Had I been an ungrateful bitch to my great-grandfather? When I reviewed what I’d said, I wondered if I’d sounded demanding and whiney. In a more optimistic interpretation, I thought I might have sounded like a stand-up woman, the kind people shouldn’t mess with, the kind of woman who speaks her mind.
I turned on the heat before I got into bed. Octavia and Amelia hadn’t complained, but it had definitely been chilly the past few mornings. The stale smell that always comes when the heat is used the first time filled the air, and I wrinkled my nose as I snuggled under the sheet and the blanket. Then the
whoosh
noise lulled me into sleep.
I’d been hearing voices for some time before I realized they
were outside my door. I blinked, saw it was day, and shut my eyes again. Back to sleep. The voices continued, and I could tell they were arguing. I cracked open one eye to peer at the digital clock on the bedside table. It was nine thirty. Gack. Since the voices wouldn’t shut up or go away, I reluctantly opened both eyes at one time, absorbed the fact that the day was not bright, and sat up, pushing the covers back. I moved to the window to the left of the bed and looked out. Gray and rainy. As I stood there, drops began to hit the glass; it was going to be that kind of day.
I went to the bathroom and heard the voices outside hush now that I was clearly up and stirring. I threw open the door to find my two housemates standing right outside, which was no big surprise.
“We didn’t know if we should wake you,” Octavia said. She looked anxious.
“But I thought we ought to, because a message from a magical source is clearly important,” Amelia said. She appeared to have said it many times in the past few minutes, from the expression on Octavia’s face.
“What message?” I asked, deciding to ignore the argument part of this conversation.
“This one,” Octavia said, handing me a large buff envelope. It was made of heavy paper, like a super-fancy wedding invitation. My name was on the outside. No address, just my name. Furthermore, it was sealed with wax. The imprint in the wax was the head of a unicorn.
“Okey-dokey,” I said. This was going to be an unusual letter.
I walked into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee and a knife, in that order, both the witches trailing behind me like a Greek chorus. Having poured the coffee and pulled out a chair to sit at the table, I slid the knife under the seal and detached it gently. I opened the flap and pulled out a card. On the card was a handwritten address: 1245 Bienville, Red Ditch, Louisiana. That was all.
“What does it mean?” Octavia said. She and Amelia were naturally standing right behind me so they could get a good view.
“It’s the location of someone I’ve been searching for,” I said, which was not exactly the truth but close enough.
“Where’s Red Ditch?” Octavia said. “I’ve never heard of it.” Amelia was already fetching the Louisiana map from the drawer under the telephone. She looked up the town, running her finger down the columns of names.
“It’s not too far,” she said. “See?” She put her finger on a tiny dot about an hour and a half’s drive southeast of Bon Temps.
I drank my coffee as fast as I could and scrambled into some jeans. I slapped a little makeup on and brushed my hair and headed out the front door to my car, map in hand.
Octavia and Amelia followed me out, dying to know what I was going to do and what significance the message had for me. But they were just going to have to wonder, at least for right now. I wondered why I was in such a hurry to do this. It wasn’t like he was going to vanish, unless Remy Savoy was a fairy, too. I thought that highly unlikely.
I had to be back for the evening shift, but I had plenty of time.
I drove with the radio on, and this morning I was in a country-and-western kind of mood. Travis Tritt and Carrie Underwood accompanied me, and by the time I drove into Red Ditch, I was feeling my roots. There was even less to Red Ditch than there was to Bon Temps, and that’s saying something.
I figured it would be easy to find Bienville Street, and I was right. It was the kind of street you can find anywhere in America. The houses were small, neat, boxy, with room for one car in the carport and a small yard. In the case of 1245, the backyard was fenced in and I could see a lively little black dog running around. There wasn’t a doghouse, so the pooch was an indoor-outdoor animal. Everything was neat, but not obsessively so. The bushes around the house were trimmed and the yard was raked. I drove by a couple of times, and then I wondered what I was going to do. How would I find out what I wanted to know?
There was a pickup truck parked in the garage, so Savoy was probably at home. I took a deep breath, parked across from the house, and tried to send my extra ability hunting. But in a neighborhood full of the thoughts of the living people in these houses, it was hard. I thought I was getting two brain signatures from the house I was watching, but it was hard to be absolutely sure.
“Fuck it,” I said, and got out of the car. I popped my keys in my jacket pocket and went up the sidewalk to the front door. I knocked.
“Hold on, son,” said a man’s voice inside, and I heard a child’s voice say, “Daddy, me! I get it!”
“No, Hunter,” the man said, and the door opened. He was looking at me through a screen door. He unhooked it and pushed it open when he saw I was a woman. “Hi,” he said. “Can I help you?”
I looked down at the child who wiggled past him to look up at me. He was maybe four years old. He had dark hair and eyes. He was the spitting image of Hadley. Then I looked at the man again. Something in his face had changed during my protracted silence.
“Who are you?” he said in an entirely different voice.
“I’m Sookie Stackhouse,” I said. I couldn’t think of any artful way to do this. “I’m Hadley’s cousin. I just found out where you were.”
“You can’t have any claim on him,” said the man, keeping a very tight rein on his voice.
“Of course not,” I said, surprised. “I just want to meet him. I don’t have much family.”
There was another significant pause. He was weighing my words and my demeanor and he was deciding whether to slam the door or let me in.
“Daddy, she’s pretty,” said the boy, and that seemed to tip the balance in my favor.
“Come on in,” Hadley’s ex-husband said.
I looked around the small living room, which had a couch and a recliner, a television and a bookcase full of DVDs and children’s books, and a scattering of toys.
“I worked Saturday, so I have today off,” he said, in case I imagined he was unemployed. “Oh, I’m Remy Savoy. I guess you knew that.”
I nodded.
“This is Hunter,” he said, and the child got a case of the shys. He hid behind his father’s legs and peeked around at me. “Please sit down,” Remy added.
I shoved a newspaper to one end of the couch and sat, trying not to stare at the man or the child. My cousin Hadley had been very striking, and she’d married a good-looking man. It was hard to peg down what left that impression. His nose was big, his jaw stuck out a little, and his eyes were a little wide-spaced. But the sum of all this was a man most women would look at twice. His hair was that medium shade between blond and brown, and it was thick and layered, the back hanging over his collar. He was wearing a flannel shirt unbuttoned over a white Hanes T-shirt. Jeans. No shoes. A dimple in his chin.
Hunter was wearing corduroy pants and a sweatshirt with a big football on the front. His clothes were brand-new, unlike his dad’s.
I’d finished looking at them before Remy’d finished looking at me. He didn’t think I had any trace of Hadley in my face. My body was plumper and my coloring was lighter and I wasn’t as hard. He thought I looked like I didn’t have a lot of money. He thought I was pretty, like his son did. But he didn’t trust me.
“How long has it been since you heard from her?” I asked.
“I haven’t heard from Hadley since a few months after he was born,” Remy said. He was used to that, but there was sadness in his thoughts, too.
Hunter was sitting on the floor, playing with some trucks. He loaded some Duplos into the back of a dump truck, which backed up to a fire engine very slowly, guided by Hunter’s small hands. To the astonishment of the Duplo man sitting in the cab of the fire engines, the dump truck let go of its load all over the fire engine. Hunter got a big kick out of this, and he said, “Daddy, look!”
“I see it, son.” Remy looked at me intently. “Why are you here?” he asked, deciding to get right to the point.
“I only found out there might be a baby a couple of weeks ago,” I said. “Wasn’t any point in tracking you down until I heard that.”
“I never met her family,” he said. “How’d you know she was married? Did she tell you?” Then, reluctantly, he said, “Is she okay?”
“No,” I said very quietly. I didn’t want Hunter to become interested. The boy was loading all the Duplos back into the dump truck. “She’s been dead since before Katrina.”
I could hear the shock detonate like a little bomb in his head. “She was already a vamp, I heard,” he said uncertainly, his voice wavering. “That kind of dead?”
“No. I mean really, finally.”
“What happened?”
“She was attacked by another vampire,” I said. “He was jealous of Hadley’s relationship with her, ah, her . . .”
“Girlfriend?” No mistaking the bitterness in her exhusband’s voice and in his head.
“Yeah.”
“That was a shocker,” he said, but in his head all the shock had worn off. There was only a grim resignation, a loss of pride.
“I didn’t know about any of this until after she passed.”
“You’re her cousin? I remember her telling me she had two. . . . You got a brother, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You knew she had been married to me?”
“I found out when I cleaned out her safe-deposit box a few weeks ago. I didn’t know there had been a son. I apologize for that.” I wasn’t sure why I was apologizing or how I could have known, but I was sorry I hadn’t even considered the fact that Hadley and her husband might have had a child. Hadley had been a little older than me, and I guessed Remy was probably thirty or thereabouts.
“You look fine,” he said suddenly, and I flushed, understanding him instantly.
“Hadley told you I had a disability.” I looked away from him, at the boy, who jumped to his feet, announced he had to go to the bathroom, and dashed out of the room. I couldn’t help but smile.
“Yeah, she said something. . . . She said you had a hard time of it in school,” he said tactfully. Hadley had told him I was crazy as hell. He was seeing no signs of it, and he wondered why Hadley had thought so. But he glanced in the direction the child had gone, and I knew he was thinking he had to be careful since Hunter was in the house, he had to be alert for any signs of this instability—though Hadley had never specified what form of craziness I had.
“That’s true,” I said. “I had a hard time of it. Hadley wasn’t any big help. But her mom, my aunt Linda, was a great woman before the cancer got her. She was real kind to me, always. And we had some good moments now and then.”
“I could say the same. We did have some good moments,” Remy said. His forearms were braced on his knees and his big hands, scarred and battered, hung down. He was a man who knew what hard work was.
There was a sound at the front door and a woman came in without bothering to knock. “Hey, baby,” she said, smiling at Remy. When she noticed me, her smile faltered and faded away.
“Kristen, this is a relative of my ex-wife’s,” Remy said, and there wasn’t any haste or apology in his voice.
Kristen had long brown hair and big brown eyes and she was maybe twenty-five. She was wearing khakis and a polo shirt with a logo on the chest, a laughing duck. The legend above the duck read, “Jerry’s Detailing.” “Nice to meet you,” Kristen said insincerely. “I’m Kristen Duchesne, Remy’s girlfriend.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, more honestly. “Sookie Stackhouse.”
“You didn’t offer this woman a drink, Remy! Sookie, can I get you a Coke or a Sprite?”
She knew what was in the refrigerator. I wondered if she lived here. Well, none of my business, as long as she was good to Hadley’s son.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve got to be going in a minute.” I made a little production out of looking at my watch. “I got to go to work this evening.”
“Oh, where is that?” Kristen asked. She was a little more relaxed.
“Merlotte’s. It’s a bar in Bon Temps,” I said. “About eighty miles from here.”
“Sure, that’s where your wife was from,” Kristen said, glancing at Remy.
Remy said, “Sookie came with some news, I’m afraid.” His hands twisted together, though his voice was steady. “Hadley is dead.”
Kristen inhaled sharply but she had to keep her comment to herself because Hunter dashed back into the room. “Daddy, I washed my hands!” he shouted, and his father smiled at him.
“Good for you, son,” he said, and ruffled the boy’s dark hair. “Say hello to Kristen.”
“Hey, Kristen,” Hunter said without much interest.
I stood. I wished I had a business card to leave. This seemed odd and wrong, to just walk out. But Kristen’s presence was oddly inhibiting. She picked up Hunter and slung him on her hip. He was quite a load for her, but she made a point of making it look easy and habitual, though it wasn’t. But she did like the little boy; I could see it in her head.
“Kristen likes me,” Hunter said, and I looked at him sharply.
“Sure I do,” Kristen said, and laughed.
Remy was looking from Hunter to me with a troubled face, a face that was just beginning to look worried.
I wondered how to explain our relationship to Hunter. I was pretty close to being his aunt, as we reckon things here. Kids don’t care about second cousins.
“Aunt Sookie,” Hunter said, testing the words. “I got an aunt?”