Dead as a doornail - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,49

Maxine Fortenberry, Hoyt’s mother, got out with a couple of laundry baskets. “Where’s your clothes, girl?” she called. “I’m gonna take them home and wash them, so you’ll have something to wear that don’t smell like smoke.”

After I protested and she insisted, we went into the chokingly unpleasant air of the house to get some clothes. Maxine also insisted on getting an armful of linens out of the linen closet to see if some of them could be resurrected.

Right after Maxine left, Tara drove her new car into the clearing, followed by her part-time help, a tall young woman called McKenna, who was driving Tara’s old car.

After a hug and a few words of sympathy, Tara said, “You drive this old Malibu while you’re getting your insurance stuff straightened out. It’s just sitting in my carport doing nothing, and I was just about to put it in the paper in the For Sale column. You can be using it.”

“Thank you,” I said in a daze. “Tara, that’s so nice of you.” She didn’t look good, I noticed vaguely, but I was too sunk in my own troubles to really evaluate Tara’s demeanor. When she and McKenna left, I gave them a limp wave good-bye.

After that, Terry Bellefleur arrived. He offered to demolish the burned part for a very nominal sum, and for a little bit more he’d haul all the resultant trash to the parish dump. He’d start as soon as the police gave him the go-ahead, he said, and to my astonishment he gave me a little hug.

Sam came after that, driven by Arlene. He stood and looked at the back of the house for a few minutes. His lips were tightly compressed. Almost any man would have said, “Pretty lucky I sent the vampire home with you, huh?” But Sam didn’t. “What can I do?” he said instead.

“Keep me working,” I said, smiling. “Forgive me coming to work in something besides my actual work clothes.” Arlene walked all around the house, and then hugged me wordlessly.

“That’s easily done,” he said. He still wasn’t smiling. “I hear that the guy who started the fire was a Fellowship member, that this is some kind of payback for you dating Bill.”

“He had the card in his wallet, and he had a gas can.” I shrugged.

“But how’d he find you? I mean, no one around here . . .” Sam’s voice trailed off as he considered the possibility more closely.

He was thinking, as I had, that though the arson could be just because I’d dated Bill, it seemed a drastic overreaction. A more typical retaliation was a Fellowship member throwing pig’s blood on humans who dated, or had a work partnership with, a vampire. That had happened more than once, most notably to a designer from Dior who’d employed all vampire models for one spring show. Such incidents usually occurred in big cities, cities that hosted large Fellowship “churches” and a bigger vampire population.

What if the man had been hired to set fire to my house by someone else? What if the Fellowship card in his wallet was planted there for misdirection?

Any of these things could be true; or all of them, or none of them. I couldn’t decide what I believed. So, was I the target of an assassin, like the shape-shifters? Should I, too, fear the shot from the dark, now that the fire had failed?

That was such a frightening prospect that I flinched from pursuing it. Those were waters too deep for me.

The state police arson investigator appeared while Sam and Arlene were there. I was eating a lunch plate Arlene had brought me. That Arlene was not much of a food person is the nicest way to put it, so my sandwich was made of cheap bologna and plastic cheese, and my canned drink was off-brand sugared tea. But she’d thought of me and she’d brought them to me, and her kids had drawn a picture for me. I would have been happy if she’d brought me just a slice of bread under those conditions.

Automatically, Arlene made eyes at the arson investigator. He was a lean man in his late forties named Dennis Pettibone. Dennis had a camera, a notebook, and a grim outlook. It took Arlene maybe two minutes of conversation to coax a little smile from Mr. Pettibone’s lips, and his brown eyes were admiring her curves after two more minutes had passed. Before Arlene drove Sam home, she had a promise from the investigator that