“That car was a gift,” he sputtered, then, realizing that he was defending himself to a woman he planned on making a meal of, stopped himself. “Look, what does it matter? I was there, and I saved your life.”
“And you’re probably going to steal my silverware when my back is turned.” She shook her head, glaring off at seemingly nothing, as though accusing the air of ruining her evening. “This is just great.”
“Yeah, I’m having a hell of a time, myself.”
Her eyes narrowed as she glared back to him.
“You’re out of here tonight. We’ll go down to June’s Place and foist you off on someone else.”
“Foist?” He chuckled. “That’s a pretty big word for a farm girl.”
Ignoring the barb, she dropped a plate in front of him. As she sauntered out of the kitchen, she snapped, “Eat up.”
“Oh, believe me, I will,” he said under his breath, and reluctantly lifted his fork.
They set out right after sunset. Jessa’s understanding of sunlight was that when the sun went down, there was no sunlight. It was a simplistic belief, but he couldn’t really expect much else from someone who was basically a Hee Haw personality. The residual light prickled his skin, but didn’t burn him. It did bring back the unpleasant memories of being nearly roasted alive in the trunk of his car, which he didn’t appreciate.
Before he killed her, he’d have to ask her where he could find a map to get back to the highway, so he wouldn’t get stuck in a similar situation once he got out of here. Who knew how many void towns there were in Ohio?
“You need to behave yourself,” Jessa scolded. He hadn’t even done anything yet. “Tom Stoke is the sheriff here. He doesn’t take lip from anybody, not even guys with fancy cars. And he has a way of dealing with people who don’t fall in line.”
“Tar and feathers?” Graf guessed, but Jessa didn’t smile. She pressed her lips together into an unattractive line and kept walking, head down.
Maybe this Tom person thought he was a tough guy, but most tough guys crumbled like dust when a vampire started sticking their teeth in them. Not dust … more like rag dolls.
“People in town don’t like different,” she warned ominously. “Bad things can happen.”
He would worry about bad things later. Right now, he needed to figure out a way to get out of town. He would think about bad things and this place when he was driving far, far away from it.
Tom Stoke’s house wasn’t a house so much as it was a single-wide trailer parked on a depressing lot surrounded by tall grass. Just after the grass a rotting wooden bridge spanned the gap over a ditch that ran through his driveway, giving the place the appearance of having a moat. It was like the worst castle in the history of all castles.
“Sheriff?” Jessa called, picking her way across the collapsing bridge. “It’s Jessa Gallagher. I’m coming to your door.”
Graf noticed the hand-painted, misspelled TRES-PASERS WILL BE SHOT ON SITE sign as he crossed the bridge behind her. The front door of the trailer swung open, and a dumpy man—who looked to be about sixty in Graf’s estimation—came out to stand on the cinder-block steps. He held a rifle at his side. Totally normal way to answer a door.
“Who’s that with you? Derek?”
“No. This is what I came here to talk to you about,” Jessa shouted back, indicating Graf with a jerk of her thumb. “Sorry to come out so late, but I can explain.”
They crossed the yard, mostly hard dirt with a few pathetic yellow clumps of grass, and Graf ducked into the shade beside the trailer. In the twilight, nearly everything was shade, but this was a cool patch that had been sunless for hours, far more comfortable than the residual heat that lingered everywhere else.
The sheriff looked Graf up and down, stroking his beard with two fingers. “I’ll be damned,” he said, beady gray eyes squinting even further in his wrinkled face. He looked like Santa Claus’s brother who’d done some time in jail for DUI. Multiple DUIs.
Jessa pushed some stray, sweat-dampened hair from her face. “I found him on the road last night, out by the service station. He said he stopped for gas, but I’m pretty sure he stopped to rob the place.”
Narc, Graf thought. Maybe she was hoping the sheriff would arrest him right then and there, and take her problem guest off her hands. “It was a good thing I stopped, though, or you would have been dead.”
“That’s true,” Jessa agreed, surprisingly. “I was out there running from It, and if he hadn’t been there … I don’t want to think about what would have happened.” She said the last part the way bad actors deliver lines in Westerns. Not convincing, and you knew that they were mimicking the performance of someone better. Which gave Graf the distinct impression that she would have rather been caught by the monster. Either she was suicidal, or she hated him enough that she would rather be dead than know him. Either way, he had the solution to her problem.
“Doesn’t really matter why he was out there, does it? Not when there ain’t nothing out there to rob.” The sheriff put out his hand. “Tom Stoke. Sheriff. Let’s not worry about what you were doing out there. Let’s talk about how you got into this here town at all.”
He welcomed them inside the trailer. The interior was in a lot better shape than the exterior, though on a purely functional level only. On an aesthetic level, it was the seventh circle of hell. The walls were covered in wood paneling, save the small, open kitchen wallpapered in a print of huge mauve roses with metallic gold leaves. Not that much of the wall coverings were visible between the commemorative Elvis plates and shelves of Precious Moments figurines.
This decorating schema was as close to wholesome as Graf figured he’d ever get, and just standing in the midst of all of it made his skin itch.
“Marjorie, you wanna go to the kitchen? I got official business here,” the sheriff said to a woman about his age dressed in a sweat suit with a picture of two kittens snuggling on the front. She set aside the tattered crossword puzzle book she had been working on and nodded, not in a friendly way, to Jessa as she walked past.
“Sit down, young man,” Tom said, taking up residence in what was probably his regular chair, a wooden rocker with padded seat and arms. “Tell me how you got here.”
Graf took a seat in the armchair Marjorie had vacated, leaving Jessa standing awkwardly by the door. “Well, I got off an exit on 75 hoping to bypass a traffic jam, then I got all turned around. I was running out of gas and needed to get somewhere to sleep, so I pulled over at the gas station. I figured it was closed, but I thought I could sleep there and get gas when it opened in the morning. It was a win-win situation.”
“And that’s where you saw Jessa?” The sheriff glanced suspiciously at her. Maybe she had a record. Stealing street signs or something smalltownish like that.
Either way, the sheriff seemed to believe him more than he would likely believe Jessa. Her antagonistic glare cut right into him, practically carving liar on his forehead.
“Yeah. I saw the beam of a flashlight in the windows, so I went in to investigate. That’s when It attacked us. Mighty nice monster you got out here, Sheriff.” Graf tipped his imaginary cowboy hat, but Stoke didn’t crack a smile.
“I don’t know how much Jessa has told you about this town, but we ain’t had any strangers here in five years.” The sheriff rocked in his chair like a shark circling a wounded seal. “You’ll have to pardon me if I get a little suspicious when I hear your story.”
“That’s fine.” Graf held up his hands. “I’m suspicious, myself. I’m supposed to be meeting friends down in D.C., and they’re going to be worried if I don’t show up soon.”
“D.C.?”