Hoyt was Jason’s sidekick. If they weren’t both definitely heterosexual, I would have recommended they marry, they complemented each other so well. Hoyt enjoyed jokes, and Jason enjoyed telling them. Hoyt was at a loss to fill his free time, and Jason was always up to something. Hoyt’s mother was a little overwhelming, and Jason was parent-free. Hoyt was firmly anchored in the here and now, and had an iron sense of what the community would tolerate and what it would not. Jason didn’t.
I thought of what a huge secret Jason now had, and I wondered if he was tempted to share it with Hoyt.
“How you doing, Sis?” Jason asked. He held up his glass, indicating he’d like a refill on his Dr Pepper. Jason didn’t drink until after his workday was over, a large point in his favor.
“Fine, Brother. You want some more, Hoyt?” I asked.
“Please, Sookie. Ice tea,” Hoyt said.
In a second I was back with their drinks. Terry glared at me when I went behind the bar, but he didn’t speak. I can ignore a glare.
“Sook, you want to go with me to the hospital in Grainger this afternoon after you get off?” Jason asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, sure.” Calvin had always been good to me.
Hoyt said, “Sure is crazy, Sam and Calvin and Heather getting shot. What do you make of it, Sookie?” Hoyt has decided I am an oracle.
“Hoyt, you know as much about it as I do,” I told him. “I think we all should be careful.” I hoped the significance of this wasn’t lost on my brother. He shrugged.
When I looked up, I saw a stranger waiting to be seated and hurried over to him. His dark hair, turned black by the rain, was pulled back in a ponytail. His face was scarred with one long thin white line that ran along one cheek. When he pulled off his jacket, I could see that he was a bodybuilder.
“Smoking or non?” I asked, with a menu already in my hand.
“Non,” he said, and followed me to a table. He carefully hung his wet jacket on the back of a chair and took the menu after he was seated. “My wife will be along in a few minutes,” he said. “She’s meeting me here.”
I put another menu at the adjacent place. “Do you want to order now or wait for her?”
“I’d like some hot tea,” he asked. “I’ll wait until she comes to order food. Kind of a limited menu here, huh?” He glanced over at Arlene and then back at me. I began to feel uneasy. I knew he wasn’t here because this place was convenient for lunch.
“That’s all we can handle,” I said, taking care to sound relaxed. “What we’ve got, it’s good.”
When I assembled the hot water and a tea bag, I put a saucer with a couple of lemon slices on the tray, too. No fairies around to offend.
“Are you Sookie Stackhouse?” he asked when I returned with his tea.
“Yes, I am.” I put the saucer gently on the table, right beside the cup. “Why do you want to know?” I already knew why, but with regular people, you had to ask.
“I’m Jack Leeds, a private investigator,” he said. He laid a business card on the table, turned so I could read it. He waited for a beat, as if he usually got a dramatic reaction to that statement. “I’ve been hired by a family in Jackson, Mississippi—the Pelt family,” he continued, when he saw I wasn’t going to speak.
My heart sank to my shoes before it began pounding at an accelerated rate. This man believed that Debbie was dead. And he thought there was a good chance I might know something about it.
He was absolutely right.
I’d shot Debbie Pelt dead a few weeks before, in self-defense. Hers was the body Eric had hidden. Hers was the bullet Eric had taken for me.
Debbie’s disappearance after leaving a “party” in Shreveport, Louisiana (in fact a life-and-death brawl between witches, vamps, and Weres), had been a nine days’ wonder. I’d hoped I’d heard the end of it.
“So the Pelts aren’t satisfied with the police investigation?” I asked. It was a stupid question, one I picked out of the air at random. I had to say something to break up the gathering silence.
“There really wasn’t an investigation,” Jack Leeds said. “The police in Jackson decided she probably vanished voluntarily.” He didn’t believe that, though.
His face changed then; it was like someone had switched on a light behind his eyes. I turned to look where he was looking, and I saw a blond woman of medium height shaking her umbrella out at the door. She had short hair and pale skin, and when she turned, I saw that she was very pretty; at least, she would have been if she had been more animated.
But that wasn’t a factor to Jack Leeds. He was looking at the woman he loved, and when she saw him, the same light switched on behind her eyes, too. She came across the floor to his table as smoothly as if she were dancing, and when she shed her own wet jacket, I saw her arms were as muscular as his. They didn’t kiss, but his hand slid over hers and squeezed just briefly. After she’d taken her chair and asked for some diet Coke, her eyes went to the menu. She was thinking that all the food Merlotte’s offered was unhealthy. She was right.
“Salad?” Jack Leeds asked.
“I have to have something hot,” she said. “Chili?”
“Okay. Two chilis,” he told me. “Lily, this is Sookie Stackhouse. Ms. Stackhouse, this is Lily Bard Leeds.”
“Hello,” she said. “I’ve just been out to your house.”
Her eyes were light blue, and she had a stare like a laser. “You saw Debbie Pelt the night she disappeared.” Her mind added,
You’re the one she hated so much
.
They didn’t know Debbie Pelt’s true nature, and I was relieved that the Pelts hadn’t been able to find a Were investigator. They wouldn’t out their daughter to regular detectives. The longer the two-natured could keep the fact of their existence a secret, the better, as far as they were concerned.
“Yes,” I said. “I saw her that night.”
“Can we come talk to you about that? After you get off work?”
“I have to go see a friend in the hospital after work,” I said.
“Sick?” Jack Leeds asked.
“Shot,” I said.
Their interest quickened. “By someone local?” the blond woman asked.
Then I saw how it might all work. “By a sniper,” I said. “Someone’s been shooting people at random in this area.”
“Have any of them vanished?” Jack Leeds asked.
“No,” I admitted. “They’ve all been left lying. Of course, there were witnesses to all of the shootings. Maybe that’s why.” I hadn’t heard of anyone actually seeing Calvin get shot, but someone had come along right afterward and called 911.
Lily Leeds asked me if they could talk to me the next day before I went to work. I gave them directions to my house and told them to come at ten. I didn’t think talking to them was a very good idea, but I didn’t think I had much of a choice, either. I would become more of an object of suspicion if I refused to talk about Debbie.
I found myself wishing I could call Eric tonight and tell him about Jack and Lily Leeds; worries shared are worries halved. But Eric didn’t remember any of it. I wished that I could forget Debbie’s death, too. It was awful to know something so heavy and terrible, to be unable to share it with a soul.
I knew so many secrets, but almost none of them were my own. This secret of mine was a dark and bloody burden.
Charles Twining was due to relieve Terry at full dark. Arlene was working late, since Danielle was attending her daughter’s dance recital, and I was able to lighten my mood a little by briefing Arlene on the new bartender/bouncer. She was intrigued. We’d never had an Englishman visit the bar, much less an Englishman with an eye patch.
“Tell Charles I said hi,” I called as I began to put on my rain gear. After a couple of hours of sprinkling, the drops were beginning to come faster again.
I splashed out to my car, the hood pulled well forward over my face. Just as I unlocked the driver’s door and pulled it open, I heard a voice call my name. Sam was standing on crutches in the door of his trailer. He’d added a roofed porch a couple of years before, so he wasn’t getting wet, but he didn’t need to be standing there, either. Slamming the car door shut, I leaped over puddles and across the stepping-stones. In a second or two, I was standing on his porch and dripping all over it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I stared at him. “You should be,” I said gruffly.
“Well, I am.”
“Okay. Good.” I resolutely didn’t ask him what he’d done with the vampire.
“Anything happen over at the bar today?”
I hesitated. “Well, the crowd was thin, to put it mildly. But . . .” I started to tell him about the private detectives, but then I knew he’d ask questions. And I might end up telling him the whole sorry story just for the relief of confessing to someone. “I have to go, Sam. Jason’s taking me to visit Calvin Norris in the hospital in Grainger.”
He looked at me. His eyes narrowed. The lashes were the same red-gold as his hair, so they showed up only when you were close to him. And I had no business at all thinking about Sam’s eyelashes, or any other part of him, for that matter.
“I was a shit yesterday,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you why.”
“Well, I guess you do,” I said, bewildered. “Because I sure don’t understand.”
“The point is, you know you can count on me.”
To get mad at me for no reason? To apologize afterward? “You’ve really confused me a lot lately,” I said. “But you’ve been my friend for years, and I have a very high opinion of you.” That sounded way too stilted, so I tried smiling. He smiled back, and a drop of rain fell off my hood and splashed on my nose, and the moment was over. I said, “When do you think you’ll get back to the bar?”
“I’ll try to come in tomorrow for a while,” he said. “At least I can sit in the office and work on the books, get some filing done.”
“See you.”
“Sure.”
And I dashed back to my car, feeling that my heart was much lighter than it had been before. Being at odds with Sam had felt wrong. I didn’t realize how that wrongness had colored my thoughts until I was right with him again.
5
T
HE RAIN PELTED DOWN AS WE PULLED IN TO THE parking lot of the Grainger hospital. It was as small as the one in Clarice, the one most Renard Parish people were carried to. But the Grainger hospital was newer and had more of the diagnostic machines modern hospitals seemed to require.
I’d changed into jeans and a sweater, but I’d resumed wearing my lined slicker. As Jason and I hurried to the sliding glass doors, I was patting myself on the back for wearing boots. Weather-wise, the evening was proving as nasty as the morning had been.
The hospital was roiling with shifters. I could feel their anger as soon as I was inside. Two of the werepanthers from Hotshot were in the lobby; I figured they were acting as guards. Jason went to them and took their hands firmly. Maybe he exchanged some kind of secret shake or something; I don’t know. At least they didn’t rub against one another’s legs. They didn’t seem quite as happy to see Jason as he was to see them, and I noticed that Jason stepped back from them with a little frown between his eyes. The two looked at me intently. The man was of medium height and stocky, and he had thick brownish-blond hair. His eyes were full of curiosity.
“Sook, this is Dixon Mayhew,” Jason said. “And this is Dixie Mayhew, his twin sister.” Dixie wore her hair, the same color as her brother’s, almost as short as Dixon’s, but she had dark, almost black, eyes. The twins were certainly not identical.
“Has it been quiet here?” I asked carefully.
“No problems so far,” Dixie said, keeping her voice low. Dixon’s gaze was fixed on Jason. “How’s your boss?”
“He’s in a cast, but he’ll heal.”
“Calvin was shot bad.” Dixie eyed me for a minute. “He’s up in 214.”
Having been given the seal of approval, Jason and I went to the stairs. The twins watched us all the way. We passed the hospital auxiliary “pink lady” on duty at the visitors’ desk. I felt kind of worried about her: white-haired, heavy glasses, sweet face with a full complement of wrinkles. I hoped nothing would happen during her watch to upset her worldview.
It was easy to pick which room was Calvin’s. A slab of muscle was leaning against the wall outside, a barrel-shaped man I’d never seen. He was a werewolf. Werewolves make good bodyguards, according to the common wisdom of the two-natured, because they are ruthless and tenacious. From what I’ve seen, that’s just the bad-boy image Weres have. But it’s true that as a rule, they’re the roughest element of the two-natured community. You won’t find too many Were doctors, for example, but you will find a lot of Weres in construction work. Jobs relating to motorcycles are heavily dominated by Weres, too. Some of those gangs do more than drink beer on the full-moon nights.
Seeing a Were disturbed me. I was surprised the panthers of Hotshot had brought in an outsider. Jason murmured, “That’s Dawson. He owns the small engine repair shop between Hotshot and Grainger.”
Dawson was on the alert as we came down the hall.
“Jason Stackhouse,” he said, identifying my brother after a minute. Dawson was wearing a denim shirt and jeans, but his biceps were about to burst through the material. His black leather boots were battle scarred.
“We’ve come to see how Calvin is doing,” Jason said. “This here’s my sister, Sookie.”
“Ma’am,” Dawson rumbled. He eyeballed me slowly, and there wasn’t anything lascivious about it. I was glad I’d left my purse in the locked truck. He would’ve gone through it, I was sure. “You want to take off that coat and turn around for me?”
I didn’t take offense; Dawson was doing his job. I didn’t want Calvin to get hurt again, either. I took off my slicker, handed it to Jason, and rotated. A nurse who’d been entering something in a chart watched this procedure with open curiosity. I held Jason’s jacket as he took his turn. Satisfied, Dawson knocked on the door. Though I didn’t hear a response, he must have, because he opened the door and said, “The Stackhouses.”