Dead Reckoning (32 page)

“Where’d you get the car?” I called from the back porch.

“I bought it,” he said proudly.

I hoped he hadn’t used fairy enchantment or something. I was scared to ask. “Let me see your head,” I said, when he got into the house. I looked at the back of his skull where the gash had been. A thin white line, that was all. “Amazing,” I said. “How do you feel?”

“Better than I did yesterday. I’m ready to get back to work.” He went into the living room. “You’re cleaning,” he said. “Is there a special occasion?”

“Yes,” I said, smacking myself on the forehead. “I’m so sorry I forgot to tell you. I’m giving Tara Thornton—Tara du Rone—a baby shower tomorrow. She’s expecting twins, Claude believes. Oh, she got that confirmed.”

“Can I come?” he asked.

“It’s all right with me,” I said, taken aback. Most human guys would rather have their toenails painted than come to such a party. “You’ll be the only man there, but I assume that won’t bother you?”

“Sounds great,” he said, smiling that beautiful smile.

“You’ll have to keep your ears covered and listen to about a million comments about how much you look like Jason,” I said. “We’ll need to explain you.”

“Just tell them I’m your great-uncle,” he said.

For one fun moment, I envisioned doing just that. I had to give it up, though with some regret. “You look much too young to be my great-uncle, and everyone here knows my family tree. The human part of it,” I added hastily. “But I’ll think of something.”

While I vacuumed, Dermot looked at the big box of pictures and the smaller one of printed material that I hadn’t yet had a chance to go over. He seemed fascinated by the pictures. “We don’t use this technology,” he said.

I sat beside him when I’d put the vacuum away. I’d tried to arrange the images in chronological order, but it had been a hasty task, and I was sure I’d have to redo it.

The pictures at the front of the box were very old. People sitting in stiff groups, their backs rigid, their faces, too. If the backs were labeled, it was in spidery formal handwriting. Many of the men were bearded or mustached, and they wore hats and ties. The women were confined in long sleeves and skirts, and their posture was amazing.

Gradually as the Stackhouse family rolled along in time, the pictures became less posed, more spontaneous. The clothing morphed along with attitudes. Color began to tint faces and scenery. Dermot seemed genuinely interested, so I explained the background on some of the more recent snapshots. One was of a very old man holding a baby swathed in pink. “That’s me and one of my great-grandfathers; he died when I was little bitty,” I said. “That’s him and his wife when they were in their fifties. And this is my grandmother Adele and her husband.”

“No,” Dermot said. “That’s my brother Fintan.”

“No, this is my grandfather, Mitchell. Look at him.”

“He
is
your grandfather. Your true grandfather. Fintan.”

“How can you tell?”

“He’s made himself to look like Adele’s husband, but I can tell it’s my brother. He was my twin, after all, though we were not identical. Look here at his feet. His feet are smaller than those of the man who married Adele. Fintan was always careless that way.”

I spread out all the pictures of Grandmother and Grandfather Stackhouse. Fintan was in about a third of them. I’d suspected from her letter that Fintan had been around more than she’d realized, but this was just creepy. In every picture of Fintan-as-Mitchell, he was smiling broadly.

“She didn’t know about this, for sure,” I said. Dermot looked dubious. And I had to admit to myself that she had suspected. It was there, in her letter.

“He was playing one of his jokes,” Dermot said fondly. “Fintan was a great one for jokes.”

“But . . .” I hesitated, not sure how to phrase what I wanted to say. “You get that this was really wrong?” I said. “You understand that he was deceiving her on a couple of different levels?”

“She agreed to be lovers with him,” Dermot said. “He was very fond of her. What difference does it make?”

“It makes a lot of difference,” I said. “If she thought she was with one man when she was with another, that’s a huge deception.”

“But a harmless one, surely? After all, even you agree she loved both men, had sex with both of them willingly. So,” he asked again, “what difference does it make?”

I stared at him doubtfully. No matter how she felt about her husband or her lover, I still thought there was a moral issue here. In fact, I knew there was. Dermot didn’t seem to be able to discern that. I wondered if my great-grandfather would agree with me or with Dermot. I had a sinking feeling I knew.

“I better get back to work,” I said, with a tight smile. “Got to mop the kitchen. You going to get back to work in the attic?”

He nodded enthusiastically. “I love the machinery,” he said.

“Please close the attic door, then, because I’ve dusted down here and I don’t want to have to do that again before tomorrow afternoon.”

“Sure, Sookie.”

Dermot went up the stairs whistling. It was a tune I’d never heard before, which figured.

I gathered up the pictures, keeping separate the ones that Dermot had earmarked as featuring his brother. I was considering building a little fire with them. Up in the attic, the sander started up. I looked at the ceiling as if I could see Dermot through the boards. Then I shook myself and went back to work, but in an abstracted and uneasy mood.

When I was standing on a stepladder hanging the WELCOME BABY sign from the light fixture, I remembered I had to iron my great-grandmother’s tablecloth. I hate ironing, but it had to be done, and better today than tomorrow. When the stepladder was put away, I opened the ironing board—there’d been a built-in one in the previous kitchen—and set to work. The tablecloth was not exactly white anymore. It had aged to ivory. I soon had it smooth and beautiful, and touching it reminded me of high occasions in the past. I’d seen pictures including this very piece of cloth today; it had been on the kitchen table or the old sideboard for Thanksgivings and Christmases and wedding showers and anniversaries. I loved my family, and I loved those memories. I only regretted that there were so few of us to recall them.

And I was aware of another truth, another real thing. I realized I really didn’t appreciate the fairy sense of fun that had made a lie out of some of those memories.

By three that afternoon, the house was as close to ready as I could get it. The sideboard was draped with the tablecloth, the paper plates and napkins were out, the plastic forks and spoons. I’d polished the silver nut dish and a little tray for the cheese straws, which I’d made and frozen a couple of weeks before. I ran down my checklist. I was as ready as I could possibly be.

If I didn’t survive tonight, I was afraid that the baby shower would be a bust. I had to assume that my friends would be too jangled to go ahead with the shower if I got killed. Just in case, I left detailed notes about the location of everything that wasn’t already out. I even brought out my present for the babies, matching wicker baskets that could be used as traveling cribs. They were decorated with big gingham bows and packed full of useful stuff. I’d accumulated the items for the gift baskets on sale, bit by bit. Bottles for supplemental feeding, a baby thermometer, a few toys, a few receiving blankets, some picture books, bibs, a package of cloth diapers for use as spit-up rags. It felt strange to think that I might not be around to see the babies grow up.

It also felt strange that paying for the shower hadn’t been such a financial hardship, thanks to the money in my savings account.

Suddenly, I had an amazing idea. That made two in two days. As soon as I’d worked it out in my head, I was in my car and on my way to town. It felt weird walking into Merlotte’s on my day off. Sam looked surprised but pleased to see me. He was in his office with a stack of bills in front of him. I put another piece of paper on his desk. He looked at it. “What is this?” he said in a low voice.

“You know what it is. Don’t you give me that, Sam Merlotte. You need money. I’ve got money. You put this in your account today. You use it to pull the bar through until times are better.”

“I can’t take this, Sookie.” He didn’t meet my eyes.

“The hell you can’t, Sam. Look at me.”

Finally, he did.

“I’m not kidding. You put it in the bank today,” I said. “And if anything might happen to me, you can repay my estate within, say, five years.”

“Why would anything happen to you?” Sam’s face darkened.

“Nothing will. I’m just saying. It’s irresponsible to loan money without making arrangements to pay it back. I’m calling my lawyer and telling him all this, and he’ll draw up a paper. But right now, right this minute, you go to the bank.”

Sam looked away. I could feel the emotions sweeping over him. Truly, it felt wonderful to do something nice for him. He’d done so many nice things for me. He said, “All right.” I could tell it was hard for him, as it would be for almost any man, but he knew it was the sensible thing to do, and he knew it wasn’t charity.

“It’s a love offering,” I said, grinning at him. “Like we took up at church last Sunday.” That love offering had been for the missionaries in Uganda, and this one was for Merlotte’s Bar.

“I’d believe that,” he said, and met my eyes.

I kept my smile, but I began to feel a little self-conscious. “I have to go get ready,” I said.

“What for?” His reddish eyebrows drew together.

“Tara’s baby shower,” I said. “It’s an old-fashioned gals-only party, so you didn’t get invited.”

“I’ll try to contain my misery,” he said. He didn’t move.

“Are you getting up to go to the bank?” I asked sweetly.

“Uh, yeah, getting up right now.” He did get out of the chair and call down the hall to let the servers know he was running a quick errand. I got in my car at the same time he got in his truck. I don’t know about Sam, but I was feeling really good.

I did stop by my lawyer’s to tell him what I’d done. This would be my human, local lawyer, not Mr. Cataliades. Whom, by the way, I hadn’t heard from.

I swung by Maxine’s house to get the punch, thanked her profusely, left her a list of what I was going to do and had done for the shower arrangements (to her puzzlement), and took the frozen containers back to my house to pop in the little chest freezer on my back porch. I had the ginger ale set out on the counter to mix with the frozen juices.

I was as prepared as I could be for the baby shower.

Now I had to get ready to kill Victor.

“Hi,��� I said. “You got the check to the bank, yes?”

“Yes,” he said. “Since you told me like a million times. No problem there. I’m calling to tell you I just got a very weird phone call from your friend Amelia. She said she was calling me because you wouldn’t want to talk to her. She said it was about that thing you found. She looked it up. The cluviel dor?” He sounded it out very carefully.

“Yeah?”

“She didn’t want to talk over the phone to me about it, but she said to tell you urgently to check your e-mail. She said you were pretty bad about forgetting to do that. She didn’t seem to think you’d answer your phone if you knew from your caller ID that it was her on the phone.”

“I’ll go look at my e-mail right now.”

“Sookie?”

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

Almost certainly not. “Sure, Sam. Thanks for standing in place of the answering machine.”

“No problem.”

Amelia had certainly figured out how to get my attention. I took the cluviel dor out of the drawer and took it with me to the little desk in the living room where I’d put the computer. Yes, I had a lot of mail.

Most of it was junk, but there was one from Amelia, sure enough, and one from Mr. Cataliades that had come two days before. Color me surprised.

I was so curious I opened his message first. Though he wasn’t brief, he was to the point.

As Pam might say, “Fuck a zombie.” Mr. Cataliades was indeed my sponsor, the dark stranger who’d visited Gran. What did that mean? And he said he had read Amelia’s mind. Was he a telepath, too? Wasn’t that quite a coincidence? I had a feeling there was a lot to know about this, and though he’d only warned me about Sandra Pelt and using the cluviel dor, I got the distinct impression he was paving the way for a Big Bad Talk. I read over the message two more times hoping to extract some solid piece of information about the cluviel dor from it, but I had to conclude I got zilch.