There are a few libraries in Galveston. We decided to start at the Rosenburg because it has some great historical stuff. The original part of the building is, like the Galvez, beautiful. Modern additions are basically, like most modern stuff, 'blah'.
It is possible to build a modern building and not have it be boring garbage as far as design goes. The Venetian in Las Vegas is a great example of that. All it takes if a metric ton of money. No taxpayer-funded building in this day and age is ever going to look like anything other than a building you stuff government employees in. That makes the outside of the Rosenburg a combination historical building and box.
I suppose we are not there to see the outside anyway. We are trying to see what we can find about LCPF. Andrea gave us an acronym, the fact that it is probably French, and little else. Great, because in a historical city like Galveston, connected by water and history to New Orleans, and French-named Pirates like Jean Lafitte, that is going to be easy to figure out.
Not.
There is a persistent rumor, even after all these centuries, that Pierre and/or Jean left some Pirate treasure someplace in Galveston. If so, it's probably buried under a new hotel now.
We have a couple or three days to kill, and contrary to popular culture, Vampires are not 'Pure Sex'. We try, but we are only extra-human at best. We have to eat and sleep too, and even though this is also a sort of honeymoon, having honeymoons is a house rule for us. Any given two people spend a week away from the family every year, to be exclusively with each other. Even the non-romantic pairs. Morgan and Helen go away to places as much as Jessica and I do. It is an inviolate rule, broken only slightly when Morgan was pregnant with Laura. To deal with the ramifications of that situation, Jessica, Morgan, and I went away for a total of three weeks together.
When a Vampire woman is pregnant (all three times we know of anyway) she has a biological imperative to be near the father of the child. It is somewhat like the monthly imperative to drink blood, but many orders of magnitude more intense. The imperative seems to be more than a mere bonding drive, insofar as it does not seem to allow substitutes. When Helen was pregnant with Rachel, it had to be me there, not Jessica or big Rachel. She could tell when a substitute was being slipped in and it did not make her happy. It is also a blood thing, as she wanted to drink from me every single day. Jessica too. I was spared that with Morgan because she has no fangs, but that seems to be compensated for by an even higher sex drive and involuntary scents.
That bonding imperative required that I could not leave for a week with Jessica. It is expressed as sex drive but its something very deep and powerful. Morgan said it is not like being horny. it is like hunger. Starvation. Morgan would have deeply suffered, and neither Jessica nor I would do that to her. Jessica, having already been in biological servitude to the imperative, understood completely. We could not let all the time away all pile up until after Laura was born either, for a more practical reason: No one wanted to be away from the new baby.
Humans have a similar thing. Sex and love cause the body to generate Oxytocin: You get a little high being around the person you are sexually bonded with. Even simple touch and cuddling cause an Oxytocin reaction. Vampires have the same mechanism, amped up, the same way so many things are taken to the next level in Vampires.
Instead of staying at home and breaking the rule, we compromised and made it the three of us on three different honeymoons. Morgan and Jessica grew much closer, in part because Jessica was the first to go through the need, and helped Morgan understand and cope with it. Morgan does NOT like being out of control, and her body had other ideas about that.
Despite all temptation to the contrary, Morgan and I are not going to sit in the hotel and have sex all day long every day until Andrea gets here. We need to rest. We have to eat and drink. We have a mystery at hand and therefore we have research to do to get ready for the day that Andrea woke up, and left his house to go to his father's.
Morgan would never let the joy of time alone stop her from doing the right thing for Angel, and as the best PI on the Earth (in my expert opinion, as her husband) she is going to be sure to spend time cracking the books. At least this is better than the time we were looking for Tommy by spending time at the courthouse looking at property records.
Spending time at the library is interesting, and fun, digging through the historical archives for some clue. The Internet and the card catalog are completely useless. My favorite hit from the Internet is 'Lyon County Pheasants Forever'. I am moderately certain that has nothing to do with why Andrea was trying to take Nakoma to his father in Galveston to 'marry'.
I want to kill every time I even think about that. Not our Nakoma. Not anyone's little girl.
As bad as that is, trying to find out anything useful about a group of people called (or maybe are) 'Astral' is worse. Unless I am to believe that Angel is able to disconnect part of herself and project it somewhere else, then it is getting us nowhere either. I know her name is 'Angel', but still!
Angel is special. She has a special talent. Projecting herself elsewhere is not the talent. To project herself to my house with Nakoma, she took her car. If nothing else it is hard to astral project while carrying Power Rangers luggage.
Morgan and I were left with scanning historical documents by hand. Things that have not been indexed yet. That is about as efficient as throwing darts at the wall randomly, but it is interesting. The stuff about the hurricane and building the seawall, the many lives of the Galvez, the Civil War events. Galveston is historical, and I am going to miss it when it goes underwater. Either that or be interested when the Seawall is expanded to protect the city from the rising waters.
It can be done, technically speaking. Holland is below sea level for about forty percent of the country. New Orleans also is partly below sea level, although we saw how well that worked out for there when during hurricane Katrina the wall holding back the water broke and the pumps failed.
I also wonder about the competition for resources. Who are people going to get the funding and the resources to protect their city when it will be everywhere? Every coastline.
Whatever happens, as a Vampire, I should be around to see it. Will man destroy itself or not? In a 'Mad Max' scenario, I and my family are Vampires. We'll be better prepared than humans for the global warming apocalypse.
Unless Cert decides to sneak up on me and takes me out for getting her placed on long term Probation and booted from the Crew. She never liked me. Now she really doesn't.
Morgan and I walked up and down the seawall and talked. Sometimes about the case, and sometimes random thoughts. Sometimes about Helen, and how to make sure she feels included in everything we do.
We talked about the smell of the ocean, coming in on the 'fresh' ocean breeze. It is not as romantic as one would hope what with Morgan and I both being sensually enhanced above and beyond both human and Vampire. Our sense of smell is increased to insanely sensitive levels. No one ever studied that exact amount, because Vampires don't get studied. Using the closest animal model, my sense of smell is over one million times more acute than an average human. I guess that is probably in the ballpark. What that means is a walk down the seawall is not a walk smelling the ocean breeze and the salt air so much as smelling everything IN the water too. It's not great. Fresh fish pulled right out of the water is not too stinky. Make it a few hours old, and it starts to smell rotted even to a human. There is a reason they toss fish into the freezer on commercial fishing boats as quickly as possible. Sealife breaks down fast once they are dead.
We are all on that same cosmic treadmill. One reason it takes about ten years to fully turn is because every atom in ones body is swapped out during that period of time. All the elements we borrow from the earth and that were made in the stars are only on lease. For sea life, that bill becomes due the second their immune systems shut down.
If we are not mentally filtering the scents that rapid decomposition is pure torture for Morgan and I. I did not like fish before I turned. Since I turned, I won't go near it. Which made me ask Morgan as we walked, holding hands like the lovers we are. "When you were human, did you like fish? Shrimp? Crab? Lobster? Any of that? I know you don't now, but I never asked about before."
"No: Not really. On a bet once, I ate a raw oyster. I would like to say for the record that it is not pleasant. I have had shrimp numerous times. Once was enough, but people I knew were personally convinced I needed to try it again. That conversation usually went like this: 'Here. Have some shrimp.' To which I would say 'No thank you, I do not like shrimp.' To which they would say 'well, you never had it made right. You have to cook it correctly or it gets rubbery.' And I would ask 'so you are telling me this is good shrimp we are looking at here?' and that would usually lead to one of several answers. One being 'No. This is only OK. I'll make you some you will like. I know how to cook it.'"
"Was that also a pickup line?" I asked.
"Sometimes." She shrugged. "Other times it was a friend who thought I was, in a word, nuts."
"Was the raw oyster part of a pickup? I.E. Eat one and you'll want to have sex, etc?"
"No. Just a bet I would like it. I did not. He bought me beer for the rest of the night. We were going to have sex anyway. Why I was there."
"I see." It kind of amazes me Morgan used to have this rich and varied love life. When I came to know her, she was basically celibate, other than apparently Bobby occasionally. Plus the time she got back DeWayne after moving to Austin: too early after she moved away from the blowup in Houston to have it work. I do not know all the details on that yet. She will tell me, in her time. I switched back to shrimp.
"I think it was worse when I told them I did not like whatever it was that they claimed was good shrimp or lobster." I said.
"Oh yes: the times I was told 'This is great Shrimp.' If I tried it, I did not like it, without fail. That inevitably led to 'You'd probably like it better boiled or fried or deep-fried or cajun style' or some other style than whatever we happened to be tasting at the moment. Two different people, on a mission from the Shrimp food industry apparently, tried many different ways, styles, places, making it themselves, you name it. I never liked it. Finally, they would give up and would say 'Huh. I guess you do not like shrimp.' Never in my life have I ever felt the need to say 'Ya Think?' more than with those people.
I laughed at that story. "Gods. I have been through that exact same thing. Not just about shrimp but about lobster too."
"Yes. That too. I finally became inflexible regarding the whole issue, and told whoever the new Shrimp pusher in my life was that 'I have tried it. I do not care for it. There is nothing you can say or do that will convince me otherwise, as I have given it every chance and it is routinely and without fail unmitigatedly awful.' It was better to be seen as intractable and inflexible than go through that entire sequence yet once again."
"I thought about having a card made up." I laughed. "Little print. Every style there is on one side. On the other side the words 'I hate all these styles' or maybe simply 'No: Really. I hate Shrimp'"
"The second one is simpler. I like it. Not an issue now, as the man in my life hates it as much as I do. The good news is that if you tell a Vampire you don't like seafood and they say, essentially, 'Yes: I understand that.' Only Vera and Angel remain as possible purveyors of shrimp, and Angel is aware."
"So is Vera. She was a pusher. Promised me sex on the roof if the house if I would try it her special way, which was fried."
"I presume with that enticement you tried it." Morgan said.
"I tried it. I still hated it. But I got sex on the roof of the house: Had to be very careful. Shingles are rough."
"I would imagine. That is not a place I have tried it yet." Morgan said.
"Yet?"
"Yet." Morgan said firmly.
"I any case, Vera gave up. No more roof love." I waved to the water. "So here we are, in Galveston. All the fresh seafood there is, other than North Atlantic Cod and Maine lobster and like that, and my Morgan and I are working our way through all the places that serve steak and hamburgers. It's kind of funny when you think about it."
Morgan gave a negative shake of her head. "I cannot get used to being referred to in the possessive, as you so often do, and liking it."
"Well, Mrs. Olsen, how many men have you been in love with in your life. Or women. I should not be sexist. Or is that genderist?"
"I am now aware that I have never, before you, been in love with anyone. Love people, certainly. In love? That is why I was over forty and single. There were a few men, such as DeWayne that I cared about above others. Men with whom, had I been ready, it could have been more." Morgan looked positively sad for a moment and looked away from me to hide her face. Every now and then I realize there is that thing she is not telling me. It's a personal thing, and it has to do with how she came to leave Houston. When she looked back, she was under control again. "For DeWayne and I to work we would have needed to hit the right place in each other's lives. We were always out of phase. Between serious relationships and the Cabal interfering in our lives, we never came together as we might have." Her voice dropped. "I should have taken those bastards out a long time before I did."
I moved her away from the heat. That subject always makes her angry. "Then perhaps that is why you are not used to it. To be used to it, first, you would have had to have it, MY Morgan." I pointed out.
"Oh, I am sure. There you go again. My husband. My other half."
"Damn, I am lucky." I said. I like it when she is possessive too.
"You certainly are, and you are going to get lucky again."