"It's a possibility."
"And then what?" I crossed my arms over my chest.
All three men exchanged a glance. "Maybe Jason followed the panther into the woods," Andy said. "Maybe the panther wasn't so badly wounded after all, and it got him."
"You think my brother would trail a wounded and dangerous animal into the woods - at night, by himself." Sure they did. I could read it loud and clear. They thought that would be absolutely typical Jason Stackhouse behavior. What they didn't get was that (reckless and wild as my brother was) Jason's favorite person in the entire universe was Jason Stackhouse, and he would not endanger that person in such an obvious way.
Andy Bellefleur had some misgivings about this theory, but Alcee Beck sure didn't. He thought I'd outlined Jason's procedure that night exactly. What the two lawmen didn't know, and what I couldn't tell them, was that if Jason had seen a panther at his house that night, the chances were good the panther was actually a shape-shifting human. Hadn't Claudine said that the witches had gathered some of the larger shifters into their fold? A panther would be a valuable animal to have at your side if you were contemplating a hostile takeover.
"Jay Stans, from Clarice, called me this morning," Andy said. His round face turned toward me and his brown eyes locked on me. "He was telling me about this gal you found by the side of the road last night."
I nodded, not seeing the connection, and too preoccupied with speculation about the panther to guess what was coming.
"This girl have any connection to Jason?"
"What?" I was stunned. "What are you talking about?"
"You find this girl, this Maria-Star Cooper, by the side of the road. They searched, but they didn't find any trace of an accident."
I shrugged. "I told them I wasn't sure I could pin the spot down, and they didn't ask me to go looking, after I offered. I'm not real surprised they couldn't find any evidence, not knowing the exact spot. I tried to pin it down, but it was at night, and I was pretty scared. Or she could have just been dumped where I found her." I don't watch the Discovery Channel for nothing.
"See, what we were thinking," Alcee Beck rumbled, "is that this girl was one of Jason's discards, and maybe he was keeping her somewhere secret? But you let her go when Jason disappeared."
"Huh?" It was like they were speaking Urdu or something. I couldn't make any sense out of it.
"With Jason getting arrested under suspicion of those murders last year and all, we wondered if there wasn't some fire under all that smoke."
"You know who did those killings. He's in jail, unless something's happened that I don't know about. And he confessed." Catfish met my eyes, and his were very uneasy. This line of questioning had my brother's boss all twitchy. Granted, my brother was a little kinky in the sex department (though none of the women he'd kinked with seemed to mind), but the idea of him keeping a sex slave that I had to deal with when he vanished? Oh, come on!
"He did confess, and he's still in jail," Andy said. Since Andy had taken the confession, I should hope so. "But what if Jason was his accomplice?"
"Wait a damn minute now," I said. My pot was beginning to boil over. "You can't have it both ways. If my brother is dead out in the woods after chasing a mythical wounded panther, how could he have been holding, what's her name, Maria-Star Cooper, hostage somewhere? You're thinking I've been in on my brother's supposed bondage activities, too? You think I hit her with my car? And then I loaded her in and drove her to the emergency room?"
We all glared at each other for a long moment. The men were tossing out waves of tension and confusion like they were necklaces at Mardi Gras.
Then Catfish launched himself off the couch like a bottle rocket. "No," he bellowed. "You guys asked me to come along to break this bad news about the panther to Sookie. No one said anything about this stuff about some girl that got hit by a car! This here is a nice girl." Catfish pointed at me. "No one's going to call her different! Not only did Jason Stackhouse never have to do more than crook his little finger at a girl for her to come running, much less take one hostage and do weird stuff to her, but if you're saying Sookie let this Cooper girl free when Jason didn't come home, and then tried to run over her, well, all I got to say is, you can go straight to hell!"
God bless Catfish Hennessey is all I had to say.
Alcee and Andy left soon after, and Catfish and I had a disjointed talk consisting mostly of him cursing the lawmen. When he ran down, he glanced at his watch.
"Come on, Sookie. You and me got to get to Jason's."
"Why?" I was willing but bewildered.
"We got us a search party together, and I know you'll want to be there."
I stared at him with my mouth open, while Catfish fumed about Alcee and Andy's allegations. I tried real hard to think of some way to cancel a search party. I hated to think of those men and women putting on all their winter gear to plow through the underbrush, now bare and brown, that made the woods so difficult to navigate. But there was no way to stop them, when they meant so well; and there was every reason to join them.
There was the remote chance that Jason was out there in the woods somewhere. Catfish told me he'd gotten together as many men as he could, and Kevin Pryor had agreed to be the coordinator, though off-duty. Maxine Fortenberry and her churchwomen were bringing out coffee and doughnuts from the Bon Temps Bakery. I began crying, because this was just overwhelming, and Catfish turned even redder. Weeping women were way high on Catfish's long list of things that made him uncomfortable.
I eased his situation by telling him I had to get ready. I threw the bed together, washed my face clean of tears, and yanked my hair back into a ponytail. I found a pair of ear-muffs that I used maybe once a year, and pulled on my old coat and stuck my yard work gloves in my pocket, along with a wad of Kleenex in case I got weepy again.
The search party was the popular activity for the day in Bon Temps. Not only do people like to help in our small town - but also rumors had inevitably begun circulating about the mysterious wild animal footprint. As far as I could tell, the word "panther" was not yet currency; if it had been, the crowd would have been even larger. Most of the men had come armed - well, actually, most of the men were always armed. Hunting is a way of life around here, the NRA provides most of the bumper stickers, and deer season is like a holy holiday. There are special times for hunting deer with a bow and arrow, with a muzzleloader, or with a rifle. (There may be a spear season, for all I know.) There must have been fifty people at Jason's house, quite a party on a workday for such a small community.