Dead Ever After

now I’ll wake up. I didn’t really wake up when I heard the doorbell. I just dreamed it. This isn’t real, because it can’t be. What convinced me that I was awake? The expression on Andy Bellefleur’s face. He was standing behind Alcee, and he looked stricken. And I could hear right in his brain, he didn’t think I deserved to be arrested. Not on the evidence they had. Alcee Beck had had to talk long and hard to convince the sheriff that I should be arrested.
    Alcee Beck’s brain was strange; it was black. I’d never seen anything like it, and I couldn’t get a handle on it. That couldn’t mean anything good. I could feel his determination to put me in jail. In Alcee Beck’s mind, I might as well have “GUILTY” tattooed on my forehead.
    When Andy put the cuffs on me, I said, “I assume I’m uninvited to Halleigh’s baby shower.”
    “Aw, Sookie,” he said, which was hardly adequate.
    To do Andy justice, he was embarrassed, but I wasn’t exactly in the mood to do him any justice when he was doing me none. “I think you know I never hurt Arlene,” I said to Andy, and I said it very evenly. I was proud of myself for keeping a sealed and stern façade, because inside I was dying of humiliation and horror.
    He looked as if he wanted to say something (he wanted to say, I hope you didn’t but there’s a little evidence says you did but not enough I don’t know how Alcee got a warrant ), but he shook his head and said, “I got to do this.”
    My sense of unreality lasted all through the booking process. My brother, God bless him, was standing at the jail door when they brought me in, having heard through the instant messaging circuit what had happened. His mouth was open, but before he could vocalize all the angry words I could see crowding his brain, I started talking. “Jason, call Beth Osiecki, and tell her to get down here soon as she can. Go in the house and get the phone number for Desmond Cataliades, and call him, too. And call Sam and tell him I can’t come to work tomorrow,” I added hastily, as I was marched into the jail and they shut the door on my brother’s anxious face. Bless his heart.
    If this had happened even a week, two weeks ago, I could have been confident that Eric, or even perhaps my great-grandfather Niall (prince of the fairies), would have me out in the wink of an eye. But I’d burned my bridges with Eric, and Niall had sealed himself into Faery for complicated reasons.
    Now I had Jason.
    I knew every single person I saw during the process of being booked. It was the most humiliating experience of my life, and that was saying something. I discovered I was being charged with second-degree murder. I knew from Kennedy Keyes’s discussion of her time in jail that the penalty for second-degree murder would be life in prison.
    I do not look good in orange.
    There are worse things than humiliation and worse things than wearing a jail outfit (baggy tunic and drawstring pants). That’s for sure. But I have to say, my cup was full and overflowing, and I was ready for some goodness and mercy. I was so agitated that I was glad to see the cell door. I thought I’d be alone. But I wasn’t. Jane Bodehouse, of all people, was passed out and snoring on the bottom bunk. She must have had a few adventures after Merlotte’s closed the night before.
    At least she was out of it, so I had plenty of time to adjust to my new circumstances. After ten minutes of processing, I was bored out of my mind. If you’d asked me how it would be to sit without work to do, without a book, without a television, without even a telephone, I would have laughed because I couldn’t have imagined such a situation.
    The boredom—and my inability to get away from my own fearful conjectures—was awful. Maybe it hadn’t been so bad for Jason when he’d been in jail? My brother didn’t like to read, and he wasn’t much on reflection, either. I would ask him how he’d managed, the next time I saw him.
    Now Jason and I had more in common than we’d ever had in our lives. We were both jailbirds.
    He’d been arrested for murder, too, in the past, and like me, he was innocent, though evidence had pointed in his direction. Oh, poor Gran! This would have been so awful for her. I hoped she couldn’t see me from heaven.
    Jane was snoring, but seeing her familiar face was somehow homey. I used the toilet while she was out of it. There would be plenty of awfulness in my future, but I was trying to forestall a