Melissa Haddad Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Melissa Haddad Faulkner was born in 2003 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and is living today in Lafayette, where she works as a paralegal in a law office on the edge of downtown. She is a woman of the House of Faulkner and of the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian line descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but she was never called, is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. She is the elder daughter of the nurse and slayer Mark Fontenot Faulkner, The Bright Lamp, who died in 2006, and of the court clerk Monica Haddad, who were married in 2000, the granddaughter of the laundry supervisor Frances Fontenot and of the late slayer Leonard Faulkner, The Lone Rook, and the sister of the slayer Wendy Faulkner. The family remembers her as the sister who stayed on the ground, the one who reads the small print, and who made of a young woman's grief at a father she could not remember a very exact kind of devotion to the paper that holds a family together. A paralegal, Melissa says, is a person who is paid to read what everyone else has signed without looking. She works for a firm in Lafayette that handles successions, property, small businesses and the sort of dull, tangled estate in which a family discovers that a great-uncle left a share of a sugar mill to three nephews who have not spoken since 1987. She indexes the exhibits, drafts the letters, checks the dates and keeps the clock on every deadline in the building, and is, in the opinion of the two lawyers for whom she works, the only person in the office who has never missed one. It is the kind of work that the Ledger has always required and has never been able to buy. The Faulkner houses own a good deal of land and a number of old buildings, in three parishes, in the names of a number of cousins, and when a title has to be cleaned or a lease renewed or a sale of a warehouse on a bayou arranged so that the buyer will not, by accident, be a creature, it is Melissa, in her quiet way, who checks the chain. She was born in the spring of 2003 in Lafayette, in the hospital there, rather than in the city where her parents lived. It was a matter of arrangement. Her mother Monica, who was a clerk in the civil court in New Orleans and who was twenty-five, had been told by her own mother's sister, a widowed seamstress with a house near the university and a great opinion of herself, that a first child was to be born in her house and under her eye, as every child on that side of the family had been, and Monica, who generally did what she was told by that particular aunt, packed a bag in March and went west on the interstate. Mark, who was twenty-one and working shifts on a surgical ward, followed on the Friday night, on the last of the day's bus connections, and was in the delivery room by dawn. He wept. He told the nurses that he did not like to see anyone in pain, and was taken out, and was brought back in, and held the baby in a white blanket and, for the only time that anyone could recall, was entirely silent for a quarter of an hour. They named her Melissa, for no reason that anyone could afterwards remember except that her father said that it sounded like a sweet thing. The family gave her Haddad for the middle, for her mother's side, which is Lebanese and Louisiana French, and which has made bread, jewellery and court records for three generations. She remembers almost nothing of her father. She was three when he died, in the spring of 2006, of an old wound that never closed, and what she holds of him, she says, are four things: a smell of antiseptic, a green sweater with a hole in the elbow, the sound of a key in a lock at night and the sensation of being carried, in the dark, from a car to a bed by someone who was being exceedingly careful not to wake her. The lamp that gave him his alias, which she saw only in photographs, hung over the door of the house on Dumaine Street, in the evenings, so that a cousin on the road might see it, and she has it now, on a table in her flat, where it is lit on the first of every month. Her mother, who had grown up in the city and was proud of her own plain manner, went on working at the courthouse and raised her daughters with the help of her mother-in-law Frances, who lived on the west bank and came across the river every other day, with a basket of clean laundry, a pot of gumbo and a book of tags. Melissa remembers the book. She says that it was the first ledger that she was ever shown, and that her grandmother kept it more exactly than any bank. She was two in the last week of August 2005, when the hurricane and the flood came, and there is a photograph of her in a yellow raincoat in the back of a car on the way to a cousin's house in Lafayette, with her mother, her baby sister in a basket and a suitcase that held every paper that the family owned. The roof of the house on Dumaine Street was damaged. The courthouse was closed for months. Monica worked, that autumn, from a rented room in Lafayette, taking dictation by telephone for a judge who had been evacuated to Baton Rouge, and it was in the course of it that the family discovered how much the girl, in a high chair, with a pencil, took in. She sorted. She sorted spoons by length, the books by colour and the mail by who was cross, and she was able at four to say, from the other side of a kitchen, which envelope was from the bank. Her mother, who has a clerk's pride in an orderly child, remarked that it was a gift, and that she hoped that it would not be wasted. She was told what the family was at sixteen, by her grandmother, in the laundry, among the steam and the starch, and was told that her father had been a slayer and that her sister, who was twelve, had been told nothing and would be told in her own time. She took it with the calm of a woman filing a document. Her father had been a hunter of the Red Ledger, a nurse who went out at dusk with a pistol and a silver-edged knife and who had died of what the hunt had done to him. Her grandfather, whom she had never met, had gone before him. She said, with the clear voice that her teachers had always remarked on, that she would like to keep the paper. Frances, who has kept a great deal of it, said that the family would be very glad. She finished school in 2021, in the long shadow of the pandemic years, with a year of lessons taken at a kitchen table over an unreliable connection, and took a two-year certificate in paralegal studies at the university in Lafayette, working in the evenings in a copy shop. She has been at her present firm since 2024. She is the one who sits in the rear office, with a lamp, a stapler and a very large number of coloured tabs, and she is in the habit of keeping, in a locked drawer, a second set of the Ledger's property records, in her own handwriting, in a notebook that her mother gave her. She says that there are fifty-one parcels in it. She knows every one, who holds it, what it is for and when the lease is due. When a cousin telephones to say that a certain old building in Breaux Bridge has been sold, she says, without looking, whether it was the one with the cellar. She is twenty-three, a slender, dark-haired, brown-eyed young woman with her mother's composure and her father's long hands, a plain gold chain, a good winter coat and a way of listening with her head very slightly to one side. She lives in a small bungalow near the university, with a cat, a bookcase that is arranged by the date of acquisition and a kitchen in which she cooks her grandmother's gumbo on Sundays. She goes to Mass when she can, reads the legal pages of three newspapers and has a standing arrangement with her sister, who lives in Mobile, to ring every evening at nine. She does not wish to hunt. She worries about her sister, who does, and has never said so, but a person who knew her well would notice that she checks the weather in Mobile every morning and has, in the drawer where she keeps the property records, a folded road map with a number written on it in red. Melissa Haddad Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the paralegal of Lafayette who keeps the deeds and the dates, the elder daughter of The Bright Lamp, who took her father's early death and turned it into a lifetime's care for the paper on which the family stands. In the Slayerverse she stands for the kin of the Red Ledger who were never called, the clerks, the title-keepers and the sisters at the other end of the telephone, who showed that a clean deed, a correct date and a person who answers at nine o'clock are among the strongest things that a hunting family can have behind it.