“Claude, can you tell I’m not entirely human? How do I register on the fairy meter?” Fae-dar.
“If you were in a crowd of humans, I could pick you out blindfolded and say you are my kin,” Claude said without hesitation. “But if you were in the middle of the fae, I would call you human. It’s an elusive scent. Most vamps would think, ‘She smells good,’ and they’d enjoy being close to you. That would be the extent of it. Once they know you have fairy blood, they can attribute that enjoyment to it.”
So Bill really could be comforted by my little streak of fae, at least now that he knew how to identify it. I got up to rinse off my plate and pour another mugful of coffee, and in passing I grabbed Claude’s empty plate, too. He didn’t thank me.
“I appreciate your cooking,” I said. “We haven’t talked about how we’ll handle grocery expenses or household items.”
Claude looked surprised. “I hadn’t thought about it,” he said.
Well, at least that was honest. “I’ll tell you how Amelia and I did it,” I said, and in a few sentences I laid out the guidelines. Looking a little stunned, Claude agreed.
I opened the refrigerator. “These two shelves are yours,” I said, “and the rest are mine.”
“I get it,” he said.
Somehow I doubted that. Claude sounded like he was simply trying to give the impression that he understood and agreed. There was a good chance we’d have to have this conversation again. When he’d left to go upstairs, I took care of the dishes—after all, he’d cooked—and after I got dressed, I thought I’d read for a while. But I was too restless to concentrate on my book.
I heard cars coming down the driveway through the woods. I looked out the front window. Two police cars.
I’d been sure this was coming. But my heart sank down to my toes. Sometimes I hated being right. Whoever had killed Basim had planted his body on my land to implicate me in his death. “Claude,” I called up the stairs. “Get decent, if you’re not. The police are here.”
Claude, curious as ever, came down the stairs at a trot. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, like me. We went out on the front porch. Bud Dearborn, the sheriff (the regular human sheriff), was in the first car, and Andy Bellefleur and Alcee Beck were in the second. The sheriff and two detectives—I must be a dangerous criminal.
Bud got out of his car slowly, the way he did most things these days. I knew from his thoughts that Bud was increasingly a victim to arthritis, and he had some doubts about his prostate, too. Bud’s mashed-in face didn’t give any hint about his physical discomfort as he came up to the porch, his heavy belt creaking with the weight of all the things hanging from it.
“Bud, what’s up?” I asked. “Not that I’m not glad to see you-all.”
“Sookie, we got an anonymous phone call,” Bud said. “As you know, law enforcement couldn’t solve much without anonymous tips, but I personally don’t respect a person who won’t tell you who they are.”
I nodded.
“Who’s your friend?” Andy asked. He looked worn. I’d heard his grandmother, who’d raised him, was on her deathbed. Poor Andy. He’d much rather be there than here. Alcee Beck, the other detective, really didn’t like me. He never had, and his dislike had found a good foundation to settle on—his wife had been attacked by a Were who was trying to get to me. Even though I’d taken the guy out, Alcee was down on me. Maybe he was one of the rare people repulsed by my trace of fairy blood, but more likely, he just didn’t care for me. There was no point in trying to win him over. I gave him a nod, which he did not return.
“This here is my cousin Claude Crane from Monroe,” I said.
“How’s he related?” Andy asked. All three of these men knew the skein of blood ties that bound together practically the whole parish.
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Claude said. (Nothing would embarrass Claude, but he gave a good imitation.) “I’m from what you call the wrong side of the blanket.”
For once, I was grateful to Claude for taking that weight. I cast my eyes down as though I couldn’t bear to talk about the shame of it. “Claude and I are trying to get acquainted since we found out we were related,” I said.
I could see that fact go into their mental files. “Why y’all here?” I asked. “What did the anonymous caller say?”
“That you had a body buried in your woods.” Bud looked away as if he were a little ashamed to say something so outrageous, but I knew different. After years in law enforcement, Bud knew exactly what human beings could do, even the most normal-looking human beings. Even young blondes with big boobs. Maybe especially them.
“You didn’t bring any tracking dogs,” Claude observed. I was kind of hoping that Claude would keep his mouth shut, but I saw I wasn’t going to get my wish.
“I think a physical search will do it,” Bud said. “The location was real specific.” (And the tracking dogs were expensive to hire, he thought.)
“Oh my gosh,” I said, genuinely startled. “How could this person claim not to be involved if they knew where the body was exactly? I don’t get it.” I’d hoped Bud would tell me more, but he didn’t bite.
Andy shrugged. “We got to go look.”
“Look away,” I said, with absolute confidence. If they’d brought the dogs, I’d have been sweating bullets that they’d scent Debbie Pelt or the former resting site of Basim. “You’ll excuse me if I just stay here in the house while you-all tramp through the woods. I hope you don’t pick up too many ticks.” Ticks lurked on bushes and weeds, sensing your chemicals and body heat as you passed, then making a leap of faith. I watched Andy tuck his pants into his boots, and Bud and Alcee sprayed themselves.
After the men had disappeared into the woods, Claude said, “You’d better tell me why you’re not scared.”
“We moved the body last night,” I said, and turned to sit down at the desk where I’d installed the computer I’d gotten from Hadley’s apartment. Let Claude put that in his pipe and smoke it! After a few seconds, I heard him stomp back up the stairs.
Since I had to wait for the men to come out of the woods, I might as well check my e-mail. A lot of forwarded messages, most of them inspirational or patriotic, from Maxine Fortenberry, Hoyt’s mother. I deleted those without reading them. I read an e-mail from Andy Bellefleur’s pregnant wife, Halleigh. It was a strange coincidence, hearing from her while her husband was out in back of my house on a wild-goose chase.
Halleigh told me she was feeling great. Just great! But Grand-mama Caroline was failing fast, and Halleigh feared Miss Caroline wouldn’t live to see her great-grandchild born.
Caroline Bellefleur was very old. Andy and Portia had been brought up in Miss Caroline’s house after their parents had died. Miss Caroline had been a widow for longer than she’d been married. I had no memory of Mr. Bellefleur at all, and I was pretty sure Portia and Andy hadn’t known him that long. Andy was older than Portia, and Portia was a year older than me, so I estimated that Miss Caroline, who’d once been Renard Parish’s finest cook and had made the best chocolate cake in the world, was at least in her nineties.
“Anyway,” Halleigh went on, “she wants to find the family Bible more than anything else on this earth. You know she’s always got a bee in her bonnet, and now it’s finding that Bible, which has been missing for umpty-ump years. I had a wild thought. She thinks way back our family was connected to some branch of the Comptons. Would you ask your neighbor, Mr. Compton, if he would mind very much looking for that old Bible? It seems like a long shot, but she hasn’t lost any of her personality though she’s physically weak.”