Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  “We better get ready, just in case,” Sam said. “Though I’m thinking we won’t get to open until sometime this afternoon.” He went into his office to begin calling substitute cooks.

  It felt strange to be going about the opening routine, just as if Lafayette were going to mince in any minute with a story about some party he’d been to, the way he had a few days before. The sirens came shrieking down the county road that ran in front of Merlotte’s. Cars crunched across Sam’s gravel parking lot. By the time we had the chairs down, the tables set, and extra silver-ware rolled in napkins and ready to replace used settings, the police came in.

  Merlotte’s is out of the city limits, so the parish sheriff, Bud Dearborn, would be in charge. Bud Dearborn, who’d been a good friend of my father’s, was gray-haired now. He had a mashed-in face, like a human Pekinese, and opaque brown eyes. As he came in the front door of the bar, I noticed Bud was wearing heavy boots and his Saints cap. He must have been called in from working on his farm. With Bud was Alcee Beck, the only African American detective on the parish force. Alcee was so black that his white shirt gleamed in contrast. His tie was knotted precisely, and his suit was absolutely correct. His shoes were polished and shining.

  Bud and Alcee, between them, ran the parish . . . at least some of the more important elements that kept it functional. Mike Spencer, funeral home director and parish coroner, had a heavy hand in local affairs, too, and he was a good friend of Bud’s. I was willing to bet Mike was already out in the parking lot, pronouncing poor Lafayette dead.

  Bud Spencer said, “Who found the body?”

  “I did.” Bud and Alcee changed course slightly and headed toward me.

  “Sam, can we borrow your office?” Bud asked. Without waiting for Sam’s response, he jerked his head to indicate I should go in.

  “Sure, go right ahead,” my boss said dryly. “Sookie, you okay?”

  “Fine, Sam.” I wasn’t sure that was true, but there wasn’t anything Sam could do about it without getting into trouble, and all to no avail. Though Bud gestured to me to sit down, I shook my head as he and Alcee settled themselves in the office chairs. Bud, of course, took Sam’s big chair, while Alcee made do with the better extra chair, the one with a little padding left.

  “Tell us about the last time you saw Lafayette alive,” Bud suggested.

  I thought about it.

  “He wasn’t working last night,” I said. “Anthony was working, Anthony Bolivar.”

  “Who is that?” Alcee’s broad forehead wrinkled.

  “Don’t recognize the name.”

  “He’s a friend of Bill’s. He was passing through, and he needed a job. He had the experience.” He’d worked in a diner during the Great Depression.

  “You mean the short-order cook at Merlotte’s is a vampire?”

  “So?” I asked. I could feel my mouth setting stubborn, and my brows drawing in, and I knew my face was getting mad. I was trying hard not to read their minds, trying hard to stay completely out of this, but it wasn’t easy. Bud Dearborn was average, but Alcee projected his thoughts like a lighthouse sends a signal. Right now he was beaming disgust and fear.

  In the months before I’d met Bill, and found that he treasured that disability of mine—my gift, as he saw it—I’d done my best to pretend to myself and everyone else that I couldn’t really “read” minds. But since Bill had liberated me from the little prison I’d built for myself, I’d been practicing and experimenting, with Bill’s encouragement. For him, I had put into words the things I’d been feeling for years. Some people sent a clear, strong message, like Alcee. Most people were more off-and-on, like Bud Dearborn. It depended a lot on how strong their emotions were, how clear-headed they were, what the weather was, for all I knew. Some people were murky as hell, and it was almost impossible to tell what they were thinking. I could get a reading of their moods, maybe, but that was all.

  I had admitted that if I was touching people while I tried to read their thoughts, it made the picture clearer—like getting cable, after having only an antenna. And I’d found that if I “sent” a person relaxing images, I could flow through his brain like water.

  There was nothing I wanted less than to flow through Alcee Beck’s mind. But absolutely involuntarily I was getting a full picture of Alcee’s deeply superstitious reaction to finding out there was a vampire working at Merlotte’s, his revulsion on discovering I was the woman he’d heard about who was dating a vampire, his deep conviction that the openly gay Lafayette had been a disgrace to the black community. Alcee figured someone must have it in for Andy Bellefleur, to have parked a gay black man’s carcass in Andy’s car. Alcee was wondering if Lafayette had had AIDS, if the virus could have seeped into Andy’s car seat somehow and survived there. He’d sell the car, if it were his.

  If I’d touched Alcee, I would have known his phone number and his wife’s bra size.

  Bud Dearborn was looking at me funny. “Did you say something?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I was wondering if you had seen Lafayette in here during the evening. Did he come in to have a drink?”

  “I never saw him here.” Come to think of it, I’d never seen Lafayette have a drink. For the first time, I realized that though the lunch crowd was mixed, the night bar patrons were almost exclusively white.

  “Where did he spend his social time?”

  “I have no idea.” All Lafayette’s stories were told with the names changed to protect the innocent. Well, actually, the guilty.

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Dead, in the car.”

  Bud shook his head in exasperation. “Alive, Sookie.”

  “Hmmm. I guess . . . three days ago. He was still here when I got here to work my shift, and we said hello to each other. Oh, he told me about a party he’d been to.” I tried to recall his exact words. “He said he’d been to a house where there were all kinds of sex hijinks going on.”

  The two men gaped at me.

  “Well, that’s what he said! I don’t know how much truth was in it.” I could just see Lafayette’s face as he’d told me about it, the coy way he kept putting his finger across his lips to indicate he wasn’t telling me any names or places.

  “Didn’t you think someone should know about that?” Bud Dearborn looked stunned.

  “It was a private party. Why should I tell anyone about it?”

  But that kind of party shouldn’t happen in their parish. Both men were glaring at me. Through compressed lips, Bud said, “Did Lafayette tell you anything about drugs being used at this get-together?”

  “No, I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “Was this party at the home of someone white, or someone black?”

  “White,” I said, and then wished I’d pled ignorance. But Lafayette had been really impressed by the home—though not because it was large or fancy. Why had he been so impressed? I wasn’t too sure what would constitute impressive for Lafayette, who had grown up poor and stayed that way, but I was sure he’d been talking about the home of someone white, because he’d said, “All the pictures on the walls, they all white as lilies and smiling like alligators.” I didn’t offer that comment to the police, and they didn’t ask further.

  When I’d left Sam’s office, after explaining why Andy’s car had been in the parking lot in the first place, I went back to stand behind the bar. I didn’t want to watch the activity out in the parking lot, and there weren’t any customers to wait on because the police had the entrances to the lot blocked off.

  Sam was rearranging the bottles behind the bar, dusting as he went, and Holly and Danielle had plunked themselves down at a table in the smoking section so Danielle could have a cigarette.

  “How was it?” Sam asked.

  “Not much to it. They didn’t like hearing about Anthony working here, and they didn’t like what I told them about the party Lafayette was bragging about the other day. Did you hear him telling me? The orgy thing?”

  “Yeah, he said somethin
g to me about that, too. Must have been a big evening for him. If it really happened.”

  “You think Lafayette made it up?”

  “I don’t think there are too many biracial, bisexual parties in Bon Temps,” he said.

  “But that’s just because no one invited you to one,” I said pointedly. I wondered if I really knew at all what went on in our little town. Of all the people in Bon Temps, I should be the one to know the ins and the outs, since all that information was more or less readily available to me, if I chose to dig for it. “At least, I assume that’s the case?”

  “That’s the case,” Sam said, smiling at me a little as he dusted a bottle of whiskey.

  “I guess my invitation got lost in the mail, too.”

  “You think Lafayette came back here last night to talk more to you or me about this party?”

  I shrugged. “He may have just arranged to meet someone in the parking lot. After all, everyone knows where Merlotte’s is. Had he gotten his paycheck?” It was the end of the week, when Sam normally paid us.

  “No. Maybe he’d come in for that, but I’d have given it to him at work the next day. Today.”

  “I wonder who invited Lafayette to that party.”

  “Good question.”

  “You don’t reckon he’d have been dumb enough to try to blackmail anyone, do you?”

  Sam rubbed the fake wood of the bar with a clean rag. The bar was already shining, but he liked to keep his hands busy, I’d noticed. “I don’t think so,” he said, after he’d thought it over. “No, they sure asked the wrong person. You know how indiscreet Lafayette was. Not only did he tell us that he went to such a party—and I’m betting he wasn’t supposed to—he might have wanted to build more on it than the other, ah, participants, would feel comfortable with.”

  “Like, keep in contact with the people at the party? Give them a sly wink in public?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I guess if you have sex with someone, or watch them having sex, you feel pretty much like you’re their equal.” I said this doubtfully, having limited experience in that area, but Sam was nodding.

  “Lafayette wanted to be accepted for what he was more than anything else,” he said, and I had to agree.

  Chapter 2

  WE REOPENED AT four-thirty, by which time we were all as bored as we could possibly be. I was ashamed of that, since after all, we were there because a man we knew had died, but it was undeniable that after straightening up the storeroom, cleaning out Sam’s office, and playing several hands of bourre (Sam won five dollars and change) we were all ready to see someone new. When Terry Bellefleur, Andy’s cousin and a frequent substitute barman or cook at Merlotte’s, came through the back door, he was a welcome sight.

  I guess Terry was in his late fifties. A Vietnam vet, he’d been a prisoner of war for a year and a half. Terry had some obvious facial scarring, and my friend Arlene told me that the scars on his body were even more drastic. Terry was redheaded, though he was graying a little more each month, it seemed like.

  I’d always been fond of Terry, who bent over backward to be kind to me—except when he was in one of his black moods. Everyone knew not to cross Terry Bellefleur when he was in one of his moods. Terry’s dark days were inevitably preceded by nightmares of the worst kind, as his neighbors testified. They could hear Terry hollering on the nightmare nights.

  I never, never read Terry’s mind.

  Terry looked okay today. His shoulders were relaxed, and his eyes didn’t dart from side to side. “You okay, sweet thing?” he asked, patting my arm sympathetically.

  “Thanks, Terry, I’m fine. Just sorry about Lafayette.”

  “Yeah, he wasn’t too bad.” From Terry, that was high praise. “Did his job, always showed up on time. Cleaned the kitchen good. Never a bad word.” Functioning on that level was Terry’s highest ambition. “And then he dies in Andy’s Buick.”

  “I’m afraid Andy’s car is kind of . . .” I groped for the blandest term.

  “It’s cleanable, he said.” Terry was anxious to close that subject.

  “Did he tell you what had happened to Lafayette?”

  “Andy says it looks like his neck was broken. And there was some, ah, evidence that he’d been . . . messed with.” Terry’s brown eyes flickered away, revealing his discomfort. “Messed with” meant something violent and sexual to Terry.

  “Oh. Gosh, how awful.” Danielle and Holly had come up behind me, and Sam, with another sack of garbage he’d cleaned out of his office, paused on his way to the Dumpster out back.

  “He didn’t look that . . . I mean, the car didn’t look that . . .”

  “Stained?”

  “Right.”

  “Andy thinks he was killed somewhere else.”

  “Yuck,” said Holly. “Don’t talk about it. That’s too much for me.”

  Terry looked over my shoulder at the two women. He had no great love for either Holly or Danielle, though I didn’t know why and had made no effort to learn. I tried to leave people privacy, especially now that I had better control over my own ability. I heard the two moving away, after Terry had kept his gaze trained on them for a few seconds.

  “Portia came and got Andy last night?” he asked.

  “Yes, I called her. He couldn’t drive. Though I’m betting he wishes I’d let him, now.” I was just never going to be number one on Andy Bellefleur’s popularity list.

  “She have trouble getting him to her car?”

  “Bill helped her.”

  “Vampire Bill? Your boyfriend?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I hope he didn’t scare her,” Terry said, as if he didn’t remember I was still there.

  I could feel my face squinching up. “There’s no reason on earth why Bill would ever scare Portia Bellefleur,” I said, and something about the way I said it penetrated Terry’s fog of private thought.

  “Portia ain’t as tough as everyone thinks she is,” Terry told me. “You, on the other hand, are a sweet little éclair on the outside and a pit bull on the inside.”

  “I don’t know whether I should feel flattered, or whether I should sock you in the nose.”

  “There you go. How many women—or men, for that matter—would say such a thing to a crazy man like me?” And Terry smiled, as a ghost would smile. I hadn’t known how conscious of his reputation Terry was, until now.

  I stood on tiptoe to give him a kiss on the scarred cheek, to show him I wasn’t scared of him. As I sank back to my heels, I realized that wasn’t exactly true. Under some circumstances, not only would I be quite wary of this damaged man, but I might become very frightened indeed.

  Terry tied the strings of one of the white cook’s aprons and began to open up the kitchen. The rest of us got back into the work mode. I wouldn’t have long to wait tables, since I was getting off at six tonight to get ready to drive to Shreveport with Bill. I hated for Sam to pay me for the time I’d spent lollygagging around Merlotte’s today, waiting to work; but straightening the storeroom and cleaning out Sam’s office had to count for something.

  As soon as the police opened up the parking lot, people began streaming in, in as heavy a flow as a small town like Bon Temps ever gets. Andy and Portia were among the first in, and I saw Terry look out the hatch from the kitchen at his cousins. They waved at him, and he raised a spatula to acknowledge their greeting. I wondered how close a cousin Terry actually was. He wasn’t a first cousin, I was sure. Of course, here you could call someone your cousin or your aunt or your uncle with little or no blood relation at all. After my mother and father had died in a flash flood that swept their car off a bridge, my mother’s best friend tried to come by my Gran’s every week or two with a little present for me; and I’d called her Aunt Patty my whole life.

  I answered all the customers’ questions if I had time, and served hamburgers and salads and chicken breast strips—and beer—until I felt dazed. When I glanced at the clock, it was time for me to go. In the ladies’ room
I found my replacement, my friend Arlene. Arlene’s flaming red hair (two shades redder this month) was arranged in an elaborate cluster of curls on the back of her head, and her tight pants let the world know she’d lost seven pounds. Arlene had been married four times, and she was on the lookout for number five.

  We talked about the murder for a couple of minutes, and I briefed her on the status of my tables, before I grabbed my purse from Sam’s office and scooted out the back door. It wasn’t quite dark when I pulled up to my house, which is a quarter mile back in the woods off a seldom-traveled parish road. It’s an old house, parts of it dating back a hundred and forty-plus years, but it’s been altered and added onto so often we don’t count it as an antebellum house. It’s just an old farmhouse, anyway. My grandmother, Adele Hale Stackhouse, left me this house, and I treasured it. Bill had spoken of me moving into his place, which sat on a hill just across the cemetery from my home, but I was reluctant to leave my own turf.

  I yanked off my waitress outfit and opened my closet. If we were going over to Shreveport on vampire business, Bill would want me to dress up a little. I couldn’t quite figure that out, since he didn’t want anyone else making a pass at me, but he always wanted me to look extra pretty when we were going to Fangtasia, a vampire-owned bar catering mainly to tourists.

  Men.

  I couldn’t make up my mind, so I hopped in the shower. Thinking about Fangtasia always made me tense. The vampires who owned it were part of the vampire power structure, and once they’d discovered my unique talent, I’d become a desirable acquisition to them. Only Bill’s determined entry into the vampire self-governing system had kept me safe; that is, living where I wanted to live, working at my chosen job. But in return for that safety, I was still obliged to show up when I was summoned, and to put my telepathy to use for them. Milder measures than their former choices (torture and terror) were what “mainstreaming” vampires needed. The hot water immediately made me feel better, and I relaxed as it beat on my back.