True Blood Book FIve Chapters 8-11

Chapter 8
CLAUDINE WAS ON my left. Bill came to stand to my right and took my hand. Together, we watched the firefighters aim the hose through the broken window. A sound of shattering glass from the other side of the house indicated they were breaking the window over the sink, too. While the firefighters concentrated on the fire, the police concentrated on the body. Charles stepped up to bat right away.
“I killed him,” he said calmly. “I caught him setting fire to the house. He was armed, and he attacked me.”
Sheriff Bud Dearborn looked more like a Pekinese than any human should look. His face was practically concave. His eyes were round and bright, and at the moment extremely curious. His brown hair, liberally streaked with gray, was combed back from his face all around, and I expected him to snuffle when he spoke. “And you would be?” he asked the vampire.
“Charles Twining,” Charles answered gracefully. “At your service.”
I wasn’t imagining the snort the sheriff gave or Andy Bellefleur’s eye roll.
“And you’d be on the spot because . . . ?”
“He’s staying with me,” Bill said smoothly, “while he works at Merlotte’s.”
Presumably the sheriff had already heard about the new bartender, because he just nodded. I was relieved at not having to confess that Charles was supposed to be sleeping in my closet, and I blessed Bill for having lied about that. Our eyes met for a moment.
“So you admit you killed this man?” Andy asked Charles. Charles nodded curtly.
Andy beckoned to the woman in hospital scrubs who’d been waiting by her car—which made maybe five cars in my front yard, plus the fire truck. This new arrival glanced at me curiously as she walked past to the huddled form in the bushes. Pulling a stethoscope from a pocket, she knelt by the man and listened to various parts of his body. “Yep, dead as a doornail,” she called.
Andy had gotten a Polaroid out of the police car to take pictures of the body. Since the only light was the flash of the camera and the flicker of flame from my burning house, I
didn’t think the pictures would turn out too well. I was numb with shock, and I watched Andy as if this were an important activity.
“What a pity. It would have been a good thing to find out why he torched Sookie’s house,” Bill said as he watched Andy work. His voice rivaled a refrigerator for coldness.
“In my fear for Sookie’s safety, I suppose I struck too hard.” Charles tried to look regretful.
“Since his neck seems to be broken, I suppose you did,” said the doctor, studying Charles’s white face with the same careful attention she’d given mine. The doctor was in her thirties, I thought; a woman slim to the point of skinny, with very short red hair. She was about five foot three, and she had elfin features, or at least the kind I’d always thought of as elfin: a short, turned-up nose, wide eyes, large mouth. Her words were both dry and bold, and she didn’t seem at all disconcerted by or excited at being called out in the middle of the night for something like this. She must be the parish coroner, so I must have voted for her, but I couldn’t recall her name.
“Who are you?” Claudine asked in her sweetest voice.
The doctor blinked at the vision of Claudine. Claudine, at this ungodly hour of the morning, was in full makeup and a fuchsia knit top with black knit leggings. Her shoes were fuchsia and black striped, and her jacket was, too. Claudine’s black rippling hair was held off her face with fuchsia combs.
“I’m Dr. Tonnesen. Linda. Who are you?”
“Claudine Crane,” the fairy said. I’d never known the last name Claudine used.
“And why were you here on the spot, Ms. Crane?” Andy Bellefleur asked.
“I’m Sookie’s fairy godmother,” Claudine said, laughing. Though the scene was grim, everyone else laughed, too. It was like we just couldn’t stop being cheerful around Claudine. But I wondered very much about Claudine’s explanation.
“No, really,” Bud Dearborn said. “Why are you here, Ms. Crane?”
Claudine smiled impishly. “I was spending the night with Sookie,” she said, winking.
In a second, we were the objects of fascinated scrutiny from every male within hearing, and I had to lock down my head as if it were a maximum-security prison to block the mental images the guys were broadcasting.
Andy shook himself, closed his mouth, and squatted by the dead man. “Bud, I’m going to roll him,” he said a little hoarsely, and turned the corpse so he could feel inside the dead
man’s pockets. The man’s wallet proved to be in his jacket, which seemed a little unusual to me. Andy straightened and stepped away from the body to examine the billfold’s contents.
“You want to have a look, see if you recognize him?” Sheriff Dearborn asked me. Of course I didn’t, but I also saw that I really didn’t have a choice. Nervously, I inched a little closer and looked again at the face of the dead man. He still looked ordinary. He still looked dead. He might be in his thirties. “I don’t know him,” I said, my voice small in the din of the firefighters and the water pouring onto the house.
“What?” Bud Dearborn was having trouble hearing me. His round brown eyes were locked onto my face.
“Don’t know him!” I said, almost yelling. “I’ve never seen him, that I remember. Claudine?”
I don’t know why I asked Claudine.
“Oh, yes, I’ve seen him,” she said cheerfully.
That attracted the undivided attention of the two vampires, the two lawmen, the doctor, and me.
“Where?”
Claudine threw her arm around my shoulders. “Why, he was in Merlotte’s tonight. You were too worried about your friend to notice, I guess. He was over in the side of the room where I was sitting.” Arlene had been working that side.
It wasn’t too amazing that I’d missed one male face in a crowded bar. But it did bother me that I’d been listening in to people’s thoughts and I’d missed out on thoughts that must have been relevant to me. After all, he was in the bar with me, and a few hours later he’d set fire to my house. He must have been mulling me over, right?
“This driver’s license says he’s from Little Rock, Arkansas,” Andy said.
“That wasn’t what he told me,” Claudine said. “He said he was from Georgia.” She looked just as radiant when she realized he’d lied to her, but she wasn’t smiling. “He said his name was Marlon.”
“Did he tell you why he was in town, Ms. Crane?”
“He said he was just passing through, had a motel room up on the interstate.”
“Did he explain any further?”
“Nope.”
“Did you go to his motel, Ms. Crane?” Bud Dearborn asked in his best non-judgmental voice.
Dr. Tonnesen was looking from speaker to speaker as if she was at a verbal tennis match.
“Gosh, no, I don’t do things like that.” Claudine smiled all around.
Bill looked as if someone had just waved a bottle of blood in front of his face. His fangs extended, and his eyes fixed on Claudine. Vampires can only hold out so long when fairies are around. Charles had stepped closer to Claudine, too.
She had to leave before the lawmen observed how the vampires were reacting. Linda Tonnesen had already noticed; she herself was pretty interested in Claudine. I hoped she’d just attribute the vamps’ fascination to Claudine’s excellent looks, rather than the overwhelming allure fairies held for vamps.
“Fellowship of the Sun,” Andy said. “He has an honest-to-God membership card in here. There’s no name written on the card; that’s strange. His license is issued to Jeff Marriot.” He looked at me questioningly.
I shook my head. The name meant nothing to me.
It was just like a Fellowship member to think that he could do something as nasty as torching my house—with me in it—and no one would question him. It wasn’t the first time the Fellowship of the Sun, an anti-vampire hate group, had tried to burn me alive.
“He must have known you’ve had, ah, an association with vampires,” Andy said into the silence.
“I’m losing my home, and I could have died, because I know vampires?”
Even Bud Dearborn looked a little embarrassed.
“Someone must have heard you used to date Mr. Compton, here,” Bud muttered. “I’m sorry, Sookie.”
I said, “Claudine needs to leave.”
The abrupt change of subject startled both Andy and Bud, as well as Claudine. She looked at the two vampires, who were perceptibly closer to her, and hastily said, “Yes, I’m sorry, I have to get back home. I have to work tomorrow.”
“Where’s your car, Ms. Crane?” Bud Dearborn looked around elaborately. “I didn’t see any car but Sookie’s, and it’s parked in the back.”
“I’m parked over at Bill’s,” Claudine lied smoothly, having had years of practice. Without waiting for further discussion, she disappeared into the woods, and only my hands gripping their arms prevented Charles and Bill from gliding into the darkness after her. They were staring into the blackness of the trees when I pinched them, hard.
“What?” asked Bill, almost dreamily.
“Snap out of it,” I muttered, hoping Bud and Andy and the new doctor wouldn’t overhear. They didn’t need to know that Claudine was supernatural.
“That’s quite a woman,” Dr. Tonnesen said, almost as dazed as the vampires. She shook herself. “The ambulance will come get, uh, Jeff Marriot. I’m just here because I had my scanner turned on as I was driving back from my shift at the Clarice hospital. I need to get home and get some sleep. Sorry about your fire, Ms. Stackhouse, but at least you didn’t end up like this guy here.” She nodded down at the corpse.
As she got into her Ranger, the fire chief trudged up to us. I’d known Catfish Hunter for years—he’d been a friend of my dad’s—but I’d never seen him in his capacity as volunteer fire chief. Catfish was sweating despite the cold, and his face was smudged with smoke.
“Sookie, we done got it out,” he said wearily. “It’s not as bad as you might think.”
“It’s not?” I asked in a small voice.
“No, honey. You lost your back porch and your kitchen and your car, I’m afraid. He splashed some gas in that, too. But most of the house should be okay.”
The kitchen . . . where the only traces of the death I’d caused could have been found. Now not even the technicians featured on the Discovery Channel could find any blood traces in the scorched room. Without meaning to, I began to laugh. “The kitchen,” I said between giggles. “The kitchen’s all gone?”
“Yes,” said Catfish uneasily. “I hope you got you some homeowners insurance.”
“Oh,” I said, trying hard not to giggle any more. “I do. It was hard for me to keep up the payments, but I kept the policy Grandmother had on the house.” Thank God my
grandmother had been a great believer in insurance. She’d seen too many people drop policy payments to cut their monthly expenses and then suffer losses they were unable to recoup.
“Who’s it with? I’ll call right now.” Catfish was so anxious to stop me laughing, he was ready to make clown faces and bark if I asked him to.
“Greg Aubert,” I said.
The whole night suddenly rose up and whalloped me one. My house had burned, at least partially. I’d had more than one prowler. I had a vampire in residence for whom daytime cover had to be provided. My car was gone. There was a dead man named Jeff Marriot in my yard, and he’d set fire to my house and car out of sheer prejudice. I was overwhelmed.
“Jason isn’t at home,” Catfish said from a distance. “I tried him. He’d want her to come over to his house.”
“She and Charles—that is, Charles and I will take her over to my house,” Bill said. He seemed to be equally far away.
“I don’t know about that,” Bud Dearborn said doubtfully. “Sookie, is that okay with you?”
I could barely make my mind shuffle through a few options. I couldn’t call Tara because Mickey was there. Arlene’s trailer was as crowded as it needed to be already.
“Yes, that would be all right,” I said, and my voice sounded remote and empty, even to my own ears.
“All right, long’s we know where to reach you.”
“I called Greg, Sookie, and left a message on his office answering machine. You better call him yourself in the morning,” Catfish said.
“Fine,” I said.
And all the firefighters shuffled by, and they all told me how sorry they were. I knew every one of them: friends of my father’s, friends of Jason’s, regulars at the bar, high school acquaintances.
“You all did the best you could,” I said over and over. “Thanks for saving most of it.”
And the ambulance came to cart away the arsonist.
By then, Andy had found a gasoline can in the bushes, and the corpse’s hands reeked of gasoline, Dr. Tonnesen said.
I could hardly believe that a stranger had decided I should lose my home and my life because of my dating preference. Thinking at that moment of how close I’d come to death, I didn’t feel it was unjust that he’d lost his own life in the process. I admitted to myself that I thought Charles had done a good thing. I might owe my life to Sam’s insistence that the vampire be billeted at my house. If Sam had been there at the moment, I would have given him a very enthusiastic thank-you.
Finally Bill and Charles and I started over to Bill’s house. Catfish had advised me not to go back into my house until the morning, and then only after the insurance agent and the arson investigator had checked it over. Dr. Tonnesen had told me that if I felt wheezy, to come in to her office in the morning. She’d said some other stuff, but I hadn’t quite absorbed it.
It was dark in the woods, of course, and by then it was maybe five in the morning. After a few paces into the trees, Bill picked me up and carried me. I didn’t protest, because I was so tired I’d been wondering how I was going to manage stumbling through the cemetery.
He put me down when we reached his house. “Can you make it up the stairs?” he asked.
“I’ll take you,” offered Charles.
“No, I can do it,” I said, and started up before they could say anything more. To tell the truth, I was not so sure I could, but slowly I made my way up to the bedroom I’d used when Bill had been my boyfriend. He had a snug light-tight place somewhere on the ground floor of the house, but I’d never asked him exactly where. (I had a pretty good idea it was in the space the builders had lopped off the kitchen to create the hot tub/plant room.) Though the water table is too high in Louisiana for houses to have basements, I was almost as sure there was another dark hole concealed somewhere. He had room for Charles without them bunking together, anyway—not that that was too high on my list of concerns. One of my nightgowns still lay in the drawer in the old-fashioned bedroom, and there was still a toothbrush of mine in the hall bathroom. Bill hadn’t put my things in the trash; he’d left them, like he’d expected me to return.
Or maybe he just hadn’t had much reason to go upstairs since we’d broken up.
Promising myself a long shower in the morning, I took off my smelly, stained pajamas and ruined socks. I washed my face and pulled on the clean nightgown before I crawled in the high bed, using the antique stool still positioned where I’d left it. As the incidents of the
day and night buzzed in my head like bees, I thanked God for the fact that my life had been spared, and that was all I had time to say to Him before sleep swallowed me up.
I slept only three hours. Then worry woke me up. I was up in plenty of time to meet Greg Aubert, the insurance agent. I dressed in a pair of Bill’s jeans and a shirt of his. They’d been left outside my door, along with heavy socks. His shoes were out of the question, but to my delight I found an old pair of rubber-soled slippers I’d left at the very back of the closet. Bill still had some coffee and a coffeemaker in his kitchen from our courtship, and I was grateful to have a mug to carry with me as I made my way carefully across the cemetery and through the belt of woods surrounding what was left of my house.
Greg was pulling into the front yard as I stepped from the trees. He got out of his truck, scanned my oddly fitting ensemble, and politely ignored it. He and I stood side by side, regarding the old house. Greg had sandy hair and rimless glasses, and he was an elder in the Presbyterian Church. I’d always liked him, at least in part because whenever I’d taken my grandmother by to pay her premiums, he’d come out of his office to shake her hand and make her feel like a valued client. His business acumen was matched only by his luck. People had said for years that his personal good fortune extended to his policyholders, though of course they said this in a joking kind of way.
“If only I could have foreseen this,” Greg said. “Sookie, I am so sorry this happened.”
“What do you mean, Greg?”
“Oh, I’m just . . . I wish I’d thought of you needing more coverage,” he said absently. He began walking around to the back of the house, and I trailed behind him. Curious, I began to listen in to his head, and I was startled out of my gloom by what I heard there.
“So casting spells to back up your insurance really works?” I asked.
He yelped. There’s no other word for it. “It’s true about you,” he gasped. “I—I don’t—it’s just . . .” He stood outside my blackened kitchen and gaped at me.
“It’s okay,” I said reassuringly. “You can pretend I don’t know if it’ll help you feel better.”
“My wife would just die if she knew,” he said soberly. “And the kids, too. I just want them kept separate from this part of my life. My mother was . . . she was . . .”
“A witch?” I supplied helpfully.
“Well, yes.” Greg’s glasses glinted in the early morning sun as he looked at what was left of my kitchen. “But my dad always pretended he didn’t know, and though she kept
training me to take her place, I wanted to be a normal man more than anything in the world.” Greg nodded, as if to say he’d achieved his goal.
I looked down into my mug of coffee, glad I had something to hold in my hands. Greg was lying to himself in a major way, but it wasn’t up to me to point that out to him. It was something he’d have to square with his God and his conscience. I wasn’t saying Greg’s method was a bad one, but it sure wasn’t a normal man’s choice. Insuring your livelihood (literally) by the use of magic had to be against some kind of rule.
“I mean, I’m a good agent,” he said, defending himself, though I hadn’t said a word. “I’m careful about what I insure. I’m careful about checking things out. It’s not all the magic.”
“Oh, no,” I said, because he would just explode with anxiety if I didn’t. “People have accidents anyway, right?”
“Regardless of what spells I use,” he agreed gloomily. “They drive drunk. And sometimes metal parts give way, no matter what.”
The idea of conventional Greg Aubert going around Bon Temps putting spells on cars was almost enough to distract me from the ruin of my house . . . but not quite.
In the clear chilly daylight, I could see the damage in full. Though I kept telling myself it could have been much worse—and that I was very lucky that the kitchen had extended off the back of the house, since it had been built at a later date—it had also been the room that had held big-ticket items. I’d have to replace the stove, the refrigerator, the hot water heater, and the microwave, and the back porch had been home to my washer and drier.
After the loss of those major appliances, there came the dishes and the pots and the pans and the silverware, some of it very old indeed. One of my greats had come from a family with a little money, and she’d brought a set of fine china and a silver tea service that had been a pain to polish. I’d never have to polish it again, I realized, but there was no joy in the thought. My Nova was old, and I’d needed to replace it for a long time, but I hadn’t planned on that being now.
Well, I had insurance, and I had money in the bank, thanks to the vampires who’d paid me for keeping Eric when he’d lost his memory.
“And you had smoke detectors?” Greg was asking.
“Yes, I did,” I said, remembering the high-pitched pulsing that had started up right after Claudine had woken me. “If the ceiling in the hall is still there, you’ll be able to see one.”
There were no more back steps to get us up onto the porch, and the porch floorboards looked very unsteady. In fact, the washer had half fallen through and was tilted at an odd angle. It made me sick, seeing my everyday things, things I’d touched and used hundreds of times, exposed to the world and ruined.
“We’ll go through from the front door,” Greg suggested, and I was glad to agree.
It was still unlocked, and I felt a flutter of alarm before I realized how ludicrous that was. I stepped in. The first thing I noticed was the smell. Everything reeked of smoke. I opened the windows, and the cool breeze that blew through began to clear the smell out until it was just tolerable.
This end of the house was better than I’d expected. The furniture would need cleaning, of course. But the floor was solid and undamaged. I didn’t even go up the stairs; I seldom used the rooms up there, so whatever had happened up there could wait.
My arms were crossed under my breasts. I looked from side to side, moving slowly across the room toward the hall. I felt the floor vibrate as someone else came in. I knew without looking around that Jason was behind me. He and Greg said something to each other, but after a second Jason fell silent, as shocked as I was.
We passed into the hall. The door to my bedroom and the door to the bedroom across the hall were both open. My bedding was still thrown back. My slippers were beside the night table. All the windows were smudged with smoke and moisture, and the dreadful odor grew even stronger. There was the smoke detector on the hall ceiling. I pointed to it silently. I opened the door to the linen closet and found that everything in it felt damp. Well, these things could be washed. I went into my room and opened my closet door. My closet shared a wall with the kitchen. At first glance my clothes looked intact, until I noticed that each garment hanging on a wire hanger had a line across the shoulders where the heated hanger had singed the cloth. My shoes had baked. Maybe three pairs were usable.
I gulped.
Though I felt shakier by the second, I joined my brother and the insurance agent as they carefully continued down the hall to the kitchen.
The floor closest to the old part of the house seemed okay. The kitchen had been a large room, since it had also served as the family dining room. The table was partially burned, as were two of the chairs. The linoleum on the floor was all broken up, and some of it was charred. The hot water heater had gone through the floor, and the curtains that had
covered the window over the sink were hanging in strips. I remembered Gran making those curtains; she hadn’t enjoyed sewing, but the ones from JCPenney that she’d liked were just too much. So she’d gotten out her mother’s old sewing machine and bought some cheap but pretty flowered material at Hancock’s, and she’d measured, and cursed under her breath, and worked and worked until finally she’d gotten them done. Jason and I had admired them extravagantly to make her feel it had been worth the effort, and she’d been so pleased.
I opened one drawer, the one that had held all the keys. They were melted together. I pressed my lips together, hard. Jason stood beside me, looked down.
“Shit,” he said, his voice low and vicious. That helped me push the tears back.
I held on to his arm for just a minute. He patted me awkwardly. Seeing items so familiar, items made dear by use, irrevocably altered by fire was a terrible shock, no matter how many times I reminded myself that the whole house could have been consumed by the flames; that I could have died, too. Even if the smoke detector had wakened me in time, there was every likelihood I would have run outside to be confronted by the arsonist, Jeff Marriot.
Almost everything on the east side of the kitchen was ruined. The floor was unstable. The kitchen roof was gone.
“It’s lucky the rooms upstairs don’t extend over the kitchen,” Greg said when he came down from examining the two bedrooms and the attic. “You’ll have to get a builder to let you know, but I think the second story is essentially sound.”
I talked to Greg about money after that. When would it come? How much would it be? What deductible would I have to pay?
Jason wandered around the yard while Greg and I stood by his car. I could interpret my brother’s posture and movements. Jason was very angry: at my near-death escape, at what had happened to the house. After Greg drove off, leaving me with an exhausting list of things to do and phone calls to make (from where?) and work to get ready for (wearing what?), Jason meandered over to me and said, “If I’d been here, I coulda killed him.”
“In your new body?” I asked.
“Yeah. It would’ve given that sumbitch the scare of his life before he left it.”
“I think Charles probably was pretty scary, but I appreciate the thought.”
“They put the vamp in jail?”
“No, Bud Dearborn just told him not to leave town. After all, the Bon Temps jail doesn’t have a vampire cell. And regular cells don’t hold ’em, plus they have windows.”
“That’s where the guy was from—Fellowship of the Sun? Just a stranger who came to town to do you in?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“What they got against you? Other than you dating Bill and associating with some of the other vamps?”
Actually, the Fellowship had quite a bit against me. I’d been responsible for their huge Dallas church being raided and one of their main leaders going underground. The papers had been full of what the police had found in the Fellowship building in Texas. Arriving to find the members dashing in turmoil around their building, claiming vampires had attacked them, the police entered the building to search it and found a basement torture chamber, illegal arms adapted to shoot wooden stakes into vampires, and a corpse. The police failed to see a single vampire. Steve and Sarah Newlin, the leaders of the Fellowship church in Dallas, had been missing since that night.
I’d seen Steve Newlin since then. He’d been at Club Dead in Jackson. He and one of his cronies had been preparing to stake a vampire in the club when I’d prevented them. Newlin had escaped; his buddy hadn’t.
It appeared that the Newlins’ followers had tracked me down. I hadn’t foreseen such a thing, but then, I’d never foreseen anything that had happened to me in the past year. When Bill had been learning how to use his computer, he’d told me that with a little knowledge and money, anyone could be found through a computer.
Maybe the Fellowship had hired private detectives, like the couple who had been in my house yesterday. Maybe Jack and Lily Leeds had just been pretending to be hired by the Pelt family? Maybe the Newlins were their real employers? They hadn’t struck me as politicized people, but the power of the color green is universal.
“I guess dating a vampire was enough for them to hate me,” I told Jason. We were sitting on the tailgate of his truck, staring dismally at the house. “Who do you think I should call about rebuilding the kitchen?”
I didn’t think I needed an architect: I just wanted to replace what was missing. The house was raised up off the ground, so slab size wasn’t a factor. Since the floor was burned through in the kitchen and would have to be completely replaced, it wouldn’t cost much more to make the kitchen a little bigger and enclose the back porch completely. The
washer and dryer wouldn’t be so awful to use in bad weather, I thought longingly. I had more than enough money to satisfy the deductible, and I was sure the insurance would pay for most of the rest.
After a while, we heard another truck coming. Maxine Fortenberry, Hoyt’s mother, got out with a couple of laundry baskets. “Where’s your clothes, girl?” she called. “I’m gonna take them home and wash them, so you’ll have something to wear that don’t smell like smoke.”
After I protested and she insisted, we went into the chokingly unpleasant air of the house to get some clothes. Maxine also insisted on getting an armful of linens out of the linen closet to see if some of them could be resurrected.
Right after Maxine left, Tara drove her new car into the clearing, followed by her part-time help, a tall young woman called McKenna, who was driving Tara’s old car.
After a hug and a few words of sympathy, Tara said, “You drive this old Malibu while you’re getting your insurance stuff straightened out. It’s just sitting in my carport doing nothing, and I was just about to put it in the paper in the For Sale column. You can be using it.”
“Thank you,” I said in a daze. “Tara, that’s so nice of you.” She didn’t look good, I noticed vaguely, but I was too sunk in my own troubles to really evaluate Tara’s demeanor. When she and McKenna left, I gave them a limp wave good-bye.
After that, Terry Bellefleur arrived. He offered to demolish the burned part for a very nominal sum, and for a little bit more he’d haul all the resultant trash to the parish dump. He’d start as soon as the police gave him the go-ahead, he said, and to my astonishment he gave me a little hug.
Sam came after that, driven by Arlene. He stood and looked at the back of the house for a few minutes. His lips were tightly compressed. Almost any man would have said, “Pretty lucky I sent the vampire home with you, huh?” But Sam didn’t. “What can I do?” he said instead.
“Keep me working,” I said, smiling. “Forgive me coming to work in something besides my actual work clothes.” Arlene walked all around the house, and then hugged me wordlessly.
“That’s easily done,” he said. He still wasn’t smiling. “I hear that the guy who started the fire was a Fellowship member, that this is some kind of payback for you dating Bill.”
“He had the card in his wallet, and he had a gas can.” I shrugged.
“But how’d he find you? I mean, no one around here . . .” Sam’s voice trailed off as he considered the possibility more closely.
He was thinking, as I had, that though the arson could be just because I’d dated Bill, it seemed a drastic overreaction. A more typical retaliation was a Fellowship member throwing pig’s blood on humans who dated, or had a work partnership with, a vampire. That had happened more than once, most notably to a designer from Dior who’d employed all vampire models for one spring show. Such incidents usually occurred in big cities, cities that hosted large Fellowship “churches” and a bigger vampire population.
What if the man had been hired to set fire to my house by someone else? What if the Fellowship card in his wallet was planted there for misdirection?
Any of these things could be true; or all of them, or none of them. I couldn’t decide what I believed. So, was I the target of an assassin, like the shape-shifters? Should I, too, fear the shot from the dark, now that the fire had failed?
That was such a frightening prospect that I flinched from pursuing it. Those were waters too deep for me.
The state police arson investigator appeared while Sam and Arlene were there. I was eating a lunch plate Arlene had brought me. That Arlene was not much of a food person is the nicest way to put it, so my sandwich was made of cheap bologna and plastic cheese, and my canned drink was off-brand sugared tea. But she’d thought of me and she’d brought them to me, and her kids had drawn a picture for me. I would have been happy if she’d brought me just a slice of bread under those conditions.
Automatically, Arlene made eyes at the arson investigator. He was a lean man in his late forties named Dennis Pettibone. Dennis had a camera, a notebook, and a grim outlook. It took Arlene maybe two minutes of conversation to coax a little smile from Mr. Pettibone’s lips, and his brown eyes were admiring her curves after two more minutes had passed. Before Arlene drove Sam home, she had a promise from the investigator that he’d drop by the bar that evening.
Also before she left, Arlene offered me the foldout couch in her trailer, which was sweet of her, but I knew it would crowd her and throw off her get-the-kids-to-school morning routine, so I told her I had a place to stay. I didn’t think Bill would evict me. Jason had mentioned his house was open to me, and to my amazement, before he left, Sam said,
“You can stay with me, Sookie. No strings. I have two empty bedrooms in the double-wide. There’s actually a bed in one of them.”
“That’s so nice of you,” I said, putting all my sincerity into my voice. “Every soul in Bon Temps would have us on the way to being married if I did that, but I sure do appreciate it.”
“You don’t think they won’t make assumptions if you stay with Bill?”
“I can’t marry Bill. Not legal,” I replied, cutting off that argument. “Besides, Charles is there, too.”
“Fuel to the fire,” Sam pointed out. “That’s even spicier.”
“That’s kind of flattering, crediting me with enough pizzazz to take care of two vampires at a go.”
Sam grinned, which knocked about ten years off his age. He looked over my shoulder as we heard the sound of gravel crunching under yet another vehicle. “Look who’s coming,” he said.
A huge and ancient pickup lumbered to a stop. Out of it stepped Dawson, the huge Were who’d been acting as Calvin Norris’s bodyguard.
“Sookie,” he rumbled, his voice so deep I expected the ground to vibrate.
“Hey, Dawson.” I wanted to ask, “What are you doing here?” but I figured that would sound plain rude.
“Calvin heard about your fire,” Dawson said, not wasting time with preliminaries. “He told me to come by here and see was you hurt, and to tell you that he is thinking about you and that if he were well, he would be here pounding nails already.”
I saw from the corner of my eye that Dennis Pettibone was eyeing Dawson with interest. Dawson might as well have been wearing a sign that said DANGEROUS DUDE on it.
“You tell him I’m real grateful for the thought. I wish he were well, too. How’s he doing, Dawson?”
“He got a couple of things unhooked this morning, and he’s been walking a little. It was a bad wound,” Dawson said. “It’ll take a bit.” He glanced over to see how far away the arson investigator was. “Even for one of us,” he added.
“Of course,” I said. “I appreciate your coming by.”
“Also, Calvin says his house is empty while he’s in the hospital, if you need a place to stay. He’d be glad to give you the use of it.”
That, too, was kind, and I said so. But I would feel very awkward, being obliged to Calvin in such a significant way.
Dennis Pettibone called me over. “See, Ms. Stackhouse,” he said. “You can see where he used the gasoline on your porch. See the way the fire ran out from the splash he made on the door?”
I gulped. “Yes, I see.”
“You’re lucky there wasn’t any wind last night. And most of all, you’re lucky that you had that door shut, the one between the kitchen and the rest of the house. The fire would have gone right down that hall if you hadn’t shut the door. When the firefighters smashed that window on the north side, the fire ran that way looking for oxygen, instead of trying to make it into the rest of the house.”
I remembered the impulse that had pushed me back into the house against all common sense, the last-minute slam of that door.
“After a couple of days, I don’t think the bulk of the house will even smell as bad,” the investigator told me. “Open the windows now, pray it don’t rain, and fairly soon I don’t think you’ll have much problem. Course, you got to call the power company and talk to them about the electricity. And the propane company needs to take a look at the tank. So the house ain’t livable, from that point of view.”
The gist of what he was saying was, I could just sleep there to have a roof over my head. No electricity, no heat, no hot water, no cooking. I thanked Dennis Pettibone and excused myself to have a last word with Dawson, who’d been listening in.
“I’ll try to come see Calvin in a day or two, once I get this straightened out,” I said, nodding toward the blackened back of my house.
“Oh, yeah,” the bodyguard said, one foot already in his pickup. “Calvin said let him know who done this, if it was ordered by someone besides the sumbitch dead at the scene.”
I looked at what remained of my kitchen and could almost count the feet from the flames to my bedroom. “I appreciate that most of all,” I said, before my Christian self could smother the thought. Dawson’s brown eyes met mine in a moment of perfect accord.
Chapter 9
THANKS TO MAXINE, I had clean-smelling clothes to wear to work, but I had to go buy some footwear at Payless. Normally, I put a little money into my shoes since I have to stand up so much, but there was no time to go to Clarice to the one good shoe shop there or to drive over to Monroe to the mall. When I got to work, Sweetie Des Arts came out of the kitchen to hug me, her thin body wrapped in a white cook’s apron. Even the boy who bussed the tables told me he was sorry. Holly and Danielle, who were switching off shifts, each gave me a pat on the shoulder and told me they hoped things got better for me.
Arlene asked me if I thought that handsome Dennis Pettibone would be coming by, and I told her I was sure he would.
“I guess he has to travel a lot,” she said thoughtfully. “I wonder where he’s based.”
“I got his business card. He’s based in Shreveport. He told me he bought himself a small farm right outside of Shreveport, now that I think about it.”
Arlene’s eyes narrowed. “Sounds like you and Dennis had a nice talk.”
I started to protest that the arson investigator was a little long in the tooth for me, but since Arlene had stuck to saying she was thirty-six for the past three years, I figured that would be less than tactful. “He was just passing the time of day,” I told her. “He asked me how long I’d worked with you, and did you have any kids.”
“Oh. He did?” Arlene beamed. “Well, well.” She went to check on her tables with a cheerful strut to her walk.
I set about my work, having to take longer than usual to do everything because of the constant interruptions. I knew some other town sensation would soon eclipse my house fire. Though I couldn’t hope anyone else would experience a similar disaster, I would be glad when I wasn’t the object of discussion of every single bar patron.
Terry hadn’t been able to handle the light daytime bar duties today, so Arlene and I pitched in to cover it. Being busy helped me feel less self-conscious.
Though I was coasting on three hours of sleep, I managed okay until Sam called me from the hallway that led to his office and the public bathrooms.
Two people had come in earlier and gone up to his corner table to talk to him; I’d noted them only in passing. The woman was in her sixties, very round and short. She used a cane. The young man with her was brown haired, with a sharp nose and heavy brows to give his face some character. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t make the reference pop to the top of my head. Sam had ushered them back into his office.
“Sookie,” Sam said unhappily, “the people in my office want to talk to you.”
“Who are they?”
“She’s Jeff Marriot’s mother. The man is his twin.”
“Oh my God,” I said, realizing the man reminded me of the corpse. “Why do they want to talk to me?”
“They don’t think he ever had anything to do with the Fellowship. They don’t understand anything about his death.”
To say I dreaded this encounter was putting it mildly. “Why talk to me?” I said in a kind of subdued wail. I was nearly at the end of my emotional endurance.
“They just . . . want answers. They’re grieving.”
“So am I,” I said. “My home.”
“Their loved one.”
I stared at Sam. “Why should I talk to them?” I asked. “What is it you want from me?”
“You need to hear what they have to say,” Sam said with a note of finality in his voice. He wouldn’t push any more, and he wouldn’t explain any more. Now the decision was up to me.
Because I trusted Sam, I nodded. “I’ll talk to them when I get off work,” I said. I secretly hoped they’d leave by then. But when my shift was over, the two were still sitting in Sam’s office. I took off my apron, tossed it in the big trash can labeled DIRTY LINEN (reflecting for the hundredth time that the trash can would probably implode if anyone put some actual linen in it), and plodded into the office.
I looked the Marriots over more carefully now that we were face-to-face. Mrs. Marriot (I assumed) was in bad shape. Her skin was grayish, and her whole body seemed to sag. Her glasses were smeared because she’d been weeping so much, and she was clutching damp tissues in her hands. Her son was shocked expressionless. He’d lost his twin, and he was sending me so much misery I could hardly absorb it.
“Thanks for talking to us,” he said. He rose from his seat automatically and extended his hand. “I’m Jay Marriot, and this is my mother, Justine.”
This was a family that found a letter of the alphabet it liked and stuck to it.
I didn’t know what to say. Could I tell them I was sorry their loved one was dead, when he’d tried to kill me? There was no rule of etiquette for this; even my grandmother would have been stymied.
“Miss—Ms.—Stackhouse, had you ever met my brother before?”
“No,” I said. Sam took my hand. Since the Marriots were seated in the only two chairs Sam’s office could boast, he and I leaned against the front of his desk. I hoped his leg wasn’t hurting.
“Why would he set fire to your house? He’d never been arrested before, for anything,” Justine spoke for the first time. Her voice was rough and choked with tears; it had an undertone of pleading. She was asking me to let this not be true, this allegation about her son Jeff.
“I sure don’t know.”
“Could you tell us how this happened? His—death, I mean?”
I felt a flare of anger at being obliged to pity them—at the necessity for being delicate, for treating them specially. After all, who had almost died here? Who had lost part of her home? Who was facing a financial crunch that only chance had reduced from a disaster? Rage surged through me, and Sam let go of my hand and put his arm around me. He could feel the tension in my body. He was hoping I would control the impulse to lash out.
I held on to my better nature by my fingernails, but I held on.
“A friend woke me up,” I said. “When we got outside, we found a vampire who is staying with my neighbour—also a vampire—standing by Mr. Marriot’s body. There was a gasoline can near to the . . . nearby. The doctor who came said there was gas on his hands.”
“What killed him?” The mother again.
“The vampire.”
“Bit him?”
“No, he . . . no. No biting.”
“How, then?” Jay was showing some of his own anger.
“Broke his neck, I think.”
“That was what we heard at the sheriff’s office,” Jay said. “But we just didn’t know if they were telling the truth.”
Oh, for goodness’s sake.
Sweetie Des Arts stuck her head in to ask Sam if she could borrow the storeroom keys because she needed a case of pickles. She apologized for interrupting. Arlene waved a hand at me as she went down the hall to the employees’ door, and I wondered if Dennis Pettibone had come in the bar. I’d been so sunk in my own problems, I hadn’t noticed. When the outside door clunked shut behind her, the silence seemed to gather in the little room.
“So why was the vampire in your yard?” Jay asked impatiently. “In the middle of the night?”
I did not tell him it was none of his business. Sam’s hand stroked my arm. “That’s when they’re up. And he was staying at the only other house out by mine.” That’s what we’d told the police. “I guess he heard someone in my yard while he was close and came to investigate.”
“We don’t know how Jeff got there,” Justine said. “Where is his car?”
“I don’t know.”
“And there was a card in his wallet?”
“Yes, a Fellowship of the Sun membership card,” I told her.
“But he had nothing particular against vampires,” Jay protested. “We’re twins. I would have known if he’d had some big grudge. This just doesn’t make any sense.”
“He did give a woman in the bar a fake name and hometown,” I said, as gently as I could.
“Well, he was just passing through,” Jay said. “I’m a married man, but Jeff’s divorced. I don’t like to say this in front of my mother, but it’s not unknown for men to give a false name and history when they meet a woman in a bar.”
This was true. Though Merlotte’s was primarily a neighbourhood bar, I’d listened to many a tale from out-of-towners who’d dropped in; and I’d known for sure they were lying.
“Where was the wallet?” Justine asked. She looked up at me like an old beaten dog, and it made my heart sick.
“In his jacket pocket,” I said.
Jay stood up abruptly. He began to move, pacing in the small space he had at his disposal. “There again,” he said, his voice more animated, “that’s just not like Jeff. He kept his billfold in his jeans, same as me. We never put our wallets in our jacket.”
“What are you saying?” Sam asked.
“I’m saying that I don’t think Jeff did this,” his twin said. “Even those people at the Fina station, they could be mistaken.”
“Someone at the Fina says he bought a can of gas there?” Sam asked.
Justine flinched again, the soft skin of her chin shaking.
I’d been wondering if there might be something to the Marriots’ suspicions, but that idea was extinguished now. The phone rang, and all of us jumped. Sam picked it up and said, “Merlotte’s,” in a calm voice. He listened, said, “Um-hum,” and “That right?” and finally, “I’ll tell her.” He hung up.
“Your brother’s car’s been found,” he told Jay Marriot. “It’s on a little road almost directly across from Sookie’s driveway.”
The light went out completely on the little family’s ray of hope, and I could only feel sorry for them. Justine seemed ten years older than she had when she’d come into the bar, and Jay looked like he’d gone days without sleep or food. They left without another word to me, which was a mercy. From the few sentences they exchanged with each other, I gathered they were going to see Jeff’s car and ask if they could remove any of his belongings from it. I thought they would meet another blank wall there.
Eric had told me that that little road, a dirt track leading back to a deer camp, was where Debbie Pelt had hidden her car when she’d come to kill me. Might as well put up a sign: PARKING FOR SOOKIE STACKHOUSE NIGHTTIME ATTACKS.
Sam came swinging back into the room. He’d been seeing the Marriots out. He stood by me propped against his desk and set his crutches aside. He put his arm around me. I turned to him and slid my arms around his waist. He held me to him, and I felt peaceful for a wonderful minute. The heat of his body warmed me, and the knowledge of his affection comforted me.
“Does your leg hurt?” I asked when he moved restlessly.
“Not my leg,” he said.
I looked up, puzzled, to meet his eyes. He looked rueful. Suddenly, I became aware of exactly what was hurting Sam, and I flushed red. But I didn’t let go of him. I was reluctant to end the comfort of being close to someone—no, of being close to Sam. When I didn’t move away, he slowly put his lips to mine, giving me every chance to step out of reach. His mouth brushed mine once, twice. Then he settled in to kissing me, and the heat of his tongue filled my mouth, stroking.
That felt incredibly good. With the visit of the Marriot family, I’d been browsing the Mystery section. Now I’d definitely wandered over to the Romances.
His height was close enough to mine that I didn’t have to strain upward to meet his mouth. His kiss became more urgent. His lips strayed down my neck, to the vulnerable and sensitive place just at the base, and his teeth nipped very gently.
I gasped. I just couldn’t help it. If I’d had the gift of teleportation, I would’ve had us somewhere more private in an instant. Remotely, I felt there was something kind of tacky at feeling this lustful in a messy office in a bar. But the heat surged as he kissed me again. We’d always had something between us, and the smoldering ember had just burst into flame.
I struggled to hold on to some sense. Was this survivor lust? What about his leg? Did he really need the buttons on his shirt?
“Not good enough for you here,” he said, doing a little gasping of his own. He pulled away and reached for his crutches, but then he hauled me back and kissed me again. “Sookie, I’m going to—”
“What are you going to do?” asked a cold voice from the doorway.
If I was shocked senseless, Sam was enraged. In a split second I was pushed to one side, and he launched himself at the intruder, broken leg and all.
My heart was thumping like a scared rabbit’s, and I put one hand over it to make sure it stayed in my chest. Sam’s sudden attack had knocked Bill to the floor. Sam pulled back his fist to get in a punch, but Bill used his greater weight and strength to roll Sam until he was on the bottom. Bill’s fangs were out and his eyes were glowing.
“Stop!” I yelled at a reduced volume, scared the patrons would come running. In a little fast action of my own, I gripped Bill’s smooth dark hair with both hands and used it to
yank his head back. In the excitement of the moment, Bill reached behind him to catch my wrists in his hands, and he began twisting. I choked with pain. Both my arms were about to break when Sam took the opportunity to sock Bill in the jaw with all his power. Shifters are not as powerful as Weres and vampires, but they can pack quite a punch, and Bill was rocked sideways. He also came to his senses. Releasing my arms, he rose and turned to me in one graceful movement.
My eyes welled full of tears from the pain, and I opened them wide, determined not to let the drops roll down my cheeks. But I’m sure I looked exactly like someone who was trying hard not to cry. I was holding my arms out in front of me, wondering when they’d stop hurting.
“Since your car was burned, I came to get you because it was time for you to get off work,” Bill said, his fingers gently evaluating the marks on my forearms. “I swear I just intended to do you a favour. I swear I wasn’t spying on you. I swear I never intended you any harm.”
That was a pretty good apology, and I was glad he’d spoken first. Not only was I in pain, I was totally embarrassed. Naturally, Bill had no way of knowing that Tara had loaned me a car. I should have left him a note or left a message on his answering machine, but I’d driven straight to work from the burned house, and it simply hadn’t crossed my mind. Something else did occur to me, as it should have right away.
“Oh, Sam, did your leg get hurt worse?” I brushed past Bill to help Sam to his feet. I took as much of his weight as I could, knowing he’d rather lie on the floor forever than accept any assistance from Bill. Finally, with some difficulty, I maneuvered Sam upright, and I saw he was careful to keep his weight on his good leg. I couldn’t even imagine how Sam must be feeling.
He was feeling pretty pissed off, I discovered directly. He glared past me at Bill. “You come in without calling out, without knocking? I’m sure you don’t expect me to say I’m sorry for jumping you.” I’d never seen Sam so angry. I could tell that he was embarrassed that he hadn’t “protected” me more effectively, that he was humiliated that Bill had gained the upper hand and furthermore had hurt me. Last but not least, Sam was coping with the backwash from all those hormones that had been exploding when we’d been interrupted.
“Oh, no. I don’t expect that.” Bill’s voice dropped in temperature when he spoke to Sam. I expected to see icicles form on the walls.
I wished I were a thousand miles away. I longed for the ability to walk out, get into my own car, and drive to my own home. Of course, I couldn’t. At least I had the use of a car, and I explained that to Bill.
“Then I needn’t have gone to the trouble of coming to get you, and you two could have continued uninterrupted,” he said in an absolutely lethal tone. “Where are you going to spend the night, if I may ask? I was going to go to the store to buy food for you.”
Since Bill hated grocery shopping, that would have been a major effort, and he wanted to be sure I knew about it. (Of course, it was also possible that he was making this up on the spot to be sure I felt as guilty as possible.)
I reviewed my options. Though I never knew what I’d walk into over at my brother’s, that seemed my safest choice. “I’m going to run by my house to get some makeup out of the bathroom, and then I’m going to Jason’s,” I said. “Thank you for putting me up last night, Bill. I guess you brought Charles to work? Tell him if he wants to spend the night at my house, I guess the, ah, hole is okay.”
“Tell him yourself. He’s right outside,” Bill said in a voice I can only characterize as grumpy. Bill’s imagination had evidently spun a whole different scenario for the evening. The way events were unfolding was making him mighty unhappy.
Sam was in so much pain (I could see it hovering like a red glow around him) that the most merciful thing I could do was clear out of there before he gave into it. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Sam,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek.
He tried to smile at me. I didn’t dare offer to help him over to his trailer while the vampires were there, because I knew Sam’s pride would suffer. At the moment, that was more important to him than the state of his injured leg.
Charles was behind the bar and already busy. When Bill offered accommodations again for a second day, Charles accepted rather than opting for my untested hidey hole. “We have to check your hiding place, Sookie, for cracks that may have occurred during the fire,” Charles said seriously.
I could understand the necessity, and without saying a word to Bill, I got into the loaner car and drove to my house. We’d left the windows open all day, and the smell had largely dissipated. That was a welcome development. Thanks to the strategy of the firefighters and the inexpert way the fire had been set, the bulk of my house would be liveable in short order. I’d called a contractor, Randall Shurtliff, that evening from the bar, and he’d agreed to stop by the next day at noon. Terry Bellefleur had promised to start removing
the remains of the kitchen early the next day. I would have to be there to set aside anything I could salvage. I felt like I had two jobs now.
I was suddenly and completely exhausted, and my arms ached. I would have huge bruises the next day. It was almost too warm to justify long sleeves, but I’d have to wear them. Armed with a flashlight from the glove compartment of Tara’s car, I got my makeup and some more clothes from my bedroom, throwing them all into a sport duffle I’d won at the Relay for Life. I tossed in a couple of paperbacks I hadn’t read yet—books I’d traded for at the library swap rack. That prompted another line of thought. Did I have any movies that needed to go back to the rental place? No. Library books? Yes, had to return some, and I needed to air them out first. Anything else that belonged to another person? Thank goodness I’d dropped Tara’s suit at the cleaner’s.
There was no point in closing and locking the windows, which I’d left open to dissipate the odour, as the house was easily accessible through the burned kitchen. But when I went out my front door, I locked it behind me. I’d gotten to Hummingbird Road before I realized how silly that had been, and as I drove to Jason’s, I found myself smiling for the first time in many, many hours.
Chapter 10
MY MELANCHOLY BROTHER was glad to see me. The fact that his new “family” didn’t trust him had been eating away at Jason all day. Even his panther girlfriend, Crystal, was nervous about seeing him while the cloud of suspicion hung around him. She’d sent him packing when he’d shown up on her front doorstep this evening. When I found out he’d actually driven out to Hotshot, I exploded. I told my brother in no uncertain terms that he apparently had a death wish and I was not responsible for whatever happened to him. He responded that I’d never been responsible for anything that he did, anyway, so why would I start now?
It went on like that for a while.
After he’d grudgingly agreed to stay away from his fellow shifters, I carried my bag down the short hall to the guest bedroom. This was where he kept his computer, his old high school trophies from the baseball team and the football team, and an ancient foldout couch on hand primarily for visitors who drank too much and couldn’t drive home. I didn’t even bother to unfold it but spread out an ancient quilt over the glossy Naugahyde. I pulled another one over me.
After I said my prayers, I reviewed my day. It had been so full of incident that I got tired trying to remember everything. In about three minutes, I was out like a light. I dreamed about growling animals that night: they were all around me in the fog, and I was scared. I could hear Jason screaming somewhere in the mist, though I couldn’t find him to defend him.
Sometimes you don’t need a psychiatrist to interpret a dream, right?
I woke up just a bit when Jason left for work in the morning, mostly because he slammed the door behind him. I dozed off again for another hour, but then I woke up decisively. Terry would be coming to my house to begin tearing down the ruined part, and I needed to see if any of my kitchen things could be saved.
Since this was liable to be a dirty job, I borrowed Jason’s blue jumpsuit, the one he put on when he worked on his car. I looked in his closet and pulled out an old leather jacket Jason wore for rough work. I also appropriated a box of garbage bags. As I started Tara’s car, I wondered how on earth I could repay her for its use. I reminded myself to pick up her suit. Since it was on my mind, I made a slight detour to retrieve it from the dry cleaner’s.
Terry was in a stable mood today, to my relief. He was smiling as he smacked away at the charred boards of the back porch with a sledgehammer. Though the day was very cool, Terry wore only a sleeveless T-shirt tucked in his jeans. It covered most of the dreadful scars. After greeting him and registering that he didn’t want to talk, I went in through the front door. I was drawn down the hall to the kitchen to look again at the damage.
The firefighters had said the floor was safe. It made me nervous to step out onto the scorched linoleum, but after a moment or two, I felt easier. I pulled on gloves and began to work, going through cabinets and cupboards and drawers. Some things had melted or twisted with the heat. A few things, like my plastic colander, were so warped it took me a second or two to identify what I was holding.
I tossed the ruined things directly out the south kitchen window, away from Terry.
I didn’t trust any of the food that had been in the cabinets that were on the outer wall. The flour, the rice, the sugar—they’d all been in Tupperware containers, and though the seals had held, I just didn’t want to use the contents. The same held true of the canned goods; for some reason, I felt uneasy about using food from cans that had gotten so hot.
Fortunately, my everyday stoneware and the good china that had belonged to my great-great-grandmother had survived, since they were in the cabinet farthest from the flames. Her sterling silver was in fine shape, too. My far more useful stainless tableware, much closer to the fire, was warped and twisted. Some of the pots and pans were usable.
I worked for two or three hours, consigning things to the growing pile outside the window or bagging them in Jason’s garbage bags for future use in a new kitchen. Terry worked hard, too, taking a break every now and then to drink bottled water while he perched on the tailgate of his pickup. The temperature rose to the upper sixties. We might have a few more hard frosts, and there was always the chance of an ice storm, but it was possible to count on spring coming soon.
It wasn’t a bad morning. I felt like I was taking a step toward regaining my home. Terry was an undemanding companion, since he didn’t like to talk, and he was exorcising his demons with hard work. Terry was in his late fifties now. Some of the chest hair I could see above his T-shirt neck was gray. The hair on his head, once auburn, was fading as he aged. But he was a strong man, and he swung his sledgehammer with vigor and loaded boards onto the flatbed of his truck with no sign of strain.
Terry left to take a load to the parish dump. While he was gone, I went into my bedroom and made my bed—a strange and foolish thing to do, I know. I would have to take the sheets off and wash them; in fact, I’d have to wash almost every piece of fabric in the
house to completely rid it of the smell of burning. I’d even have to wash the walls and repaint the hall, though the paint in the rest of the house seemed clean enough.
I was taking a break out in the yard when I heard a truck approaching a moment before it appeared, coming out of the trees that surrounded the driveway. To my astonishment, I recognized it as Alcide’s truck, and I felt a pang of dismay. I’d told him to stay away.
He seemed miffed about something when he leaped out of the cab. I’d been sitting in the sunshine on one of my aluminum lawn chairs, wondering what time it was and wondering when the contractor would get here. After the all-round discomfort of my night at Jason’s, I was also planning on finding somewhere else to stay while the kitchen was being rebuilt. I couldn’t imagine the rest of my house being habitable until the work was complete, and that might be months from now. Jason wouldn’t want me around that long, I was sure. He’d have to put up with me if I wanted to stay—he was my brother, after all—but I didn’t want to strain his fraternal spirit. There wasn’t anyone I wanted to stay with for a couple of months, when I came to consider the matter.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Alcide bellowed as his feet touched the ground.
I sighed. Another angry man.
“We aren’t big buddies right now,” I reminded him. “But I would have gotten around to it. It’s only been a couple of days.”
“You should have called me first thing,” he told me, striding around the house to survey the damage. He stopped right in front of me. “You could have died,” he said, as if it was big news.
“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”
“A vampire had to save you.” There was disgust in his voice. Vamps and Weres just didn’t get along.
“Yes,” I agreed, though actually my saviour had been Claudine. But Charles had killed the arsonist. “Oh, would you rather I’d burned?”
“No, of course not!” He turned away, looked at the mostly dismantled porch. “Someone’s working on tearing down the damaged part already?”
“Yes.”
“I could have gotten a whole crew out here.”
“Terry volunteered.”
“I can get you a good rate on the reconstruction.”
“I’ve lined up a contractor.”
“I can loan you the money to do it.”
“I have the money, thank you very much.”
That startled him. “You do? Where’d—” He stopped before saying something inexcusable. “I didn’t think your grandmother had had much to leave you,” he said, which was almost as bad.
“I earned the money,” I said.
“You earned the money from Eric?” he guessed accurately. Alcide’s green eyes were hot with anger. I thought he was going to shake me.
“You just calm down, Alcide Herveaux,” I said sharply. “How I earned it is none of your damn business. I’m glad to have it. If you’ll get down off your high horse, I’ll tell you that I’m glad you’re concerned about me, and I’m grateful you’re offering help. But don’t treat me like I’m a slow fifth grader in the special class.”
Alcide stared down at me while my speech soaked in. “I’m sorry. I thought you—I thought we were close enough for you to’ve called me that night. I thought . . . maybe you needed help.”
He was playing the “you hurt my feelings” card.
“I don’t mind asking for help when I need it. I’m not that proud,” I said. “And I’m glad to see you.” (Not totally true.) “But don’t act like I can’t do things for myself, because I can, and I am.”
“The vampires paid you for keeping Eric while the witches were in Shreveport?”
“Yes,” I said. “My brother’s idea. It embarrassed me. But now I’m grateful I’ve got the money. I won’t have to borrow any to get the house put into shape.”
Terry Bellefleur returned with his pickup just then, and I introduced the two men. Terry didn’t seem at all impressed by meeting Alcide. In fact, he went right back to work after he gave Alcide’s hand a perfunctory shake. Alcide eyed Terry doubtfully.
“Where are you staying?” Alcide had decided not to ask questions about Terry’s scars, thank goodness.
“I’m staying with Jason,” I said promptly, leaving out the fact that I hoped that would be temporary.
“How long is it gonna take to rebuild?”
“Here’s the guy who can tell me,” I said gratefully. Randall Shurtliff was in a pickup, too, and he had his wife and partner with him. Delia Shurtliff was younger than Randall, pretty as a picture, and tough as nails. She was Randall’s second wife. When he’d gotten divorced from his “starter” wife, the one who’d had three children and cleaned his house for twelve years, Delia had already been working for Randall and had gradually begun to run his business for him far more efficiently than he’d ever done. He was able to give his first wife and sons more advantages with the money his second wife had helped him earn than he otherwise might have, had he married someone else. It was common knowledge (by which I mean I wasn’t the only one who knew this) that Delia was very ready for Mary Helen to remarry and for the three Shurtliff boys to graduate from high school.
I shut out Delia’s thoughts with a firm resolve to work on keeping my shields up. Randall was pleased to meet Alcide, whom he’d known by sight, and Randall was even more eager to take on rebuilding my kitchen when he knew I was a friend of Alcide’s. The Herveaux family carried a lot of weight personally and financially in the building trade. To my irritation, Randall began addressing all his remarks to Alcide instead of to me. Alcide accepted this quite naturally.
I looked at Delia. Delia looked at me. We were very unlike, but we were of one mind at that moment.
“What do you think, Delia?” I asked her. “How long?”
“He’ll huff and he’ll puff,” she said. Her hair was paler than mine, courtesy of the beauty salon, and she wore emphatic eye makeup, but she was dressed sensibly in khakis and a polo shirt with “Shurtliff Construction” in script above her left breast. “But he’s got that house over on Robin Egg to finish. He can work on your kitchen before he begins a house in Clarice. So, say, three to four months from now, you’ll have you a usable kitchen.”
“Thanks, Delia. Do I need to sign something?”
“We’ll get an estimate ready for you. I’ll bring it to the bar for you to check. We’ll include the new appliances, because we can get a dealer discount. But I’ll tell you right now, you’re looking at this ballpark.”
She showed me the estimate on a kitchen renovation they had done a month before.
“I have it,” I said, though I gave one long shriek deep inside. Even with the insurance money, I’d be using up a big chunk of what I had in the bank.
I should be thankful, I reminded myself sternly, that Eric had paid me all that money, that I had it to spend. I wouldn’t have to borrow from the bank or sell the land or take any other drastic step. I should think of that money as just passing through my account rather than living there. I hadn’t actually owned it. I’d just had custody of it for a while.
“You and Alcide good friends?” Delia asked, our business concluded.
I gave it some thought. “Some days,” I answered honestly.
She laughed, a harsh cackle that was somehow sexy. Both men looked around, Randall smiling, Alcide quizzical. They were too far away to hear what we were saying.
“I’ll tell you something,” Delia Shurtliff said to me quietly. “Just between you and me and the fencepost. Jackson Herveaux’s secretary, Connie Babcock—you met her?”
I nodded. I’d at least seen her and talked to her when I’d dropped by Alcide’s office in Shreveport.
“She got arrested this morning for stealing from Herveaux and Son.”
“What did she take?” I was all ears.
“This is what I don’t understand. She was caught sneaking some papers out of Jackson Herveaux’s office. Not business papers, but personal, the way I heard it. She said she’d been paid to do it.”
“By?”
“Some guy who owns a motorcycle dealership. Now, does that make sense?”
It did if you knew that Connie Babcock had been sleeping with Jackson Herveaux, as well as working in his office. It did if you suddenly realized that Jackson had taken Christine Larrabee, a pure Were and influential, to the funeral of Colonel Flood, instead of taking the powerless human Connie Babcock.
While Delia elaborated on the story, I stood, lost in thought. Jackson Herveaux was without a doubt a clever businessman, but he was proving to be a stupid politician. Having Connie arrested was dumb. It drew attention to the Weres, had the potential to expose them. A people so secretive would not appreciate a leader who couldn’t manage a problem with more finesse than that.
As a matter of fact, since Alcide and Randall were still discussing the rebuilding of my house with each other instead of with me, a lack of finesse appeared to run in the Herveaux family.
Then I frowned. It occurred to me that Patrick Furnan might be devious and clever enough to have engineered the whole thing—bribing the spurned Connie to steal Jackson’s private papers, then ensuring she was caught—knowing that Jackson would react with a hot head. Patrick Furnan might be much smarter than he looked, and Jackson Herveaux much stupider, at least in the way that mattered if you wanted to be packmaster. I tried to shake off these disturbing speculations. Alcide hadn’t said a word about Connie’s arrest, so I had to conclude that he considered it none of my business. Okay, maybe he thought I had enough to worry about, and he was right. I turned my mind back to the moment.
“You think they’d notice if we left?” I asked Delia.
“Oh, yeah,” Delia said confidently. “It might take Randall a minute, but he’d look around for me. He’d get lost if he couldn’t find me.”
Here was a woman who knew her own worth. I sighed and thought about getting in my borrowed car and driving away. Alcide, catching sight of my face, broke off his discussion with my contractor and looked guilty. “Sorry,” he called. “Habit.”
Randall came back to where I was standing quite a bit faster than he’d wandered away. “Sorry,” he apologized. “We were talking shop. What did you have in mind, Sookie?”
“I want the same dimensions for the kitchen as before,” I said, having dropped visions of a larger room after seeing the estimate. “But I want the new back porch to be just as wide as the kitchen, and I want to enclose it.”
Randall produced a tablet, and I sketched what I wanted.
“You want the sinks where they were? You want all the appliances where they were?”
After some discussion, I drew everything I wanted, and Randall said he’d call me when it was time to pick out the cabinets and the sinks and all the other incidentals.
“One thing I wish you’d do for me today or tomorrow is fix the door from the hall into the kitchen,” I said. “I want to be able to lock the house.”
Randall rummaged around in the back of his pickup for a minute or two and came up with a brand-new doorknob with a lock, still in its package. “This won’t keep out anyone really determined,” he said, still in the apologetic vein, “but it’s better’n nothing.” He had it installed within fifteen minutes, and I was able to lock the sound part of the house away
from the burned part. I felt much better, though I knew this lock wasn’t worth much. I needed to put a dead bolt on the inside of the door; that would be even better. I wondered if I could do it myself, but I recalled that would entail cutting away some of the door frame, and I wasn’t anything of a carpenter. Surely I could find someone who’d help me with that task.
Randall and Delia left with many assurances that I would be next on the list, and Terry resumed work. Alcide said, “You’re never alone,” in mildly exasperated tones.
“What did you want to talk about? Terry can’t hear us over here.” I led the way over to where my aluminum chair was sitting under a tree. Its companion was leaning up against the rough bark of the oak, and Alcide unfolded it. It creaked a little under his weight as he settled into it. I assumed he was going to tell me about the arrest of Connie Babcock.
“I upset you the last time I talked to you,” he said directly.
I had to change mental gears at the unexpected opening. Okay, I liked a man who could apologize. “Yes, you did.”
“You didn’t want me to tell you I knew about Debbie?”
“I just hate that the whole thing happened. I hate that her family is taking it so hard. I hate that they don’t know, that they’re suffering. But I’m glad to be alive, and I’m not going to jail for defending myself.”
“If it’ll make you feel any better, Debbie wasn’t that close to her family. Her parents always preferred Debbie’s little sister, though she didn’t inherit any shifter characteristics. Sandra is the apple of their eye, and the only reason they’re pursuing this with such vigor is that Sandra expected it.”
“You think they’ll give up?”
“They think I did it,” Alcide said. “The Pelts think that because Debbie got engaged to another man, I killed her. I got an e-mail from Sandra in response to mine about the private eyes.”
I could only gape at him. I had a horrible vista of the future in which I saw myself going down to the police station and confessing to save Alcide from a jail term. Even to be suspected of a murder he hadn’t committed was an awful thing, and I couldn’t permit it. It just hadn’t occurred to me that someone else would be blamed for what I’d done.
“But,” Alcide continued, “I can prove I didn’t. Four pack members have sworn I was at Pam’s house after Debbie left, and one female will swear I spent the night with her.”
He had been with the pack members, just somewhere else. I slumped with relief. I was not going to have a jealous spasm about the female. He wouldn’t have called her that if he’d actually had sex with her.
“So the Pelts will just have to suspect someone else. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about, anyway.”
Alcide took my hand. His were big, and hard, and enclosed mine like he was holding something wild that would fly away if he relaxed his grip. “I want you to think about seeing me on a steady basis,” Alcide said. “As in, every day.”
Once again, the world seemed to rearrange itself around me. “Huh?” I said.
“I like you very much,” he said. “I think you like me, too. We want each other.” He leaned over to kiss me once on the cheek and then, when I didn’t move, on the mouth. I was too surprised to get into it and unsure whether I wanted to anyway. It’s not often a mind reader gets taken by surprise, but Alcide had achieved it.
He took a deep breath and continued. “We enjoy each other’s company. I want to see you in my bed so much it makes me ache. I wouldn’t have spoken this soon, without us being together more, but you need a place to live right now. I have a condo in Shreveport. I want you to think about staying with me.”
If he’d whomped me upside the head with a two-by-four, I couldn’t have been more stunned. Instead of trying so hard to stay out of people’s heads, I should consider getting back into them. I started several sentences in my head, discarded them all. The warmth of him, the attraction of his big body, was something I had to fight as I struggled to sort my thoughts.
“Alcide,” I began at last, speaking over the background noise of Terry’s sledgehammer knocking down the boards of my burned kitchen, “you’re right that I like you. In fact, I more than like you.” I couldn’t even look at his face. I looked instead at his big hands, with their dusting of dark hair across the backs. If I looked down past his hands, I could see his muscular thighs and his . . . Well, back to the hands. “But the timing seems all wrong. I think you need more time to get over your relationship with Debbie, since you seemed so enslaved to her. You may feel that just saying the words ‘I abjure you’ got rid of all your feelings for Debbie, but I’m not convinced that’s so.”
“It’s a powerful ritual of my people,” Alcide said stiffly, and I risked a quick glance at his face.
“I could tell it was a powerful ritual,” I assured him, “and it had a big effect on everyone there. But I can’t believe that, quick as a flash, every single feeling you had for Debbie was uprooted when you said the words. That’s just not how people work.”
“That’s how werewolves work.” He looked stubborn. And determined.
I thought very hard about what I wanted to say.
“I’d love for someone to step in and solve all my problems,” I told him. “But I don’t want to accept your offer because I need a place to live and we’re hot for each other. When my house is rebuilt, then we’ll talk, if you still feel the same.”
“This is when you need me the most,” he protested, the words spilling out of his mouth in his haste to persuade me. “You need me now. I need you now. We’re right for each other. You know it.”
“No, I don’t. I know that you’re worried about a lot of things right now. You lost your lover, however it happened. I don’t think it’s sunk into you yet that you’ll never see her again.”
He flinched.
“I shot her, Alcide. With a shotgun.”
His whole face clenched.
“See? Alcide, I’ve seen you rip into a person’s flesh when you were being a wolf. And it didn’t make me scared of you. Because I’m on your side. But you loved Debbie, at least for a time. We get into a relationship now, at some point you’re going to look up and say, ‘Here’s the one who ended her life.’ ”
Alcide opened his mouth to protest, but I held up a hand. I wanted to finish.
“Plus, Alcide, your dad’s in this succession struggle. He wants to win the election. Maybe you being in a settled relationship would help his ambitions. I don’t know. But I don’t want any part of Were politics. I didn’t appreciate you dragging me into it cold last week at the funeral. You should have let me decide.”
“I wanted them to get used to the sight of you by my side,” Alcide said, his face stiffening with offense. “I meant it as an honor to you.”
“I might have appreciated that honor more if I’d known about it,” I snapped. It was a relief to hear another vehicle approaching, to see Andy Bellefleur get out of his Ford and watch his cousin knocking down my kitchen. For the first time in months, I was glad to see Andy.
I introduced Andy to Alcide, of course, and watched them size each other up. I like men in general, and some men in specific, but when I saw them practically circle each other as they sniffed each other’s butts—excuse me, exchanged greetings—I just had to shake my head. Alcide was the taller by a good four inches, but Andy Bellefleur had been on his college wrestling team, and he was still a block of muscle. They were about the same age. I would put even money on them in a fight, providing that Alcide kept his human form.
“Sookie, you asked me to keep you posted on the man who died here,” Andy said.
Sure, but it had never occurred to me he’d actually do it. Andy did not have any very high opinion of me, though he’d always been a big fan of my rear end. It’s wonderful being telepathic, huh?
“He has no prior record,” Andy said, looking down at the little notebook he’d produced. “He has no known association with the Fellowship of the Sun.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I said into the little silence that followed. “Why would he set the fire otherwise?”
“I was hoping you could tell me that,” Andy said, his clear gray eyes meeting mine.
I’d had it with Andy, abruptly and finally. In our dealings over the years, he’d insulted me and wounded me, and now I’d encountered that last straw.
“Listen to me, Andy,” I said, and I looked right back into his eyes. “I never did anything to you that I know of. I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never even jaywalked, or been late paying my taxes, or sold a drink to an underage teen. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket. Now someone tried to barbecue me inside my own home. Where do you get off, making me feel like I’ve done something wrong?” Other than shoot Debbie Pelt, a voice whispered in my head. It was the voice of my conscience.
“I don’t think there’s anything in this guy’s past that would indicate he’d do this to you.”
“Fine! Then find out who did! Because someone burned my house, and it sure wasn’t me!” I was yelling when I got to the last part, partly to drown the voice. My only recourse was to turn and walk away, striding around the house until I was out of Andy’s sight. Terry gave me a sidelong look, but he didn’t stop swinging his sledgehammer.
After a minute, I heard someone picking his way through the debris behind me. “He’s gone,” Alcide said, his deep voice just a tiny bit amused. “I guess you’re not interested in going any further with our conversation.”
“You’re right,” I said briefly.
“Then I’ll go back to Shreveport. Call me if you need me.”
“Sure.” I made myself be more polite. “Thanks for your offer of help.”
“ ‘Help’? I asked you to live with me!”
“Then thank you for asking me to live with you.” I couldn’t help it if I didn’t sound completely sincere. I said the right words. Then my grandmother’s voice sounded in my head, telling me that I was acting like I was seven years old. I made myself turn around.
“I do appreciate your . . . affection,” I said, looking up into Alcide’s face. Even this early in the spring, he had a tan line from wearing a hard hat. His olive complexion would be shades darker in a few weeks. “I do appreciate . . .” I trailed off, not sure how to put it. I appreciated his willingness to consider me as an eligible woman to mate with, which so many men didn’t, as well as his assumption that I would make a good mate and a good ally. This was as close as I could get to phrasing what I meant.
“But you’re not having any.” The green eyes regarded me steadily.
“I’m not saying that.” I drew a breath. “I’m saying now is not the time to work on a relationship with you.” Though I wouldn’t mind jumping your bones, I added to myself wistfully.
But I wasn’t going to do that on a whim, and certainly not with a man like Alcide. The new Sookie, the rebound Sookie, wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice in a row. I was double rebounding. (If you rebound from the two men you’ve had so far, do you end up a virgin again? To what state are you rebounding?) Alcide gave me a hard hug and dropped a kiss on my cheek. He left while I was still mulling that over. Soon after Alcide left, Terry knocked off for the day. I changed from the jumpsuit into my work clothes. The afternoon had chilled, so I pulled on the jacket I’d borrowed from Jason’s closet. It smelled faintly of Jason.
I detoured on the way to work to drop off the pink and black suit at Tara’s house. Her car wasn’t there, so I figured she was still at the shop. I let myself in and went back to her bedroom to put the plastic bag in her closet. The house was dusky and deep shadowed. It was almost dark outside. Suddenly my nerves thrummed with alarm. I shouldn’t be here. I
turned away from the closet and stared around the room. When my eyes got to the doorway, it was filled with a slim figure. I gasped before I could stop myself. Showing them you’re scared is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
I couldn’t see Mickey’s face to read his expression, if he had any.
“Where did that new bartender at Merlotte’s come from?” he asked.
If I’d expected anything, it wasn’t that.
“When Sam got shot, we needed another bartender in a hurry. We borrowed him from Shreveport,” I said. “From the vampire bar.”
“Had he been there long?”
“No,” I said, managing to feel surprised even through my creeping fear. “He hadn’t been there long at all.”
Mickey nodded, as if that confirmed some conclusion he’d reached. “Get out of here,” he said, his deep voice quite calm. “You’re a bad influence on Tara. She doesn’t need anything but me, until I’m tired of her. Don’t come back.”
The only way out of the room was through the door he was filling. I didn’t trust myself to speak. I walked toward him as confidently as I could, and I wondered if he would move when I reached him. It felt like three hours later by the time I rounded Tara’s bed and eased my way around her dressing table. When I showed no sign of slowing down, the vampire stepped aside. I couldn’t stop myself from looking up at his face as I passed him, and he was showing fang. I shuddered. I felt so sick for Tara that I couldn’t stop myself. How had this happened to her?
When he saw my revulsion, he smiled.
I tucked the problem of Tara away in my heart to pull out later. Maybe I could think of something to do for her, but as long as she seemed willing to stay with this monstrous creature, I didn’t see what I could do to help.
Sweetie Des Arts was outside smoking a cigarette when I parked my car at the back of Merlotte’s. She looked pretty good, despite being wrapped in a stained white apron. The outside floodlights lit up every little crease in her skin, revealing that Sweetie was a little older than I’d thought, but she still looked very fit for someone who cooked most of the day. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the white apron swathing her and the lingering perfume of cooking oil, Sweetie might have been a sexy woman. She certainly carried herself like a person who was used to being noticed.
We’d had such a succession of cooks that I hadn’t made much effort to know her. I was sure she’d drift away sooner or later—probably sooner. But she raised a hand in greeting and seemed to want to talk to me, so I paused.
“I’m sorry about your house,” she said. Her eyes were shining in the artificial light. It didn’t smell so great here by the Dumpster, but Sweetie was as relaxed as if she were on an Acapulco beach.
“Thanks,” I said. I just didn’t want to talk about it. “How are you today?”
“Fine, thanks.” She waved the hand with the cigarette around, indicating the parking lot. “Enjoying the view. Hey, you got something on your jacket.” Holding her hand carefully to one side so she wouldn’t get ash on me, she leaned forward, closer than my comfort zone permitted, and flicked something off my shoulder. She sniffed. Maybe the smokey smell of the burned wood clung to me, despite all my efforts.
“I need to go in. Time for my shift,” I said.
“Yeah, I gotta get back in myself. It’s a busy night.” But Sweetie stayed where she was. “You know, Sam’s just nuts about you.”
“I’ve worked for him for a long time.”
“No, I think it goes a little beyond that.”
“Ah, I don’t think so, Sweetie.” I couldn’t think of any polite way to conclude a conversation that had gotten way too personal.
“You were with him when he got shot, right?”
“Yeah, he was heading for his trailer and I was heading for my car.” I wanted to make it clear we were going in different directions.
“You didn’t notice anything?” Sweetie leaned against the wall and tilted her head back, her eyes closed as if she were sunbathing.
“No. I wish I had. I’d like the police to catch whoever’s doing this.”
“Did you ever think there might be a reason those people were targeted?”
“No,” I lied stoutly. “Heather and Sam and Calvin have nothing in common.”
Sweetie opened one brown eye and squinted up at me. “If we were in a mystery, they’d all know the same secret, or they’d have witnessed the same accident, or something. Or
the police would find out they all had the same dry cleaner.” Sweetie flicked the ashes off her cigarette.
I relaxed a little. “I see what you’re getting at,” I said. “But I think real life doesn’t have as many patterns as a serial killer book. I think they were all chosen at random.”
Sweetie shrugged. “You’re probably right.” I saw she’d been reading a Tami Hoag suspense novel, now tucked into an apron pocket. She tapped her book with one blunt fingernail. “Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.”
“Not in my world,” I said.
Chapter 11
BILL BROUGHT A date into Merlotte’s that night. I assumed this was payback for my kissing Sam, or maybe I was just being proud. This possible payback was in the form of a woman from Clarice. I’d seen her in the bar before every once in a while. She was a slim brunette with shoulder-length hair, and Danielle could hardly wait to tell me she was Selah Pumphrey, a real estate saleswoman who’d gotten the million-dollar sales award the year before.
I hated her instantly, utterly, and passionately.
So I smiled as brightly as a thousand-watt bulb and brought them Bill’s warm TrueBlood and her cold screwdriver quick as a wink. I didn’t spit in the screwdriver, either. That was beneath me, I told myself. Also, I didn’t have enough privacy.
Not only was the bar crowded, but Charles was eyeing me watchfully. The pirate was in fine form tonight, wearing a white shirt with billowing sleeves and navy blue Dockers, a bright scarf pulled through the belt loops for a dash of color. His eye patch matched the Dockers, and it was embroidered with a gold star. This was as exotic as Bon Temps could get.
Sam beckoned me over to his tiny table, which we’d wedged into a corner. He had his bad leg propped up on another chair. “Are you all right, Sookie?” Sam murmured, turning away from the crowd at the bar so no one could even read his lips.
“Sure, Sam!” I gave him an amazed expression. “Why not?” At that moment, I hated him for kissing me, and I hated me for responding.
He rolled his eyes and smiled for a fleeting second. “I think I’ve solved your housing problem,” he said to distract me. “I’ll tell you later.” I hurried off to take an order. We were swamped that night. The warming weather and the attraction of a new bartender had combined to fill Merlotte’s with the optimistic and the curious.
I’d left Bill, I reminded myself proudly. Though he’d cheated on me, he hadn’t wanted us to break up. I had to keep telling myself that, so I wouldn’t hate everyone present who was witnessing my humiliation. Of course, none of the people knew any of the circumstances, so they were free to imagine that Bill had dropped me for this brunette bitch. Which was so not the case.
I stiffened my back, broadened my smile, and hustled drinks. After the first ten minutes, I began to relax and see that I was behaving like a fool. Like millions of couples, Bill and I had broken up. Naturally, he’d begun dating someone else. If I’d had the normal run of boyfriends, starting when I was thirteen or fourteen, my relationship with Bill would just be another in a long line of relationships that hadn’t panned out. I’d be able to take this in stride, or at least in perspective.
I had no perspective. Bill was my first love, in every sense.
The second time I brought drinks to their table, Selah Pumphrey looked at me uneasily when I beamed at her. “Thanks,” she said uncertainly.
“Don’t mention it,” I advised her through clenched teeth, and she blanched.
Bill turned away. I hoped he wasn’t hiding a smile. I went back to the bar.
Charles said, “Shall I give her a good scare, if she spends the night with him?”
I’d been standing behind the bar with him, staring into the glass-fronted refrigerator we kept back there. It held soft drinks, bottled blood, and sliced lemons and limes. I’d come to get a slice of lemon and a cherry to put on a Tom Collins, and I’d just stayed. He was entirely too perceptive.
“Yes, please,” I said gratefully. The vampire pirate was turning into an ally. He’d saved me from burning, he’d killed the man who’d set fire to my house, and now he was offering to scare Bill’s date. You had to like that.
“Consider her terrified,” he said in a courtly way, bowing with a florid sweep of his arm, his other hand on his heart.
“Oh, you,” I said with a more natural smile, and got out the bowl of sliced lemons.
It took every ounce of self-control I had to stay out of Selah Pumphrey’s head. I was proud of myself for making the effort.
To my horror, the next time the door opened, Eric came in. My heart rate picked up immediately, and I felt almost faint. I was going to have to stop reacting like this. I wished I could forget our “time together” (as one of my favorite romance novels might term it) as thoroughly as Eric had. Maybe I should track down a witch, or a hypnotherapist, and give myself a dose of amnesia. I bit down on the inside of my cheek, hard, and carried two pitchers of beer over to a table of young couples who were celebrating the promotion of one of the men to supervisor—of someone, somewhere.
Eric was talking to Charles when I turned around, and though vampires can be pretty stone-faced when they’re dealing with each other, it seemed apparent to me that Eric wasn’t happy with his loaned-out bartender. Charles was nearly a foot shorter than his boss, and his head was tilted up as they talked. But his back was stiff, his fangs protruded a bit, and his eyes were glowing. Eric was pretty scary when he was mad, too. He was now definitely looking toothy. The humans around the bar were tending to find something to do somewhere else in the room, and any minute they’d start finding something to do at some other bar.
I saw Sam grabbing at a cane—an improvement over the crutches—so he could get up and go over to the pair, and I sped over to his table in the corner. “You stay put,” I told him in a very firm low voice. “Don’t you think about intervening.”
I heel and toed it over to the bar. “Hi, Eric! How you doing? Is there anything I can help you with?” I smiled up at him.
“Yes. I need to talk to you, too,” he growled.
“Then why don’t you come with me? I was just going to step out back to take a break,” I offered.
I took hold of his arm and towed him through the door and down the hall to the employees’ entrance. We were outside in the night-cold air before you could say Jack Robinson.
“You better not be about to tell me what to do,” I said instantly. “I’ve had enough of that for one day, and Bill’s in here with a woman, and I lost my kitchen. I’m in a bad mood.” I underlined this by squeezing Eric’s arm, which was like gripping a small tree trunk.
“I care nothing about your mood,” he said instantly, and he was showing fang. “I pay Charles Twining to watch you and keep you safe, and who hauls you out of the fire? A fairy. While Charles is out in the yard, killing the fire setter rather than saving his hostess’s life. Stupid Englishman!”
“He’s supposed to be here as a favour to Sam. He’s supposed to be here helping Sam out.” I peered at Eric doubtfully.
“Like I give a damn about a shifter,” the vampire said impatiently.
I stared up at him.
“There’s something about you,” Eric said. His voice was cold, but his eyes were not. “There is something I am almost on the verge of knowing about you, and it’s under my skin, this
feeling that something happened while I was cursed, something I should know about. Did we have sex, Sookie? But I can’t think that was it, or it alone. Something happened. Your coat was ruined with brain tissue. Did I kill someone, Sookie? Is that it? You’re protecting me from what I did while I was cursed?” His eyes were glowing like lamps in the darkness.
I’d never thought he might be wondering whom he’d killed. But frankly, if it had occurred to me, I wouldn’t have thought Eric would care; what difference would one human life make to a vampire as old as this one? But he seemed mighty upset. Now that I understood what he was worried about, I said, “Eric, you did not kill anyone at my house that night.” I stopped short.
“You have to tell me what happened.” He bent a little to look into my face. “I hate not knowing what I did. I’ve had a life longer than you can even imagine, and I remember every second of it, except for those days I spent with you.”
“I can’t make you remember,” I said as calmly as I could. “I can only tell you that you stayed with me for several days, and then Pam came to get you.”
Eric stared into my eyes a little longer. “I wish I could get in your head and get the truth out of you,” he said, which alarmed me more than I wanted to show. “You’ve had my blood. I can tell you’re concealing things from me.” After a moment’s silence, he said, “I wish I knew who’s trying to kill you. And I hear you had a visit from some private detectives. What did they want of you?”
“Who told you that?” Now I had something else to worry about. Someone was informing on me. I could feel my blood pressure rise. I wondered if Charles was reporting to Eric every night.
“Is this something to do with the woman who’s missing, that bitch the Were loved so much? Are you protecting him? If I didn’t kill her, did he? Did she die in front of us?”
Eric had gripped my shoulders, and the pressure was excruciating.
“Listen, you’re hurting me! Let go.”
Eric’s grip loosened, but he didn’t remove his hands.
My breath began to come faster and shallower, and the air was full of the crackling of danger. I was sick to death of being threatened.
“Tell me now,” he demanded.
He would have power over me for the rest of my life if I told him he’d seen me kill someone. Eric already knew more about me than I wanted him to, because I’d had his blood, and he’d had mine. Now I rued our blood exchange more than ever. Eric was sure I was concealing something important.
“You were so sweet when you didn’t know who you were,” I said, and whatever he’d been expecting me to say, it wasn’t that. Astonishment played tag with outrage across his handsome face. Finally, he was amused.
“Sweet?” he said, one corner of his mouth turning up in a smile.
“Very,” I said, trying to smile back. “We gossiped like old buddies.” My shoulders ached. Probably everyone in the bar needed a new drink. But I couldn’t go back in just yet. “You were scared and alone, and you liked to talk to me. It was fun having you around.”
“Fun,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m not fun now?”
“No, Eric. You’re too busy being . . . yourself.” Head boss vampire, political animal, budding tycoon.
He shrugged. “Is myself so bad? Many women seem to think not.”
“I’m sure they do.” I was tired to the bone.
The back door opened. “Sookie, are you all right?” Sam had hobbled to my rescue. His face was stiff with pain.
“Shifter, she doesn’t need your assistance,” Eric said.
Sam didn’t say anything. He just kept Eric’s attention.
“I was rude,” Eric said, not exactly apologetically, but civilly enough. “I’m on your premises. I’ll be gone. Sookie,” he said to me, “we haven’t finished this conversation, but I see this isn’t the time or place.”
“I’ll see you,” I said, since I knew I had no choice.
Eric melted into the darkness, a neat trick that I’d love to master someday.
“What is he so upset about?” Sam asked. He hobbled out of the doorway and leaned against the wall.
“He doesn’t remember what happened while he was cursed,” I said, speaking slowly out of sheer weariness. “That makes him feel like he’s lost control. Vampires are big on having control. I guess you noticed.”
Sam smiled—a small smile, but genuine. “Yes, that had come to my attention,” he admitted. “I’d also noticed they’re pretty possessive.”
“You’re referring to Bill’s reaction when he walked in on us?” Sam nodded. “Well, he seems to have gotten over it.”
“I think he’s just repaying you in kind.”
I felt awkward. Last night, I’d been on the verge of going to bed with Sam. But I was far from feeling passionate at this moment, and Sam’s leg had been hurt badly in his fall. He didn’t look as if he could romance a rag doll, much less a robust woman like me. I knew it was wrong to think of indulging in some sex play with my boss, though Sam and I had been teetering on a fine edge for months. Coming down on the “no” side was the safest, sanest thing to do. Tonight, particularly after the emotionally jangling events of the past hour, I wanted to be safe.
“He stopped us in time,” I said.
Sam raised a fine red-gold eyebrow. “Did you want to be stopped?”
“Not at that moment,” I admitted. “But I guess it was for the best.”
Sam just looked at me for a moment. “What I was going to tell you, though I was going to wait until after the bar closed, is that one of my rental houses is empty right now. It’s the one next to—well, you remember, the one where Dawn . . .”
“Died,” I finished.
“Right. I had that one redone, and it’s rented out now. So you’d have a neighbour, and you’re not used to that. But the empty side is furnished. You’d only have to bring a few linens, your clothes, and some pots and pans.” Sam smiled. “You could get that in a car. By the way, where’d you get this?” He nodded at the Malibu.
I told him how generous Tara had been, and I also told him I was worried about her. I repeated the warning Eric had given me about Mickey.
When I saw how anxious Sam looked, I felt like a selfish creep for burdening him with all this. Sam had enough to worry about. I said, “I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear more troubles. Come on, let’s go back inside.”
Sam stared at me. “I do need to sit down,” he said after a moment.
“Thanks for the rental. Of course I’ll pay you. I’m so glad to have a place to live where I can come and go without bothering anyone! How much is it? I think my insurance will pay for me renting a place to live while my house is being fixed.”
Sam gave me a hard look, and then named a price that I was sure was well below his usual rate. I slid my arm around him because his limp was so bad. He accepted the help without a struggle, which made me think even better of him. He hobbled down the hall with my help and settled in the rolling chair behind his desk with a sigh. I pushed over one of the visitor chairs so he could put his leg up on it if he wanted, and he used it immediately. Under the strong fluorescent light in his office, my boss looked haggard.
“Get back to work,” he said mock-threateningly. “I’ll bet they’re mobbing Charles.”
The bar was just as chaotic as I’d feared, and I began tending to my tables immediately. Danielle shot me a dirty look, and even Charles looked less than happy. But gradually, moving as fast as I could, I served fresh drinks, took away empty glasses, dumped the occasional ashtray, wiped the sticky tables, and smiled at and spoke to as many people as I could. I could kiss my tips good-bye, but at least peace was restored.
Bit by bit, the pulse of the bar slowed and returned to normal. Bill and his date were deep in conversation, I noticed . . . though I made a great effort not to keep glancing their way. To my dismay, every single time I saw them as a couple, I felt a wave of rage that did not speak well for my character. For another thing, though my feelings were a matter of indifference to almost ninety percent of the bar’s patrons, the other ten percent were watching like hawks to see if Bill’s date was making me suffer. Some of them would be glad to see it, and some wouldn’t—but it was no one’s business, either way.
As I was cleaning off a table that had just been vacated, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I picked up a foreshadowing just as I turned, and that enabled me to keep my smile in place. Selah Pumphrey was waiting for my attention, her own smile bright and armor plated.
She was taller than I, and perhaps ten pounds lighter. Her makeup was expensive and expert, and she smelled like a million bucks. I reached out and touched her brain without even thinking twice.
Selah was thinking she had it all over me, unless I was fantastic in bed. Selah thought that lower-class women must always be better in bed, because they were less inhibited. She knew she was slimmer, was smarter, made more money, and was far more educated and
better read than the waitress she was looking at. But Selah Pumphrey doubted her own sexual skill and had a terror of making herself vulnerable. I blinked. This was more than I wanted to know.
It was interesting to discover that (in Selah’s mind) since I was poor and uneducated, I was more in touch with my nature as a sexual being. I’d have to tell all the other poor people in Bon Temps. Here we’d been having a wonderful time screwing one another, having much better sex than smart upper-class people, and we hadn’t even appreciated it.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Where is the ladies’ room?” she asked.
“Through that door there. The one with ‘Restrooms’ on the sign above it.” I should be grateful I was clever enough to read signs.
“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t notice.”
I just waited.
“So, um, you got any tips for me? About dating a vampire?” She waited, looking nervous and defiant all at once.
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t eat any garlic.” And I turned away from her to wipe down the table.
Once I was certain she was out of the room, I swung around to carry two empty beer mugs to the bar, and when I turned back, Bill was standing there. I gave a gasp of surprise. Bill has dark brown hair and of course the whitest skin you can imagine. His eyes are as dark as his hair. Right at the moment, those eyes were fixed on mine.
“Why did she talk to you?” he asked.
“Wanted to know the way to the bathroom.”
He cocked an eyebrow, glancing up at the sign.
“She just wanted to take my measure,” I said. “At least, that’s my guess.” I felt oddly comfortable with Bill at that moment, no matter what had passed between us.
“Did you scare her?”
“I didn’t try to.”
“Did you scare her?” he asked again in a sterner voice. But he smiled at me.
“No,” I said. “Did you want me to?”
He shook his head in mock disgust. “Are you jealous?”
“Yes.” Honesty was always safest. “I hate her skinny thighs and her elitist attitude. I hope she’s a dreadful bitch who makes you so miserable that you howl when you remember me.”
“Good,” said Bill. “That’s good to hear.” He gave me a brush of lips on my cheek. At the touch of his cool flesh, I shivered, remembering. He did, too. I saw the heat flare in his eyes, the fangs begin to run out. Then Catfish Hunter yelled to me to stir my stumps and bring him another bourbon and Coke, and I walked away from my first lover.
It had been a long, long day, not only from a physical-energy-expended measurement, but also from an emotional-depths-plumbed point of view. When I let myself into my brother’s house, there were giggles and squeakings coming from his bedroom, and I deduced Jason was consoling himself in the usual way. Jason might be upset that his new community suspected him of a foul crime, but he was not so upset that it affected his libido.
I spent as brief a time in the bathroom as I could and went into the guest room, shutting the door firmly behind me. Tonight the couch looked a lot more inviting than it had the evening before. As I curled up on my side and pulled the quilt over me, I realized that the woman spending the night with my brother was a shifter; I could feel it in the faint pulsing redness of her brain.
I hoped she was Crystal Norris. I hoped Jason had somehow persuaded the girl that he had nothing to do with the shootings. If Jason wanted to compound his troubles, the best way possible would be to cheat on Crystal, the woman he’d chosen from the werepanther community. And surely even Jason wasn’t that stupid. Surely.
He wasn’t. I met Crystal in the kitchen the next morning after ten o’clock. Jason was long gone, since he had to be at work by seven forty-five. I was drinking my first mug of coffee when Crystal stumbled in, wearing one of Jason’s shirts, her face blurry with sleep.
Crystal was not my favorite person, and I was not hers, but she said, “Morning” civilly enough. I agreed that it was morning, and I got out a mug for her. She grimaced and got out a glass, filling it with ice and then Coca-Cola. I shuddered.
“How’s your uncle?” I asked, when she seemed conscious.
“He’s doing better,” she said. “You ought to go see him. He liked having you visit.”
“I guess you’re sure Jason didn’t shoot him.”
“I am,” she said briefly. “I didn’t want to talk to him at first, but once he got me on the phone, he just talked his way out of me suspecting him.”
I wanted to ask her if the other inhabitants of Hotshot were willing to give Jason the benefit of the doubt, but I hated to bring up a touchy subject.
I thought of what I had to do today: I had to go get enough clothes, some sheets and blankets, and some kitchen gear from the house, and get those things installed in Sam’s duplex.
Moving into a small, furnished place was a perfect solution to my housing problem. I had forgotten Sam owned several small houses on Berry Street, three of them duplexes. He worked on them himself, though sometimes he hired JB du Rone, a high school friend of mine, to do simple repairs and maintenance chores. Simple was the best way to keep it, with JB.
After I retrieved my things, I might have time to go see Calvin. I showered and dressed, and Crystal was sitting in the living room watching TV when I left. I assumed that was okay with Jason.
Terry was hard at work when I pulled into the clearing. I walked around back to check his progress, and I was delighted to see he’d done more than I’d have thought possible. He smiled when I said so, and paused in loading broken boards into his truck. “Tearing down is always easier than building up,” he said. This was no big philosophical statement, but a builder’s summary. “I should be done in two more days, if nothing happens to slow me down. There’s no rain in the forecast.”
“Great. How much will I owe you?”
“Oh,” he muttered, shrugging and looking embarrassed. “A hundred? Fifty?”
“No, not enough.” I ran a quick estimate of his hours in my head, multiplied. “More like three.”
“Sookie, I’m not charging you that much.” Terry got his stubborn face on. “I wouldn’t charge you anything, but I got to get a new dog.”
Terry bought a very expensive Catahoula hunting dog about every four years. He wasn’t turning in the old models for new ones. Something always seemed to happen to Terry’s dogs, though he took great care of them. After he’d had the first hound about three years, a truck had hit him. Someone had fed poisoned meat to the second. The third one, the
one he’d named Molly, had gotten snake-bit, and the bite had turned septic. For months now, Terry had been on the list for one in the next litter born at the kennel in Clarice that bred Catahoulas.
“You bring that puppy around for me to hug,” I suggested, and he smiled. Terry was at his best in the outdoors, I realized for the first time. He always seemed more comfortable mentally and physically when he was not under a roof, and when he was outside with a dog, he seemed quite normal.
I unlocked the house and went in to gather what I might need. It was a sunny day, so the absence of electric light wasn’t a problem. I filled a big plastic laundry basket with two sets of sheets and an old chenille bedspread, some more clothes, and a few pots and pans. I would have to get a new coffeepot. My old one had melted.
And then, standing there looking out the window at the coffeemaker, which I’d pitched to the top of the trash heap, I understood how close I’d come to dying. The realization hit me broadside.
One minute I was standing at my bedroom window, looking out at the misshaped bit of plastic; the next I was sitting on the floor, staring at the painted boards and trying to breathe.
Why did it hit me now, after three days? I don’t know. Maybe there was something about the way the Mr. Coffee looked: cord charred, plastic warped with the heat. The plastic had literally bubbled. I looked at the skin of my hands and shuddered. I stayed on the floor, shivering and shaking, for an unmeasured bit of time. For the first minute or two after that, I had no thoughts at all. The closeness of my brush with death simply overwhelmed me.
Claudine had not only most probably saved my life; she had certainly saved me from pain so excruciating that I would have wanted to be dead. I owed her a debt I would never be able to repay.
Maybe she really was my fairy godmother.
I got up, shook myself. Grabbing up the plastic basket, I left to go move into my new home.