Dead Ever After: A True Blood Novel

such a maneuver would work for one person would be if the killer already had Arlene over his shoulder (and I was using his because it would take a strong person to lift Arlene that way). She had gotten skinny, but she was still no featherweight.
    Two people could do it easily enough—or one supernatural of any gender.
    I glanced over at Sam, working behind the bar. Since he was a shifter, he was incredibly strong. He could easily have tossed Arlene’s corpse into the trash.
    He could have, but he hadn’t.
    The most obvious reason was that he would never put Arlene’s corpse in the Dumpster right behind his business in the first place. Second, Sam would never have staged himself finding the body with me as witness. And third, I simply didn’t believe he would have killed Arlene, not without some compelling reason or in the heat of some terrible struggle. Fourth, he would already have told me if either of those circumstances applied.
    If Andy understood that I couldn’t get Arlene in there by myself, he must be trying to figure out who would help me do such a thing. When I considered that, I did have a lot of friends and acquaintances who were not strangers to body disposal. They would help me with few questions asked. But what did that say about my life?
    Okay, screw the brooding introspection. My life was what it was. If it had been tougher and bloodier than I’d ever imagined . . . that was a done deal.
    Suspect Number One for “helping Sookie dispose of a body” came in right after that. My brother, Jason, was a werepanther, and though he hadn’t ever changed publicly, word had gotten around. Jason had never been able to keep his mouth shut when he was excited about something. If I’d called him to help me put a woman in a Dumpster, he would have jumped in his pickup and been there as fast as he could drive.
    I waved at my brother as he walked in the door holding hands with his Michele. Jason was still stained and sweaty after a long, hot day’s work as a boss of one of the parish road crews. Michele looked perky in contrast, in her red polo shirt all the employees wore at the Schubert Ford dealership. They were both in the throes of marriage fever. But like everyone else in Bon Temps, they were fascinated by the death of a former Merlotte’s server.
    I didn’t want to talk about Arlene, so I headed them off by telling Michele I’d found a dress to wear in the wedding. Their forthcoming ceremony took precedence over everything else, even a lurid death in the parking lot. As I’d hoped, Michele asked me a million questions and said she was going to come by to look at it, and she told me Greater Love Baptist (Michele’s dad’s church) was willing to lend their folding tables and chairs for the potluck reception at Jason’s house. A friend of Michele’s had volunteered to make the cake as her wedding present to the happy couple, and the mother of another friend was going to do the flowers at cost. By the time they’d finished their meals and paid their tab, the word “strangled” hadn’t entered the conversation.
    That was the only respite I had the whole evening. Though I’d noticed the bar crowd was thin the previous day, an amazing number of people now told me they’d seen Arlene enter Merlotte’s. They’d all spoken to her personally before watching her go to the office. And they’d all watched her leave (either five or fifteen or fifty minutes afterward) with steam coming out of her ears. No matter how their stories varied on other points of interest, to me that was the important memory: that she’d left, alive and unharmed. And angry.
    “Did she come to ask your forgiveness?” Maxine Fortenberry asked. Maxine had come in to have supper with two of her cronies, buddies of my grandmother’s.
    “No, she wanted a job,” I said, with as much frank and open honesty as I could plaster on my face.
    All three women looked delightfully shocked. “Not really,” Maxine breathed. “She had the gall to ask if she could have her job back?”
    “She couldn’t see why not,” I said, lifting a shoulder as I gathered up their dirty plates. “You all want a refill on your tea?”
    “Sure, bring the pitcher around,” Maxine said. “My Lord, Sookie. That just takes the cake.”
    She was absolutely right.
    The next moment I had to spare was spent cudgeling my brain to try to remember when I’d last seen that blue and green scarf. Sam had said he remembered me wearing it to church with a