Dead Until Dark

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?” Gran 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 DeeAnne’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 been Sookie’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 missed Sally 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 every stone would be turned in its investigation.
    “I ain’t the only one who fills the bill. Plenty of other guys get their gas there, and all of them know Maudette.”
    “Yeah, but in what sense?” Gran asked bluntly. “She wasn’t a prostitute, was she? So she will have talked about who she saw.”
    “She just liked to have a good time, she wasn’t a pro.” It was good of Jason to defend Maudette, considering what I knew of his selfish character. I began to think a little better of my big brother. “She was kinda lonely, I guess,” he added.
    Jason looked at both of us, then, and saw we were surprised and