And then, amazingly, problem solved again: the nervous little vampire had been assassinated in front of the court.
"I do wonder how Kyle Perkins was hired," I said. "He must have known he was on a suicide mission."
"Perhaps," Mr. Cataliades said carefully, "he had decided to meet the sun anyway. Perhaps he was looking for a spectacular and interesting way to go, earning a monetary legacy for his human descendants."
"It seems strange that I was sent looking for information about him by a member of our very own party," I said, my voice neutral.
"Ah, not everyone needs to know everything," Mr. Cataliades said, his voice just as neutral.
Barry could hear my thoughts, of course, but he wasn't getting what Mr. Cataliades was saying, which was just as well. It was stupid that it made me feel better, Eric and Bill not knowing the queen's deep game. Not that they weren't capable of playing deep games themselves, but I didn't think Eric would have sent me on the wild goose chase for the archery range where Kyle Perkins had trained if Eric had known the queen herself had hired Perkins.
The poor woman behind the counter had died because the queen hadn't told her left hand what her right hand was doing. And I wondered what had happened to the human, the one who'd thrown up on the murder scene, the one who'd been hired to drive Sigebert or Andre to the range... after I'd so thoughtfully left a message to tell them when Barry and I were going back to collect the evidence. I'd sealed the woman's fate myself by leaving that phone message.
Mr. Cataliades took his departure, shaking our hands with his beaming smile, almost normal. He urged us once again to get to the airport.
"Sookie?" said Barry.
"Yeah."
"I really want to be on that plane."
"I know."
"What about you?"
"I don't think I can do it. Sit on the same plane with them."
"They all got hurt," Barry said.
"Yeah, but that isn't payback."
"You took care of that, didn't you?"
I didn't ask him what he meant. I knew what he could pick up out of my head.
"As much as I could," I said.
"Maybe I don't want to be on the same plane with you," Barry said.
Of course it hurt, but I guess I deserved it.
I shrugged. "You gotta decide that on your own. All of us have different things we can live with."
Barry considered that. "Yeah," he said. "I know. But for right now, it's better that we go our separate ways, here. I'm leaving for the airport to hang around until I can leave. Are you going to the hospital?"
I was too wary now to tell him. "I don't know," I said. "But I'm finding a car or a bus to take me home."
He hugged me, no matter how upset he was about the choices I'd made. I could feel the affection and regret in his heart. I hugged him back. He'd made his own choices.
I left the maid ten dollars when I departed on foot about five minutes after Barry got in a cab. I waited until I got two blocks from the hotel, and then I asked a passerby how to get to St. Cosmas. It was a long ten-block hike, but the day was beautiful, cool and crisp with a bright sun. It felt good to be by myself. I might be wearing rubber-soled slippers, but I was dressed nicely enough, and I was clean. I ate a hot dog on my way to the hospital, a hot dog I'd bought from a street vendor, and that was something else I'd never done before. I bought a shapeless hat from a street vender, too, and stuffed all my hair up under it. The same guy had some dark glasses for sale. With the sky being so bright and the wind blowing in off the lake, the combination didn't look too odd.
St. Cosmas was an old edifice, with lots of ornate architectural embellishment on the outside. It was huge, too. I asked about Quinn's condition, and one of the women stationed at the busy visitors' desk said she couldn't give out that information. But to see if he was registered at the hospital, she'd had to look up his records, and I plucked his room number from her thoughts. I waited until all three of the women were occupied with other queries, and I slipped into the elevator and rode up.
Quinn was on the tenth floor. I'd never seen a hospital so large, and I'd never seen one so bustling. It was easy to stride around like I had a purpose and knew where I was going.
There was no one on guard outside his room.
I knocked lightly, and there wasn't a sound from inside. I pushed open the door very gently and stepped inside. Quinn was asleep in the bed, and he was attached to machines and tubes. And he was a fast-healing shifter, so his injuries must have been grievous. His sister was by his side. Her bandaged head, which had been propped on her hand, jerked up as she became aware of my presence. I pulled off the sunglasses and the hat.
"You," she said.
"Yeah, me, Sookie. What's Frannie short for, anyway?"
"It's really Francine, but everyone calls me Frannie." She looked younger as she said it.
Though I was pleased at the decreased hostility, I decided I'd better stay on my side of the room. "How is he?" I asked, jerking my chin at the sleeping man.
"He fades in and out." There was a moment of silence while she took a drink from a white plastic cup on the bedside table. "When you woke him up, he got me up," she said abruptly. "We started down the stairs. But a big piece of ceiling fell on him, and the floor went out from beneath us, and the next thing I knew, some firemen are telling me some crazy woman found me while I was still alive, and they're giving me all kinds of tests, and Quinn's telling me he was going to take care of me until I was well. Then they told me he had two broken legs."
There was an extra chair, and I collapsed onto it. My legs just wouldn't hold me. "What does the doctor say?"
"Which one?" Frannie said bleakly.
"Any. All." I took one of Quinn's hands. Frannie almost reached out as if she thought I'd hurt him, but then she subsided. I had the hand that was free of tubes, and I held it for a while.
"They can't believe how much better he is already," Frannie said just when I'd decided she wasn't going to answer. "In fact, they think it's something of a miracle. Now we're gonna have to pay someone to get his records out of the system." Her dark-rooted hair was in clumps, and she was still filthy from the blast site.
"Go buy some clothes and come back and have a shower," I said. "I'll sit with him."
"Are you really his girlfriend?"
"Yes, I am."
"He said you had some conflicts."
"I do, but not with him."
"So, okay. I will. You got any money?"
"Not a lot, but here's what I can spare."
I handed her seventy-five dollars of Mr. Cataliades's money.
"Okay, I can stretch it," she said. "Thanks." She said it without enthusiasm, but she said it.
I sat in the quiet room and held Quinn's hand for almost an hour. In that time, his eyes had flickered open once, registered my presence, and closed again. A very faint smile curved his lips for a moment. I knew that while he was sleeping, his body was healing, and when he woke, he might be able to walk again. I would have found it very comforting to climb on that bed and snuggle with Quinn for a while, but it might be bad for him if I did that; I might jostle him or something.
After a while, I began talking to him. I told him why I thought the crude bomb had been left outside the queen's door, and I told him my theory about the deaths of the three Arkansas vampires. "You gotta agree, it makes sense," I said, and then I told him what I thought about the death of Henrik Feith and the execution of his murderer. I told him about the dead woman in the shop. I told him about my suspicions about the explosion.
"I'm sorry it was Jake that was in with them," I told him. "I know you used to like him. But he just couldn't stand being a vamp. I don't know if he approached the Fellowship or the Fellowship approached him. They had the guy at the computer, the one who was so rude to me. I think he called a delegate from each party to have them come pick up a suitcase. Some of them were too smart or too lazy to pick them up, and some of them returned the suitcases when no one claimed them. But not me, oh no, I put it in the queen's effing living room." I shook my head. "I guess not too many of the staff were in on it, because otherwise Barry or I would've picked up on something way before Barry did."
Then I slept for a few minutes, I think, because Frannie was there when I looked around, and she was eating from a McDonald's bag. She was clean, and her hair was wet.
"You love him?" she asked, sucking up some Coke through a straw.
"Too soon to tell."
"I'm going to have to take him home to Memphis," she said.
"Yeah, I know. I may not get to see him for a while. I've got to get home, too, somehow."
"The Greyhound station is two blocks away."
I shuddered. A long, long bus ride was not a prospect that I could look forward to.
"Or you could take my car," Frannie said.
"What?"
"Well, we got here separately. He drove here with all the props and a trailer, and I left out of my mama's in a hurry in my little sports car. So there are two cars here, and we only need one. I'm going to have to go home with him and stay for a while. You have to get back to work, right?"
"Right."
"So, drive my car home, and we'll pick it up when we're able."
"That's very nice of you," I said. I was surprised by her generosity, because I'd definitely had the impression she wasn't keen on Quinn having a girlfriend, and she wasn't keen on me, specifically.
"You seem okay. You tried to get us out of there in time. And he really cares about you."
"And you know this how?"
"He told me so."
She'd gotten part of the family directness, I could tell.
"Okay," I said. "Where are you parked?"
I'd been terrified the whole two-day drive: that I'd be stopped and they wouldn't believe I'd gotten permission to use the car, that Frannie would change her mind and tell the police I'd stolen it, that I'd have an accident and have to repay Quinn's sister for the vehicle. Frannie had an old red Mustang, and it was fun to drive. No one stopped me. The weather was good all the way back to Louisiana. I thought I'd see a slice of America, but along the interstate, everything looks the same. I imagined that in any small town I passed through, there was another Merlotte's, and maybe another Sookie.
I didn't sleep well on the trip, either, because I dreamed of the floor shaking under my feet and the dreadful moment we went out the hole in the glass. Or I saw Pam burning. Or other things, things I'd done and seen during the hours we patrolled the debris, looking for bodies.
When I turned into my driveway, having been gone a week, my heart began to pound as if the house was waiting for me. Amelia was sitting on the front porch with a bright blue ribbon in her hand, and Bob was sitting in front of her, batting at the dangling ribbon with a black paw. She looked up to see who it was, and when she recognized me behind the wheel, she leaped to her feet. I didn't pull around back; I stopped right there and jumped out of the driver's seat. Amelia's arms wrapped around me like vines, and she shrieked, "You're back! Oh, blessed Virgin, you're back!"
We danced around and hopped up and down like teenagers, whooping with sheer happiness.
"The paper listed you as a survivor," she said. "But no one could find you the day after. Until you called, I wasn't sure you were alive."
"It's a long story," I said. "A long, long story."
"Is it the right time to tell it to me?"
"Maybe after a few days," I said.
"Do you have anything to carry in?"
"Not a thing. All my stuff went up in smoke when the building went down."
"Oh, my God! Your new clothes!"
"Well, at least I have my driver's license and my credit card and my cell phone, though the battery's flat and I don't have the charger."
"And a new car?" She glanced back at the Mustang.
"A borrowed car."
"I don't think I have a single friend who would loan me a whole car."
"Half a car?" I asked, and she laughed.
"Guess what?" Amelia said. "Your friends got married."
I stopped dead. "Which friends?" Surely she couldn't mean the Bellefleur double wedding; surely they hadn't changed the date yet again.
"Oh, I shouldn't have said anything," Amelia said, looking guilty. "Well, speak of the devil!" There was another car coming to a stop right by the red Mustang.
Tara scrambled out. "I saw you driving by the shop," she called. "I almost didn't recognize you in the new car."
"Borrowed it from a friend," I said, looking at her askance.
"You did not tell her, Amelia Broadway!" Tara was righteously indignant.
"I didn't," Amelia said. "I started to, but I stopped in time!"
"Tell me what?"
"Sookie, I know this is going to sound crazy," Tara said, and I felt my brows draw together. "While you were gone, everything just clicked in a strange way, like something I'd known should happen, you know?"
I shook my head. I didn't know.
"JB and I got married!" Tara said, and the expression on her face was full of so many things: anxiety, hopefulness, guilt, wonder.
I ran that incredible sentence through my head several times before I was sure I understood the meaning of it. "You and JB? Husband and wife?" I said.
"I know, I know, it seems maybe a little strange... "
"It seems perfect," I said with all the sincerity I could scrape together. I wasn't really sure how I felt, but I owed my friend the happy face and cheerful voice I offered her. At the moment, this was the true stuff, and vampire fangs and blood under the bright searchlights seemed like the dream, or a scene from a movie I hadn't much enjoyed. "I'm so happy for you. What do you need for a wedding present?"
"Just your blessing, we put the announcement in the paper yesterday," she said, burbling away like a happy brook. "And the phone just hasn't stopped ringing off the wall since then. People are so nice!"
She truly believed she'd swept all her bad memories into a corner. She was in the mood to credit the world with benevolence.
I would try that, too. I would do my best to smother the memory of that moment when I'd glanced back to see Quinn pulling himself along by his elbows. He'd reached Andre, who lay mute and stricken. Quinn had propped himself on one elbow, reached out with his other hand, grabbed the piece of wood lying by Andre's leg and jammed it into Andre's chest. And, just like that, Andre's long life was over.
He'd done it for me.
How could I be the same person? I wondered. How could I be happy that Tara had gotten married and yet remember such a thing – not with horror, but with a savage sense of pleasure? I had wanted Andre to die, as much as I had wanted Tara to find someone to live with who would never tease her for her awful past, someone who would care for her and be sweet to her. And JB would do that. He might not be much on intellectual conversation, but Tara seemed to have made her peace with that.
Theoretically, then, I was delighted and hopeful for my two friends. But I couldn't feel it. I'd seen awful things, and I'd felt awful things. Now I felt like two different people trying to exist inside the same space.
If I just stay away from the vampires for a while, I told myself, smiling and nodding the whole time as Tara talked on and Amelia patted my shoulder or my arm. If I pray every night, and hang around with humans, and leave the Weres alone, I'll be okay.
I hugged Tara, squeezing her until she squeaked.
"What do JB's parents say?" I asked. "Where'd you get the license? Up in Arkansas?"
As Tara began to tell me all about it, I winked at Amelia, who winked back and bent down to scoop up Bob in her arms. Bob blinked when he looked into my face, and he rubbed his head against my offered fingers and purred. We went inside with the sun bright on our backs and our shadows preceding us into the old house.