Dead in the Family ss-10

by Charlaine Harris

  Bill nodded to both of them, and without further ado we left Belle Rive.

  Caroline Bellefleur, Bill’s great-granddaughter, died in the early hours of the morning.

  Bill sat with the family during the funeral, which took place the next night, to the profound amazement of the town.

  I sat at the back with Sam.

  It wasn’t an occasion for tears; without a doubt, Caroline Bellefleur had had a long life—a life not devoid of sorrow, but at least full of moments of compensatory happiness. She had very few remaining contemporaries, and those who were still alive were almost all too tottery to come to her funeral.

  The service seemed quite normal until we drove out to the cemetery, which didn’t have night lighting—of course—and I saw that temporary lights had been set up around the perimeter of the grave in the Bellefleur plot. That was a strange sight. The minister had a hard time reading the service until a member of the congregation held his own flashlight to the page.

  The bright lights in the dark night were an unpleasant reminder of the recovery of Basim al Saud’s body. It was hard to think properly about Miss Caroline’s life and legacy with all the conjecture rattling around in my head. And why hadn’t anything already happened? I felt as though I were living waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wasn’t aware my hand had tightened on Sam’s arm until he turned to look at me with some alarm. I forced my fingers to relax and bowed my head for the prayer.

  The family, I heard, was going to Belle Rive for a buffet meal after the service. I wondered if they’d gotten Bill his favorite blood. Bill looked awful. He was using a cane at the grave site. Something had to be done about finding his sibling, since he wasn’t taking action himself. If there was a chance his sibling’s blood might cure him, the effort had to be made.

  I’d driven to the funeral with Sam, and since my house was so close, I told Sam I’d walk back from the grave site. I’d stuck a little flashlight in my purse, and I reminded Sam I knew the cemetery like the back of my hand. So when all the other attendees took off, including Bill, to go to Belle Rive for the buffet meal, I waited in the shadows until the cemetery employees started filling in the hole, and then I walked through the trees to Bill’s house.

  I still had a key.

  Yes, I knew I was being a terrible busybody. And maybe I was doing the wrong thing. But Bill was wasting away, and I just couldn’t sit by and let him do it.

  I unlocked the front door and went to Bill’s office, which had been the Compton formal dining room. Bill had all his computer gear set up on a huge table, and he had a rolling chair he’d gotten at Office Depot. A smaller table served as a mailing station, where Bill prepared copies of his vampire database to send to purchasers. He advertised heavily in vampire magazines—Fang, of course, and Dead Life, which appeared in so many languages. Bill’s newest marketing effort involved hiring vampires who spoke many different languages to translate all the information so he could sell foreign-language editions of his worldwide vampire listing service. As I remembered from a previous visit, there were a dozen CD copies of his database in cases by his mailing station. I double-checked to make sure I had one that was in English. Wouldn’t do me much good to get one in Russian.

  Of course, Russian reminded me of Alexei, and thinking of Alexei reminded me all over of how worried/angry/frightened I was about Eric’s silence.

  I could feel my mouth pinching together in a really unpleasant expression as I thought about that silence. But I had to pay attention to my own little problem right now, and I scooted out of the house, relocked the door, and hoped Bill wouldn’t pick up on my scent in the air.

  I went through the cemetery as quickly as if it had been daytime. When I was in my own kitchen, I looked around for a good hiding place. I finally fi xed on the linen closet in the hall bathroom as a good spot, and I put the CD under the stack of clean towels. I didn’t think even Claude could use five towels before I got up the next day.

  I checked my answering machine; I checked my cell phone, which I hadn’t taken to the service. No messages. I undressed slowly, trying to imagine what could have happened to Eric. I’d decided I wouldn’t call him, no matter what. He knew where I was and how to reach me. I hung my black dress in the closet, put my black heels on the shoe rack, and then pulled on my Tweety Bird nightshirt, an old favorite. Then I went to bed, mad as a wet hen.

  And scared.

  Chapter 10

  Claude hadn’t come home the night before. His car wasn’t by the back door. I was glad someone had gotten lucky. Then I told myself not to be so pitiful.

  “You’re doing okay,” I said, looking in the mirror so I’d believe it. “Look at you! Great tan, Sook!” I had to be in for the lunch shift, so I got dressed right after I’d eaten breakfast. I retrieved the purloined CD from under the towels. I’d either pay Bill for it or return it, I told myself virtuously. I hadn’t really stolen it if I planned to pay for it. Someday. I looked at the clear plastic case in my hands. I wondered how much the FBI would pay for it. Despite all Bill’s attempts to make sure only vampires bought the CD, it would be truly amazing if no one else had it.

  So I opened it and popped it into my computer. After a preliminary whir, the screen popped up. “The Vampire Directory,” it said in Gothic lettering, red on a black screen. Stereotype, anyone?

  “Enter your code number,” prompted the screen.

  Uh-oh.

  Then I remembered there’d been a little Post-it on top of the case, and I dug it out of the wastebasket. Yep, this was surely a code. Bill would never have attached the code to the box if he hadn’t believed his house was secure, and I felt a pang of guilt. I didn’t know what procedure he’d established, but I assumed he put the code in a directory when he mailed out the disc to a happy customer. Or maybe he’d put a “destruct” code on the paper for fools like me, and the whole thing would blow up in my face. I was glad no one else was in the house after I typed in the code and hit Enter, because I dropped to my knees under the desk.

  Nothing happened, except some more whirring, and I figured I was safe. I scrambled back into my chair.

  The screen was showing me my options. I could search by country of residence, country of origin, name, or last sighting. I clicked on “Residence,” and I was prompted: “Which country?” I could pick from a list. After I clicked on “USA,” I got another prompt: “What state?” And another list. I clicked on “Louisiana” and then on “Compton.” There he was, in a modern picture taken at his house. I recognized the paint color. Bill was smiling stiffly, and he didn’t look like a party animal, that’s for sure. I wondered how he’d fare with a dating service. I began to read his biography. And sure enough, there at the bottom, I read, “Sired by Lorena Ball of Louisiana, 1870.”

  But there was no listing for “brothers” or “sisters.”

  Okay, it wasn’t going to be that easy. I clicked on the boldfaced name of Bill’s sire, the late, unlamented Lorena. I was curious as to what her entry would say, since Lorena had met the ultimate death, at least until they learned how to resuscitate ashes.

  “Lorena Ball,” her entry read, with only a drawing. It was a pretty good likeness, I thought, cocking my head as I looked it over. Turned in 1788 in New Orleans. lived all across the South but returned to Louisiana after the Civil War. had “met the sun,” murder by person or persons “unknown.” Huh. Bill knew perfectly well who’d killed Lorena, and I could only be glad he hadn’t put my name in the directory. I wondered what would have happened to me if he had. See, you think you have enough to worry about, but then you think of a possibility you’d never imagined and you realize you have even more problems.

  Okay, here we go. “Sired Bill Compton (1870) and Judith Vardamon (1902).”

  Judith. So this was Bill’s “sister.”

  After some more clicking and reading, I discovered that Judith Vardamon was still “alive,” or at least she had been when Bill had been compiling his database. She lived in Little Rock.

&nbs
p; I further discovered I could send her an e-mail. Naturally, she wasn’t obliged to answer it.

  I stared down at my hands, and I thought hard. I thought about how awful Bill looked. I thought about his pride, and the fact that he hadn’t yet contacted this Judith, though he suspected her blood would cure him. Bill wasn’t a fool, so there was some good reason he hadn’t called this other child of Lorena. I just didn’t know that reason. But if Bill had decided she shouldn’t be contacted, he knew what he was doing, right? Oh, to hell with it.

  I typed in her e-mail address. And moved the cursor down to the topic. Typed “Bill’s ill.” Thought that looked almost funny. Almost changed it, but didn’t. Moved the cursor down to the body of the e-mail, clicked again. Hesitated. Then I typed, “I’m Bill Compton’s neighbor. I don’t know how long it’s been since you heard from him, but he lives at his old home place in Bon Temps, Louisiana, now. Bill’s got silver poisoning. He can’t heal without your blood. He doesn’t know I’m sending this. We used to date, and we’re still friends. I want him to get better.” I signed it, because anonymous is not my style.

  I clenched my teeth really hard together. I clicked on Send.

  As much as I wanted to keep the CD and browse through it, my little code of honor told me I had to return it without enjoying it, because I hadn’t paid. So I got Bill’s key and put the disc back in its plastic case and started across the cemetery.

  I slowed as I drew near to the Bellefleur plot. The flowers were still piled on Miss Caroline’s grave. Andy was standing there, staring at a cross made out of red carnations. I thought it was pretty awful, but this was definitely an occasion for the thought to count more than the deed. I didn’t think Andy was registering what was right in front of him anyway.

  I felt as though “Thief” were burned onto my forehead. I knew Andy wouldn’t care if I backed up a truck to Bill’s house and loaded up all the furniture and drove off with it. It was my own sense of guilt that was plaguing me.

  “Sookie,” Andy said. I hadn’t realized he’d noticed me.

  “Andy,” I said cautiously. I wasn’t sure where this conversation would go, and I had to leave for work soon. “You still have relatives in town? Or have they left?”

  “They’re leaving after lunch,” he said. “Halleigh had to work on some class preparations this morning, and Glen had to run into his office to catch up on paperwork. This has been hardest on Portia.”

  “I guess she’ll be glad when things get back to normal.” That seemed safe enough.

  “Yeah. She’s got a law practice to run.”

  “Did the lady who was taking care of Miss Caroline have another job to go to?” Reliable caregivers were as scarce as hens’ teeth and far more valuable.

  “Doreen? Yeah, she moved right across the garden to Mr. DeWitt’s.” After an uncomfortable pause, he said, “She kind of got on to me that night, after you-all left. I know I wasn’t polite to. Bill.”

  “It’s been a hard time for you-all.”

  “I just. It makes me mad that we were getting charity.”

  “You weren’t, Andy. Bill is your family. I know it must feel weird, and I know you don’t think much of vampires in general, but he’s your great-great-great-grandfather, and he wanted to help out his people. It wouldn’t make you feel funny if he’d left you money and he was out here with Miss Caroline under the ground, would it? It’s just that Bill’s still walking around.”

  Andy shook his head, as if flies were buzzing around it. His hair was thinning, I noticed. “You know what my grandmother’s last request was?”

  I couldn’t imagine. “No,” I said.

  “She left her chocolate cake recipe to the town,” he said, and he smiled. “A damn recipe. And you know what, they were as excited at the newspaper when I took that recipe in as if it were Christmas and I’d brought them a map to Jimmy Hoffa’s body.”

  “It’s going to be in the paper?” I sounded as thrilled as I felt. I bet there would be at least a hundred chocolate cakes in the oven the day the paper came out.

  “See, you’re all excited, too,” Andy said, sounding five years younger.

  “Andy, that’s big news,” I assured him. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go return something.” And I hurried through the rest of the cemetery to Bill’s house. I put the CD, complete with its little sticky note, on top of the pile from which I’d taken it, and I skedaddled.

  I second-guessed myself, and third-, fourth-, and fi fth-guessed, too. At Merlotte’s I worked in a kind of haze, concentrating fiercely on getting lunch orders right, being quick, and responding instantly to any request. My other sense told me that despite my efficiency, people weren’t glad to see me coming, and really I couldn’t blame them.

  Tips were low. People were ready to forgive inefficiency, as long as you smiled while you were sloppy. They didn’t like the unsmiling, quick-handed me.

  I could tell (simply because he thought it so often) that Sam was assuming I’d had a fight with Eric. Holly thought that I was having my period.

  And Antoine was an informant.

  Our cook had been lost in his own broody mood. I realized how resistant he normally was to my telepathy only when he forgot to be. I was waiting on an order to be up at the hatch, and I was looking at Antoine while he flipped a burger, and I heard directly from him, Not getting off work to meet that asshole again, he can just stuff it up his butt. I’m not telling him nothing else. Then Antoine, whom I’d come to respect and admire, flipped the burger onto its waiting bun and turned to the hatch with the plate in his hand. He met my eyes squarely.

  Oh shit, he thought.

  “Let me talk to you before you do anything,” he said, and I knew for sure that he was a traitor.

  “No,” I said, and turned away, going right to Sam, who was behind the bar washing glasses. “Sam, Antoine is some kind of agent for the government,” I said, very quietly.

  Sam didn’t ask me how I knew, and he didn’t question my statement. His mouth pressed into a hard line. “We’ll talk to him later,” he said. “Thanks, Sook.” I regretted now that I hadn’t told Sam about the Were buried on my land. I was always sorry when I didn’t tell Sam something, it seemed.

  I got the plate and took it to the right table without meeting Antoine’s eyes.

  Some days I hated my ability more than others. Today was one of those days. I had been much happier (though in retrospect, it had been a foolish happiness) when I’d assumed Antoine was a new friend. I wondered if any of the stories he’d told about going through Katrina in the Superdome had been true, or if those had been lies, too. I’d felt such sympathy for him. And I’d never had a hint until now that his persona was false. How could that be?

  First, I don’t monitor every single thought of every person. I block a lot of it out, in general, and I try especially hard to stay out of the heads of my co-workers. Second, people don’t always think about critical stuff in explicit terms. A guy might not think, I believe I’ll get the pistol from under the seat of my truck and shoot Jerry in the head for screwing my wife. I was much more likely to get an impression of sullen anger, with overtones of violence. Or even a projection of how it might feel to shoot Jerry. But the shooting of Jerry might not have reached the specific planning stage at the moment the shooter was in the bar, when I was privy to his thoughts.

  And mostly people didn’t act on their violent impulses, something I didn’t learn until after some very painful incidents as I grew up.

  If I spent my life trying to figure out the background of every single thought I heard, I wouldn’t have my own life.

  At least I had something to think about besides wondering what the hell was happening with Eric and the Long Tooth pack. At the end of my shift, I found myself in Sam’s office with Sam and Antoine.

  Sam shut the door behind me. He was furious. I didn’t blame him. Antoine was mad at himself, mad at me, and defensive with Sam. The atmosphere in the room was choking with anger and frustration and fear.
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  “Listen, man,” Antoine said. He was standing facing Sam. He made Sam look small. “Just listen, okay? After Katrina, I didn’t have no place to live and nothing to do. I was trying to find work and keep myself going. I couldn’t even get a damn FEMA trailer. Things were going bad. So I. I borrowed a car, to get to Texas to some relatives. I was gonna dump it where the cops could find it, get it back to the owner. I know it was stupid. I know I shouldn’ta done it. But I was desperate, and I did something dumb.”

  “Yet you’re not in jail,” Sam observed. His words were like a whip that barely flicked Antoine, drew a little bit of blood.

  Antoine breathed out heavily. “No, I’m not, and I’ll tell you why. My uncle is a werewolf, in one of the New Orleans packs. So I knew something about ’em. An FBI agent named Sara Weiss came to talk to me in jail. She was okay. But after she spoke with me once, she brought this guy Lattesta, Tom Lattesta. He said he was based in Rhodes, and I couldn’t figure out what he was doing in New Orleans. But he told me that he knew all about my uncle, and he figured that you-all were coming out sooner or later since the vamps did. He knew what you were, that there were other things besides wolves. He knew there’d be a lot of people didn’t like hearing that people who were part animal lived in with the rest of us. He described Sookie to me. He said she was something strange, too, and he didn’t know what. He sent me here to watch, to see what happened.”

  Sam and I exchanged glances. I don’t know what Sam had anticipated, but this was way more serious than I’d imagined. I figured back. “Tom Lattesta has known all along?” I said. “When did he start thinking there was something wrong with me?” Had it been before he saw the footage from the hotel explosion in Rhodes, which he’d used as the reason for approaching me a few months ago?

  “Half the time he’s sure you’re a fraud. Half the time he thinks you’re the real deal.”

  I turned to my boss. “Sam, he came to my house the other day. Lattesta. He told me that someone close to me, one of the great relatives”—I didn’t want to get more specific in front of Antoine—“had fixed it so he had to back off.”