Definitely Dead (Sookie Stackhouse #6)(42)
Author: Charlaine Harris

I knocked on Amelia’s door. She answered it immediately, and I saw over her shoulder that her place, though of course laid out exactly like Hadley’s, was full of light colors and energy. She liked yellow, and cream, and coral, and green. Her furniture was modern and heavily cushioned, and the wooden bits were polished to the nth degree. As I’d suspected, Amelia’s place was spotless.

"Yes?" she said, in a subdued kind of way.

"Okay," I said, as if I were laying down an olive branch. "I’ve got a problem, and I suspect you do, too."

"Why do you say that?" she asked. Her open face was closed now, as if keeping her expression blank would keep me out of her mind.

"You put a stasis spell on the apartment, right? To keep everything exactly as it was. Before you warded it against intruders?"

"Yes," she said cautiously. "I told you that."

"No one’s been in that apartment since the night Hadley died?"

"I can’t give you my word on it, because I suppose a very good witch or wizard could have breached my spell," she said. "But to the best of my knowledge, no one’s been in there."

"So you don’t know that you sealed a body in there?"

I don’t know what I expected in the way of reaction, but Amelia was pretty cool about it. "Okay," she said steadily. She may have gulped. "Okay. Who is it?" Her eyelids fluttered up and down a few extra times.

Maybe she wasn’t quite so cool.

"I really don’t know," I said carefully. "You’ll have to come see." As we went up the stairs, I said, "He was killed there, and the mess was cleaned up with towels. They were in the hamper." I told her about the condition of the towels.

"Holly Cleary tells me you saved her son’s life," Amelia said.

That took me aback. It made me feel awkward, too. "The police would have found him," I said. "I just accelerated it a little."

"The doctor told Holly if the little boy hadn’t gotten to the hospital when he did, the bleeding in his brain might not have been stopped in time," Amelia said.

"That’s good then," I said, uncomfortable in the extreme. "How’s Cody doing?"

"Well," the witch said. "He’s going to be well."

"In the meantime, we got a problem right here," I reminded her.

"Okay, let’s see the corpse." Amelia worked hard to keep her voice level.

I kind of liked this witch.

I led her to the closet. I’d left the door open. She stepped inside. She didn’t make a sound. She came back out with a slightly green tinge to her glowing tan and leaned against the wall.

"He’s a Were," she said, a moment later. The spell she’d put on the apartment had kept everything fresh, as part of the way it worked. The blood had begun to smell a little before the spell had been cast, and when I’d entered the apartment, the spell had been broken. Now the towels reeked of decay. The body didn’t have an odor yet, which surprised me a little, but I figured it would any minute. Surely the body would decompose rapidly now that it had been released from Amelia’s magic, and she was obviously trying not to point out how well that had worked.

"You know him?"

"Yes, I know him," she said. "The supernatural community, even in New Orleans, isn’t that big. It’s Jake Purifoy. He did security for the queen’s wedding."

I had to sit down. I exited the walk-in closet and slid down the wall until I was sitting propped up, facing Amelia. She sat against the opposite wall. I hardly knew where to start asking questions.

"That’s would be when she married the King of Arkansas?" I recalled what Felicia had said, and the wedding photo I’d seen in Al Cumberland’s album. Had that been the queen, under that elaborate headdress? When Quinn had mentioned making the arrangements for a wedding in New Orleans, was this the wedding he’d meant?

"The queen, according to Hadley, is bi," Amelia told me. "So yes, she married a guy. Now they have an alliance."

"They can’t have kids," I said. I know, that was obvious, but I wasn’t getting this alliance thing.

"No, but unless someone stakes them, they’ll live forever, so passing things on is not a big issue," Amelia said. "It takes months, even years, of negotiations to hammer out the rules for such a wedding. The contract can take just as long. Then they both gotta sign it. That’s a big ceremony, takes place right before the wedding. They don’t actually have to spend their lives together, you know, but they have to visit a couple of times a year. Conjugal-type visit."

Fascinating as this was, it was beside the point right now.

"So this guy in the closet, he was part of the security force." Had he worked for Quinn? Hadn’t Quinn said that one of his workers had gone missing in New Orleans?

"Yeah, I wasn’t asked to the wedding, of course, but I helped Hadley into her dress. He came to pick her up."

"Jake Purifoy came to pick Hadley up for the wedding."

"Yep. He was all dressed up that night."

"And that was the night of the wedding."

"Yeah, the night before Hadley died."

"Did you see them leave?"

"No, I just… No. I heard the car pull up. I looked out my living room window and saw Jake coming in. I knew him already, kind of casually. I had a friend who used to date him. I went back to whatever I was doing, watching TV I think, and I heard the car leave after a while."

"So he may not have left at all."

She stared at me, her eyes wide. "Could be," she said at last, sounding as if her mouth were dry.

"Hadley was by herself when he came to pick her up… right?"

"When I came down from her apartment, I left her there alone."

"All I came to do," I said, mainly to my bare feet, "was clean out my cousin’s apartment. I didn’t much like her anyway. Now I’m stuck with a body. The last time I got rid of a body," I told the witch, "I had a big strong helper, and we wrapped it in a shower curtain."

"You did?" Amelia said faintly. She didn’t look too happy to be the recipient of this information.

"Yes." I nodded. "We didn’t kill him. We just had to get rid of the body. We thought we’d be blamed for the death, and I’m sure we would have been." I stared at my toenail polish some more. It had been a good job when it started out, a nice bright pink, but now I needed to refresh the paint job or remove it. I stopped trying to think about other things and resumed my gloomy contemplation of the body. He was lying in the closet, stretched out on the floor, pushed under the lowest shelf. He’d been covered with a sheet. Jake Purifoy had been a handsome man, I suspected. He’d had dark brown hair, and a muscular build. Lots of body hair. Though he’d been dressed for a formal wedding, and Amelia had said he looked very nice, now he was naked. A minor question: where were his clothes?