When Lemuel Kittredge came to, he was high, high up, lying in a drafty cage of planks and rusty pipes.
Weak sunlight drifted in like smoke through cracks in three of the walls. The fourth wall had been mostly window but now it was just a giant, rectangular hole, paneless and raw where birds and small climbing animals had chewed and pecked at the rotting wood.
Since Miss McKee was as old as dirt, this raised the unpleasant rumor that she was actually a vampire. Even though only the biggest idiots believed in vampires, there were plenty of believers in the little mountain town of Bleu Cheze, enough to make a more sensitive woman think about suicide just to clear her name.
"Barry, you okay?"
"Trisha, hi!" He spun his chair away from the screen to grin at his new boss.
"Any problems?" she asked.
"Just double-checking the figures on William Sanderson. That’s why I’m in the Department of Final Accounting, right?”
“I don’t know how you can eat that.” Charlene wrinkled her nose. “It really amazes me that in the twenty-first century people still think they can indulge themselves in acts of barbarism that destroy innocent animals.”
“Okay.” Jackie squinted at the greasy card she’d just picked from the pile of trivia questions. The bartender, Timmy O’Toole, always pulled the pack out once a year and spread the questions under their yellowed laminated coats around the bar at random, a clump here and a clump there. “What’s small and green and has a wicked sense of humor?”
