Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set
Page 63
“He left you a note to tell you what he was doing? Girl, you should be proud. That man hasn’t set pen to paper since high school.” She gave me a sideways look and grinned. “You all have a good time last night?”
I thought it over. “Ah, it was okay,” I said hesitantly. The dancing had been fun, anyway.
Janice burst out laughing. “If you have to think about it that hard, it must not have been a perfect evening.”
“Well, no,” I admitted. “There was like a little fight in the bar, and a man had to be evicted. And then, Debbie was there.”
“How did her engagement party go?”
“There was quite a crowd at her table,” I said. “But she came over after a while and asked a lot of questions.” I smiled reminiscently. “She sure didn’t like seeing Alcide with someone else!”
Janice laughed again.
“Who got engaged?” asked her customer, having decided against the recipe.
“Oh, Debbie Pelt? Used to go with my brother?” Janice said.
“I know her,” said the black-haired woman, pleasure in her voice. “She used to date your brother, Alcide? And now she’s marrying someone else?”
“Marrying Charles Clausen,” Janice said, nodding gravely. “You know him?”
“Sure I do! We went to high school together. He’s marrying Debbie Pelt? Well, better him than your brother,” Black Hair said confidentially.
“I’d already figured that out,” Janice said. “You know something I don’t know, though?”
“That Debbie, she’s into some weird stuff,” Black Hair said, raising her eyebrows to mark deep significance.
“Like what?” I asked, hardly breathing as I waited to hear what would come out. Could it be that this woman actually knew about shape-shifting, about werewolves? My eyes met Janice’s and I saw the same apprehension in them.
Janice knew about her brother. She knew about his world.
And she knew I did, too.
“Devil worship, they say,” Black Hair said. “Witchcraft.”
We both gaped at her reflection in the mirror. She had gotten the reaction she’d been looking for. She gave a satisfied nod. Devil worship and witchcraft weren’t synonymous, but I wasn’t going to argue with this woman; this was the wrong time and place.
“Yes, ma’am, that’s what I hear. At every full moon, she and some friends of hers go out in the woods and do stuff. No one seems to know exactly what,” she admitted.
Janice and I exhaled simultaneously.
“Oh, my goodness,” I said weakly.
“Then my brother’s well out of a relationship with her. We don’t hold with such doings,” Janice said righteously.
“Of course not,” I agreed.
We didn’t meet each other’s eyes.
After that little passage, I made motions about leaving, but Janice asked me what I was wearing that night.
“Oh, it’s kind of a champagne color,” I said. “Kind of a shiny beige.”
“Then the red nails won’t do,” Janice said. “Corinne!”
Despite all my protests, I left the shop with bronze finger- and toenails, and Jarvis worked on my hair again. I tried to pay Janice, but the most she would let me do was tip her employees.
“I’ve never been pampered so much in my life,” I told her.
“What do you do, Sookie?” Somehow that hadn’t come up the day before.
“I’m a barmaid,” I said.
“That is a change from Debbie,” Janice said. She looked thoughtful.
“Oh, yeah? What does Debbie do?”
“She’s a legal assistant.”
Debbie definitely had an educational edge. I’d never been able to manage college; financially, it would have been rough, though I could’ve found a way, I guess. But my disability had made it hard enough to get out of high school. A telepathic teenager has an extremely hard time of it, let me tell you. And I had so little control then. Every day had been full of dramas—the dramas of other kids. Trying to concentrate on listening in class, taking tests in a roomful of buzzing brains . . . the only thing I’d ever excelled in was homework.
Janice didn’t seem to be too concerned that I was a barmaid, which was an occupation not guaranteed to impress the families of those you dated.
I had to remind myself all over again that this setup with Alcide was a temporary arrangement he’d never asked for, and that after I’d discovered Bill’s whereabouts—right, Sookie, remember Bill, your boyfriend ?—I’d never see Alcide again. Oh, he might drop into Merlotte’s, if he felt like getting off the interstate on his way from Shreveport to Jackson, but that would be all.
Janice was genuinely hoping I would be a permanent member of her family. That was so nice of her. I liked her a lot. I almost found myself wishing that Alcide really liked me, that there was a real chance of Janice being my sister-in-law.
They say there’s no harm in daydreaming, but there is.
Chapter Seven
ALCIDE WAS WAITING for me when I got back. A pile of wrapped presents on the kitchen counter showed me how he’d spent at least part of his morning. Alcide had been completing his Christmas shopping.
Judging from his self-conscious look (Mr. Subtle, he wasn’t), he’d done something he wasn’t sure I’d like. Whatever it was, he wasn’t ready to reveal it to me, so I tried to be polite and stay out of his head. As I was passing through the short hall formed by the bedroom wall and the kitchen counter, I sniffed something less than pleasant. Maybe the garbage needed to be tossed? What garbage could we have generated in our short stay that would produce that faint, unpleasant odor? But the past pleasure of my chat with Janice and the present pleasure of seeing Alcide made it easy to forget.
“You look nice,” he said.
“I stopped in to see Janice.” I was worried for fear he would think I was imposing on his sister’s generosity. “She has a way of getting you to accept things you had no intention of accepting.”
“She’s good,” he said simply. “She’s known about me since we were in high school, and she’s never told a soul.”
“I could tell.”
“How—? Oh, yeah.” He shook his head. “You seem like the most regular person I ever met, and it’s hard to remember you’ve got all this extra stuff.”
No one had ever put it quite like that.
“When you were coming in, did you smell something strange by—” he began, but then the doorbell rang.
Alcide went to answer it while I took off my coat.
He sounded pleased, and I turned to face the door with a smile. The young man coming in didn’t seem surprised to see me, and Alcide introduced him as Janice’s husband, Dell Phillips. I shook his hand, expecting to be as pleased with him as I was with Janice.
He touched me as briefly as possible, and then he ignored me. “I wondered if you could come by this afternoon and help me set up our outside Christmas lights,” Dell said—to Alcide, and Alcide only.
“Where’s Tommy?” Alcide asked. He looked disappointed. “You didn’t bring him by to see me?” Tommy was Janice’s baby.
Dell looked at me, and shook his head. “You’ve got a woman here, it didn’t seem right. He’s with my mom.”
The comment was so unexpected, all I could do was stand in silence. Dell’s attitude had caught Alcide flat-footed, too. “Dell,” he said, “don’t be rude to my friend.”
“She’s staying in your apartment, that says more than friend,” Dell said matter-of-factly. “Sorry, miss, this just isn’t right.”
“Judge not, that ye be not judged,” I told him, hoping I didn’t sound as furious as my clenched stomach told me I was. It felt wrong to quote the Bible when you were in a towering rage. I went into the guest bedroom and shut the door.
After I heard Dell Phillips leave, Alcide knocked on the door.
“You want to play Scrabble?” he asked.
I blinked. “Sure.”
“When I was shopping for Tommy, I picked up a game.”
“I’ll pour us a Coke,” I said. Not for the first time, I noticed that the apartment was quite cool, though of course it was much warmer than outside. I wished I had brought a light sweater to put on, and I wondered if it would offend Alcide if I asked him to turn the heat up. Then I remembered how warm his skin was, and I figured he was one of those people who runs kind of hot. Or maybe all Weres were like that? I pulled on the sweatshirt I’d worn yesterday, being very careful when I eased it over my hair.
Alcide had folded himself onto the floor on one side of the table, and I settled on the other. It had been a long time since either of us played Scrabble, so we studied the rules for a while before we began the game.
Alcide had graduated from Louisiana Tech. I’d never been to college, but I read a lot, so we were about even on the extent of our vocabulary. Alcide was the better strategist. I seemed to think a little faster.
I scored big with “quirt,” and he stuck his tongue out at me. I laughed, and he said, “Don’t read my mind, that would be cheating.”
“Of course I wouldn’t do any such thing,” I said demurely, and he scowled at me.
I lost—but only by twelve points. After a pleasantly quarrelsome rehash of the game, Alcide got up and took our glasses over to the kitchen. He put them down and began to search through the cabinets, while I stored the game pieces and replaced the lid.
“Where you want me to put this?” I asked.
“Oh, in the closet by the door. There are a couple of shelves in there.”
I tucked the box under one arm and went to the closet. The smell I’d noticed earlier seemed to be stronger.
“You know, Alcide,” I said, hoping I wasn’t being tacky, “there’s something that smells almost rotten, right around here.”
“I’d noticed it, too. That’s why I’m over here looking through the cabinets. Maybe there’s a dead mouse?”
As I spoke, I was turning the doorknob.
I discovered the source of the smell.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, nononono.”
“Don’t tell me a rat got in there and died,” Alcide said.
“Not a rat,” I said. “A werewolf.”
The closet had a shelf above a hanging bar, and it was a small closet, intended only for visitors’ coats. Now it was filled by the swarthy man from Club Dead, the man who’d grabbed me by the shoulder. He was really dead. He’d been dead for several hours.
I didn’t seem to be able to look away.
Alcide’s presence at my back was an unexpected comfort. He stared over my head, his hands gripping my shoulders.
“No blood,” I said in a jittery voice.
“His neck.” Alcide was at least as shaken as I was.
His head really was resting on his shoulder, while still attached to his body. Ick, ick, ick. I gulped hard. “We should call the police,” I said, not sounding very positive about the process. I noted the way the body had been stuffed into the closet. The dead man was almost standing up. I figured he’d been shoved in, and then whoever had done the shoving had forced the door closed. He’d sort of hardened in position.
“But if we call the police . . .” Alcide’s voice trailed off. He took a deep breath. “They’ll never believe we didn’t do it. They’ll interview his friends, and his friends will tell them he was at Club Dead last night, and they’ll check it out. They’ll find out he got into trouble for bothering you. No one will believe we didn’t have a hand in killing him.”
“On the other hand,” I said slowly, thinking out loud, “do you think they’d mention a word about Club Dead?”
Alcide pondered that. He ran his thumb over his mouth while he thought. “You may be right. And if they couldn’t bring up Club Dead, how could they describe the, uh, confrontation? You know what they’d do? They’d want to take care of the problem themselves.”
That was an excellent point. I was sold: no police. “Then we need to dispose of him,” I said, getting down to brass tacks. “How are we gonna do that?”
Alcide was a practical man. He was used to solving problems, starting with the biggest.
“We need to take him out to the country somewhere. To do that, we have to get him down to the garage,” he said after a few moments’ thought. “To do that, we have to wrap him up.”
“The shower curtain,” I suggested, nodding my head in the direction of the bathroom I’d used. “Um, can we close the closet and go somewhere else while we work this out?”
“Sure,” Alcide said, suddenly as anxious as I was to stop looking at the gruesome sight before us.
So we stood in the middle of the living room and had a planning session. The first thing I did was turn off the heat in the apartment altogether, and open all the windows. The body had not made its presence known earlier only because Alcide liked the temperature kept cool, and because the closet door fit well. Now we had to disperse the faint but pervasive smell.
“It’s five flights down, and I don’t think I can carry him that far,” Alcide said. “He needs to go at least some of the distance in the elevator. That’s the most dangerous part.”
We kept discussing and refining, until we felt we had a workable procedure. Alcide asked me twice if I was okay, and I reassured him both times; it finally dawned on me that he was thinking I might break into hysterics, or faint.
“I’ve never been able to afford to be too finicky,” I said. “That’s not my nature.” If Alcide expected or wanted me to ask for smelling salts, or to beg him to save little me from the big bad wolf, he had the wrong woman.
I might be determined to keep my head, but that’s not to say I felt exactly calm. I was so jittery when I went to get the shower curtain that I had to restrain myself from ripping it from the clear plastic rings. Slow and steady, I told myself fiercely. Breathe in, breathe out, get the shower curtain, spread it on the hall floor.
It was blue and green with yellow fish swimming serenely in even rows.
Alcide had gone downstairs to the parking garage to move his truck as close to the stair door as possible. He’d thoughtfully brought a pair of work gloves back up with him. While he pulled them on, he took a deep breath—maybe a mistake, considering the body’s proximity. His face a frozen mask of determination, Alcide gripped the corpse’s shoulders and gave a yank.
The results were dramatic beyond our imagining. In one stiff piece, the biker toppled out of the closet. Alcide had to leap to his right to avoid the falling body, which banged against the kitchen counter and then fell sideways onto the shower curtain.
“Wow,” I said in a shaky voice, looking down at the result. “That turned out well.”
The body was lying almost exactly as we wanted it. Alcide and I gave each other a sharp nod and knelt at each end. Acting in concert, we took one side of the plastic curtain and flipped it over the body, then the other. We both relaxed when the man’s face was covered. Alcide had also brought up a roll of duct tape—real men always have duct tape in their trucks—and we used it to seal the wrapped body in the curtain. Then we folded the ends over, and taped them. Luckily, though a hefty guy, the Were hadn’t been very tall.
We stood up and let ourselves have a little moment of recovery. Alcide spoke first. “It looks like a big green burrito,” he observed.
I slapped a hand over my mouth to stifle a fit of the giggles.
Alcide’s eyes were startled as he stared at me over the wrapped corpse. Suddenly, he laughed, too.
After we’d settled down, I asked, “You ready for phase two?”
He nodded, and I pulled on my coat and scooted past the body and Alcide. I went out to the elevator, closing the apartment door behind me very quickly, just in case someone passed by.
The minute I punched the button, a man appeared around the corner and came to stand by the elevator door. Perhaps he was a relative of old Mrs. Osburgh, or maybe one of
the senators was making a flying trip back to Jackson. Whoever he was, he was well dressed and in his sixties, and he was polite enough to feel the obligation of making conversation.
“It’s really cold today, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but not as cold as yesterday.” I stared at the closed doors, willing them to open so he would be gone.
“Did you just move in?”
I had never been so irritated with a courteous person before. “I’m visiting,” I said, in the kind of flat voice that should indicate the conversation is closed.
“Oh,” he said cheerfully. “Who?”
Luckily the elevator chose that moment to arrive and its doors snicked open just in time to save this too-genial man from getting his head snapped off. He gestured with a sweep of his hand, wanting me to precede him, but I took a step back, said, “Oh my gosh, I forgot my keys!” and walked briskly off without a backward glance. I went to the door of the apartment next to Alcide’s, the one he’d told me was empty, and I knocked on the door. I heard the elevator doors close behind me, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
When I figured Mr. Chatty had had time to get to his car and drive out of the garage—unless he was talking the ears off the security guard—I recalled the elevator. It was Saturday, and there was no telling what people’s schedules would be like. According to Alcide, many of the condos had been bought as an investment and were subleased to legislators, most of who would be gone for the pre-holidays. The year-round tenants, however, would be moving around in atypical ways, since it was not only the weekend, but also only two weekends before Christmas. When the creaky contraption came back to the fifth floor, it was empty.
I dashed back to 504, knocked twice on the door, and dashed back to the elevator to hold the doors open. Preceded by the legs of the corpse, Alcide emerged from the apartment. He moved as quickly as a man can while he’s carrying a stiff body over his shoulder.
This was our most vulnerable moment. Alcide’s bundle looked like nothing on this earth but a corpse wrapped in a shower curtain. The plastic kept the smell down, but it was still noticeable in the small enclosure. We made it down one floor safely, then the next. At the third floor, our nerve ran out. We stopped the elevator, and to our great relief it opened onto an empty corridor. I darted out and over to the stair door, holding it open for Alcide. Then I scampered down the stairs ahead of him, and looked through the pane of glass in the door to the garage.