Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (177 page)

I remembered all the corridors and doorways as if I’d just left. The walls were a peach color now, instead of the off-white I remembered, and the carpet was a sort of speckled gray in place of brown linoleum; but the structure of the school was unchanged. Without hesitation, I slipped through a back door to the little stage, which was at one end of the lunchroom. If I remembered correctly, the space was actually called the “multipurpose room.” The serving area could be shut off with folding doors, and the picnic tables that lined the room could be folded and moved aside. Now they were taking up the floor in orderly rows, and the people sitting at them were all adults, with the exception of some teachers’ children who’d been in the classrooms with their mothers when the alarm had been raised.

I found a tiny plastic chair and set it back behind the curtains on stage left. I closed my eyes and began to concentrate. I lost the awareness of my body as I shut out all stimuli and began to let my mind roam free.

Poor Halleigh. She was sitting by herself, and the mound of tissues by her showed how she’d been spending her waiting time. She was completely innocent of anything, so I resumed my probing.

It went on and on, a litany of harmless thoughts. The children were thinking about snacks and television, and they were also scared. The adults, for the most part, were very frightened for their own children and worried about the effect of Cody’s disappearance on their own families and their own class.

Andy Bellefleur said, “In just a minute Sheriff Dearborn will be in here, and then we’ll divide you into two groups.”

The teachers relaxed. These were familiar instructions, as they themselves had often given.

“We’ll ask questions of each of you in turn, and then you can go. I know you’re all worried, and we have patrol officers searching the area, but maybe we can get some information that will help us find Cody.”

Mrs. Garfield came in. I could feel her anxiety preceding her like a dark cloud, full of thunder. Miss Maddy was right behind her. I could hear the wheels of her cart, loaded with its lined garbage can and laden with cleaning supplies. All the scents surrounding her were familiar. Of course, she started cleaning right after school. She would have been in one of the classrooms, and she probably hadn’t seen anything. Mrs. Garfield might have been in her office. The principal in my day, Mr. Heffernan, had stood outside with the teacher on duty until all the children were gone, so that parents would have a chance to talk to him if they had questions about their child’s progress . . . or lack thereof.

I didn’t lean out from behind the dusty curtain to look, but I could follow the progress of the two easily. Mrs. Garfield was a ball of tension so dense it charged the air around her, and Miss Maddy was equally surrounded by the smell of all the cleaning products and the sounds of her cart. She was miserable, too, and above all she wanted to get back to her routine. Maddy Pepper might be a woman of limited intelligence, but she loved her job because she was good at it.

I learned a lot while I was sitting there. I learned that one of the teachers was a lesbian, though she was married and had three children. I learned that another teacher was pregnant but hadn’t told anyone yet. I learned that most of the women (there were no male teachers at the elementary school) were stressed out by multiple obligations to their families, their jobs, and their churches. Cody’s teacher was very unhappy, because she liked the little boy, though she thought his mother was weird. She did believe Holly was trying hard to be a good mother, and that offset her distaste for Holly’s goth trappings.

But nothing I learned helped me discover Cody’s whereabouts until I ventured into Maddy Pepper’s head.

When Kenya came up behind me, I was doubled over, my hand over my mouth, trying to cry silently. I was not capable of getting up to look for Andy or anyone else. I knew where the boy was.

“He sent me back here to find out what you know,” Kenya whispered. She was massively unhappy about her errand, and though she’d always liked me okay, she didn’t think I could do anything to help the police. She thought Andy was a fool for stalling his career by asking me to sit back there, concealed.

Then I caught something else, something faint and weak.

I jumped to my feet and grabbed Kenya by the shoulder. “Look in the garbage can, the one loaded on the cart, right now!” I said, my voice low but (I hoped) urgent enough to light a fire under Kenya. “He’s in the can, he’s still alive!”

Kenya wasn’t rash enough to leap out from behind the curtain, jump down from the stage, and dash over to the custodian’s cart. She gave me a hard, hard, look. I stepped out from behind the curtain to watch as Kenya made her way down the little stairs at the front of the stage, and went over to where Maddy Pepper was sitting, her fingers tapping against her legs. Miss Maddy wanted a cigarette. Then she realized that Kenya was approaching her, and a dull alarm sounded in her brain. When the custodian saw Kenya actually touch the edge of the large garbage can, she leaped to her feet and yelled, “I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean to!”

Everyone in the room turned to the commotion, and everyone’s face wore identical expressions of horror. Andy strode over, his face hard. Kenya was bent over the can, rummaging, tossing a snowstorm of used tissues over her shoulder. She froze for a second when she found what she’d been looking for. She bent over, almost in danger of falling into the can.

“He’s alive,” she called to Andy. “Call 911!”

 

“She was mopping when he ran back into the school to get the picture,” Andy said. We were sitting in the cafeteria all by ourselves. “I don’t know if you could hear all that, there was so much noise in the room.”

I nodded. I’d been able to hear her thoughts as she’d spoken. All these years on her job, and she’d never had a problem with a student that wasn’t easily resolved with a few strong words on her part. Then, today, Cody had come running into the classroom, pollen all over his shoes and pants cuffs, tracking up Maddy’s freshly mopped floor. She’d yelled at him, and he’d been so startled that his feet had slipped on the wet floor. The little boy had gone over backward and hit his head on the floor. The corridor had indoor-outdoor carpeting to reduce the noise, but the classrooms did not, and his head had bounced on the linoleum.

Maddy had thought she’d killed him, and she’d hastily concealed his body in the nearest receptacle. She’d realized she’d lose her job if the child was dead, and on an impulse she’d tried to hide him. She had no plan and no idea of what would happen. She hadn’t figured out how she’d dispose of his body, and she hadn’t counted on how miserable she’d feel about the whole thing, how guilty.

To keep my part of it silent, which the police and I both agreed was absolutely the best idea, Andy suggested to Kenya that she’d suddenly realized the only receptacle in the school she hadn’t searched was Maddy Pepper’s trash can. “That’s exactly what I thought,” Kenya said. “I should search it, at least poke around and see if an abductor had tossed something into it.” Kenya’s round face was unreadable. Kevin looked at her, his brows drawn together, sensing something beneath the surface of the conversation. Kevin was no fool, especially where Kenya was concerned.

Andy’s thoughts were clear to me. “Don’t ever ask me to do this again,” I told him.

He nodded in acquiescence, but he was lying. He was seeing before him a vista of cleared cases, of malefactors locked up, of how clean Bon Temps would be when I’d told him who all the criminals were and he’d found a way to charge them with something.

“I’m not going to do it,” I said. “I’m not going to help you all the time. You’re a detective. You have to find things out in a legal way, so you can build a court case. If you use me all the time, you’ll get sloppy. The cases will fall through. You’ll get a bad reputation.” I spoke desperately, helplessly. I didn’t think my words would have any effect.

“She’s not a Magic 8 Ball,” Kevin said.

Kenya looked surprised, and Andy was more than surprised; he thought this was almost heresy. Kevin was a patrolman; Andy was a detective. And Kevin was a quiet man, listening to all his co-workers, but not often offering a comment of his own. He was notoriously mother-ridden; maybe he’d learned at his mother’s knee not to offer opinions.

“You can’t shake her and come up with the right answer,” Kevin continued. “You have to find out the answer on your own. It’s not right to take over Sookie’s life so you can do your job better.”

“Right,” said Andy, unconvinced. “But I would think any citizen would want her town to be rid of thieves and rapists and murderers.”

“What about adulterers and people who take extra papers out of the newspaper dispensers? Should I turn those in, too? What about kids who cheat on their exams?”

“Sookie, you know what I mean,” he said, white-faced and furious.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Forget it. I helped you save that child’s life. Don’t make me even think about regretting it.” I left the same way I’d come, out the back gate and down the side of the school property to where I’d left my car. I drove back to work very carefully, because I was still shaking with the intensity of the emotions that had flowed through the school this afternoon.

At the bar, I found that Holly and Danielle had left—Holly to the hospital to be with her son, and Danielle to drive her there because she was so shaky.

“The police would have taken Holly, gladly,” Sam said. “But I knew Holly didn’t have anyone but Danielle here, so I thought I might as well let Danielle go, too.”

“Of course, that leaves me to serve by myself,” I said tartly, thinking I was getting punished doubly for helping Holly out.

He smiled at me, and for a second I couldn’t help but smile back. “I’ve called that Tanya Grissom. She said she’d like to help out, just on a fill-in basis.”

Tanya Grissom had just moved to Bon Temps, and she’d come into Merlotte’s right away to put in an application. She’d put herself through college waitressing, she’d told Sam. She’d pulled down over two hundred dollars a night in tips. That wasn’t going to happen in Bon Temps, and I’d told her so frankly.

“Did you call Arlene and Charlsie first?” I realized I’d overstepped my bounds, because I was only a waitress/barmaid, not the owner. It wasn’t for me to remind Sam he should call the women with longer time in before he called the newcomer. The newcomer was definitely a shape-shifter, and I was afraid Sam was prejudiced in her favor.

Sam didn’t look irritated, just matter-of-fact. “Yeah, I called them first. Arlene said she had a date, and Charlsie was keeping her grandbaby. She’s been hinting pretty heavily that she won’t be working much longer. I think she’s going to keep the baby full-time when her daughter-in-law goes back to work.”

“Oh,” I said, disconcerted. I’d have to get used to someone new. Of course, barmaids come and barmaids go, and I’d seen quite a few pass through the employee door of Merlotte’s in my—gosh, now five—years of working for Sam. Merlotte’s was open until midnight on weeknights and until one on Friday and Saturday. Sam had tried opening on Sunday for a while, but it didn’t pay. So now Merlotte’s was closed on Sunday, unless it had been rented for a private party.

Sam tried to rotate our times so everyone got a chance to work the more lucrative night shift, so some days I worked eleven to five (or six-thirty, if we became extra busy) and sometimes I worked five to closing. He’d experimented with times and days until we’d all agreed on what worked best. He expected a little flexibility from us, and in return he was good about letting us off for funerals and weddings and other mile-stones.

I’d had a couple of other jobs before I’d started working for Sam. He was the easiest person to work for, by far. He’d become more than my employer somewhere along the way; he was my friend. When I’d found out he was a shape-shifter, it hadn’t bothered me a bit. I’d heard rumors in the shifting community that the Weres were thinking of going public, the way the vampires had. I worried about Sam. I worried about people in Bon Temps accepting him. Would they feel he’d been deceiving them all these years, or would they take it in stride? Since the vampires had made their carefully orchestrated revelation, life as we knew it had changed, all over the world. Some countries, after the initial shock had worn off, had begun working to include vampires in the mainstream of life; others had pronounced vampires nonhuman and urged their citizens to kill vampires on sight (easier said than done).

“I’m sure Tanya will be fine,” I said, but I sounded uncertain, even to my own ears. Acting on an impulse—and I can only suppose the tidal wave of emotions I’d experienced that day had something to do with this—I threw my arms around Sam and gave him a hug. I smelled clean skin and hair and the slight sweet smell of a light aftershave, an undertone of wine, a whiff of beer . . . the Sam smell. I drew it into my lungs like oxygen.

Surprised, Sam hugged me back, and for a second the warmth of his embrace made me feel almost light-headed with pleasure. Then we both backed off, because after all, this was our workplace and there were a few customers scattered around. Tanya came in, so it was good we were out of the clinch. I didn’t want her to think this was routine.

Tanya was shorter than my five foot six, and she was a pleasant-looking woman in her late twenties. Her hair was short and straight and shiny, a medium brown that almost matched her eyes. She had a small mouth and a button nose and a nice figure. I had absolutely no reason to dislike her, but I wasn’t happy to see her. I was ashamed of myself. I should give Tanya a fair chance to show her true character.