Dead But Not Forgotten (11 page)

“You're a cop,” she said. “Isn't that precious? I'll call soon as I can get a free minute. Got to run, now.” She gave him a peck on the cheek, letting her lips rest there a long moment before pulling away. Then she was rushing toward the kitchen door, where Tristan Kowel stood, arms folded over his chest, waiting with what must have been his trademark impatience.

Andy looked around for Sam, who never had answered his questions about that night. When he finally spotted him, Sam was deep in conversation with Bradley and one of the bearded guys. Andy, it seemed, would just have to wait.

Casey-Lynn Jennings. How about that? At first he couldn't wait to tell Portia he had seen her, but by the time he was belted into the torture-Honda, he had changed his mind. Portia had never liked her. When Casey-Lynn had broken up with him, Portia had said—and these words had been blazed into his soul ever since—“Good. That scrawny bitch doesn't deserve you anyway.”

Even that was selective memory. Truth was, she never had broken up with him, really. She had stopped answering his letters and stopped coming to the phone when he called after her family had moved to Arizona. Then the number he had was disconnected and he'd never heard from her again.

He never would have taken her for a Hollywood type. But years had passed since he'd known Casey-Lynn. A lot of them.

Bon Temps was small enough that everybody in the high school more or less knew one another. You saw the same people every day for four years—most of them people you'd known in grade school and junior high—and every face became pretty familiar. But there were people you socialized with and those you didn't, and even though Andy had thought Casey-Lynn Jennings attractive, he had never believed they had anything in common.

He played football and hung out with jocks. Friday nights, after the season ended, were for drinking beers and maybe plinking at cans out in the woods. Casey-Lynn hung out in the library, wrote poetry, and was friends with the drama club people. If they had been drawn into a human Venn diagram, they would barely have intersected.

Until midway through the season during his junior year, when a rough tackle had left Andy sidelined with a torn rotator cuff. He had still suited up for practice, and for the first couple of weeks he sat on the bench cheering on his teammates. But when the pressure of an upcoming midterm in his World History class had caught up with him, he'd started cracking his books instead of watching drills and practice scrimmages.

That was when Casey-Lynn entered his life. Andy was sitting in the shade of the bleachers, near the chain-link fence surrounding the stadium, and had a couple of books spread out on the ground as he scribbled in a spiral notebook.

“What're you working on?” a voice asked from the other side of the fence. Andy looked up and saw Casey-Lynn there, fingers laced through the chain link. The late-afternoon sun was in her face, and her big green eyes were squinting, her nose crinkled. She had long blond hair that caught the sunlight and seemed to magnify it, and he thought, in that moment, that he had never seen a prettier girl.

“History,” he said. “I have to know the causes of World War One, and I'm trying to keep these names straight. Archduke Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, Kaiser Wilhelm, and the rest of those guys.”

“Ferdinand's assassination was the immediate catalyst, but don't forget about the spread of European nationalism. And the Pig War.”

“Pig War?” Andy echoed.

When Casey-Lynn released the fence and sat, her crossed legs transformed her long, floral-print skirt into rolling meadowlands. “It was really a customs blockade of Serbian pork,” she explained. “But it's symptomatic, and it did play a direct role.”

“No shi—no kidding?” He hadn't heard anything in class about a Pig War. But Casey-Lynn sounded like she knew what she was talking about. When she launched into a detailed description of the events that pushed the world toward war, she made it both more entertaining and easier to follow than Mr. Ludlow, Andy's history teacher, had ever managed to do.

By the end of the lecture, he'd asked her out.

Casey-Lynn declined.

She also said no the second time, and the third through ninth.

But somehow she never made him feel rejected or demeaned. It almost turned into a game between them, and their friendship deepened to the point that at school they spent most of their time together, except when class schedules interfered. Finally, the tenth time Andy asked, she agreed to accompany him to the school's Christmas dance, though she insisted on meeting him there.

That night was as close to magic as anything Andy had ever known.

He arrived at school to find her waiting outside. It was cold enough that every exhalation produced a puff of steam, but she was wearing a red sateen dress that left her arms and shoulders bare. If she'd come in a coat, she had already ditched it. As Andy approached, she dashed into his arms and welcomed him with a kiss that seemed like it would never end, and at the same time was over far too soon.

They danced together to every song—Andy had never been much of a dancer, except for that night—and during slow ones, they held each other as if they would never let go. Once in a while, she tilted her head up and found his lips with hers, for kisses that went on until, on one occasion, Assistant Principal Duckworth warned them that if they did it again, they'd be escorted from the premises.

After, in Andy's car, the kisses were faster and more frantic, and accompanied by groping and heavy breathing that curtained the windows with steam. Later, Andy couldn't say when the pickup truck had stopped beside his car in the now-empty school lot, or how long it had sat, engine rumbling, before he and Casey-Lynn noticed.

“Shit!” she said when she finally peered outside. “It's my brother. I have to go, baby.”

“I could take you home in a while.” She had never invited him to her house or introduced him to her family. He was curious about the brother, but fogged windows and the truck cab's height blocked his view.

“No, it's okay. I'll get in trouble if I don't go with him.”

“But, Casey-Lynn . . .”

She pushed his hands away from her. “Seriously, Andy. I have to go.”

“Can I see you tomorrow? Or over break?”

“We'll see. I'll call you.”

And she had, from a gas station pay phone in Houston. The family, she told him, was moving west. She apologized for not being able to see him before they left, but she would let him know where she landed. Then she said, “Someone's coming, I gotta run,” and hung up.

She had written, for a while, and taken his calls for a while.

Then nothing.

Until now.

She called at eleven the next morning and asked if Andy could meet her at Merlotte's for lunch. He was off that day, not even exercising his thumbs at his desk. He had already showered and shaved, but he did so again, then got in the hated Honda and drove over.

Sam's parking lot was full of booth benches and tables and bar stools and chairs and kitchen equipment, stacks of dishes and glassware, pots and pans, trays of utensils, and all the miscellaneous stuff Sam used inside. A carpentry crew had set up sawhorses and acquired lumber and was hard at work on some object Andy couldn't identify. The sounds of power saws and hammering filled the air, as did scents of sawdust and paint. Plastic sheeting trailed from the front door, and a paint-spattered guy was carrying two five-gallon cans inside.

Sam Merlotte stood at a remove from it all, watching and scratching the top of his head.

“What's goin' on?” Andy asked him.

“I don't really know anymore.”

“Lot of activity. Looks like they're tearing the place apart.”

Sam glanced at him. “They are, pretty much.”

“That okay with you?”

“Apparently I signed a contract saying it was. I don't actually remember doing that, but it's my signature.”

“Could it be a forgery?”

Sam showed him a wry grin. “One thing I've learned in Bon Temps, Andy. Anything could be anything.”

“Guess that's true.”

“Count on it.”

“Listen, Sam,” Andy said. “About that night—”

“I've been trying to remember, Andy. Lafayette was my friend as well as my chef. But I really can't say that anyone came in that night who was at all out of the ordinary. Anyway, I doubt anyone would have dumped his body while we were open. There are always people coming and going, and they couldn't have known you'd get a ride home, until you did. I figure the body was put in your car after hours, when it was the only car left in the lot. They might not even have known it was yours.”

“Could be,” Andy agreed. He had thought of that. In the couple of days since, he had considered just about every possible angle.

Still, he had to be missing something, because he hadn't yet figured out who had done it.

“Sorry, Andy,” Sam said. “I—”

“Yeah,” Andy interrupted. Casey-Lynn had appeared in the doorway and was looking outside, shading her eyes against the sun. “If you think of anything else, let me know.”

She spotted Andy and burst from the door. He broke away from Sam and met her halfway. They embraced, not quite with the passion of that evening outside the Christmas dance, but it was, Andy thought, a better hug than most he'd had since then.

“You ready for some lunch?” she asked.

Andy gestured toward the restaurant furnishings clotting the parking lot. “Is it open?”

“Only to crew,” Casey-Lynn said. “But Terry's on the grill. He can whip up anything you want.”

“I know that. He's my cousin.”

“Of course he is, silly.”

She took him by the hand and led him inside. Emptied out, the place seemed huge. The crew had set up lights on stands and suspended more from the ceiling. Against one wall, workers were installing a kind of wooden latticework with indentations that almost looked like the insides of egg cartons, except with hollow centers. Soundproofing, Andy guessed. Others were refinishing the bar with a high-gloss, almost metallic finish, and yet more were painting the kitchen. Andy wondered how Terry was managing to cook anything, with what seemed to be all the kitchenware outside and a crew of painters underfoot.

Casey-Lynn led Andy through the interior and out the back door. A handful of tables had been set up between the restaurant and Sam's trailer, and various crew members occupied a couple of them. Tristan Kowel sat by himself, at a table with a single chair and a big umbrella covering it. He gazed on the scene before him with what looked like barely restrained revulsion.

“Guy's kind of a jerk, ain't he?” Andy said softly.

“Tristan? He's okay. He knows he's the show. Without him, it's just footage of a bunch of greasy spoons nobody would want to go into.”

“Sam's place isn't bad.”

“I don't mean Merlotte's,” Casey-Lynn said quickly. “But most of them.
This
is like coming home.”

“It wasn't here when you were.”

“I mean Bon Temps. You. Being here again, after so long.”

“It has been a while.”

She took his hand, held it. The years had etched tiny lines in her face: around her eyes, at the corners of her mouth. He liked them. Her hair was a shade or two darker than it had been, and cut short, even with her jawline. She had put on a little weight, and he liked that, too. He wondered what the transition had been like, from the smart, pretty girl he had known to the accomplished woman she was today.

“I guess I owe you an apology, don't I?” she said.

“For what?”

“Disappearing like that.”

He chuckled. “It was kind of abrupt.”

“You didn't know my parents.”

“You never let me.”

“There was a reason for that.” She let go of his hand, and her gaze wandered around the back parking area. Andy followed it. Fall was starting to set in; leaves were beginning to brown, and some had already dropped, dry and curled, onto the ground. Nobody had told the mosquitoes yet, but they would get the message soon enough. “I guess we didn't use the word
dysfunctional
in those days, but that's what they were.
We
were. My daddy was never any good, Andy. He was a petty criminal, as lazy as the day is long, always looking for the easiest way to do anything. Mama wasn't much better, and that's how they reared up us kids. When one of them would come home and say, ‘Time to pack up and move,' we packed up and moved. It usually meant there was a sheriff on the way.”