The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories (Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood)

by Charlaine Harris

  “Good,” said JB, looking down at his daughter. “Then let’s find out how to get rid of it.”

  “Who’m I gonna call for that?” I wondered out loud.

  “Ghostbusters,” Sam said automatically. Then he looked embarrassed.

  “Me,” said a new voice, and we all rotated to look at Quiana. She still had the spoon in her hand, and it was dripping red.

  There was what you might call a significant pause.

  “I know stuff,” she said, sounding pretty unhappy about it. “I get pictures in my head.”

  The pause extended to an uncomfortable length. I had to say something. She was already full of regret at revealing herself, and I could see that clearly, anyway. “How long have you been psychic?” I asked, which was like saying, Do you come here often? But I was clean out of ideas.

  “Since I was little,” she said. “But with my parents, you know, I knew not to say anything after the first time . . . they got spooked.”

  That was probably an understatement, and I could completely sympathize with Quiana. I’d had the same problem. Having a little girl living with you who could read your mind had been tough on both my mother and my father, and consequently tough on me.

  “How does it happen?” I said, since Sam and JB were still floundering through their thoughts. “I mean, do you get clear pictures? What triggers them?”

  She shrugged, but I could tell she was relieved that I was taking her seriously. “It’s touch, mostly. I mean, I don’t have visions when I’m driving or anything like that.”

  “That’s so interesting,” I said, and I was totally sincere. It was kind of neat to know someone else who was completely human but also wasn’t normal.

  She felt the same way.

  “So when you touch the babies,” JB said abruptly, “what do you see?”

  “They’re little,” Quiana said with surprising gentleness. “I ain’t going to see nothing with them this little.”

  Since that wasn’t true, I had to applaud her for keeping her mouth shut. And I was grateful that she didn’t spell out whatever she had seen in her own head, that I didn’t have to see it with her. If anything was worse than reading people’s minds, it would be knowing their future—especially when there wasn’t anything you could do about it.

  “Can you . . . You can’t change anything?” I asked. “When you see something that’s going to happen?”

  “I cannot,” she said, with absolute finality. “I don’t have a bit of responsibility. But people make decisions, and that can change what I’ve seen.” Quiana’s golden skin flushed as we all stared at her.

  “Right now,” said Sam, getting from the bigger picture to the smaller, “do you think you can help us with the problems in this house?”

  Quiana looked down. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to try,” she said. “When I figure out what to do.” She looked at each of us questioningly. None of us had a helpful idea, at least not at the moment.

  I said, “I’m hoping that the funny feeling in the house will sort of wear away, myself. Sam opened the wall, we’ve found the hammer, so we know Albert did kill Isaiah. Surely that should set it all to rest.”

  JB said, “Is that the way it works?” He didn’t seem to have a doubt in the world that I would know the answer.

  “Friend, I don’t know,” I said. “If it doesn’t work that way, maybe we should call the Catholic priest.” One came to Bon Temps’s little church from a nearby town.

  “But this isn’t a demon that needs to be exorcised,” Quiana said, outraged. “It’s not a devil. It’s just real unhappy.”

  “It has to go be unhappy somewhere else,” JB said. “This is our house. These are our babies. They can’t go on crying all the time.”

  As if he’d pressed a cue button, we could hear Robbie start to wail in the house. We all sighed simultaneously, which would have been funny if we’d had a clue what to do. But further conversation didn’t trigger any plan, so we figured we might as well go back to the job that had brought us there.

  Sam and I picked up the painted shelves and went inside to put them up. Quiana followed, and she returned to the stove to stir the spaghetti sauce, her face tense with distress, her brain concentrating on fighting the unhappiness that flowed through the house like invisible water.

  Sam brought in the paint. While I painted the doorframe, the men put up the drywall to close up where the old closet door had been. Once that was done, Sam very carefully painted the new wall on the old babies’ room side while I painted the interior of the closet from the new babies’ room side. It was odd to hear his brushstrokes just a few millimeters away from mine. We were working on the same thing, but invisible to each other.

  It didn’t take long to finish my task. JB planned to put up two hanger rods for the twins’ tiny clothes, and shelving above them, but he’d left a few minutes before to run errands before going to work. JB had been moving slowly. When he’d gotten into his car, he’d sat for a moment, his head resting on the steering wheel. But before he’d reached the corner, he was smiling, and I felt my shoulders relax with relief.

  After cleaning his brushes and drop cloths, Sam left for Merlotte’s. It was my day off and I needed to take care of some bills. I could hardly wait to get out of the house. I offered to take Tara with me while I drove around town, and to my surprise she agreed to go. She sat quietly in the car the whole time, and I couldn’t tell if she was depressed or exhausted, or maybe both. She grew more talkative the longer we were away.

  “We can’t leave our house,” she said. “I can’t afford to buy another one, and we can’t live with JB’s folks. Besides, no one would buy it unless we can make it a regular home again.”

  Since I hadn’t been in the house as long as Tara, I recovered my spirits more quickly. “Maybe we’re just being silly, Tara. Maybe we’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  “Or a haunting out of a hammer,” she said, and we both managed to laugh.

  We returned to eat Quiana’s spaghetti and garlic bread in a much more grounded frame of mind. I can’t tell you how cheered I was by our little excursion . . . or how bleak I felt after we’d been back in the house only ten minutes. The exhausted babies slept for a while, and lunch was at least tolerable, but always at the back of our conversation was the feeling that any moment one of us would burst into tears.

  There wasn’t a mind I could read to get any information on what was happening in this house. There wasn’t an action I could take, a deed I could perform, that could help. I had a few friends who were witches, but Amelia Broadway, the only one I trusted, was in Europe for a month. I felt oddly stymied.

  • • •

  LATER THAT EVENING, we met back in the living room, even Sam and JB. No one had arranged it—it was like we were all drawn back to the house by whatever unhappy thing we’d disturbed.

  Tara had slipcovered the love seat and couch recently, and she’d hung some pretty pictures of the Thomas Kinkade school: lots of cute cottages with flowers, or lofty trees with the sun grazing the tops. This was the kind of house Tara wanted: peaceful, bright, happy.

  The house on Magnolia Street was not like that any longer.

  Tara was holding Sara, and JB was holding Robbie. Both babies were fussy—again, still—which upped the tension in the room. Tara, uncharacteristically, had decided to turn away from reality. She was blaming JB for the misery in the house.

  “He watches Ghost Hunters too often,” she said, for maybe the tenth time. “I’ve lived here for four years and I’ve never felt a thing wrong!”

  “Tara, there’s something wrong now,” I said, as quietly as I could. “You know there is. Quiana knows there is. We all know there is.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Tara said impatiently, and she jiggled Sara so hard that Sara started crying. Tara looked shocked, and for a moment I read her impulse to hand Sa
ra to someone else, anyone. Instead, she took a deep breath and rocked Sara with exaggerated gentleness. (She was terrified of turning into her mother. I think that says it all about Mama Thornton.)

  Quiana stood, and there was something desperately brave about the way she went into the sunroom and approached the closet. Her thick black hair pulled back in a band, her thin shoulders squared, her golden face determined. With great courage, Quiana stepped into the space where the hammer had been stowed for so long.

  I rose hastily, covering the few steps without a thought. I stood outside the closet looking in. Quiana turned a muddy white and her eyes rolled up. I sort of expected her to fall to the floor and convulse, but she stayed on her feet. Her small hands shot out in my direction. Without thinking, I grabbed them. They were freezing cold. I felt a charge of stinging electricity passing from her to me, and I made my own little shocked noise.

  “Sookie?” Sam was just about to put his hand on my shoulder when I stopped him with a sharp shake of my head. I could just see us forming a chain of shaking, grunting victims of whatever had entered Quiana Wong. I could see a shape in her brain, something that wasn’t Quiana. Someone else inhabited her for a few awful seconds.

  And then it was over. I had my arms around Quiana and her head on my shoulder. I was patting her a little desperately, saying, “Hey, you okay? You need to go to the hospital?”

  Quiana straightened, shaking her head as if she had cobwebs caught in her hair. She said, “Step back so I can get out of this fucking closet.”

  I did so very promptly.

  “What happened?” Sam said. The hairs on his arms were standing on end.

  Quiana was understandably freaked, but she was also excited. Her skin glowed with it. I’d never seen her look so lively.

  The babies were as quiet and big-eyed as fawns when a predator is near. JB looked scared and Tara looked angry, both pretty typical reactions.

  By an exchange of half-finished sentences, we agreed to adjourn to the backyard. Though it was hot, the heat was better than whatever had been in the closet.

  Tara brought all of us sweating cans of soda from the refrigerator, and we sat in the darkness, the area lit only by the light coming from the house windows. I wondered what the neighbors would think of our silent, somber party if they could see over Tara’s fence.

  “So, what was it?” I asked Quiana when she looked a little more collected.

  “It was a ghost,” she said promptly.

  “So it must have been the boy Isaiah,” I said. “Since he was the murder victim. But why would his ghost be in this house? He was killed next door, right? Andy and Halleigh haven’t had any problems, because Andy would have told me.” (On purpose or by accident—Andy was a clear broadcaster.)

  “There weren’t any bones or anything,” Tara objected. “Just the hammer.” Quiana leaned over to take one of the twins from Tara, and Tara hesitated before letting Quiana take the baby. I could feel Quiana’s sadness, but she didn’t blame Tara. “Shouldn’t there be remains of a body if there’s a ghost here?”

  “Ghosts don’t have to be where their physical remains are laid,” Quiana said, her voice weary. “They’re stuck where the emotion . . . grabbed them up.”

  “Huh?” Tara said.

  “It’s the strong emotion that imprints them on the place,” Quiana told us. “It’s the trauma.”

  Now that she’d decided to tell us she was a psychic, Quiana was just full of information.

  “What kind of trauma?” JB said.

  “Usually the death trauma,” Quiana said, a little impatiently. “If a person dies real scared, real angry, he leaves his imprint on the space where that emotion took over. Or sometimes the person gets fixed on an object that played a part in the traumatic event. Like a bloody hammer? And after he dies, that’s where his ghost manifests. In this case, the hammer and the closet are the objects.”

  “Huh,” Sam said. He didn’t sound like he was automatically signing up for the Ghost Hunters Club, but he didn’t sound skeptical, either. More like he was chewing these new ideas over. That was kind of the way I felt. My world had not included this before now. “So you’re saying he—is it a guy?—could be buried anywhere.”

  “In the movies, when you find the bones, the ghost is laid,” JB said unexpectedly.

  “The murder victim was Isaiah Wechsler, and his headstone is out in the cemetery by my house,” I said.

  “But someone’s not resting easy,” JB said, sounding just as reasonable. “You know that, Sookie.”

  Suddenly I felt tired and depressed, more depressed than I’d ever been in my life. And that just wasn’t me. I’m not saying I’m Pollyanna, but this sudden misery simply wasn’t my normal style.

  “Sam,” I said, “do you think you could change to your bloodhound form? And maybe go over the yard? If there was a burial that had to do with the murder, it would be really old, and hard to scent.” I shrugged. “But it’s worth a try.”

  “This is real life,” Tara said, not exactly as if she were angry, but simply protesting that none of this should be happening.

  Real life? I almost laughed. Experiencing a ghost secondhand and looking for a corpse weren’t what I wanted from my real life. On the other hand, worse things had happened to me.

  “All right,” Sam said grudgingly. “But not tonight. It’s nowhere near the full moon, so it won’t be as easy to change. I need a full night’s sleep first.” I wouldn’t do this for anyone but her, Sam thought, feeling ashamed that he was dragging his feet.

  I could only be grateful I had such a friend.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY I was at Tara’s house by midafternoon. Sam pulled up just as I got out of my car.

  I was startled to see JB and Tara on their way out, in workout clothes. “I got called in to substitute for another trainer,” JB explained.

  I looked at Tara, my eyebrows raised. She said, “I have to get the hell out of this house. Quiana just got here. She’s in charge of the twins.” In truth, Tara looked awful, and JB not much better. I nodded. “We’ll keep on with the plan, then,” I said, and they were out the door before I could say good-bye.

  When Sam and I went in the kitchen, Quiana was bathing Robbie, while Sara sat in her infant seat. The babysitter looked determined to do her job. Robbie was whimpering, and I picked up Sara from her infant seat and patted her back, hoping she’d stay quiet. But she didn’t. She began to cry. It looked as if Quiana needed some help for a while.

  Since there wasn’t a third baby for Sam to hold, he went to work on the hardware for the new closet doors. I walked Sara around the house, trying to make her happier, and when I went through the sunroom, I helped by handing Sam whatever he needed. Sometimes being a telepath can be handy.

  “Do you feel as lousy as I do?” he asked, as both babies escalated to full Defcon Five. I chickened out and put Sara in her infant seat in the kitchen while Quiana dressed Robbie.

  “At least that lousy,” I said.

  “I wonder if hauntings are all like this.”

  “I hope I never experience another one to find out,” I said. “I wonder . . .” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “I wonder if any of this would have happened if Quiana hadn’t been here. If a psychic hadn’t been around, would we have had the same experience? Would the hammer have been a haunted hammer, or just a bloody hammer?”

  Sam shrugged and laid down his tools. “Who knows?” He took a deep breath. “Come on. If I’m going to turn, I want to get it over with. Kennedy is watching the bar, but I want to get back sooner rather than later.” The atmosphere of the house was having its way with Sam.

  I followed him through the house. Quiana watched us pass through the kitchen, her face dark with unhappiness, her eyes shadowed. The babies had finally gotten quiet in their infant seats, watching their nanny clean up from the bathing ordeal. I looked into
her brain to be sure that Quiana was herself and that she was alert; Robbie and Sara were safe.

  Though I’d seen Sam change before, I could never get jaded about watching a human turn into an animal. I’d overheard some college kids in the bar talking about the physics of shapeshifting, and they’d seemed to think that the transformation was impossible. So much for their impossibilities. It was happening before me: a full-sized man changed into a bloodhound. Sam liked to turn into dogs, because humans weren’t as likely to shoot him by mistake. As a true shapeshifter, he had an advantage over wereanimals, who had to transform to one thing—werewolf, of course, or weretiger, werewombat—whatever their genetic makeup was. Sam enjoyed the variety. Sam, who normally had a smooth and swift transition, was panting on the ground when I got a scare.

  “Smooth move,” Quiana said from right behind me. I jumped about a mile. “I wish I could do that,” she added.

  “Hell in a handbasket, Quiana! Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I was making plenty of noise,” she said casually. “You were just too interested in watching.”

  I opened the back door and threw Sam’s clothes on one of the dinette chairs. “Aren’t you supposed to be with the twins?”

  She unclipped a device from the waistband of her shorts. “I got the monitor right here. They’re both asleep in their cribs. Finally.”

  Sam rolled to his feet and ambled over to me. I never knew exactly how much he understood human speech while he was in animal form, but he was looking at the house and his chest was rumbling. “I’m going to check on them,” I said. If that sounded distrustful, I didn’t care.

  The atmosphere in the house seemed somewhat easier, more peaceful. I wondered if the bad influence was wearing away—or was it because we three were out in the yard? That was a disturbing idea. I made myself put it aside, and I looked at the sleeping Robbie, hardly daring to breathe loud. The baby seemed perfectly all right. So did Sara, in her own crib. I put my hand gently on Sara’s back. The inchoate dreams of an infant flowed into my head. I thought of putting both of them in the stroller and taking them with me into the backyard, but the house was so pleasant and cool, and it was so hot outside. We had the monitor.