Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (6 page)

“Oh, gosh, I got to get home. I hope Gran went to sleep.”

“She must worry about you being out so late at night by yourself,” Bill observed. He sounded disapproving. Maybe he was thinking of Maudette? I had a moment of deep unease, wondering if in fact Bill had known her, if she’d invited him to come home with her. But I rejected the idea because I was stubbornly unwilling to dwell on the odd, awful, nature of Maudette’s life and death; I didn’t want that horror to cast a shadow on my little bit of happiness.

“It’s part of my job,” I said tartly. “Can’t be helped. I don’t work nights all the time, anyway. But when I can, I do.”

“Why?” The vampire gave me a shove up to my feet, and then he rose easily from the ground.

“Better tips. Harder work. No time to think.”

“But night is more dangerous,” he said disapprovingly. He ought to know. “Now don’t you go sounding like my grandmother,” I chided him mildly. We had almost reached the parking lot.

“I’m older than your grandmother,” he reminded me. That brought the conversation up short.

After I stepped out of the woods, I stood staring. The parking lot was as serene and untouched as if nothing had ever happened there, as if I hadn’t been nearly beaten to death on that patch of gravel only an hour before, as if the Rats hadn’t met their bloody end.

The lights in the bar and in Sam’s trailer were off.

The gravel was wet, but not bloody.

My purse was sitting on the hood of my car.

“And what about the dog?” I said.

I turned to look at my savior.

He wasn’t there.

I
GOT UP very late the next morning, which was not too surprising. Gran had been asleep when I got home, to my relief, and I was able to climb into my bed without waking her.

 

I
WAS DRINKING a cup of coffee at the kitchen table and Gran was cleaning out the pantry when the phone rang. Gran eased her bottom up onto the stool by the counter, her normal chatting perch, to answer it.

“
Hel
-lo,” she said. For some reason, she always sounded put out, as if a phone call were the last thing on earth she wanted. I knew for a fact that wasn’t the case.

“Hey, Everlee. No, sitting here talking to Sookie, she just got up. No, I haven’t heard any news today. No, no one called me yet. What? What tornado? Last night was clear. Four Tracks Corner? It did? No! No, it did not! Really? Both of ’em? Um, um, um. What did Mike Spencer say?”

Mike Spencer was our parish coroner. I began to have a creepy feeling. I finished my coffee and poured myself another cup. I thought I was going to need it.

Gran hung up a minute later. “Sookie, you are not going to believe what has happened!”

I was willing to bet I would believe it.

“What?” I asked, trying not to look guilty.

“No matter how smooth the weather looked last night, a tornado must have touched down at Four Tracks Corner! It turned over that rent trailer in the clearing there. The couple that was staying in it, they both got killed, trapped under the trailer somehow and crushed to a pulp. Mike says he hasn’t seen anything like it.”

“Is he sending the bodies for autopsy?”

“Well, I think he has to, though the cause of death seems clear enough, according to Stella. The trailer is over on its side, their car is halfway on top of it, and trees are pulled up in the yard.”

“My God,” I whispered, thinking of the strength necessary to accomplish the staging of that scene.

“Honey, you didn’t tell me if your friend the vampire came in last night?”

I jumped in a guilty way until I realized that in Gran’s mind, she’d changed subjects. She’d been asking me if I’d seen Bill every day, and now, at last, I could tell her yes—but not with a light heart.

Predictably, Gran was excited out of her gourd. She fluttered around the kitchen as if Prince Charles were the expected guest.

“Tomorrow night. Now what time’s he coming?” she asked.

“After dark. That’s as close as I can get.”

“We’re on daylight saving time, so that’ll be pretty late.” Gran considered. “Good, we’ll have time to eat supper and clear it away beforehand. And we’ll have all day tomorrow to clean the house. I haven’t cleaned that area rug in a year, I bet!”

“Gran, we’re talking about a guy who sleeps in the ground all day,” I reminded her. “I don’t think he’d ever look at the rug.”

“Well, if I’m not doing it for him, then I’m doing it for me, so I can feel proud,” Gran said unanswerably. “Besides, young lady, how do you know where he sleeps?”

“Good question, Gran. I don’t. But he has to keep out of the light and he has to keep safe, so that’s my guess.”

Nothing would prevent my grandmother from going into a house-proud frenzy, I realized very shortly. While I was getting ready for work, she went to the grocery and rented a rug cleaner and set to cleaning.

On my way to Merlotte’s, I detoured north a bit and drove by the Four Tracks Corner. It was a crossroads as old as human habitation of the area. Now formalized by road signs and pavement, local lore said it was the intersection of two hunting trails. Sooner or later, there would be ranch-style houses and strip malls lining the roads, I guessed, but for now it was woods and the hunting was still good, according to Jason.

Since there was nothing to prevent me, I drove down the rutted path that led to the clearing where the Rattrays’ rented trailer had stood. I stopped my car and stared out the windshield, appalled. The trailer, a very small and old one, lay crushed ten feet behind its original location. The Rattrays’ dented red car was still resting on one end of the accordianpleated mobile home. Bushes and debris were littered around the clearing, and the woods behind the trailer showed signs of a great force passing through; branches snapped off, the top of one pine hanging down by a thread of bark. There were clothes up in the branches, and even a roast pan.

I got out slowly and looked around me. The damage was simply incredible, especially since I knew it hadn’t been caused by a tornado; Bill the vampire had staged this scene to account for the deaths of the Rattrays.

An old Jeep bumped its way down the ruts to come to a stop by me.

“Well, Sookie Stackhouse!” called Mike Spencer, “What you doing here, girl? Ain’t you got work to go to?”

“Yes, sir. I knew the Rat—the Rattrays. This is just an awful thing.” I thought that was sufficiently ambiguous. I could see now that the sheriff was with Mike.

“An awful thing. Yes, well. I did hear,” Sheriff Bud Dearborn said as climbed down out of the Jeep, “that you and Mack and Denise didn’t exactly see eye to eye in the parking lot of Merlotte’s, last week.”

I felt a cold chill somewhere around the region of my liver as the two men ranged themselves in front of me.

Mike Spencer was the funeral director of one of Bon Temps’ two funeral homes. As Mike was always quick and definite in pointing out, anyone who wanted could be buried by Spencer and Sons Funeral Home; but only white people seemed to want to. Likewise, only people of color chose to be buried at Sweet Rest. Mike himself was a heavy middle-aged man with hair and mustache the color of weak tea, and a fondness for cowboy boots and string ties that he could not wear when he was on duty at Spencer and Sons. He was wearing them now.

Sheriff Dearborn, who had the reputation of being a good man, was a little older than Mike, but fit and tough from his thick gray hair to his heavy shoes. The sheriff had a mashed-in face and quick brown eyes. He had been a good friend of my father’s.

“Yes, sir, we had us a disagreement,” I said frankly in my down-homiest voice.

“You want to tell me about it?” The sheriff pulled out a Marlboro and lit it with a plain, metal lighter.

And I made a mistake. I should have just told him. I was supposed to be crazy, and some thought me simple, too. But for the life of me, I could see no reason to explain myself to Bud Dearborn. No reason, except good sense.

“Why?” I asked.

His small brown eyes were suddenly sharp, and the amiable air vanished.

“Sookie,” he said, with a world of disappointment in his voice. I didn’t believe in it for a minute.

“I didn’t do this,” I said, waving my hand at the destruction.

“No, you didn’t,” he agreed. “But just the same, they die the week after they have a fight with someone, I feel I should ask questions.”

I was reconsidering staring him down. It would feel good, but I didn’t think feeling good was worth it. It was becoming apparent to me that a reputation for simplicity could be handy.

I may be uneducated and unworldly, but I’m not stupid or unread.

“Well, they were hurting my friend,” I confessed, hanging my head and eyeing my shoes.

“Would that be this vampire that’s living at the old Compton house?” Mike Spencer and Bud Dearborn exchanged glances.

“Yes, sir.” I was surprised to hear where Bill was living, but they didn’t know that. From years of deliberately not reacting to things I heard that I didn’t want to know, I have good facial control. The old Compton house was right across the fields from us, on the same side of the road. Between our houses lay only the woods and the cemetery. How handy for Bill, I thought, and smiled.

“Sookie Stackhouse, your granny is letting you associate with that vampire?” Spencer said unwisely.

“You can sure talk to her about that,” I suggested maliciously, hardly able to wait to hear what Gran would say when someone suggested she wasn’t taking care of me. “You know, the Rattrays were trying to drain Bill.”

“So the vampire was being drained by the Rattrays? And you stopped them?” interrupted the sheriff.

“Yes,” I said and tried to look resolute.

“Vampire draining
is
illegal,” he mused.

“Isn’t it murder, to kill a vampire that hasn’t attacked you?” I asked.

I may have pushed the naivete a little too hard.

“You know damn good and well it is, though I don’t agree with that law. It is a law, and I will uphold it,” the sheriff said stiffly.

“So the vampire just let them leave, without threatening vengeance? Saying anything like he wished they were dead?” Mike Spencer was being stupid.

“That’s right.” I smiled at both of them and then looked at my watch. I remembered the blood on its face, my blood, beaten out of me by the Rattrays. I had to look through that blood to read the time.

“Excuse me, I have to get to work,” I said. “Good-bye, Mr. Spencer, Sheriff.”

“Good-bye, Sookie,” Sheriff Dearborn said. He looked like he had more to ask me, but couldn’t think of how to put it. I could tell he wasn’t totally happy with the look of the scene, and I doubted any tornado had shown up on radar anywhere. Nonetheless, there was the trailer, there was the car, there were the trees, and the Rattrays had been dead under them. What could you decide but that the tornado had killed them? I guessed the bodies had been sent for an autopsy, and I wondered how much could be told by such a procedure under the circumstances.

The human mind is an amazing thing. Sheriff Dearborn must have known that vampires are very strong. But he just couldn’t imagine how strong one could be: strong enough to turn over a trailor, crush it. It was even hard for me to comprehend, and I knew good and well that no tornado had touched down at Four Corners.

The whole bar was humming with the news of the deaths. Maudette’s murder had taken a backseat to Denise and Mack’s demises. I caught Sam eyeing me a couple of times, and I thought about the night before and wondered how much he knew. But I was scared to ask in case he hadn’t seen anything. I knew there were things that had happened the night before that I hadn’t yet explained to my own satisfaction, but I was so grateful to be alive that I put off thinking of them.

I’d never smiled so hard while I toted drinks, I’d never made change so briskly, I’d never gotten orders so exactly. Even ol’ bushy-haired Rene didn’t slow me down, though he insisted on dragging me into his long-winded conversations every time I came near the table he was sharing with Hoyt and a couple of other cronies.

Rene played the role of crazy Cajun some of the time, though any Cajun accent he might assume was faked. His folks had let their heritage fade. Every woman he’d married had been hard-living and wild. His brief hitch with Arlene had been when she was young and childless, and she’d told me that from time to time she’d done things then that curled her hair to think about now. She’d grown up since then, but Rene hadn’t. Arlene was sure fond of him, to my amazement.

Everyone in the bar was excited that night because of the unusual happenings in Bon Temps. A woman had been murdered, and it was a mystery; usually murders in Bon Temps are easily solved. And a couple had died violently by a freak of nature. I attributed what happened next to that excitement. This is a neighborhood bar, with a few out of towners who pass through on a regular basis, and I’ve never had much problem with unwanted attention. But that night one of the men at a table next to Rene and Hoyt’s, a heavy blond man with a broad, red face, slid his hand up the leg of my shorts when I was bringing their beer.

That doesn’t fly at Merlotte’s.

I thought of bringing the tray down on his head when I felt the hand removed. I felt someone standing right behind me. I turned my head and saw Rene, who had left his chair without my even realizing it. I followed his arm down and saw that his hand was gripping the blond’s and squeezing. The blond’s red face was turning a mottled mixture.

“Hey, man, let go!” the blond protested. “I didn’t mean nothing.”

“You don’t touch anyone who works here. That’s the rule.” Rene might be short and slim, but anyone there would have put his money on our local boy over the beefier visitor.

“Okay, okay.”

“Apologize to the lady.”

“To Crazy Sookie?” His voice was incredulous. He must have been here before.