Why were the words “willingly” and “legally” necessary? Wait a minute. Pleasant phone voice, good communication skills, and people-pleasing personality? This was not secretarial work, this was telemarketing.

“I don’t think this is going to work for me,” I said, hesitantly rising to my feet.

“Oh, honey, please, just give it a try!” she cried. “You’ve got the voice. And you’re well educated, articulate. People who are lonely, just waiting by the phone hoping someone will call, they ’ll love talking to someone like you. You could make a lot of money doing this.”

OK, we were talking about telemarketing, not phone sex. Right?

“But I’ve never done telemarketing before,” I said, clutching my purse like a lifeline and taking a step toward the door.

“Oh, we don’t like to use that word around here. We prefer telecommunications-based sales.”

“And the difference is…”

Sandy ignored my question. “You said you needed a night job, and you won’t find many nice, safe sales jobs with hours available this late. We call the West Coast until eight P.M. Pacific time. You’ll get on-the-job training. And you won’t find a sweeter group of girls to work with. We’re just a big, happy family here.”

I chewed my lip and cast a longing glance at the reception desk, which I now noticed was brand new and looked as if it had never been touched. I could not afford to be proud or picky. I had bills to pay and a dog who expected to be fed occasionally.

Besides, they probably weren’t going to ask me to do anything grosser than scraping chewing gum off the bottom of tables or degunking a grease trap, both of which I’d done regularly while working at the Dairy Freeze in my teens. Hell, I was the one who ran for the “vomit dust” whenever a kid got sick at the library. Nothing could be worse than that. Right now, something was better than nothing. And this was something.

“When can I start?”

As I rounded the corner, I couldn’t help but think I’d just made a rather large mistake. I was not a salesperson. I was definitely not a telecommunications-based salesperson. But I’d already given Sandy my social security number, and I think that’s the point of no return in terms of employment etiquette. Sandy had even given me an information packet on Greenfield Studios and how the company was bringing affordable family memories to you. I was supposed to review the materials before Friday, my first night on the job.

As I turned toward the block where Big Bertha was parked, the breeze carried the scent of blood. I looked around for an injured person, some source of the smell. But the scent was old, the blood long cold and dead.

The closer I walked to the car, the stronger the smell. I could make out splashes of red across the hood. I jogged closer to see that some ambitious soul had scrawled “BLOODSUCKING WHORE” in huge, dripping, bloody letters across Big Bertha’s paint.

“What the hell?” I gaped. “What—”

I slid my fingers through the crook of the U. The blood smeared sticky and cold across my fingers. It was animal blood, something gamey, deer blood. Cringing, I swiped my fingers across my skirt, too shocked to worry about the stains it would leave.

I scanned the street for any sign of the vandal. There might as well have been tumbleweeds blowing across the asphalt.

Shock gave way to fear, fear to anger, then anger to shame. And when I realized that I was actually tearing up because someone wrote mean things about me on my car, I rolled right back to anger again. This was a nasty girl trick. This was high school stuff. My hands were shaking so badly it took several passes to try to pull my keys from my pocket.

And now I was driving around town in a car declaring that I was a bloodsucking whore. No one would notice that. I slumped low behind the wheel and drove on as many side streets as I could. Fortunately, there were very few people who needed to wash slanderous graffiti off their cars after ten P.M., so I had the Auto Spa all to myself.

As the remnants swirled red around the drain of the car-wash bay, I pondered the list of people who might have victimized Big Bertha. Unless Sandy had some sort of senior-citizen ninja skills, I doubted she’d be able to beat me back to my car, bloody it, and then get out of sight before I got there. Could it have been a friend of Walter ’s? A human who guessed my secret and was determined to out me whether I liked it or not?

The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I got. I was a grown woman, a vampire. People weren ’t supposed to be able to pull crap like this on me. By the time I turned the newly bathed Bertha onto my driveway, I’d gripped the steering wheel so tightly I’d warped it. Big Bertha now aimed slightly to the right no matter how I steered.

That was kind of an improvement.

I couldn’t burn Walter’s festering grab bag of personal effects. It seemed mean and petty, especially when you considered his fiery end. I decided to give the box to Dick. He was the only person I knew who had some sort of history with Walter and the only person I could think of who could unload so many Knight Rider DVDs.

I made absolutely no effort to look nice. Plain white T -shirt, fat jeans, no makeup. I was planning to go to one of Zeb ’s FFOTU meetings afterward, so I wanted to stand out as little as possible, anyway.

I knocked tentatively on the door, half hoping he wouldn ’t be home. I wasn’t in the mood for dirty charades. The door swung open, and out stepped a familiar, barely dressed blonde.

“Missy! Wow, you’re mostly naked,” I exclaimed.

“Hi, shug!” she said cheerfully. You’d think that someone with a “public sales persona” like Missy would be embarrassed to be caught in a position like this. But she soldiered through the situation as if she weren’t just wearing an old Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt and a smile.

“Hi. So, I guess the other night on the phone, when you mentioned you knew Dick, you meant that you knew Dick. Wow.

Awkward.”

“Jane?” Dick came up behind Missy, barefoot and buttoning ragged Levi ’s. He looked mildly embarrassed but not embarrassed enough to go put on a shirt. I just stared, unsure of what to say or where to look.

“Hi,” I said, settling for a long glance at the pull -tab wind chime dangling from Dick’s porch light. I intentionally hoisted a mental brick wall between my brain/ senses and whatever was going on in Dick’s and Missy’s heads. I did not need those visuals haunting me for the rest of my immortal life.

“What brings you over, Jane?” Missy cooed, smooching Dick’s neck. “Do I have competition for my sweet Dickie?”

“No!” I said, too emphatically. Dick was too occupied by Missy’s full-on oral assault to look offended.

I tried to hand the box over, but Missy wound herself around Dick like a strangling vine. A strangling vine with a butt you could bounce a quarter off. “I just wanted to drop this off for you. It’s Walter’s stuff—”

“Oh, honey, I heard about that awful mess,” Missy said, pulling herself away from nipping Dick’s Adam’s apple. “You just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

Pulling her tongue out of Dick’s ear would have been a nice start.

“Don’t you have a meeting to go to, baby?” he asked, untangling himself.

“Why, yes, the Undead Realtors Association is meeting tonight. I ’m the chapter president,” Missy told me. She laughed, tweaking Dick’s nipple. “Wait, are you trying to get rid of me so you can get to your next appointment? You ’d better watch yourself, Jane, we may have a little catfight over my Dickie.”

Missy laughed and disappeared into the trailer. Dick caught my apparently horrified expression and said, “She’s just messing with you. We’re not dating or anything. It’s not even what you would call a relationship. We’re just…” He looked away, avoiding eye contact. “You know, sometimes you just need a lukewarm body.”

“And there’s the Dick I know and…barely tolerate,” I said, as Missy opened the door. She was wearing another slick pink dress suit and fluffing her blond curls back into their “Junior League gone slightly slutty” style.

“Well, I’m off, shug,” she said, then leaned in for another tongue bath. She winked at me. “Jane, don’t forget. Monday.

Mojitos at my place. You promised you’d try. Y’all be good now.”

Did I use the word “promise”?

“I should be going, too,” I said, as Missy slid into her sporty little car. “I hope you find some use for that stuff.”

He smiled, opening the door to show me his rumpled fold-out couch. “You know, you could stick around—”

“Again, I’m going to have to ask you not to finish that sentence.”

“What’s the matter, Stretch? We could have a lot of fun, you and me.” Dick leaned in far too close and made preliminary moves to kiss me. I leaned out of it until I was bent back at a spine -breaking angle. Spicy man treat though he may be, Dick was not boyfriend material. He was just barely respectable acquaintance material.

“Dick,” I said, “I’m really flattered, but I’m not going to let you use me to piss off Gabriel.”

“But I do want you. I want to hear you whisper, pant, scream my name. I want to know what kind of panties an out-of-work librarian wears,” he said, grinning lazily. “Pissing off Gabriel would be an added side bonus.”

I laughed, hoping it would cover up the involuntary shivers Dick was giving me. I hadn’t lived a sheltered life where attractive men didn’t say that sort of thing to me, but I hadn’t had sex in three years. Do the math. “You two have no idea how alike you are.

Dick, I like you. But don’t make me choose between being friends with you and doing whatever the hell I’m doing with Gabriel.

My choice wouldn’t make you happy.”

Instead of taking my rejection at face value, Dick smirked. “You like me?”

“You’re mildly amusing and remotely charming, when you’re not giving me the full-on Pat O’Brien routine.” I sighed, rolling my eyes. “Plus, you’re one of the few people who actually tell me what they ’re thinking, even when I don’t want to know. I appreciate that.”