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  INNOCENT BLOOD

  Graham Masterton

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published in Great Britain 2005 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2011 by Graham Masterton.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Masterton, Graham.

  Innocent Blood

  1. Motion picture industry – California – Los Angeles – Fiction

  2. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) – Fiction

  3. Horror tales

  I. Title

  823.9’14 [F]

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-118-7 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 0-7278-6189-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 0-7278-9136-7 (paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  Wednesday, September 22, 8:34 A.M.

  As usual, the school gateway was jammed with mothers awkwardly trying to maneuver their oversized SUVs in and out, so Lynn steered her Explorer over to the opposite side of the street and parked it with two wheels mounted on the grass.

  ‘Remember it’s your dance class today,’ she told Kathy, turning around in her seat. ‘That means no dawdling after school, OK?’

  ‘I don’t feel good,’ Kathy protested, flopping in her seat.

  ‘Nonsense. I’ve never seen you look healthier. Just because you have a math test.’

  ‘I think I’m going to barf. I know I’m going to barf. I can feel all of those mushed-up pancakes in my tummy, and they don’t like it down there.’

  Lynn snapped her seat-belt buckle back into place. ‘OK, then. If you feel so bad, I’ll just have to take you back home to bed and cancel your dance class.’

  ‘Not my dance class! That’s not till three thirty! I’ll be better by then!’

  ‘No, I’ll have to cancel it. You can’t jeté with a tummy full of mutinous pancakes.’

  ‘But I want to be an actress like you. Why do I have to learn math? You don’t have to know math to be an actress, do you?’

  ‘You don’t think so? Supposing you’re an actress and you make squillions and squillions of dollars like Julia Roberts and your agent takes three and a quarter percent more than he’s supposed to? How are you going to know?’

  ‘Because all agents take more than they’re supposed to. Agents are chiselers and shysters and they all work for Satan.’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake! Who told you that?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Lynn, unbuckling her seat belt again. ‘Let’s get you into school before Ms Redmond gives you another demerit for being late.’

  Kathy climbed out and tugged on her beret. She was a small girl for ten years old, with blonde braids and a pale, elfin face like her mother’s. Her eyes were that same luminous green as her mother’s, too, like pieces of a glass bottle found on the seashore. Her legs were so skinny that she kept having to pull up her long white socks.

  ‘What do you want to do after your dance class? We could go to De Lunghi’s for spaghetti if you like.’

  ‘So long as Gene doesn’t have to come with us.’

  ‘I thought you liked Gene.’

  ‘I don’t like his nose. He looks like an anteater.’

  ‘He does not. You’re just being obnoxious.’

  ‘He does too. Every time he has soup the end of his nose dips right into it.’

  They crossed Franklin Avenue to the school gates. The Cedars private elementary school didn’t look like a school at all: although it had no religious affiliations, it shared the First Methodist Church building, with its tall square tower and its gray stone walls, and several of the classrooms, even though they were large and airy, had stained-glass windows, with scenes of Christ surrounded by little children.

  ‘You won’t forget to bring home your hockey kit, will you?’ asked Lynn. But at that moment Kathy caught sight of her friend Terra, and waved, and jumped, and immediately skipped off. Terra’s mother, Sidne, came up to Lynn and the two of them watched their daughters run through the school gates and into the yard, where thirty or forty other children were jumping and screaming and tearing around in circles.

  ‘Some tummy ache,’ said Lynn.

  ‘Oh, the math test,’ smiled Sidne. ‘Terra said she had leprosy.’

  ‘Leprosy?’

  ‘That’s right. On the spur of the moment, it was the only illness she could think of. At least it shows she’s reading her Bible.’

  ‘They really kill you sometimes, don’t they? I love Terra’s braids.’

  ‘Janie did them. I don’t know how she has the patience.’

  They walked back to Sidne’s car together. ‘Did you hear from George Lowenstein?’ Lynn asked her.

  ‘No, nothing. If you want to know the truth, I think he’s looking for somebody younger.’

  ‘But you’d be perfect as Corinne, you know you would!’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I used to wonder when I would have to stop playing wayward daughters and start to play harassed mothers, and maybe it’s now. I think I’ll go to Miska’s and have a massage and a pedicure. And then I’ll go to Freddie’s and order a treble strawberry sundae with extra cream.’

  ‘I’d join you, believe me, if we didn’t have a read-through.’

  Lynn said goodbye to Sidne and crossed the street. A short, crop-haired man with a neck like a stovepipe and a maroon polyester shirt was waiting beside her Explorer. His face was the same maroon as his shirt, and beaded with sweat.

  ‘What the fuck do you call this?’ he demanded.

  ‘What the fuck do I call what?’ Lynn didn’t want to show that she was the slightest bit afraid of him.

  ‘What, you’re blind? Where’s your goddamned guide dog? You parked on the goddamned grass, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but there was no parking space anyplace else.’

  ‘Oh, and you think that’s some kind of excuse? If there was no parking space anyplace else you should’ve gone around the block again until there was. You’re all the same, you women. You think you can do whatever you damn well like and say whatever you damn well like and park wherever you damn well like and you don’t give squat for nobody else.’

  Lynn opened the Explorer’s door and climbed into the driver’s seat, but the man clung on to the door to prevent her from closing it.

/>   ‘Listen, lady, I don’t even have to take care of this piece of grass, but I do, because it’s outside of my house and I’m proud of my house, and then somebody like you comes along and drives their goddamned vehicle all over it. How would you like it if I came around to your house and drove my goddamned vehicle all over your goddamned grass?’

  ‘I think you’d better take your hands off my door,’ said Lynn.

  ‘And what if I don’t?’

  ‘I’ll call for the school security guard, that’s what.’ All the same, her heart was thumping wildly. The man had a large maroon wart on the left side of his nose and she couldn’t stop looking at it and she was convinced that he knew she was looking at it.

  He turned his head around for a moment, as if he were looking for somebody, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Then he turned back to Lynn and said, ‘OK. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to curse you for this. I’m going to wish on you the shittiest day that you ever experienced in your entire life.’

  He took his hands off the door. Lynn immediately slammed it and locked it. He stood beside the Explorer, not saying anything more, but he lifted his finger and pointed it at her as if to say, you mark my words, lady, you’re going to remember this day for ever.

  Wednesday, September 22, 8:43 A.M.

  Ann Redmond looked out of the window of her study and frowned. A group of children had gathered around the bench on the far side of the schoolyard, ten or twelve of them at least, and she was experienced enough in grade school crowd patterns to see at once that they were huddling.

  Huddling was what children did when there was something exciting to look at and they didn’t want the teachers to see what it was. As far as Ms Redmond was concerned, they might just as well have raised a placard announcing WE ARE BEING NAUGHTY. She took off her half-glasses, marched out of her study, and went out on to the front steps where Lilian Bushmeyer, the physical education teacher, was sitting on the wall and supervising the schoolyard by reading a dog-eared copy of The Bridges of Madison County.

  ‘Over there, Ms Bushmeyer,’ she said curtly, nodding her head.

  Lilian Bushmeyer shaded her eyes and peered across the asphalt. After a while she shook her head and said, ‘I don’t see anything.’

  ‘Conspiratorial body language,’ said Ms Redmond impatiently. ‘Go and see what they’re up to.’

  Lilian Bushmeyer reluctantly put down her book and plodded across in her Birkenstocks to see what all the fuss was about. As she came closer, she could hear the children giggling and squealing, and then suddenly there was a flustered ‘Shh! Shh! It’s Bush Baby. Put it away!’ Some of the children broke away from the huddle, leaving a small knot of girls right in the middle. Lilian Bushmeyer walked right up to them and held out her hand.

  ‘What?’ asked Jade Peller. She had just turned eleven, and she was taller and more mature than most of the girls in the sixth grade. She had long black hair, a thin pale face, and she always dressed in black, with silver bangles around her wrists. Her father was Oliver Peller, who had written music for Wes Craven and John Carpenter.

  ‘Whatever it is, give it to me,’ said Lilian Bushmeyer.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Well it’s obviously a very interesting nothing. Hand it over.’

  ‘It’s only a stupid game, Ms Bushmeyer,’ complained Helen Fairfax. She was plump and pink-cheeked but she had a mass of curly blonde hair and it was obvious that once she had lost her puppy fat she was going to grow up as stunning as her mother, Juliana. Her father, Greg, was one of Hollywood’s most talked-about independent producers and had recently bankrolled the stalker movie, Breather.

  Lilian Bushmeyer waited patiently, her hand still held out. Maybe she hadn’t yet developed Ms Redmond’s radar for subversive crowd formations, but she knew how to deal with the spoiled children of minor celebrities. You had to act resolutely unimpressed, which Lilian Bushmeyer genuinely was.

  At last, Jade produced a crown-shaped piece of paper from behind her back, and handed it over. It was nothing more than one of those fortune-telling devices, with the paper folded into triangles, and a fortune written on each of them. Except that the fortunes on this device were much stronger than the usual ‘you will be lucky in love’ or ‘you will be rich and famous’ or ‘you will go to jail.’

  One of them read ‘you will suck Mr Lomax’s cock.’ Another said ‘you will lose both your legs in an auto accident.’ A third predicted ‘you will get pregnant at thirteen.’

  ‘Like Helen said, it’s only a game,’ Jade protested as Lilian Bushmeyer opened each triangle in turn. The last prediction was ‘you will die before your next birthday.’

  When she had finished, Lilian Bushmeyer looked at the children one after the other. It was obvious that three or four of them were really embarrassed and ashamed, and it seemed that the boys went pinker than the girls.

  ‘Do you want me to show this to Ms Redmond?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ said Jade. ‘Might give her a thrill.’

  ‘No!’ gasped David Ritter. ‘She’ll kill us. I know my mom will kill me. My stepmom will kill me, too.’

  Lilian Bushmeyer said, ‘I know that you probably didn’t mean any real harm, but you know what this is? It’s tasteless, and there’s little enough taste left in this world without you young people making things worse. Supposing one of you did lose your legs, or did get pregnant, or did get sexually abused? How would you feel then?’

  ‘I’d feel like my fortune-telling really works.’ Jade grinned.

  ‘So which one did you pick?’ Lilian Bushmeyer asked her.

  ‘Die before my next birthday.’

  ‘And do you want that to happen, just to prove you right?’

  ‘I don’t care. Like, what’s death? It’s only like not being born.’

  Wednesday, September 22, 9:03 A.M.

  Ms Redmond stood up in assembly and the sun shone on her glasses so that she looked as if she were blind.

  ‘As usual, October brings our first great event of the year – the all-school camp-out. This year we will all be going to Silverwood Lake in the beautiful San Bernardino Mountains. Over the weekend, students and parents will get to know one another by camp-fire singing and storytelling, pot-luck dinners, hiking, swimming and picnics. This is a wonderful way for new families to join the Cedars community. At the end of October, we will be holding our first fund-raising event, which this year is going to be a Latin fiesta.’

  ‘Arriba! Arriba!’ called out Tony Perlman, the geography teacher, and then looked deeply embarrassed.

  Wednesday, September 22, 9:06 A.M.

  A tractor-trailer had jackknifed right across the off-ramp from the Hollywood Freeway, causing a southbound tailback of glittering cars as far as Ventura Boulevard. Frank shifted the Buick into neutral and pressed down the parking brake.

  ‘I’m going to be late,’ Danny protested.

  ‘Sorry, champ, there’s nothing I can do. I’m going to be late, too, and I have a script meeting.’

  ‘I’m paint monitor, I’m supposed to put out the paints.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell your teacher what happened.’

  Danny frowned furiously out of the window, as if the traffic could be willed to get moving just by glaring at it. But they had to sit and wait for over twenty minutes while highway patrolmen stood around in their mirror sunglasses and chatted to each other and yawned, and drivers climbed out of their automobiles to use their cellphones and stretch their legs, and one woman even took a folding chair out of the back of her station wagon and sat reading the paper as if she were sitting in her own back yard.

  ‘I bet Susan Capelli is putting out the paints,’ said Danny, as if he were suffering the greatest personal tragedy since Hamlet.

  ‘You can do it next time, can’t you?’

  ‘You have to be reliable when you’re a monitor.’

  Frank shook his head and said nothing. Danny always amused him because he
was so serious about everything. He may have been a tufty-haired eight-year-old kid with freckles and a snubby nose and scabs on his knees, but he had the mind of a forty-eight-year-old man. He said he wanted to be a real-estate developer when he grew up, building low-cost housing in some of Hollywood’s most expensive enclaves, so that poor people and rich people could learn to get along. Like, for an eight-year-old, how serious was that?

  ‘Is it Ms Pulaski I have to talk to?’ Frank asked him.

  ‘You don’t have to. I can tell her myself.’

  Another five minutes passed before a huge green and silver tow truck came grinding up the hard shoulder, and after a further ten minutes of gesticulating between the police and the tow truck guys, the tractor-trailer was finally chained up and dragged clear of the off-ramp.

  ‘Stupid truck,’ said Danny venomously, as they drove past it and down the off-ramp.

  ‘It was an accident, Danny, that’s all. Accidents happen.’

  ‘Not if people were more reliable.’

  Traffic was slow all the way along Hollywood Boulevard, and Danny gave a theatrical groan at every red signal, but eventually they reached La Brea and turned right toward Franklin Avenue.

  Frank said, ‘Remind me what time you finish school today. You don’t have drama rehearsals, do you?’

  Danny had been picked to play Abraham Lincoln in the school play, Heroes and Heroines of America. He had been bitterly disappointed that he hadn’t been given the part of John Wilkes Booth, since John Wilkes Booth got to fire a gun and jump off the stage.

  ‘That’s tomorrow,’ Danny replied.

  Frank parked the car outside the school and Danny scrambled out. ‘See you later then, champ. Have a good day.’

  Danny ran toward the school gates, swinging his X-Men satchel like a propeller. Frank turned around to check the back seat and saw that, in his hurry, Danny had left his sandwiches behind. Danny suffered from a nut allergy, so he always had to take a home-prepared lunch.

  Frank climbed out of the car and shouted, ‘Danny! Hey, Danny! You forgot your . . .’ He held up his Tupperware box.