Midlife Blues - Victoria Danann Page 0,10

come with two problems. One is that they look equally bad on everybody. The other is that the tiniest little movement looks like tsunami waves of jiggle. It seemed to me that, if she was breathing, the dress would give it away.

My friends and neighbors didn’t appear to be having fun any longer. They looked serious as the grave.

“She can’t be really dead,” I whispered to the room. When no one said anything, I reasoned that I had to force myself to feel for a pulse.

Systems check. Big girl panties raised all the way to the natural waist.

I walked slowly toward Lorca’s haphazardly reclined form, forced myself to take hold of her wrist, but dropped it like I’d received a jolt of electricity. There was no point in checking for a pulse, her body was room temperature, which feels very, very cold on another person.

“No. No. No. No. No. No. No. She can’t be really dead.”

Keir brushed past me, apparently on his way to the music room. “Why not? You knew he was a vampire.”

My lips parted into a dumbfounded gape as I watched him sit down at the studio grand and begin playing “As Time Goes By”. I’d just been confronted with the fact that the fun murder mystery dinner party had turned into the most gruesome reality of a real murder. But I must’ve been jaded from decades of movies and TV because I managed to think, “Keir can play the piano?”

I quickly forgot about that when my eyes returned to what was left of poor Lorca Scarlet. My ears were starting to whir. It felt like I might be on the verge of having an out of body experience. The idyllic existence I’d believed I’d found was feeling like I’d stepped into a nightmare.

“Maggie,” I pled. “Tell me this isn’t real.”

Maggie shrugged and took a sip of orange dessert wine, which she’d refused to leave behind. I was thinking, That was smart. I wish I’d done that. Then she said, “You know what they say. Vampires will be vampires.” Her nonchalance was so jarring it took my breath away.

I remembered that John David had been gone from the dining room at the same time as Lorca Scarlet. I also remembered that he’d returned alone with a toothpick.

Ew! I took a deep, shaky breath then wheeled on my host. There was no avenue by which to escape the obvious conclusion.

“John David! You’ve been a VERY, VERY, VERY, BAD VAMPIRE!”

At the end of that utterance, I heard a familiar snort coming from the music room. That small sound functioned as a signal that gave everybody the permission they’d been waiting for to begin laughing.

“But,” John David said, “she’s an actor from London. It’s not like she’s one of us!”

That caused the little gathering to laugh even harder.

“Are you all insane?” I cried. “There’s a dead body in the room.”

“Look again,” John David said.

“What?”

My eyes jerked back to the pool table in time to see the air shimmer around the corpse, which then blurred into a white aqueous goo. Within a couple of seconds Lorca Scarlet’s body was gone, replaced by a very-pleased-with-himself Geoffrey, straightening his cuffs and looking quite the catch in his perfectly fitted tux.

My eyes panned the room of smiling faces all staring at me and landed last on John David.

“Coffee?” he asked.

My head was spinning, but I was starting to put it together. I’d had the fright of my life and been punked by the entire village. My entire village. Including Keir. My face must’ve been as red as Lorca’s fake blood.

“J… J… Jeff. You’re a…?”

“Lorcan,” he said. “A true shapeshifter. You name it. I can be it.”

“Wow.”

Keir slipped in beside me and put his arm around me. I wanted to smack him, but remembered how much it had hurt the last time I’d tried that. And I’m no masochist.

As the initial shock began to wear off, I managed a smile through gritted teeth and whispered in his ear. “That was so mean. Tonight you’re sleeping on the couch in your room with all those TV monitors for company.”

He laughed. “Oh, come on. It was all in good fun. It just means everybody likes you.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe I want to be liked a lot less.”

People were filing out, heading downstairs to have a parting cup of coffee and share more laughter about the look on my face when I’d thought John David had ripped poor Scarlet’s throat away and casually picked his teeth with a toothpick.

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