"Sookie, I had to replace the hot water heater in the house," Jason said suddenly. He lives in my parents' old house, the one we'd been living in when they died in a flash flood. We lived with Gran after that, but when Jason got through his two years of college and went to work for the state, he moved back into the house, which on paper is half mine.
"You need any money on that?" I asked.
"Naw, I got it."
We both make salaries, but we also have a little income from a fund established when an oil well was sunk on my parents' property. It played out in a few years, but my parents and then Gran made sure the money was invested. It saved Jason and me a lot of struggle, that padding. I don't know how Gran could have raised us if it hadn't been for that money. She was determined not to sell any land, but her own income is not much more than social security. That's one reason I don't get an apartment. If I get groceries when I'm living with her, that's reasonable, to her; but if I buy groceries and bring them to her house and leave them on her table and go home to my house, that's charity and that makes her mad.
"What kind did you get?" I asked, just to show interest.
He was dying to tell me; Jason's an appliance freak, and he wanted to describe his comparison shopping for a new water heater in detail. I listened with as much attention as I could muster.
And then he interrupted himself. "Hey Sook, you remember Maudette Pickens?"
"Sure," I said, surprised. "We graduated in the same class."
"Somebody killed Maudette in her apartment last night."
Gran and I were riveted. "When?" Grand asked, puzzled that she hadn't heard already.
"They just found her this very morning in her bedroom. Her boss tried to call her to find out why she hadn't shown up for work yesterday and today and got no answer, so he rode over and got the manager up, and they unlocked the place. You know she had the apartment across from DeeAnne's?" Bon Temps had only one bona fide apartment complex, a three-building, two-story U-shaped grouping, so we knew exactly where he meant.
"She got killed there?" I felt ill. I remembered Maudette clearly. Maudette had had a heavy jaw and a square bottom, pretty black hair and husky shoulders. Maudette had been a plodder, never bright or ambitious. I thought I recalled her working at the Grabbit Kwik, a gas station/convenience store.
"Yeah, she'd been working there for at least a year, I guess," Jason confirmed.
"How was it done?" My grandmother had that squnched, give-it-to-me-quick look with which nice people ask for bad news.
"She had some vampire bites on her - uh - inner thighs," my brother said, looking down at his plate. "But that wasn't what killed her. She was strangled. DeeAnne told me Maudette liked to go to that vampire bar in Shreveport when she had a couple of days off, so maybe that's where she got the bites. Might not have been Sookie's vampire."
"Maudette was a fang-banger?" I felt queasy, imagining slow, chunky Maudette draped in the exotic black dresses fang-bangers affected.
"What's that?" asked Gran. She must have missed Sally-Jessy the day the phenomenon was explored.
"Men and women that hang around with vampires and enjoy being bitten. Vampire groupies. They don't last too long, I think, because they want to be bitten too much, and sooner or later they get that one bite too many."
"But a bite didn't kill Maudette." Gran wanted to be sure she had it straight.
"Nope, strangling." Jason had begun finishing his lunch.
"Don't you always get gas at the Grabbit?" I asked.
"Sure. So do a lot of people."
"And didn't you hang around with Maudette some?" Gran asked.
"Well, in a way of speaking," Jason said cautiously.
I took that to mean he'd bedded Maudette when he couldn't find anyone else.
"I hope the sheriff doesn't want to talk to you," Gran said, shaking her head as if indicating "no" would make it less likely.
"What?" Jason was turning red, looking defensive.
"You see Maudette in the store all the time when you get your gas, you so-to-speak date her, then she winds up dead in an apartment you're familiar with," I summarized. It wasn't much, but it was something, and there were so few mysterious homicides in Bon Temps that I thought every stone would be turned in its investigation.
"I ain't the only one who fills the bill. Plenty of other guys get their gas there, and all of them know Maudette."
"Yeah, but in what sense?" Gran asked bluntly. "She wasn't a prostitute, was she? So she will have talked about who she saw."
"She just liked to have a good time, she wasn't a pro." It was good of Jason to defend Maudette, considering what I knew of his selfish character. I began to think a little better of my big brother. "She was kinda lonely, I guess," he added.
Jason looked at both of us, then, and saw we were surprised and touched.
"Speaking of prostitutes," he said hastily, "there's one in Monroe specializes in vampires. She keeps a guy standing by with a stake in case one gets carried away. She drinks synthetic blood to keep her blood supply up."
That was a pretty definite change of subject, so Gran and I tried to think of a question we could ask without being indecent.
"Wonder how much she charges?" I ventured, and when Jason told us the figure he'd heard, we both gasped.
Once we got off the topic of Maudette's murder, lunch went about as usual, with Jason looking at his watch and exclaiming that he had to leave just when it was time to do the dishes.
But Gran's mind was still running on vampires, I found out. She came into my room later, when I was putting on my makeup to go to work.
"How old you reckon the vampire is, the one you met?"
"I have no idea, Gran." I was putting on my mascara, looking wide-eyed and trying to hold still so I wouldn't poke myself in the eye, so my voice came out funny, as if I was trying out for a horror movie.
"Do you suppose ... he might remember the War?"
I didn't need to ask which war. After all, Gran was a charter member of the Descendants of the Glorious Dead.
"Could be," I said, turning my face from side to side to make sure my blush was even.
"You think he might come to talk to us about it? We could have a special meeting."
"At night," I reminded her.
"Oh. Yes, it'd have to be." The Descendants usually met at noon at the library and brought a bag lunch.
I thought about it. It would be plain rude to suggest to the vampire that he ought to speak to Gran's club because I'd saved his blood from Drainers, but maybe he would offer if I gave a little hint? I didn't like to, but I'd do it for Gran. "I'll ask him the next time he comes in," I promised.