Chapter 38: Deadbeat and Dead

"Are you okay?" Archer asks his wife while they care for their newborn twins in the nursery, "I mean, about your Dad..."


"All I ever knew about my father was from my mother complaining about the child support he wasn't paying," Meghan sighs bitterly, "I never even saw him. To me, Wesley Greenwood's death is just an obituary in the paper."


It's a hard concept for Archer to get his mind around, never having met your own father. Or having children you don't love and support personally.

After work Archer runs into his mother-in-law, Shawn Curious-Kindle with her youngest offspring, Meghan's half brother Donovan, busking outside City Hall. Meghan has no idea who the father of this toddler is. Between her mother and her dead beat father Meghan has four half-siblings. Marrying into the Carlton family was like entering a refuge of stability.

Later that evening, Archer's buzzer goes off, and he has to go back to the station. A body was found in the river that runs through Twinbrook. Before he goes to the station, Archer stops at the Red Rendezvous to talk to fellow cop Raheem Lillard, to give him fair warning.


"They found Kristian Merrick-Curious," Archer tells him, "Dead. Not far from your house. Sharita's house." Raheem recently married Sharita after she became pregnant with his child. Shortly before that Sharita had given birth to Kristian Merrick-Curious' child, and he had moved in with her, along with one of his daughters from a previous relationship. A notorious deadbeat and womanizer, Kristian had continued seeing other women even while living with pregnant Sharita. And then he disappeared right around the time Raheem started dating Sharita. And today he turned up dead in the river.


"They suspect foul play?" Raheem asks.


"Forensics hasn't said yet. I'm on my way in now. I just wanted to give you a heads up. If they call it homicide, Sharita will be the prime suspect."

Forensics did declare the death a homicide. The victim had been strangled before being tossed in the river, his clothes weighted with stones. Archer goes out to the Lillard house the next day for preliminary questioning.


"I honestly don't remember the last time I saw Kristian. I was so busy with the baby, and he was hardly ever home. He'd stay out all night, for days at a time. You know how he was. That's why I hooked up with Raheem. He's steady, you know. He comes home after work, he takes care of the kids. Even the ones that aren't his."


"This isn't about Raheem, Sharita," Archer reminds her. "This is about Kristian. And you."

"Look, he was a deadbeat. And he was cheating on me. And I guess I cheated on him with Raheem. If he ever turned up again, I would have asked him to move out. But I didn't want to see him dead."
Archer isn't entirely convinced of that, but he's also not convinced she killed him, either.

Questioning Kristian's teenage daughter Amy is a lot harder. The poor girl hardly knew her father, she'd only recently moved in with him after the death of her mother. And now he's dead, leaving her with the woman her father bedded, impregnated and abandoned as he had with so many others in this town.

Archer's preliminary investigation ends with a search through the family's trashcan. He doesn't find anything he thinks is noteworty, but he bags it up for the forensics team nonetheless. 

This Saturday, Archer doesn't throw his usual party at the Red Rendezvous. Today is Bronwyn and Carys' birthday, so the party is at home, for them.
Meghan reluctantly greets her younger sister, Lilah, with her new husband Kristopher, and their mother. She had wanted to cut all ties to her former life when she married Archer, but thus town is too small to get away from her family that easily.

Archer greets his brother and his date, who at first he thinks is Lucida Merrick, but he quickly recognizes she's not Lucinda, but her mother Sommer, somewhat recently widowed. Her human husband had died of old age while she remained young. Lucinda had recently gotten married to Angelo Wolf-Ball, so of course she wouldn't be dating Griffin anymore. But her mother?

From a brief conversation with the couple, Archer discovers they are planning to move in together. What is Griffin thinking?

Cake time. Going alphabetically, Bronwyn is first to blow out the candles, assisted by her grandmother.

Bronwyn has her mother's hair and her father's eyes.

Carys has her grandmother Shawn's hair and Drew's violet eyes.

After cake, Archer corners his brother for a chat. "You can't be serious about Sommer. I mean, you dated her daughter. She's way too old for you!"


"She's older than me in years, but she'll still be young when I'm an old man," Griffin explains, "Vampires age on a totally different scale from us."


"What is it with you and vampires, Griff? They're creepy! They suck blood!"


Griffin laughs. "Actually, the whole blood drinking thing is kind of erotic."


Archer sticks his fingers in his ears. "I'm not hearing that from my little brother!"

Briar had meant to avoid her vampire grandfather after she became an elder, but she decided to invite him to the twins' party. While the party carries on after the girls have been put in their cribs, Beau slips up to the nursery to get a look at his great-great-grandchildren. They are human, not like him, and thus should have nothing but his contempt. But they are his blood, born in the only family of his descendants who had wanted anything to do with him. The only other vampire at this party, his granddaughter Sommer, didn't speak so much as a word to him, having learned to hate him from an early age by her mother Bree.

As he leaves the house, Beau tries to grasp what he feels about this human family. That he feels anything at all is somewhat of a surprise. Allowing himself to get attached to these humans has brought great pain. But it has also brought the only real joy he's ever found in life.

"That wasn't so bad. I actually had a good time," Meghan admits after she and Archer finish cleaning up the cake plates. She had initially resited the idea of a birthday party, hating crowds as much as she does. 

Forensics has analyzed the evidence Archer found in the Lillard's trash. Sharita is no longer a suspect, she wouldn't have had the strength to strangle Kristian. But Raheem Lillard is capable of strangling another man, and he had motive. Archer doesn't like it, but his fellow cop is now the prime suspect.

With three toddlers, the nursery is chaos. Even with his parents here, Archer has had to cut back on his partying and socializing to help raise his children. And he wouldn't have it any other way. It's hard, but he's no deadbeat like Meghan's father, and while he's often tempted, he doesn't want to be a womanizing Kristian Merrick-Curious, either. 
Would he kill to defend his wife and family, as his friend Raheem is suspected of doing? It's not a question Archer wants to answer, but it keeps rolling around in his head. If Raheem killed Kristian, it was with good reason, good enough for Archer, anyway.

Challenge Notes:
From the time he turned YA, Kristian Merrick-Curious' MO has been to date a girl briefly, get her pregnant and move on to the next girl. I use the expanded version of Twallan's story progression which makes non-custodial parents pay child support. And sometimes those parents fail to pay their child support. You get pop up notices when they pay or fail to pay. Kristian usually failed to pay (as did Meghan's father Wesley Greenwood).
Kristian was also an ugly troll of a man who was determined to pass on his ugliness to as many children as possible. After impregnating Sharita he started dating again, and I decided to put a stop to it. He's already got 4 or 5 ugly kids in town (I edited his daughter Amy before Archer questioned her. Her lower teeth were sticking out of her chin. When I say his kids are ugly, I mean hideously deformed. He's a Bayless descendant as well as a Curious, and people who've played Twinbrook know what that means)
So, I used master controller to drown him. Ha ha! Yes, I murdered Kristian Merrick-Curious.


I had a moment of ick when I got the notice that Griffin and Sommer were going steady and she moved in with him. But I got over it. If she makes Griffin happy, it's all good.