Club Dead - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,80

I’d held the phone clamped to my ear, and when it squawked, I was actually startled.

“We got him down in time,” Betty Joe said brightly.

“The call came in time,” I told Eric. He closed his eyes and seemed to be offering up a prayer. I wondered to whom Eric prayed. I waited for further instructions.

“Tell them,” he said, “to just let him go, and he will take himself home. Tell them that we apologize for letting him stray.”

I relayed that message from my “abductors.”

Betty Jo was quick to dismiss the directions. “Would you ask if he could stay and sing to us a little? He’s in pretty good shape,” she said.

So I relayedthat . Eric rolled his eyes. “She can ask him, but if he says no, she must take it to heart and not ask him anymore,” he said. “It just upsets him, if he’s not in the mood. And sometimes when he does sing, it brings back memories, and he gets, ah, obstreperous.”

“All right,” she said, after I’d explained. “We’ll do our best. If he doesn’t want to sing, we’ll let him go right away.” From the sound of it, she turned to someone by her. “He can sing, if he’ll consent,” she said, and the someone said, “Yippee!” Two big nights in a row for the crowd at the king of Mississippi’s mansion, I guess.

Betty Joe said into the telephone, “I hope you get out of your difficulties. I don’t know how whoever’s got you got lucky enough to have the care of the greatest star in the world. Would he consider negotiating?”

She didn’t know yet about the troubles that entailed. “Bubba” had an unfortunate predilection for cat blood, and he was addlepated, and he could only follow the simplest directions; though every now and then, he exhibited a streak of shrewdness. He followed directions quite literally.

“She wants permission to keep him,” I told Eric. I was tired of being the go-between. But Betty Joe couldn’t meet with Eric, or she’d know he was the supposed friend of Alcide’s who’d helped me get to the mansion the night before.

This was all too complicated for me.

“Yes?” Eric said into the telephone. Suddenly he had an English accent. Mr. Master of Disguise. Soon he was saying things like, “He’s a sacred trust,” and, “You don’t know what you’re biting off,” into the phone. (If I’d had any sense of humor that night, I would have thought the last statement was pretty funny.) After a little more conversation, he hung up, with a pleased air.

I was thinking how strange it was that Betty Joe hadn’t indicated that anything else was amiss at the compound. She hadn’t accused Bubba of taking their prisoner, and she hadn’t commented on finding the body of Lorena. Not that she’d necessarily mention these things in a phone conversation with a human stranger; and, for that matter, not that there’d be much to find; vampires disintegrate pretty quickly. But the silver chains would still be in the pool, and maybe enough sludge to identify as the corpse of a vampire. Of course, why would anyone look under the pool cover? But surely someone had noticed their star prisoner was gone?

Maybe they were assuming Bubba had freed Bill while he was roaming the compound. We’d told him not to say anything, and he would follow that directive to the letter.

Maybe I was off the hook. Maybe Lorena would be completely dissolved by the time they started to clean the pool in the spring.

The topic of corpses reminded me of the body we’d found stuffed in the closet of this apartment. Someone sure knew where we were, and someone sure didn’t like us. Leaving the body there was an attempt to tie us to the crime of murder, which, actually, I had committed. I just hadn’t done that particular murder. I wondered if the body of Jerry Falcon had been discovered yet. The chance seemed remote. I opened my mouth to ask Alcide if it had been on the news, and then I closed it again. I lacked the energy to frame the sentence.

My life was spinning out of control. In the space of two days I’d hidden one corpse and created another one. And all because I’d fallen in love with a vampire. I gave Bill an unloving glance. I was so absorbed in my thoughts, I hardly heard the telephone. Alcide, who had gone into the kitchen, must have answered it on the first ring.

Alcide appeared