though I were talking to a child. “Did you set the fire in the house?”

“No.”

“How did it start?”

“The lamp cord.”

“Did you do something to the lamp cord?”

“I fixed it.”

“So that it would start the fire?”

“Yes.”

“Then you did kill Violet.”

“No, the fire killed her.”

Laura is practical too. Not pragmatic. She didn't do what she did to get to an end goal, per se. (Maybe Emily.) She just kept encountering situations that she needed to address.

And oh my god, I've been reading this book wrong the whole fucking time.

I've been complaining about the lack of focus to Emily and Laura because I missed the obvious.

I kept looking at it as though Jack and Jonathan were parallels. Two vampires, both important to Maureen. Same fucking name! But I was looking at it wrong. Because as we've seen all along, aside from a shared romantic streak that manifests differently (Jack is far more into the idea of an equal collaborative partner), and a certain nobility of spirit (Barrett's being far more literal, and having a touch of nobless oblige), they don't actually have that much in common.

And maybe parallel is the wrong word. I was looking for parallels and that's why I got it wrong. I should have been looking for reflections.

Jack's reflection here isn't Jonathan. It was never Jonathan. It was LAURA.

The youth, the passion, the fucking clarity of purpose. All of that. That's JACK. That's LAURA.

He was YOUNG with Maureen. Not so much literally. Jack, at thirty, would have been considerably older than Jonathan was when he was turned into a vampire for example. But emotionally. We'd heard the story. We glimpsed that young, pre-seasons changing Jack in the flashbacks in Bloodlist.

He was young and he was passionately in love with Maureen. Now, unlike Laura, it was actually requited. But this is a man who spent five years sending a personal ad every day, in countless newspapers. And I find myself thinking of Jack's almost teenaged reaction to seeing Barrett and Emily be intimate (another beat that, at the time, didn't feel completely in character). And it makes me think about Escott, I think, explaining that Laura never saw Emily as a true rival, because she was old.

Hell, even the creepy focus on Laura's nudity and sexuality makes sense. Though I still wish Elrod had done it differently. Because Jack is very sexual. Sex is a huge part of his relationship with Bobbi, even though theoretically it does very little for him. The "apples and oranges" bit from Lifeblood, their one-night stand at the start. It's all there.

But Laura's love is unrequited. And Laura doesn't have a conscience. She's got the practicality and the romanticism, but there's no idealism. And deep down even more than the other two, I think idealism is Jack's core defining trait.

And so Laura's methodical, step-by-step, "see a need"/"address the need" process includes things like murder.

A lot of murder. And it will never be her fault.

Jack asks how she killed Violet: for Barrett. She'd frayed the wires, fixed the rug, turned on the lamp and then snuck back to her room.

Oh...here we go:

Fire and ice inside me and now the same sickness I’d felt when Banks had died.

“How did you kill Maureen?” Someone else seemed to be talking to her but using my voice.

She’d read up about vampires that summer. She knew more about us than Barrett had ever suspected, and she knew what to do.

Being a strong girl, it had been nothing for her to lift Maureen’s small body from her trunk to the bath in the bright light of morning. She’d filched a sharp stake of wood from Mayfair’s work shed and she had a hammer. Frozen by daylight, Maureen had died without a sound. The only problem for Laura was the blood. Her clothes had been soaked with it and she was frightened she’d be found out. She’d spent hours cleaning it up.

In a cardboard box scavenged from the kitchen she hid Maureen’s body. It was very light now, hardly more than a husk. She had no trouble getting it downstairs and out the side door, away from the servants’ wing. Dragging it into some trees, she used their cover to take it to the ruins of the old house.

Oh, Jeeze. There goes any hope of an eleventh book plot twist, doesn't it? That sounds pretty definitely dead.

But another reflection. Like Jack, Laura knows a lot more about vampires than she's supposed to. But where he earned his through trust and initimacy, she used hers to murder.

And NOW we see some trauma from Jack:

The parallels of what happened to Maureen and what nearly happened to me were all too clear in my mind. I knew exactly what she had gone through, and inside I was screaming for her. I stood and backed away from Laura. Not all feeling had died. The war was still going on between fiery rage and cold justice. Neither was canceling the other out, both seemed to be fusing together somehow.

Laura describes getting rid of Maureen's belongings, and it's as already established. She'd hired the cab, overpaid, loaded the trunk with rocks and dropped it off the dock.

She had the Port Jefferson driver drop her near the gate, snuck through, and walked back to the house without being caught. She listened to her radio and danced before her mirror, pretending that Barrett was her partner.

“What did you do with her clothes?”

“I pushed them into the house incinerator. Haskell burned them up the next day with the usual trash.”

She watched the trucks and crews roll in and begin tearing down the ruins. The blackened shards of wood were torn away, and the broken glass was removed. What was left of the floor was pounded apart and allowed to cave in to the cellar, which gradually filled with the packed debris. A few days later more trucks came in with topsoil and covered it all like a grave.

All too fitting.

There is so much in this scene. I still think we didn't need to spend as much time with the gardener and lawyer, but this, this is exquisite. And maybe we shouldn't have had more of Laura, because the reflection aspect might have been lost.

EMILY though, I think could have benefitted.

But we do know Laura, on some level, because we know Jack. But then again, there's still that big difference:

I found it difficult to look at her. “Then you just went on as before?”

“Yes.”

“No questions, no guilt?”

She blinked.

“Didn’t you feel bad about what you did?”

“Why should I?”

“You killed. You murdered an innocent woman you knew nothing about.”

“Well, I had to.”

No guilt, no regret. A job finished and a goal achieved. Barrett would be hers when the time came.

Jack asks about Emily. Emily wasn't a threat like Maureen. Laura just dismisses that with "He wants me, not her." But the problem was, Emily overheard Barrett and Laura talking.

See. Jack was maybe a little too effective: Barrett immediately confronted Laura, hypnotized her, and got the story out.

And Laura is, as always, very methodical:

She’d heard about the man asking questions about the fire from the house staff. The story of Banks and his memorable tip came up. She left to find him, to see for herself if he was a danger. She carried along a small suitcase. Inside it was a club.

Parking her car near a gas station with a phone, she called for Banks to come pick her up. They drove a little and she talked with him. Her questions about his Port Jefferson trip clicked things together in his memory, and he recognized her. He thought it to be an amazing coincidence.

She asked him to stop the car and he did so, still chattering about her and how she’d changed. She brought the club out of the suitcase and smashed it into the side of his head as hard as she could. She hit him several times to make sure, then took his money box to make it look like a robbery.

Jack himself is hilariously an afterthought. A driver who was talking to Banks, Laura took care of him too. And this:

Breathless, she tumbled into it and crept home again. She laughed to see a third car in line behind the others as she passed. The frantic man waving at her to stop looked so ridiculous.

Jack is a vampire but he's not a monster. Laura is.

But can Jack be one? He did come awfully close at the end of the last book. Though that was more a crime of passion than this kind of calculation.

Emily hadn't heard the content, but she'd heard Jonathan's tone. She was worried. She asked Laura. Jonathan had made Laura forget the conversation, but she remembered once Emily brought it up.

“Then I had to do it again,” she said wistfully.


God, there's too much here and it's all great. But basically we get the story of her staking Jonathan. Stripped to the skin this time, because she learned from Maureen. She cried when she cleaned up, because she really did love him. She had known this was coming though.

She blames Emily. It's HER fault. But see, Barrett and Emily were going to get married. And Laura couldn't have that. Then he'd get the money. There's such an amazing juxtaposition here where we go from Laura's passionate child logic about whose fault this is, to her coldly adult logic of who gets Emily's money.

We learned that apparently Emily had proposed before. But THIS time, Barrett said yes.

I wonder if that's Jack's fault too. He thinks he knows when Jonathan told Laura - he'd seen them talking when he broke in. It would have been after their first conversation/confrontation. Their first moment of understanding. Maybe Jonathan, looking into the desperate eyes of Maureen's abandoned lover, realized that life is too short even for a vampire?

Maybe not.

Anyway, the interview is almost over. Just a few more questions:

“Laura, how do you feel about murder?”

I had to repeat the question. She shook her head.

“Don’t you feel anything at all about killing those people?”

Puzzlement. Another head shake.

“How do you think they felt?”

Her face was blank.

“Don’t you think they had a right to live?”

She shrugged. It was like explaining light and color to the totally blind. She would never, ever be able to see.

“Are you thirsty, Laura?”

“A little.”

“I’ll get you a glass of water. Wait right here.”

She's never going to get it. Because she's practical, like Jack, methodical, like Jack, brilliant, like Jack...but she'll never have his empathy or conscience.

But she does have the rest, and she has money, so who'll ever catch her?

In her bathroom I mixed the stuff with the whiskey and stirred it around in a glass with my finger until it dissolved. I wiped everything clean and took the glass in wrapped in a washcloth. I told her it was cold water and that she was to drink it all.

“Will you write something for me, Laura?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She put down the empty glass and smeared dark pink lip color onto her dressing-table mirror, and I gave her the washcloth to wipe her finger on. The few words scribbled over the glass were for others to read and interpret. For her, they were utterly meaningless.

“You’re tired, Laura. It’s been a busy day. Go to bed now.”

Did Jack become a monster at the end of Lifeblood? Maybe. Briefly. He did exact his rage on a dying man. He did hold a woman's head under the water. He was passionate and damaged and they were dangerous and something had to be done.

And now?

We watch Laura go through her bedtime routine: dressing, brushing her hair, as her movements grow slow and unsteady. She loses focus a few times as she goes. (For his part, Jack extracts Barrett's suitcase from under Laura's bed. She'd had plans for that too...)

She got into bed. The lights were on. I turned them off for her, using the cloth again as I had for the door. I left the bedside table lamp on.

Her eyes canted to the radio and her hand twitched. By now she’d lost muscle control. I turned it on for her, it warmed up, and we listened to soft dance music.

She was deeply asleep now. Her breathing was slow and shallow even as her pulse speeded up. A thin sheen of sweat appeared on her serene face.

Instead of the sleeping mannequin on the bed, I saw Emily Francher.

I saw John Henry Banks.

I saw a last ghostly image of Maureen flash over my inner eye and spin away forever into memory.

I waited and watched and felt nothing.

Back in Bloodlist, in one of their earliest conversations, Jack had a warning for Escott about hypnosis. Do you recall?

He said something like: hypnosis doesn't work the way the stage stuff does. Jack can overrule Escott's mind entirely. He CAN force him to do something dangerous or even deadly.

There's something oddly full circle about that here.

But actually, I misled you a little. That's not the end of the scene. This is:

Nothing until the time finally came and the room was silent but for the radio.

Nothing until I looked at the scrawl on the mirror and read the words I’d dictated: I’m sorry. God forgive me.

Then I bowed my head and tried not to weep.

Charles is a pragmatic man, but Jack is a practical one. And there was only one solution here. And it's why all of those questions were "for Charles", rather than Jack.

Laura is a serial killer. Patient and methodical, and far too careful to get caught. And in the end, it doesn't really matter why she did it. There's only one practical way to deal with someone who is this dangerous, whose crimes can't be proven, who is all but guaranteed to murder more people in the future.

And Jack is her reflection. He's methodical, step-by-step, see a need/address the need. And he does it here, as carefully and patiently as she would have.

But they're still not the same. And Jack will be living with this decision for a long time.

--

Later, Jack talks to Escott. He asks after Barrett. He doesn't mention Laura. They wonder what Barrett will do. Jack decides to find out.

He knocks at Barrett's door, and Barrett lets him in. He leaves the suitcase by the bed, and they talk in the library. Barrett is a picture:

He was in his library seated on a long couch. He’d pulled on some pants and slippers, but his shirt was buttoned only halfway, as though he’d forgotten to finish the job. There was a new weariness in his expression, the kind that comes from a tired soul and not just a tired body. His arms hugged his chest, a gesture I could commiserate with; I’d felt the same when it had happened to me.

I stood in the doorway, hands jammed in my pockets. “Glad you’re better.”

I can't believe I ever thought these men were parallels.

Barrett thanks Jack for saving him, noting that Escott hadn't wanted to hear it. Jack's uncomfortable about it too, and thinks he might understand the sentiment. They talk awkwardly about Haskell for a moment.

Jonathan, rather hopelessly, asks after Emily. No change. Jack asks how long it took for Maureen. And I'm intrigued at how easily he asks the question. Maybe someday, Jack will be in a place where he can ask Jonathan about her for her sake, and share his own experiences.

Sadly, it happened that same night. Same for Jack. (Well, you think, dude. As I recall, you got shot and dropped into the harbor. You could have lost a day - but admittedly, probably didn't.)

But Jack wants to talk about Laura. And that's a sore spot, of course. For both. Jonathan thinks they're having a different conversation.

He shook his head. “No, you don’t, Mr. Fleming. Not one word. I’ve been a fool’s fool over that girl and there’s no excuse for me. You were both right. I wish to God I’d realized it earlier—”

“She… she pushed Emily.”

He faltered.

“She remembered you questioning her; that’s why she came here to kill you. Then she had to kill Emily to cover up your death.”

The pain rolled off him like a tidal wave and I stayed there and let it hit me. I said nothing about the money or anything stupid like that because the man was falling apart in front of me, and I stared at the floor for the whole time and pretended not to see or hear him.

Later he mumbled something about talking to Laura.

Jack interrupts him. Tells him she's dead.

And it's funny, but Jack, unlike most characters of his type, is actually a pretty good liar. Remember Gerald Fleming?

“I found her. She’d put some sleeping pills in a drink.”

The truth, but not all of it. He didn’t want to believe it and then he couldn’t help but believe it. All he had to do was look up at my face and see it there. I stared at the damned floor and memorized the carpet pattern.

“I think maybe it was too much for her, and in the end she was sorry.” The one thing I could give him was the cold comfort of a lie. He needed it badly.

Because Jack isn't JUST a practical man. He can be compassionate too. And gentle. And Barrett pours it all out, what he'd learned. What Jack already knows. "the words tumbling swiftly until they ceased to be words and turned into an unintelligible drone."

I'm not sure Jack is any more okay than Jonathan is, to be honest.

But he gives him one more lie. When Jonathan says he wishes he could have helped her, Jack says that he could have.

So eventually, Jack rejoins Escott. They're ready to go home. Surprisingly, Barrett ends up joining them. He intends to ride with them as far as the gate. (He doesn't want to wake the Mayfairs.) But then...something happens.

I started to say something, but forgot it—a small, soft sound distracted me. Barrett heard it, too, and automatically swiveled his head in the right direction. From where I stood I could see the parlor and noticed a white rose lying on the floor next to the casket. It was the rose Emily held to her breast. Somehow it had fallen out.

Barrett stared at us with sudden, agonized hope and dashed in to her.

And the story ends here.

..and just like Lifeblood, I really really could use a nice comforting fanfic epilogue to decompress. Alas. I respect you, Ms. Elrod, but I really do wish you'd reconsider some day...