My good mood evaporated. I felt a profound depression settle on my shoulders. Hearing this spoken out loud made it seem even more horrible. I could think of no comment to offer. “What does Tray hear about what might happen to them?” I said finally.
“Depends on whose bullet hit Agent Weiss. If it was Donny’s—well, he’s dead. Whit can say he was being shot at, so he shot back. He can say he didn’t know anything about a plan to harm you. He was visiting his girlfriend and happened to have some pieces of wood in the back of his pickup.”
“What about Helen Ellis?”
“She told Andy Bellefleur she just came to the trailer to pick up the kids because they’d done really well on their report cards, and she’d promised to take them to the Sonic for an ice cream treat. Any more than that, she doesn’t know diddly squat.” Amelia’s face expressed extreme skepticism.
“So Arlene is the only one talking.” I dried the baking sheet. I’d made biscuits that morning. Baking therapy, cheap and satisfying.
“Yeah, and she may recant any minute. She was real shaken up when she talked, but she’ll wise up. Maybe too late. At least we can hope so.”
I’d been right; Arlenewas the weakest link. “She gotten a lawyer?”
“Yeah. She couldn’t afford Sid Matt Lancaster, so she hired Melba Jennings.”
“Good move,” I said thoughtfully. Melba Jennings was only a couple of years older than me. She was the only African-American woman in Bon Temps who’d been to law school. She had a hard-as-nails facade and was confrontational in the extreme. Other lawyers had been known to take incredible detours to dodge Melba if they saw her coming. “Makes her look less of a bigot.”
“I don’t think it’s going to fool anyone, but Melba’s like a pit bull.” Melba had been in Amelia’s insurance agency on behalf of a couple of clients. “I better go make my bed,” Amelia said, standing and stretching. “Hey, Tray and I are going to the movies in Clarice tonight. Want to come?”
“You’ve really been trying to include me on your dates. You’re not getting bored with Tray already, I hope?”
“Not a bit,” Amelia said, sounding faintly surprised. “In fact, I think he’s great. Tray’s buddy Drake has been pestering him, though. Drake’s seen you in the bar, and he wants to get to know you.”
“He a Were?”
“Just a guy. Thinks you’re pretty.”
“I don’t do regular guys,” I said, smiling. “It just doesn’t work out very well.” It “worked out” disastrously, as a matter of fact. Imagine knowing what your date thinks of you every single minute.
Plus, there was the issue of Eric and our undefined but intimate relationship.
“Keep the possibility on the back burner. He’s really cute, and by cute, I mean hotter than a steam iron.”
After Amelia had tromped up the stairs, I poured myself a glass of tea. I tried to read, but I found I couldn’t concentrate on the book. Finally, I slid my paper bookmark in and stared into space, thinking about a lot of things.
I wondered where Arlene’s children were now. With Arlene’s old aunt, who lived over in Clarice? Or still with Helen Ellis? Did Helen like Arlene enough to keep Coby and Lisa?
I couldn’t rid myself of a nagging feeling of responsibility for the kids’ sad situation, but it was going to have to be one of those things I simply suffered. The person really responsible was Arlene. There was nothing I could do for them.
As if thinking of children had triggered a nerve in the universe, the phone rang. I got up and went to the wall-mounted unit in the kitchen. “Hello,” I said without enthusiasm.
“Ms. Stackhouse? Sookie?”
“Yes, this is she,” I said properly.
“This is Remy Savoy.”
My dead cousin Hadley’s ex, father of her child. “I’m glad you called. How’s Hunter?” Hunter was a “gifted” child, God bless him. He’d been “gifted” the same way I had been.
“He’s fine. Uh, about that thing.”
“Sure.” We were going to talk telepathy.
“He’s going to need some guidance soon. He’ll be starting kindergarten. They’re going to notice. I mean, it’ll take a while, but sooner or later . . .”
“Yeah, they’ll notice all right.” I opened my mouth to suggest that Remy bring Hunter over on my next day off or that I could drive to Red Ditch. But then I remembered that I was the target of a group of homicidal fairies. Not a good time for a young ’un to come visiting, and who’s to say they couldn’t follow me to Remy’s little house? So far none of them knew about Hunter. I hadn’t even told my great-grandfather about Hunter’s special talent. If Niall himself didn’t know, maybe none of the hostiles had uncovered the information.
On the whole, better to take no risks.
“I really want to meet with him and get to know him. I promise I’ll help him as much as I can,” I said. “Right now, it just isn’t possible. But since we have a little time to spare before kindergarten . . . maybe in a month or so?”
“Oh,” Remy said in a nonplussed way. “I was hoping to bring him over on my day off.”
“I have a little situation here that I have to resolve.” If I was alive after it was resolved . . . but I wasn’t going to imagine that. I tried to think of a palatable excuse, and of course, I did have one. “My sister-in-law just died,” I told Remy. “Can I call you when I’m not so busy with the details of . . .” I couldn’t think of a way to wrap up that sentence. “I promise it’ll be soon. If you don’t have a day off, maybe Kristen could bring him?” Kristen was Remy’s girlfriend.
“Well, that’s part of the problem,” Remy said, and he sounded tired but also a little amused. “Hunter told Kristen that he knew she didn’t really like him, and that she should stop thinking about his daddy without any clothes on.”
I drew a deep breath, tried not to laugh, didn’t manage it. “Iam sorry,” I said. “How did Kristen handle that?”
“She started crying. Then she told me she loved me but my kid was a freak, and she left.”
“Worst possible scenario,” I said. “Ah . . . do you think she’ll tell other people?”
“Don’t see why she wouldn’t.”
This sounded depressingly familiar: shades of my painful childhood. “Remy, I’m sorry,” I said. Remy had seemed like a nice guy on our brief acquaintance, and I had been able to see he was devoted to his son. “If it makes you feel any better, I survived that somehow.”
“But did your parents?” There was a trace of a smile in his voice, to his credit.
“No,” I said. “However, it didn’t have anything to do with me. They got caught by a flash flood when they were driving home one night. It was pouring rain, visibility was terrible, the water was black like the road, and they just drove down onto the bridge and got swept away.” Something buzzed in my brain, some kind of signal that this thought was significant.
“I’m sorry, I was just joking,” Remy was saying in a shocked voice.
“No, no problem. Just one of those things,” I said, the way you do when you don’t want the other person to fuss about your feelings.
We left it that I would call him when I had “some free time.” (That actually meant “when no one’s trying to kill me,” but I didn’t explain that to Remy.) I hung up and sat on the stool by the kitchen counter. I was thinking about my parents’ deaths for the first time in a while. I had some sad memories, but that was the saddest of all. Jason had been ten, and I had been seven, so my recollection wasn’t precise, but we’d talked about it over the years, of course, and my grandmother had recounted the story many times, especially as she grew older. It never varied. The torrential rain, the road leading down into the little hollow where the creek ran, the black water . . . and they’d been swept away into the dark. The truck had been found the next day; their bodies, a day or two after that.
I got dressed for work automatically. I slicked my hair up in an extra-tight ponytail, making sure any stray hairs were gelled into place. As I was tying my shoes, Amelia dashed downstairs to tell me that she’d checked her witch reference books.