Dead in the Family (Sookie Stackhouse #10)(49)
Author: Charlaine Harris

"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."

That was a nice way of saying that Miss Caroline was bringing up that Bible real often.

I was in a quandary. I knew that Bible was over at the Compton house. And I knew after she studied it, Miss Caroline would find out that she was a direct descendant of Bill Compton. How she’d feel about that was anybody’s guess. Did I want to screw with her world-view when the woman was on her deathbed?

On the other hand, did … Oh, hell, I was tired of trying to balance everything out, and I had enough on my plate to worry about. In a reckless moment, I forwarded Halleigh’s e-mail to Bill. I had come late to e-mail, and I still didn’t entirely trust it. But at least I felt I’d put the ball into Bill’s court. If he chose to lob it back, well, okay.

After I’d messed around a little on eBay, marveling at the things people were trying to sell, I heard voices in the front yard. I looked out to see Bud, Alcee, and Andy brushing dust and twigs off their clothes. Andy was rubbing at a bite on his neck.

I went outside. "Did you find a body?" I asked them.

"No, we did not," Alcee Beck said. "We did see that people had been back there."

"Well, sure," I said. "But no body?"

"We won’t trouble you any further," Bud said shortly.

They left in a cloud of dust. I watched them go, and shivered. I felt like the guillotine had been descending on my neck and had been prevented from cutting off my head only because the rope was too short.

I went back to the computer and sent Alcide an e-mail. It said only, "The police were just here." I figured that would be enough. I knew I wouldn’t hear from him until he was ready for me to come to Shreveport.

I was surprised that it took three days to receive a reply from Bill. Those days had been remarkable only for the number of people I hadn’t heard from. I hadn’t heard from Remy, which wasn’t too extraordinary. None of the members of the Long Tooth pack called, so I could only assume they’d retrieved the body of Basim from its new resting place and that they would let me know when the meeting would be held. If someone came into my woods and tried to find out why Basim’s body had vanished, I didn’t know about it. And I didn’t hear from Pam or Bobby Burnham, which was a little worrisome, but still … no big.

What did gripe me in a major way was not hearing from Eric. Okay, his (maker, sire, dad) mentor Appius Livius Ocella was in town … but geez Louise.

In between sessions of worrying, I looked up Roman names and found that "Appius" was his praenomen, his common name. Livius was his nomen, his family name, handed down from father to son, indicating that he was a member of the Livii family or clan. Ocella was his cognomen, so it was meant to indicate what particular branch of the Livii had borne him; or it could have been given as an honorific for his service in a war. (I had no idea what war that could have been.) As a third possibility, if he’d been adopted into another family, the cognomen would reflect his birth family.

Your name said a lot about you in the Roman world.

I wasted a lot of time finding out all about Appius Livius Ocella’s name. I still had no idea what he wanted or what he intended to do to my boyfriend. And those were the things I needed to know the most. I have to say, I was feeling pretty sulky, pugnacious, and sullen (I looked up a few words while I was online). Not a pretty posy of emotions, but I couldn’t seem to upgrade to dull unhappiness.

Cousin Claude was making himself scarce, too. I glimpsed him only once in those three days, and that was when I heard him go through the kitchen and out the back door and got up in time to see him getting into his car.

This goes to explain why I was delighted to see Bill at my back door when the sun had set on the third day after I’d sent him Halleigh’s e-mail. He was not looking appreciably better than he had the last time I’d seen him, but he was dressed in a suit and tie and his hair was carefully combed. The Bible was under his arm.