Read Online Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris - Free Book Online

afterward and called 911.
    Lily Leeds asked me if they could talk to me the next day before I went to work. I gave them directions to my house and told them to come at ten. I didn’t think talking to them was a very good idea, but I didn’t think I had much of a choice, either. I would become more of an object of suspicion if I refused to talk about Debbie.
    I found myself wishing I could call Eric tonight and tell him about Jack and Lily Leeds; worries shared are worries halved. But Eric didn’t remember any of it. I wished that I could forget Debbie’s death, too. It was awful to know something so heavy and terrible, to be unable to share it with a soul.
    I knew so many secrets, but almost none of them were my own. This secret of mine was a dark and bloody burden.
    Charles Twining was due to relieve Terry at full dark. Arlene was working late, since Danielle was attending her daughter’s dance recital, and I was able to lighten my mood a little by briefing Arlene on the new bartender/bouncer. She was intrigued. We’d never had an Englishman visit the bar, much less an Englishman with an eye patch.
    “Tell Charles I said hi,” I called as I began to put on my rain gear. After a couple of hours of sprinkling, the drops were beginning to come faster again.
    I splashed out to my car, the hood pulled well forward over my face. Just as I unlocked the driver’s door and pulled it open, I heard a voice call my name. Sam was standing on crutches in the door of his trailer. He’d added a roofed porch a couple of years before, so he wasn’t getting wet, but hedidn’t need to be standing there, either. Slamming the car door shut, I leaped over puddles and across the stepping-stones. In a second or two, I was standing on his porch and dripping all over it.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    I stared at him. “You should be,” I said gruffly.
    “Well, I am.”
    “Okay. Good.” I resolutely didn’t ask him what he’d done with the vampire.
    “Anything happen over at the bar today?”
    I hesitated. “Well, the crowd was thin, to put it mildly. But . . .” I started to tell him about the private detectives, but then I knew he’d ask questions. And I might end up telling him the whole sorry story just for the relief of confessing to someone. “I have to go, Sam. Jason’s taking me to visit Calvin Norris in the hospital in Grainger.”
    He looked at me. His eyes narrowed. The lashes were the same red-gold as his hair, so they showed up only when you were close to him. And I had no business at all thinking about Sam’s eyelashes, or any other part of him, for that matter.
    “I was a shit yesterday,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you why.”
    “Well, I guess you do,” I said, bewildered. “Because I sure don’t understand.”
    “The point is, you know you can count on me.”
    To get mad at me for no reason? To apologize afterward? “You’ve really confused me a lot lately,” I said. “But you’ve been my friend for years, and I have a very high opinion of you.” That sounded way too stilted, so I tried smiling. He smiled back, and a drop of rain fell off my hood and splashed on my nose, and the moment was over. I said, “When do you think you’ll get back to the bar?”
    “I’ll try to come in tomorrow for a while,” he said. “At least I can sit in the office and work on the books, get some filing done.”
    “See you.”
    “Sure.”
    And I dashed back to my car, feeling that my heart was much lighter than it had been before. Being at odds with Sam had felt wrong. I didn’t realize how that wrongness had colored my thoughts until I was right with him again.

Chapter 5
    T HE RAIN PELTED down as we pulled in to the parking lot of the Grainger hospital. It was as small as the one in Clarice, the one most Renard Parish people were carried to. But the Grainger hospital was newer and had more of the diagnostic machines modern hospitals seemed to require.
    I’d changed into jeans and a sweater, but