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brother.”
    “And the brother didn’t get anything?”
    “Not one thin dime. Even Chauncy didn’t understand it. Apparently Mrs. LeBard was annoyed with the brother and didn’t care for his wife. Courtney seemed like a fine woman to everyone else, but from what I understand a
saint
wouldn’t have been good enough for the mother.”
    “How come?”
    “Who knows? I always figured she had trouble letting go.”
    We just sit for a minute, and finally I ask, “So where’s the brother now?”
    “Oh, he still lives in town—off Morrison somewhere. The man’s very stubborn. He somehow blames Chauncy for everything—the inheritance, even their mother’s death.”
    “How long ago did Chauncy’s mother die?”
    Hudson takes a deep breath. “Oh, it’s got to be ten years by now. After that, he quit coming over, and pretty soon he started letting the yard go. I used to go over there and offer to help out, but he didn’t want it, and after a while he wouldn’t even answer the door.” Then he says very quietly, “I didn’t know about the tracheotomy until tonight.”
    We both look at the stars for a bit. “Grams says he’s dangerous—or unstable, anyway.”
    Hudson throws his head back and laughs. “Rita told you that?” He takes a deep breath and smooths an eyebrow. “Chauncy is fragile. Brilliant, but fragile. He’s an honorable man—he’d go to his grave before he’d hurt anotherperson.” He grins at me and says, “I’ll have to have a talk with your grandmother about her information sources.”
    Hudson goes back to staring off into space, and I’m about to ask him if I can
please
take a shower when he says real softly, “How’s he doing?”
    Well, somehow I don’t feel like telling him that this brilliant, honorable friend of his is living like a rat in Vampire Heaven, so I kind of stammer, “Um … ah …”
    Hudson shakes his head. “Rita said he’s got no power, no phone …? I can’t imagine it! That house used to shake with Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. You could smell the coffee brewing from the foyer! How does he make his coffee? Chauncy without coffee … can’t imagine it! And this time of year … he must be freezing.”
    By now I’m sitting there with my teeth chattering out of my mouth. Hudson turns to me and says, “You’re cold? Say, don’t you want to get out of that costume?”
    I chatter and laugh and nod all at the same time.
    After I take a shower, Hudson brings me some cocoa and shows me to the couch.
    When he leaves, I rearrange the cushions, turn off the light, and sit there, snuggled up in a blanket, sipping hot chocolate, and thinking about Chauncy.
    But as my eyes get used to the darkness, I start to feel very uncomfortable. See, Hudson’s den is really a library. And I’m not talking a set of encyclopedias and a dictionary or two. I’m talking a
library
. He has shelves that go from the floor clear to the ceiling, and whenever I come over with a question that he can’t answer, we come to the den and he finds a book that’ll tell us.
    And I’ve always liked coming to the den to watch him dig for answers, but sitting there in the dark with books all around me—all of a sudden I feel like I’m spending the night in Vampire Heaven.
    It takes me a while to shake off the creeps, and the last thing I remember thinking before falling asleep is, Why would anyone want to rob a man who seems to have nothing? Nothing but books.

FIVE
    Hudson didn’t wake me up in the morning; his cooking did. I could smell bacon frying and hear eggs popping on the griddle, and let me tell you, that got me out of bed quicker than oatmeal ever has. And it wasn’t until I’d eaten three eggs, six pieces of bacon, and a couple slices of toast that I noticed the clock on the wall.
    I jumped up. “Holy smokes! I’m
late
.”
    Hudson looks over his shoulder at the clock and says, “You’ve still got twenty minutes.”
    “Twenty minutes! It takes me almost twenty to
get
to