She still sounded pretty puny, though God knew her body should be empty of toxins.
“I’m as surprised as you are,” I said. “They think I killed Arlene.”
“So she did get out of jail. I really did see her, not last night but the night before,” Jane said, brightening a little. “I thought it was a dream or something, since I was sure she was behind bars.”
“You saw her? Somewhere besides Merlotte’s?” I didn’t think Jane had been in Merlotte’s when Arlene had come to speak to me.
“Yeah, I was gonna tell you yesterday, but I got sidetracked by that lawyer talk.”
“Where did you see her, Jane?”
“Oh, where’d I see her? She was . . .” This was clearly a big effort for Jane. She ran her fingers through her snarled hair. “She was with two guys.”
Presumably these were the friends Arlene had mentioned. “When was this?” I tried to ask this very gently, because I didn’t want to risk knocking Jane off course. She wasn’t the only one who was having a hard time staying on track. I had to concentrate hard to both breathe and ask coherent questions. After Jane’s episodes of illness, it smelled pretty awful in our little bunkhouse.
Jane tried to recall the time and place of her Arlene encounter, but it was such a struggle and there were so many less taxing things to think about that it took her a while. However, Jane was at heart a kind person, so she fumbled through her memories till she arrived at success. “I seen her out back of . . . you remember that real big guy who repaired motorcycles?”
I had to clamp down on myself to keep my voice casual. “Tray Dawson. Had a shop and a house out where Court Street turns into Clarice Road.” Tray’s large shop/garage stood between Tray’s house and Brock and Chessie Johnson’s, where Coby and Lisa were living. There were only woods behind those houses, and since Tray’s was the last one on the street, it was a secluded spot.
“Yeah. She was out there, in back of his house. It’s been closed for a while now, so I got no idea what she was doing.”
“You know the guys she was with?” I was trying so hard to sound casual, trying so hard not to inhale the terrible miasma, that my voice came out in a squeak like a mouse that was being strangled.
“No, I ain’t seen them before. One of ’em was kind of tall and skinny and bony, and the other one was just plain looking.”
“How’d you come to see them?”
If Jane had had enough energy to look uncomfortable, she would have. As it was, she looked a tad woeful. She said, “Well, that night I thought about going by the nursing home to see Aunt Martha, but I stopped off at the house to have a little drink, so by the time I got to the nursing home, they said the place was closing to visitors, it being pretty late and all. But I run into Hank Clearwater there, you know, the handyman? He was leaving after visiting his dad. Well, me and Hank have known each other forever, and he said we could have a drink in his car, and before you know it one thing led to another, but we thought he better move the car somewhere a little more private, so he pulled into the woods across the street from the nursing home, there’s a little track through the woods where kids run four-wheelers. We could see the backs of the houses on Clarice Road. They all got those big security lights. Helped us see what we were doing!” She giggled.
“So that’s how you were able to see Arlene,” I said, since I didn’t even want to think about Hank and Jane.
“Yeah, that’s how come I saw her. I thought, ‘Damn, that’s Arlene, and she’s out, and she tried to kill Sookie. What’s up with that?’ Those men were real close to her. She was handing them something, and then Hank and I . . . got to . . . talking, and I never saw them again. Next time I looked up, they were gone.”
Jane’s piece of information was very important to me in a dubious kind of way. On the one hand, it might help clear me or at least give the law grounds for doubting that I’d had any part in killing Arlene. On the other hand, Jane was not what you