Dead Ever After

getting stabbed in the hand by Mr. Cataliades, who was after the same piece.
    “I got your scarf, Sookie,” said Diantha, who was eating very slowly. Her voice and demeanor were pale shadows of her normal hypervitality. She was even speaking slowly enough to be understandable.
    Silence fell around the table as we all regarded her with awe. Mr. Cataliades was looking at his niece fondly. “I knew she could do it,” he told us, and I wondered if he’d actually had a foreseeing or if he just had a lot of faith in Diantha.
    “How?” Amelia asked. (Amelia never hesitated when it came to asking a direct question.)
    Diantha said, “I went in the police station after I saw the big woman cop.”
    Everyone else looked at her blankly.
    “She turned herself into Kenya Jones,” I explained. “Kenya’s a patrolwoman who’s been trained to do crime-scene processing.”
    “We waited at the police station a long time this morning, Sookie,” Mr. Cataliades explained. “I had to interview Detective Bellefleur personally, and Detective Beck, too, since I am now co-counsel on your case, thanks to Ms. Osiecki. During our long, long wait we had time to find out all kinds of interesting information. Like where the evidence locker is and who can check out items from it. Diantha is so quick and devious!”
    Diantha smiled faintly.
    “How’d you manage it?” Amelia asked. She looked admiring.
    “I had a scarf in my pocket in a plastic bag. It was pretty close to Sookie’s description. We found it at Tara’s Togs. I turned myself into Kenya. I went to the locker and storage area. I told the policeman there I needed to see the scarf. The old guy, he brought it to me in a plastic bag. I looked at it, and when he went to the bathroom, I swapped it for the scarf I’d brought. I handed it to him when he came back. I walked out.” She reached for her glass of tea in a weary way.
    “Thank you, Diantha,” I said. I was both happy she’d done such a ballsy thing and sorry she’d done something illegal. My law-abiding half was kind of appalled that we were screwing around with real evidence in a real murder. But my self-preserving half was relieved that we might find out something, now that we had the real scarf . . . if the touch psychic lived up to her billing.
    Diantha perked up after receiving a good helping of praise from all of us. Though she was still moving and speaking slowly, after she ate everything on the table that wasn’t on someone’s plate she seemed to have taken a big step toward restoring her strength. Obviously, the transformation she’d accomplished had burned up a tremendous amount of energy.
    “It’s much harder when she has to speak as the person, rather than just resemble them,” Mr. Cataliades said quietly. He’d read my mind. He treated her with courtesy and respect, refilling her glass with tea and passing her the butter with great frequency. (I made a mental note to add butter to my store list.) Barry had bought a cake at the bakery. Though Gran would have thrown up her hands in horror at having a store-bought cake in her house, I was not so proud, since I hadn’t had time to bake. Diantha was definitely on board for dessert, which I planned to dish up as soon as the kitchen was clean.
    Amelia was such a clear broadcaster. She stared across the room at Diantha, lost in thought. While we were clearing the table, I had to listen to her reassessing Diantha’s abilities and cleverness. She was really impressed with the part-demon girl. Amelia was thinking about Diantha’s amazing elasticity. She wondered if Diantha was transforming her actual flesh or if she was casting an illusion. Diantha’s success made Amelia feel she hadn’t done her share of the detecting.
    “Of course,” Amelia said abruptly, “Bob and I couldn’t cast the spell we wanted to cast, since we haven’t found the two men yet. But after Barry came back to get us in his snazzy rental”—this was a joke; Barry had come back in a battered Ford Focus—“we did go to all the apartment and house rental places in Bon Temps, including answering the newspaper ads. We were ready to insist on seeing any unrented apartments or houses we’d seen an ad for, because we thought the owner would say, ‘Oh, sorry, we just rented that place to two guys from wherever.’ Then we could go check them out. But we didn’t get a lead.”
    “Well, that’s good information to have,” I said. “They’re too smart to stay locally.” I