Dead Ever After (Sookie Stackhouse #13)(32)
Author: Charlaine Harris

The boredom – and my inability to get away from my own fearful conjectures – was awful. Maybe it hadn’t been so bad for Jason when he’d been in jail? My brother didn’t like to read, and he wasn’t much on reflection, either. I would ask him how he’d managed, the next time I saw him.

Now Jason and I had more in common than we’d ever had in our lives. We were both jailbirds.

He’d been arrested for murder, too, in the past, and like me, he was innocent, though evidence had pointed in his direction. Oh, poor Gran! This would have been so awful for her. I hoped she couldn’t see me from heaven.

Jane was snoring, but seeing her familiar face was somehow homey. I used the toilet while she was out of it. There would be plenty of awfulness in my future, but I was trying to forestall a little bit of it.

I’d never been in a jail cell before. It was pretty disgusting. Tiny, battered, scarred, concrete floor, bunk beds. After a while, I got tired of squatting on the floor. Since Jane was sprawled across the bottom bunk, with some difficulty I hauled myself to the top level. I thought of all the faces I’d seen through the bars as I’d gone to my cell: startled, curious, bored, hard. If I’d known all the people on the free side of the bars, I’d also recognized almost all those men and women on the other side, too. Some were just f**kups, like Jane. Some of them were very bad people.

I could hardly breathe, I was so scared.

And the worst part – well, not the worst part, but a real bad part – was that I was guilty. Oh, not of Arlene’s death. But I had killed other people, and I’d watched many more die at the hands of others. I couldn’t even be sure I remembered them all.

In a kind of panic, I scrambled to recall their names, how they’d died. The harder I tried, the more the memories became jumbled. I saw the faces of people I’d watched perish, people whose deaths I hadn’t caused. But also I saw the faces of people (or creatures) I’d killed; the fairy Murry, for example, and the vampire Bruno. The werefox Debbie Pelt. Not that I’d gone out hunting them because I had a beef with them; they’d all been intent on killing me. I kept telling myself that it had been okay to defend my life, but the reiteration of their death scenes was my conscience letting me know that (though I was not guilty of the crime that had put me here) jail was not a totally inappropriate place for me to be.

This was the rock-bottom moment of my life. I had a lot of clarity about my own character; I had more time than I wanted to think about how I’d landed where I was. As unpleasant as the first hours in the cell were, they got worse when Jane woke up.

First, she was sick from both ends, and since the toilet was sitting completely exposed, that was just . . . disgusting. After Jane weathered that phase, she was so miserable and hungover that her thoughts were dull throbs of pain and remorse. She promised herself over and over that she would do better, that she would not drink so much again, that her son would not have to fetch her again, that she would start that very evening to cut way back on the beers and shots. Or since she felt so horrible today, maybe tomorrow would be soon enough. That would be much more practical.

I endured a few more mental and verbal cycles like this before Jane realized she had a companion in the cell and that her new buddy wasn’t one of her usual cell mates.

"Sookie, what are you doing here?" Jane said. She still sounded pretty puny, though God knew her body should be empty of toxins.

"I’m as surprised as you are," I said. "They think I killed Arlene."

"So she did get out of jail. I really did see her, not last night but the night before," Jane said, brightening a little. "I thought it was a dream or something, since I was sure she was behind bars."

"You saw her? Somewhere besides Merlotte’s?" I didn’t think Jane had been in Merlotte’s when Arlene had come to speak to me.

"Yeah, I was gonna tell you yesterday, but I got sidetracked by that lawyer talk."

"Where did you see her, Jane?"

"Oh, where’d I see her? She was . . ." This was clearly a big effort for Jane. She ran her fingers through her snarled hair. "She was with two guys."

Presumably these were the friends Arlene had mentioned. "When was this?" I tried to ask this very gently, because I didn’t want to risk knocking Jane off course. She wasn’t the only one who was having a hard time staying on track. I had to concentrate hard to both breathe and ask coherent questions. After Jane’s episodes of illness, it smelled pretty awful in our little bunkhouse.

Jane tried to recall the time and place of her Arlene encounter, but it was such a struggle and there were so many less taxing things to think about that it took her a while. However, Jane was at heart a kind person, so she fumbled through her memories till she arrived at success. "I seen her out back of . . . you remember that real big guy who repaired motorcycles?"

I had to clamp down on myself to keep my voice casual. "Tray Dawson. Had a shop and a house out where Court Street turns into Clarice Road." Tray’s large shop/garage stood between Tray’s house and Brock and Chessie Johnson’s, where Coby and Lisa were living. There were only woods behind those houses, and since Tray’s was the last one on the street, it was a secluded spot.

"Yeah. She was out there, in back of his house. It’s been closed for a while now, so I got no idea what she was doing."

"You know the guys she was with?" I was trying so hard to sound casual, trying so hard not to inhale the terrible miasma, that my voice came out in a squeak like a mouse that was being strangled.

"No, I ain’t seen them before. One of ’em was kind of tall and skinny and bony, and the other one was just plain looking."

"How’d you come to see them?"

If Jane had had enough energy to look uncomfortable, she would have. As it was, she looked a tad woeful. She said, "Well, that night I thought about going by the nursing home to see Aunt Martha, but I stopped off at the house to have a little drink, so by the time I got to the nursing home, they said the place was closing to visitors, it being pretty late and all. But I run into Hank Clearwater there, you know, the handyman? He was leaving after visiting his dad. Well, me and Hank have known each other forever, and he said we could have a drink in his car, and before you know it one thing led to another, but we thought he better move the car somewhere a little more private, so he pulled into the woods across the street from the nursing home, there’s a little track through the woods where kids run four-wheelers. We could see the backs of the houses on Clarice Road. They all got those big security lights. Helped us see what we were doing!" She giggled.

"So that’s how you were able to see Arlene," I said, since I didn’t even want to think about Hank and Jane.