dead until dark | Page 9

called it "catching up") about people in our
little town and parish. My brother worked for the state, supervising road crews. It seemed to me like
Jason's day consisted of driving around in a state pickup, clocking off work, and then driving aroundall
night in his own pickup. Rene was on one of the work crews Jason oversaw, and they'd been to high
school to­gether. They hung around with Hoyt Fortenberry a lot.
"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 Dee-Anne'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 beenSookie'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 missedSally-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