Dead But Not Forgotten

by Charlaine Harris

  Until midway through the season during his junior year, when a rough tackle had left Andy sidelined with a torn rotator cuff. He had still suited up for practice, and for the first couple of weeks he sat on the bench cheering on his teammates. But when the pressure of an upcoming midterm in his World History class had caught up with him, he’d started cracking his books instead of watching drills and practice scrimmages.

  That was when Casey-Lynn entered his life. Andy was sitting in the shade of the bleachers, near the chain-link fence surrounding the stadium, and had a couple of books spread out on the ground as he scribbled in a spiral notebook.

  “What’re you working on?” a voice asked from the other side of the fence. Andy looked up and saw Casey-Lynn there, fingers laced through the chain link. The late-afternoon sun was in her face, and her big green eyes were squinting, her nose crinkled. She had long blond hair that caught the sunlight and seemed to magnify it, and he thought, in that moment, that he had never seen a prettier girl.

  “History,” he said. “I have to know the causes of World War One, and I’m trying to keep these names straight. Archduke Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, Kaiser Wilhelm, and the rest of those guys.”

  “Ferdinand’s assassination was the immediate catalyst, but don’t forget about the spread of European nationalism. And the Pig War.”

  “Pig War?” Andy echoed.

  When Casey-Lynn released the fence and sat, her crossed legs transformed her long, floral-print skirt into rolling meadowlands. “It was really a customs blockade of Serbian pork,” she explained. “But it’s symptomatic, and it did play a direct role.”

  “No shi—no kidding?” He hadn’t heard anything in class about a Pig War. But Casey-Lynn sounded like she knew what she was talking about. When she launched into a detailed description of the events that pushed the world toward war, she made it both more entertaining and easier to follow than Mr. Ludlow, Andy’s history teacher, had ever managed to do.

  By the end of the lecture, he’d asked her out.

  Casey-Lynn declined.

  She also said no the second time, and the third through ninth.

  But somehow she never made him feel rejected or demeaned. It almost turned into a game between them, and their friendship deepened to the point that at school they spent most of their time together, except when class schedules interfered. Finally, the tenth time Andy asked, she agreed to accompany him to the school’s Christmas dance, though she insisted on meeting him there.

  That night was as close to magic as anything Andy had ever known.

  He arrived at school to find her waiting outside. It was cold enough that every exhalation produced a puff of steam, but she was wearing a red sateen dress that left her arms and shoulders bare. If she’d come in a coat, she had already ditched it. As Andy approached, she dashed into his arms and welcomed him with a kiss that seemed like it would never end, and at the same time was over far too soon.

  They danced together to every song—Andy had never been much of a dancer, except for that night—and during slow ones, they held each other as if they would never let go. Once in a while, she tilted her head up and found his lips with hers, for kisses that went on until, on one occasion, Assistant Principal Duckworth warned them that if they did it again, they’d be escorted from the premises.

  After, in Andy’s car, the kisses were faster and more frantic, and accompanied by groping and heavy breathing that curtained the windows with steam. Later, Andy couldn’t say when the pickup truck had stopped beside his car in the now-empty school lot, or how long it had sat, engine rumbling, before he and Casey-Lynn noticed.

  “Shit!” she said when she finally peered outside. “It’s my brother. I have to go, baby.”

  “I could take you home in a while.” She had never invited him to her house or introduced him to her family. He was curious about the brother, but fogged windows and the truck cab’s height blocked his view.

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll get in trouble if I don’t go with him.”

  “But, Casey-Lynn . . .”

  She pushed his hands away from her. “Seriously, Andy. I have to go.”

  “Can I see you tomorrow? Or over break?”

  “We’ll see. I’ll call you.”

  And she had, from a gas station pay phone in Houston. The family, she told him, was moving west. She apologized for not being able to see him before they left, but she would let him know where she landed. Then she said, “Someone’s coming, I gotta run,” and hung up.

  She had written, for a while, and taken his calls for a while.

  Then nothing.

  Until now.

  She called at eleven the next morning and asked if Andy could meet her at Merlotte’s for lunch. He was off that day, not even exercising his thumbs at his desk. He had already showered and shaved, but he did so again, then got in the hated Honda and drove over.

  Sam’s parking lot was full of booth benches and tables and bar stools and chairs and kitchen equipment, stacks of dishes and glassware, pots and pans, trays of utensils, and all the miscellaneous stuff Sam used inside. A carpentry crew had set up sawhorses and acquired lumber and was hard at work on some object Andy couldn’t identify. The sounds of power saws and hammering filled the air, as did scents of sawdust and paint. Plastic sheeting trailed from the front door, and a paint-spattered guy was carrying two five-gallon cans inside.

  Sam Merlotte stood at a remove from it all, watching and scratching the top of his head.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Andy asked him.

  “I don’t really know anymore.”

  “Lot of activity. Looks like they’re tearing the place apart.”

  Sam glanced at him. “They are, pretty much.”

  “That okay with you?”

  “Apparently I signed a contract saying it was. I don’t actually remember doing that, but it’s my signature.”

  “Could it be a forgery?”

  Sam showed him a wry grin. “One thing I’ve learned in Bon Temps, Andy. Anything could be anything.”

  “Guess that’s true.”

  “Count on it.”

  “Listen, Sam,” Andy said. “About that night—”

  “I’ve been trying to remember, Andy. Lafayette was my friend as well as my chef. But I really can’t say that anyone came in that night who was at all out of the ordinary. Anyway, I doubt anyone would have dumped his body while we were open. There are always people coming and going, and they couldn’t have known you’d get a ride home, until you did. I figure the body was put in your car after hours, when it was the only car left in the lot. They might not even have known it was yours.”

  “Could be,” Andy agreed. He had thought of that. In the couple of days since, he had considered just about every possible angle.

  Still, he had to be missing something, because he hadn’t yet figured out who had done it.

  “Sorry, Andy,” Sam said. “I—”

  “Yeah,” Andy interrupted. Casey-Lynn had appeared in the doorway and was looking outside, shading her eyes against the sun. “If you think of anything else, let me know.”

  She spotted Andy and burst from the door. He broke away from Sam and met her halfway. They embraced, not quite with the passion of that evening outside the Christmas dance, but it was, Andy thought, a better hug than most he’d had since then.

  “You ready for some lunch?” she asked.

  Andy gestured toward the restaurant furnishings clotting the parking lot. “Is it open?”

  “Only to crew,” Casey-Lynn said. “But Terry’s on the grill. He can whip up anything you want.”

  “I know that. He’s my cousin.”

  “Of course he is, silly.”

  She took him by the hand and led him inside. Emptied out, the place seemed huge. The crew had set up lights on stands and suspended more from the ceiling. Against one w
all, workers were installing a kind of wooden latticework with indentations that almost looked like the insides of egg cartons, except with hollow centers. Soundproofing, Andy guessed. Others were refinishing the bar with a high-gloss, almost metallic finish, and yet more were painting the kitchen. Andy wondered how Terry was managing to cook anything, with what seemed to be all the kitchenware outside and a crew of painters underfoot.

  Casey-Lynn led Andy through the interior and out the back door. A handful of tables had been set up between the restaurant and Sam’s trailer, and various crew members occupied a couple of them. Tristan Kowel sat by himself, at a table with a single chair and a big umbrella covering it. He gazed on the scene before him with what looked like barely restrained revulsion.

  “Guy’s kind of a jerk, ain’t he?” Andy said softly.

  “Tristan? He’s okay. He knows he’s the show. Without him, it’s just footage of a bunch of greasy spoons nobody would want to go into.”

  “Sam’s place isn’t bad.”

  “I don’t mean Merlotte’s,” Casey-Lynn said quickly. “But most of them. This is like coming home.”

  “It wasn’t here when you were.”

  “I mean Bon Temps. You. Being here again, after so long.”

  “It has been a while.”

  She took his hand, held it. The years had etched tiny lines in her face: around her eyes, at the corners of her mouth. He liked them. Her hair was a shade or two darker than it had been, and cut short, even with her jawline. She had put on a little weight, and he liked that, too. He wondered what the transition had been like, from the smart, pretty girl he had known to the accomplished woman she was today.

  “I guess I owe you an apology, don’t I?” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Disappearing like that.”

  He chuckled. “It was kind of abrupt.”

  “You didn’t know my parents.”

  “You never let me.”

  “There was a reason for that.” She let go of his hand, and her gaze wandered around the back parking area. Andy followed it. Fall was starting to set in; leaves were beginning to brown, and some had already dropped, dry and curled, onto the ground. Nobody had told the mosquitoes yet, but they would get the message soon enough. “I guess we didn’t use the word dysfunctional in those days, but that’s what they were. We were. My daddy was never any good, Andy. He was a petty criminal, as lazy as the day is long, always looking for the easiest way to do anything. Mama wasn’t much better, and that’s how they reared up us kids. When one of them would come home and say, ‘Time to pack up and move,’ we packed up and moved. It usually meant there was a sheriff on the way.”

  “You wrote me back for a while. You answered when I called.”

  “Until they told me I couldn’t. If anybody figured out I was talking to you, they could find us through you. So I had to stop, and I couldn’t say why. I’m so sorry, Andy.” She met his gaze again, her eyes liquid, her lower lip trembling. He hoped she wouldn’t cry. He never had liked it when women cried. A cop saw too much of that. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  “I can’t say I wasn’t hurt,” he said. “But that was a long time ago. I’m over it now.”

  She managed a smile, though it looked a little pained. “I’m glad to hear that. When I knew we were coming here, I hoped I’d be able to see you. I admit, I looked you up online, saw that you and Portia were still here. I even knew you were a cop before you gave me your card, even though I pretended to be surprised. And I saw some pictures of you, so I knew how handsome you’d become.”

  Andy felt heat rising into his cheeks. “Not half as handsome as you are pretty, Casey-Lynn.”

  “Oh, stop.” She waved her fingers at him. “I’m practically haggard.”

  “You’re crazy. You look beautiful.”

  “Obviously the years have affected your eyesight, but I’ll take it.”

  A production assistant came over with a legal pad and took lunch orders. A little while later, they were eating burgers and fries that weren’t half-bad and hardly tasted like paint. Casey-Lynn told him how she’d wound up in the television business, and Andy tried to bring her up to speed on events in Bon Temps. To the extent that he could, anyway; as he talked, he realized that a lot of people around Bon Temps seemed to have secrets they wanted to protect. That was probably true everywhere, but it seemed especially pronounced here. He stopped short of telling her what he knew of Sookie’s abilities, but he did bring her name up after she got him talking about Vampire Bill. He couldn’t tell if she was more fascinated by the fact that Bon Temps now harbored an out vampire, or that Sookie was dating him.

  “I would love to see Sookie,” Casey-Lynn said. “I never knew her that well, but I always thought she was cool. And I wouldn’t mind a look at that vampire. When do they get back?”

  “Sam’s not sure,” Andy replied. “Couple of days, maybe.”

  “Okay, good. I mean, we should still be here.”

  “I meant to ask you something, Casey-Lynn. Sam says he doesn’t remember signing any contracts. How did you approach him in the first place?”

  She let her gaze fall to her plate and tapped her fingernails on its edge. “E-mail, I think. It might have been a phone call, though, then e-mail. I do whatever I can to line up the places Tristan wants to visit.”

  “How did he hear about Merlotte’s?”

  “I told him about it.”

  “But you’d never been here.”

  “Andy, I spend my life studying up on bar and grills, roadside cafés, that kind of thing. When I heard about it, that it was in Bon Temps, of course I was intrigued. I did some more research and it sounded like it was right up Tris’s alley. So I got in touch with Sam and made the arrangements.”

  “Which he forgot all about. He sure wasn’t expecting you yesterday.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to say something here?”

  “I’m just curious about how y’all do things in Hollywood,” Andy said. “Sam was genuinely surprised.”

  “We usually call a few days before we show up. Somebody might have dropped the ball on that. Or else not been able to reach him. I hear there was quite a stir over here the other day.”

  Andy had wondered when that would come up, and how. He told her what had happened that night, admitting that he’d been emotionally ravaged by a pedophilia case and gotten much drunker than he’d intended. Talking about the case, even in the most general terms, twisted his guts into knots.

  When he was finished telling Casey-Lynn about that, and the aftermath—Sookie finding the murdered Lafayette in his car—she was holding his hands, trying to quell their trembling. He swallowed, hard, and knew the blood had drained from his face. Casey-Lynn regarded him as if trying to decide whether she should dial 911.

  “I’m so sorry, Andy,” she said. “That’s truly awful, start to finish. I’m sorry you had to go through it, but I’m glad you’re strong enough to stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves.”

  “I guess,” Andy said. He’d never been great at accepting praise. “Thanks.”

  “How did Sookie handle it?”

  “She’s pretty tough, I guess. She’s okay.”

  “When did you say she and Bill Compton are getting back into town? I’d hate to miss her.”

  “I’m not sure,” Andy said again. “Shouldn’t be too long.”

  Kowel had gone inside while they ate, but now he came to the back door. “Casey-Lynn, I need you,” he said.

  She gave Andy’s hands a final squeeze. “Duty calls, babe. I’ll let you know when I can get free again.”

  “Okay, Casey-Lynn,” he said. “See you later.”

  She went inside. He waited a few minutes longer, not sure his legs would support him yet. His own story had affected him, as he had known it would. He was more surprised by the impact
of hers. He had thought there was something off about her family, about their disappearance. Who just picks up and vanishes like that? For years, he had woven fanciful tales of intrigue in his mind. Thinking about it now, he suspected that taste of mystery might have been one of the factors that had driven him to become a detective.

  When he felt stronger, he pushed back his chair, rose, and headed through the restaurant. The crew had finished putting up the strange egg-carton construction on the west wall. Now one of the clean-shaven guys stood on a ladder, inserting what looked like six-inch wooden dowels into the holes in the center of each depression. Andy wasn’t sure what the point was, but he was impressed by the crew’s thoroughness. He even saw one of the female crew members spraying something onto a cloth from an unmarked bottle—some cleaning solution, he guessed—and wiping out the inside of each glass.

  Driving home, he couldn’t get the lunchtime conversation out of his mind. Casey-Lynn hadn’t quite been all over him, but she had been more physically affectionate than he’d expected. Did she want to pick up where they left off, all those years ago? That was impossible, wasn’t it? Too much had happened—and, he had to admit, he had been really hurt. He wasn’t sure he had entirely forgiven her. He’d thought he had, but her showing up again had peeled away the emotional scar tissue, exposing the original wound again.

  He was glad to see her, and the attraction was still strong. But he felt there was something she wanted, and he couldn’t figure out what it was.

  He was a smart guy. He was a detective, a good one, who solved real crimes. So why couldn’t he figure out Casey-Lynn? If she had an angle, it was opaque to him. If she wanted to rekindle something long since buried, what was the purpose? She wasn’t likely to stick around in Bon Temps, and he had no interest in going to Hollywood. And she was still beautiful, but he would never have anything like movie-star looks.