“What?” I said. I couldn’t have uttered another word.
“The blood on the dock is probably feline blood, and there’s a print in it, besides Jason’s boot print,” said Andy. “We’ve kept this quiet, because we didn’t want those woods crawling with idiots.” I could feel myself swaying in an invisible wind. I would have laughed, if I hadn’t had the “gift” of telepathy. He wasn’t thinking tabby or calico when he said feline; he was thinking panther.
Panthers were what we called mountain lions. Sure, there aren’t mountains around here, but panthers—the oldest men hereabouts called them “painters”—live in low bottomland, too. To the best of my knowledge, the only place panthers could be found in the wild was in Florida, and their numbers were dwindling to the brink of extinction. No solid evidence had been produced to prove that any live native panthers had been living in Louisiana in the past fifty years, give or take a decade.
But of course, there were stories. And our woods and streams could produce no end of alligators, nutria, possums, coons, and even the occasional black bear or wildcat. Coyotes, too. But there were no pictures, or scat, or print casts, to prove the presence of panthers . . . until now.
Andy Bellefleur’s eyes were hot with longing, but not for me. Any red-blooded male who’d ever gone hunting, or even any P.C. guy who photographed nature, would give almost anything to see a real wild panther. Despite the fact that these large predators were deeply anxious to avoid humans, humans would not return the favor.
“What are you thinking?” I asked, though I knew damn good and well what they were thinking. But to keep them on an even keel, I had to pretend not to; they’d feel better, and they might let something slip. Catfish was just thinking that Jason was most likely dead. The two lawmen kept fixing me in their gaze, but Catfish, who knew me better than they did, was sitting forward on the edge of Gran’s old recliner, his big red hands clasped to each other so hard the knuckles were white.
“Maybe Jason spotted the panther when he came home that night,” Andy said carefully. “You know he’d run and get his rifle and try to track it.”
“They’re endangered,” I said. “You think Jason doesn’t know that panthers are endangered?” Of course, they thought Jason was so impulsive and brainless that he just wouldn’t care.
“Are you sure that would be at the top of his list?” Alcee Beck asked, with an attempt at gentleness.
“So you think Jason shot the panther,” I said, having a little difficulty getting the words out of my mouth.
“It’s a possibility.”
“And then what?” I crossed my arms over my chest.
All three men exchanged a glance. “Maybe Jason followed the panther into the woods,” Andy said. “Maybe the panther wasn’t so badly wounded after all, and it got him.”
“You think my brother would trail a wounded and dangerous animal into the woods—at night, by himself.” Sure they did. I could read it loud and clear. They thought that would be absolutely typical Jason Stackhouse behavior. What they didn’t get was that (reckless and wild as my brother was) Jason’s favorite person in the entire universe was Jason Stackhouse, and he would not endanger that person in such an obvious way.
Andy Bellefleur had some misgivings about this theory, but Alcee Beck sure didn’t. He thought I’d outlined Jason’s procedure that night exactly. What the two lawmen didn’t know, and what I couldn’t tell them, was that if Jason had seen a panther at his house that night, the chances were good the panther was actually a shape-shifting human. Hadn’t Claudine said that the witches had gathered some of the larger shifters into their fold? A panther would be a valuable animal to have at your side if you were contemplating a hostile takeover.
“Jay Stans, from Clarice, called me this morning,” Andy said. His round face turned toward me and his brown eyes locked on me. “He was telling me about this gal you found by the side of the road last night.”
I nodded, not seeing the connection, and too preoccupied with speculation about the panther to guess what was coming.
“This girl have any connection to Jason?”
“What?” I was stunned. “What are you talking about?”
“You find this girl, this Maria-Star Cooper, by the side of the road. They searched, but they didn’t find any trace of an accident.”
I shrugged. “I told them I wasn’t sure I could pin the spot down, and they didn’t ask me to go looking, after I offered. I’m not real surprised they couldn’t find any evidence, not knowing the exact spot. I tried to pin it down, but it was at night, and I was pretty scared. Or she could have just been dumped where I found her.” I don’t watch the Discovery Channel for nothing.
“See, what we were thinking,” Alcee Beck rumbled, “is that this girl was one of Jason’s discards, and maybe he was keeping her somewhere secret? But you let her go when Jason disappeared.”
“Huh?” It was like they were speaking Urdu or something. I couldn’t make any sense out of it.
“With Jason getting arrested under suspicion of those murders last year and all, we wondered if there wasn’t some fire under all that smoke.”
“You know who did those killings. He’s in jail, unless something’s happened that I don’t know about. And he confessed.” Catfish met my eyes, and his were very uneasy. This line of questioning had my brother’s boss all twitchy. Granted, my brother was a little kinky in the sex department (though none of the women he’d kinked with seemed to mind), but the idea of him keeping a sex slave that I had to deal with when he vanished? Oh, come on!
“He did confess, and he’s still in jail,” Andy said. Since Andy had taken the confession, I should hope so. “But what if Jason was his accomplice?”
“Wait a damn minute now,” I said. My pot was beginning to boil over. “You can’t have it both ways. If my brother is dead out in the woods after chasing a mythical wounded panther, how could he have been holding, what’s her name, Maria-Star Cooper, hostage somewhere? You’re thinking I’ve been in on my brother’s supposed bondage activities, too? You think I hit her with my car? And then I loaded her in and drove her to the emergency room?”
We all glared at each other for a long moment. The men were tossing out waves of tension and confusion like they were necklaces at Mardi Gras.
Then Catfish launched himself off the couch like a bottle rocket. “No,” he bellowed. “You guys asked me to come along to break this bad news about the panther to Sookie. No one said anything about this stuff about some girl that got hit by a car! This here is a nice girl.” Catfish pointed at me. “No one’s going to call her different! Not only did Jason Stackhouse never have to do more than crook his little finger at a girl for her to come running, much less take one hostage and do weird stuff to her, but if you’re saying Sookie let this Cooper girl free when Jason didn’t come home, and then tried to run over her, well, all I got to say is, you can go straight to hell!”
God bless Catfish Hennessey is all
I
had to say.
Alcee and Andy left soon after, and Catfish and I had a disjointed talk consisting mostly of him cursing the lawmen. When he ran down, he glanced at his watch.
“Come on, Sookie. You and me got to get to Jason’s.”
“Why?” I was willing but bewildered.
“We got us a search party together, and I know you’ll want to be there.”
I stared at him with my mouth open, while Catfish fumed about Alcee and Andy’s allegations. I tried real hard to think of some way to cancel a search party. I hated to think of those men and women putting on all their winter gear to plow through the underbrush, now bare and brown, that made the woods so difficult to navigate. But there was no way to stop them, when they meant so well; and there was every reason to join them.
There was the remote chance that Jason
was
out there in the woods somewhere. Catfish told me he’d gotten together as many men as he could, and Kevin Pryor had agreed to be the coordinator, though off-duty. Maxine Fortenberry and her churchwomen were bringing out coffee and doughnuts from the Bon Temps Bakery. I began crying, because this was just overwhelming, and Catfish turned even redder. Weeping women were way high on Catfish’s long list of things that made him uncomfortable.
I eased his situation by telling him I had to get ready. I threw the bed together, washed my face clean of tears, and yanked my hair back into a ponytail. I found a pair of ear-muffs that I used maybe once a year, and pulled on my old coat and stuck my yard work gloves in my pocket, along with a wad of Kleenex in case I got weepy again.
The search party was the popular activity for the day in Bon Temps. Not only do people like to help in our small town—but also rumors had inevitably begun circulating about the mysterious wild animal footprint. As far as I could tell, the word “panther” was not yet currency; if it had been, the crowd would have been even larger. Most of the men had come armed—well, actually, most of the men were always armed. Hunting is a way of life around here, the NRA provides most of the bumper stickers, and deer season is like a holy holiday. There are special times for hunting deer with a bow and arrow, with a muzzleloader, or with a rifle. (There may be a spear season, for all I know.) There must have been fifty people at Jason’s house, quite a party on a workday for such a small community.
Sam was there, and I was so glad to see him I almost began crying again. Sam was the best boss I’d ever had, and a friend, and he always came when I was in trouble. His red-gold hair was covered with a bright orange knit cap, and he wore bright orange gloves, too. His heavy brown jacket looked somber in contrast, and like all of the men, he was wearing work boots. You didn’t go out in the woods, even in winter, with ankles unprotected. Snakes were slow and sluggish, but they were there, and they’d retaliate if you stepped on them.
Somehow the presence of all these people made Jason’s disappearance seem that much more terrifying. If all these people believed Jason might be out in the woods, dead or badly wounded, he might be. Despite every sensible thing I could tell myself, I grew more and more afraid. I had a few minutes of blanking out on the scene entirely while I imagined all the things that could have happened to Jason, for maybe the hundredth go-round.
Sam was standing beside me, when I could hear and see again. He’d pulled off a glove, and his hand found mine and clasped it. His felt warm and hard, and I was glad to be holding on to him. Sam, though a shifter, knew how to aim his thoughts at me, though he couldn’t “hear” mine in return.
Do you really believe he’s out there?
he asked me.
I shook my head. Our eyes met and held.
Do you think he’s still alive?
That was a lot harder. Finally, I just shrugged. He kept hold of my hand, and I was glad of it.
Arlene and Tack scrambled out of Arlene’s car and came toward us. Arlene’s hair was as bright red as ever, but quite a bit more snarled than she usually wore it, and the short-order cook needed to shave. So he hadn’t started keeping a razor at Arlene’s yet, was the way I read it.
“Did you see Tara?” Arlene asked.
“No.”
“Look.” She pointed, as surreptitiously as you can, and I saw Tara in jeans and rubber boots that came up to her knees. She looked as unlike the meticulously groomed clothing-store proprietor as I could imagine, though she was wearing an adorable fake-fur hat of white and brown that made you want to go up and stroke her head. Her coat matched the hat. So did her gloves. But from the waist down, Tara was ready for the woods. Jason’s friend Dago was staring at Tara with the stunned look of the newly smitten. Holly and Danielle had come, too, and since Danielle’s boyfriend wasn’t around, the search party was turning out to have an unexpected social side.
Maxine Fortenberry and two other women from her church had let down the tailgate of Maxine’s husband’s old pickup, and there were several thermoses containing coffee set up there, along with disposable cups, plastic spoons, and packages of sugar. Six dozen doughnuts steamed up the long boxes they’d been packed in. A large plastic trash can, already lined with a black bag, stood ready. Theses ladies knew how to throw a search party.
I couldn’t believe all this had been organized in the space of a few hours. I had to take my hand from Sam’s to fish out a tissue and mop my face with it. I would have expected Arlene to come, but the presence of Holly and Danielle was just about stunning, and Tara’s attendance was even more surprising. She wasn’t a search-the-woods kind of woman. Kevin Pryor didn’t have much use for Jason, but here he was, with a map and pad and pencil, organizing away.
I caught Holly’s eye, and she gave me a sad sort of smile, the kind of little smile you gave someone at a funeral.
Just then Kevin banged the plastic trash can lid against the tailgate of the truck, and when everyone’s attention was on him, he began to give directions for the search. I hadn’t realized Kevin could be so authoritative; on most occasions, he was overshadowed by his clingy mother, Jeneen, or his oversized partner, Kenya. You wouldn’t catch Kenya out in the woods looking for Jason, I reflected, and just then I spotted her and had to swallow my own thoughts. In sensible gear, she was leaning against the Fortenberrys’ pickup, her brown face absolutely expressionless. Her stance suggested that she was Kevin’s enforcer—that she’d move or speak only if he were challenged in some way. Kenya knew how to project silent menace; I’ll give her that. She would throw a bucket of water on Jason if he were on fire, but her feelings for my brother were certainly not overwhelmingly positive. She’d come because Kevin was volunteering. As Kevin divided people up into teams, her dark eyes left him only to scan the faces of the searchers, including mine. She gave me a slight nod, and I gave her the same.
“Each group of five has to have a rifleman,” Kevin called. “That can’t be just anybody. It has to be someone who’s spent time out in the woods hunting.” The excitement level rose to the boiling point with this directive. But after that, I didn’t listen to the rest of Kevin’s instructions. I was still tired from the day before, for one thing; what an exceptionally full day it had been. And the whole time, in the background, my fear for my brother had been nagging and eating at me. I’d been woken early this morning after a long night, and here I was standing in the cold outside my childhood home, waiting to participate in a touching wild goose chase—or at least I hoped it was a wild goose chase. I was too dazed to judge any more. A chill wind began to gust through the clearing around the house, making the tears on my cheeks unbearably cold.