How to Kiss a Vampire novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Back at Dusk

The anchor bolt was sawed halfway; Hanne waits outside Torsten's clock shop until dusk and slaps him, then finds he has no heartbeat.

At 6:30 the next morning I stood on the Lundgren roof in dry clothes and looked at the hole where my bolt used to be.

The sun was up and the storm was gone.

The lake behind the building was flat and silver.

Berit crouched next to me with a flashlight and a pair of pliers.

She had brought the bolt in a freezer bag, because she is a woman who plans.

"Look at the threads," she said.

I looked.

The steel shaft was bright and clean for about half its width.

Then it turned dull, with the rough torn look of metal that has been pulled apart.

"Somebody cut this halfway with a hacksaw," Berit said. "Then they let you do the rest."

"Who has the key to the roof door?"

"The building manager. Me. The night guard."

"And whoever walks in behind the night guard."

Berit stood up slowly.

Her knees cracked.

"Hanne," she said. "Go to the police."

"And tell them what? A man jumped twenty-two feet and caught me?"

She did not argue.

She did not tell me I had hit my head.

I was starting to hate that she did not.

I dropped Eero at kindergarten at eight, and he made me promise to look at his picture of the lift bridge at pickup.

"It goes up and down," he told me, as if I had not lived in Duluth my whole life.

"Show me tonight."

"You look tired, Mama."

"I'm always tired, bug."

"Not like this," he said, and walked into school with his backpack bumping his knees.

I spent the rest of the day on a flat roof on Piedmont, shoving shingles into a dumpster and thinking about a watch.

I had given Tor that watch four years ago.

I had stood in the doorway of his shop with my one-year-old on my hip.

I had said, "Happy birthday, now you have no excuse to be late."

He had laughed.

Then three weeks later he was gone.

All I had was a note on my kitchen table.

I can't be what you need. Don't look for me. T.

I had not looked.

I had cried for a week, and then I had gotten a better hard hat and gone back to work.

I had not thought about his face in a year.

Now I was trying, and I could not make it come.

I could remember his hands.

I could remember a beard and a quiet voice.

His face was a smear.

At four o'clock I left the roof, drove down the hill, and parked in Canal Park.

Ruud Clocks was where it had always been, in a narrow brick building half a block from the water.

The window was full of mantel clocks and pocket watches, all ticking at different speeds.

The door was locked and the sign said OPEN EVENINGS, AFTER DARK.

It had always said that.

I sat on the stone step across from the door with a coffee I did not drink, and I waited.

The light went gold and then orange over the lake.

At 5:58 a light came on upstairs.

At 6:04 the sun slid under the hills behind me, and the street turned blue.

At 6:07 the lock on the door turned.

I stood up so fast I spilled my coffee.

Torsten Ruud stepped out of the shop and onto the sidewalk with a ring of keys in his hand.

He was big, the way I remembered him, six foot four and heavy through the shoulders.

He had a shaved head and a short brown beard with grey in it.

He wore a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a canvas apron with a loupe on the pocket.

There was a pale scar across the back of his left hand.

I knew the scar.

I knew it, and I knew his face, and for one whole second my entire chest went warm.

Then I looked at him again, and what I saw was this.

He had not aged.

Not a day.

He was exactly the man who had left me four years ago, down to the lines at the corners of his eyes.

He looked up from his keys and saw me.

He went completely still.

It was a stillness I had never seen in a living person.

His hand stopped with the key in the air.

"Hanne," he said.

It was the voice from the roof.

I crossed the street, and I was not thinking at all.

I hit him.

It was an open-handed slap across the cheek, and it cracked like a board.

His face turned with it, and it turned back.

He did not touch his cheek.

"That's for the note," I said.

My hand stung.

It felt like I had slapped a brick wall.

"That's fair," he said, quiet.

"It's also for the watch. And the roof. And whatever the hell you did to my handwriting."

"Yes."

"You jumped across an alley, Tor."

"I know."

"You look the same."

He looked at me for a long moment, and his amber eyes were so sad that I forgot to be angry.

I stepped in close and laid my palm flat on the middle of his chest.

His shirt was warm from the shop, and the body under it was cold and hard.

I waited for a heartbeat.

I waited through my own, which was going like a drum.

There was nothing under my hand, and there was no breath either.

He stood there and let me find out.

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