Dead Reckoning: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Ace Books by Charlaine Harris

  The Sookie Stackhouse Novels

  DEAD UNTIL DARK

  LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS

  CLUB DEAD

  DEAD TO THE WORLD

  DEAD AS A DOORNAIL

  DEFINITELY DEAD

  ALL TOGETHER DEAD

  FROM DEAD TO WORSE

  DEAD AND GONE

  DEAD IN THE FAMILY

  DEAD RECKONING

  A TOUCH OF DEAD: SOOKIE STACKHOUSE,

  THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES

  Ace Anthologies Edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner

  MANY BLOODY RETURNS

  WOLFSBANE AND MISTLETOE

  DEATH’S EXCELLENT VACATION

  Berkley Prime Crime Books by Charlaine Harris

  SWEET AND DEADLY

  A SECRET RAGE

  The Harper Connelly Mysteries

  GRAVE SIGHT

  GRAVE SURPRISE

  AN ICE COLD GRAVE

  GRAVE SECRET

  The Lily Bard Mysteries

  SHAKESPEARE’S LANDLORD

  SHAKESPEARE’S CHAMPION

  SHAKESPEARE’S CHRISTMAS

  SHAKESPEARE’S TROLLOP

  SHAKESPEARE’S COUNSELOR

  The Aurora Teagarden Mysteries

  REAL MURDERS

  A BONE TO PICK

  THREE BEDROOMS, ONE CORPSE

  THE JULIUS HOUSE

  DEAD OVER HEELS

  A FOOL AND HIS HONEY

  LAST SCENE ALIVE

  POPPY DONE TO DEATH

  Berkley Prime Crime Anthologies Edited by Charlaine Harris

  CRIMES BY MOONLIGHT

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harris, Charlaine.

  Dead reckoning : a Sookie Stackhouse novel / Charlaine Harris. p. cm.—(Sookie Stackhouse / True blood ; 11)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51438-2

  1. Stackhouse, Sookie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Vampires—Fiction.

  3. Werewolves—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A6427D433 2011

  813’.54—dc22

  2010054261

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  I have to dedicate this book to

  the memory of my mother.

  She would not have thought it strange

  to have an urban fantasy novel dedicated to her.

  She was my biggest fan and my most faithful reader.

  There was so much to admire about my mother.

  I miss her every day.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am afraid I’ll skip someone this time around, because I am fortunate enough to have a lot of great help as I work on these books. Let me thank my assistant and best friend, Paula Woldan, first and foremost, for allowing me the peace of mind to work without worry; my friends and readers Toni L. P. Kelner and Dana Cameron, who help me focus on the important aspects of the work at hand; Victoria Koski, who tries to keep the huge world of Sookie in order; and my agent, Joshua Bilmes, and my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, who work so hard to keep my professional train on the tracks. For this book, I had the excellent advice of Ellen Dugan, writer, mother, and witch.

  Chapter 1

  The attic had been kept locked until the day after my grandmother died. I’d found her key and opened it that awful day to look for her wedding dress, having the crazy idea she should be buried in it. I’d taken one step inside and then turned and walked out, leaving the door unsecured behind me.

  Now, two years later, I pushed that door open again. The hinges creaked as ominously as if it were midnight on Halloween instead of a sunny Wednesday morning in late May. The broad floorboards protested under my feet as I stepped over the threshold. There were dark shapes all around me, and a very faint musty odor—the smell of old things long forgotten.

  When the second story had been added to the original Stackhouse home decades before, the new floor had been divided into bedrooms, but perhaps a third of it had been relegated to storage space after the largest generation of Stackhouses had thinned out. Since Jason and I had come to live with my grandparents after our parents had died, the attic door had been kept locked. Gran hadn’t wanted to clean up after us if we decided the attic was a great place to play.

  Now I owned the house, and the key was on a ribbon around my neck. There were only three Stackhouse descendants—Jason, me, and my deceased cousin Hadley’s son, a little boy named Hunter.

  I waved my hand around in the shadowy gloom to find the hanging chain, grasped it, and pulled. An overhead bulb illuminated decades of family castoffs.

  Cousin Claude and Great-Uncle Dermot stepped in behind me. Dermot exhaled so loudly it was almost a snort. Claude looked grim. I was sure he was regretting his offer to help me clean out the attic. But I wasn’t going to let my cousin off the hook, not when there was another able-bodied male available to help. For now, Dermot went where Claude went, so I had two for the price of one. I couldn’t predict how long the situation would hold. I’d suddenly realized that morning that soon it would be too hot to spend time in the upstairs room. The window unit my friend Amelia had installed in one of the bedrooms kept the living spaces tolerable, but of course we’d never wasted money putting one in the attic.

  “How shall we go ab
out this?” Dermot asked. He was blond and Claude was dark; they looked like gorgeous bookends. I’d asked Claude once how old he was, to find he had only the vaguest idea. The fae don’t keep track of time the same way we do, but Claude was at least a century older than me. He was a kid compared to Dermot; my great-uncle thought he was seven hundred years my senior. Not a wrinkle, not a gray hair, not a droop anywhere, on either of them.

  Since they were much more fairy than me—I was only one-eighth—we all seemed to be about the same age, our late twenties. But that would change in a few years. I would look older than my ancient kin. Though Dermot looked very like my brother, Jason, I’d realized the day before that Jason had crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. Dermot might not ever show even that token of aging.

  Pulling myself back into the here and now, I said, “I suggest we carry things down to the living room. It’s so much brighter down there; it’ll be easier to see what’s worth keeping and what isn’t. After we get everything out of the attic, I can clean it up after you two leave for work.” Claude owned a strip club in Monroe and drove over every day, and Dermot went where Claude went. As always . . .

  “We’ve got three hours,” Claude said.

  “Let’s get to work,” I said, my lips curving upward in a bright and cheerful smile. That’s my fallback expression.

  About an hour later, I was having second thoughts, but it was too late to back out of the task. (Getting to watch Claude and Dermot shirtless made the work a lot more interesting.) My family has lived in this house since there have been Stackhouses in Renard Parish. And that’s been well over a hundred and fifty years. We’ve saved things.

  The living room began to fill up in a hurry. There were boxes of books, trunks full of clothes, furniture, vases. The Stackhouse family had never been rich, and apparently we’d always thought we could find a use for anything, no matter how battered or broken, if we kept it long enough. Even the two fairies wanted to take a break after maneuvering an incredibly heavy wooden desk down the narrow staircase. We all sat on the front porch. The guys sat on the railing, and I slumped down on the swing.

  “We could just pile it all in the yard and burn it,” Claude suggested. He wasn’t joking. Claude’s sense of humor was quirky at best, minuscule the rest of the time.

  “No!” I tried not to sound as irritated as I felt. “I know this stuff is not valuable, but if other Stackhouses thought it ought to be stored up there, I at least owe them the courtesy of having a look at all of it.”

  “Dearest great-niece,” Dermot said, “I’m afraid Claude has a point. Saying this debris is ‘not valuable’ is being kind.” Once you heard Dermot talk, you knew his resemblance to Jason was strictly superficial.

  I glowered at the fairies. “Of course to you two most of this would be trash, but to humans it might have some value,” I said. “I may call the theater group in Shreveport to see if they want any of the clothes or furniture.”

  Claude shrugged. “That’ll get rid of some of it,” he said. “But most of the fabric isn’t even good for rags.” We’d put some boxes out on the porch when the living room began to be impassable, and he poked one with his toe. The label said the contents were curtains, but I could only guess what they’d originally looked like.

  “You’re right,” I admitted. I pushed with my feet, not too energetically, and swung for a minute. Dermot went in the house and returned with a glass of peach tea with lots of ice in it. He handed it to me silently. I thanked him and stared dismally at all the old things someone had once treasured. “Okay, we’ll start a burn pile,” I said, bowing to common sense. “Round back, where I usually burn the leaves?”

  Dermot and Claude glared at me.

  “Okay, right here on the gravel is fine,” I said. The last time my driveway had been graveled, the parking area in front of the house, outlined with landscape timbers, had gotten a fresh load, too. “It’s not like I get a lot of visitors.”

  By the time Dermot and Claude knocked off to shower and change for work, the parking area contained a substantial mound of useless items waiting for the torch. Stackhouse wives had stored extra sheets and coverlets, and most of them were in the same ragged condition as the curtains. To my deeper regret, many of the books were mildewed and mouse-chewed. I sighed and added them to the pile, though the very idea of burning books made me queasy. But broken furniture, rotted umbrellas, spotted place mats, an ancient leather suitcase with big holes in it . . . no one would ever need these items again.

  The pictures we’d uncovered—framed, in albums, or loose—we placed in a box in the living room. Documents were sorted into another box. I’d found some old dolls, too. I knew from television that people collected dolls, and perhaps these were worth something. There were some old guns, too, and a sword. Where was Antiques Roadshow when you needed it?

  Later that evening at Merlotte’s, I told my boss Sam about my day. Sam, a compact man who was actually immensely strong, was dusting the bottles behind the bar. We weren’t very busy that night. In fact, business hadn’t been good for the past few weeks. I didn’t know if the slump was due to the chicken processing plant closing or the fact that some people objected to Sam being a shapeshifter. (The two-natured had tried to emulate the successful transition of the vampires, but it hadn’t gone so well.) And there was a new bar, Vic’s Redneck Roadhouse, about ten miles west off the interstate. I’d heard the Redneck Roadhouse held all kinds of wet T-shirt contests, beer pong tournaments, and a promotion called “Bring in a Bubba Night”—crap like that.

  Popular crap. Crap that raked in the customers.

  Whatever the reasons, Sam and I had time to talk about attics and antiques.

  “There’s a store called Splendide in Shreveport,” Sam said. “Both the owners are appraisers. You could give them a call.”

  “How’d you know that?” Okay, maybe that wasn’t so tactful.

  “Well, I do know a few things besides tending bar,” Sam said, giving me a sideways look.

  I had to refill a pitcher of beer for one of my tables. When I returned, I said, “Of course you know all kinds of stuff. I just didn’t know you were into antiques.”

  “I’m not. But Jannalynn is. Splendide’s her favorite place to shop.”

  I blinked, trying not to look as disconcerted as I felt. Jannalynn Hopper, who’d been dating Sam for a few weeks now, was so ferocious she’d been named the Long Tooth pack enforcer—though she was only twenty-one and about as big as a seventh grader. It was hard to imagine Jannalynn restoring a vintage picture frame or planning to fit a plantation sideboard into her place in Shreveport. (Come to think of it, I had no idea where she lived. Did Jannalynn actually have a house?)

  “I sure wouldn’t have guessed that,” I said, making myself smile at Sam. It was my personal opinion that Jannalynn was not good enough for Sam.

  Of course, I kept that to myself. Glass houses, stones, right? I was dating a vampire whose kill list would top Jannalynn’s for sure, since Eric was over a thousand years old. In one of those awful moments you have at random, I realized that everyone I’d ever dated—though, granted, that was a short list—was a killer.

  And so was I.

  I had to shake this off in a hurry, or I’d be in a melancholy funk all evening.

  “You have a name and phone number for this shop?” I hoped the antiques dealers would agree to come to Bon Temps. I’d have to rent a U-Haul to get all the attic contents to Shreveport.

  “Yeah, I got it in my office,” Sam said. “I was talking to Brenda, the female half of the partnership, about getting Jannalynn something special for her birthday. It’s coming right up. Brenda—Brenda Hesterman—called this morning to tell me she had a few things for me to look at.”

  “Maybe we could go see her tomorrow?” I suggested. “I have things piled all over the living room and some out on the front porch, and the good weather won’t last forever.”

  “Would Jason want any of it?” Sam asked diffidently. “I’m just saying,
family stuff.”

  “He got a piecrust table around a month ago,” I said. “But I guess I should ask him.” I thought about it. The house and its contents were mine, since Gran had left it to me. Hmmmm. Well, first things first. “Let’s ask Ms. Hesterman if she’ll come give a look. If there’s pieces that are worth anything, I can think about it.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. “Sounds good. Pick you up tomorrow at ten?”

  That was a little early for me to be up and dressed since I was working the late shift, but I agreed.

  Sam sounded pleased. “You can tell me what you think about whatever Brenda shows me. It’ll be good to have a woman’s opinion.” He ran a hand over his hair, which (as usual) was a mess. A few weeks ago he’d cut it real short, and now it was in an awkward stage of growing back. Sam’s hair is a pretty color, sort of strawberry blond; but since it’s naturally curly, now that it was growing out it couldn’t seem to pick a direction. I suppressed an urge to whip out a brush and make sense out of it. That was not something an employee should do to her boss’s head.

  Kennedy Keyes and Danny Prideaux, who worked for Sam parttime as substitute bartender and bouncer, respectively, came in to climb on two of the empty barstools. Kennedy is beautiful. She was first runner-up to Miss Louisiana a few years ago, and she still looks like a beauty pageant queen. Her chestnut hair’s all glossy and thick, and the ends wouldn’t dare to split. Her makeup is meticulous. She has manicures and pedicures on a regular basis. She wouldn’t buy a garment at Wal-Mart if her life depended on it.

  A few years ago her future, which should have included a country club marriage in the next parish and a big inheritance from her daddy, had been derailed from its path when she’d served time for manslaughter.