XVI.

Previously... Sookie is drawn into a mystery with detective Andy Bellefleur involving the assault of local Bon Temps' resident Jock Fortier. While an unexpected late-night visit from Eric leads to the discovery of were-panther tracks around the perimeter of Sookie's home and also to some very enjoyable moments pressed up against a tree with our favorite Viking.

It was after ten when I awoke the next morning. I hummed and stretched myself out in bed like a cat after a long nap. My muscles were stiff, but the rest of me felt good. Who would've thought getting to third base with a vampire was all it took to have a good night's rest?

The weatherman from my bedside radio informed me it would be sunny and 70 that day, so I put on my denim shorts and a thin baby blue cotton sweater. I pulled out a pair of sneakers from the back of my closet and dusted them off. I hadn't had many opportunities to wear them—I'd bought them in the month before I'd been kidnapped. They were only cheap canvas slide on shoes in white, but they were cute and comfy.

I washed my face, cleaned my teeth, and afterward I examined my tongue in the bathroom mirror. No sign of the cut I'd inadvertently made on Eric's fang. It hadn't bothered me last night in the heat of the moment, but now…? I shivered and pulled a face at my reflection before leaving the bathroom. The idea of letting him bite me elicited a confusing tumble of emotions. Disgust and fear and, heck, maybe a little excitement too. And that just made me feel even worse.

If Eric and I were going to be doing this—this thing, whatever it was—then I needed to get a lid on the whole biting aspect of it all. I could hardly stand a nurse drawing blood from me, how the heck would I stand a vampire biting me? I couldn't imagine a vampire would be okay with not biting their lover, if that's what we even were. I sighed my pulled my hair tight into a ponytail. I'd have to work it out sometimes but not right now. Right now, I had to hurry to meet Detective Bellefleur at Jock Fortier's house in Bon Temps.

I grabbed an apple on my way through the kitchen and found Gran outside in the sunshine of the backyard hanging washing on the line.

"Someone's got a pep in her step," Gran said as she pegged up a plaid tea towel.

"Slept well," I said and took a bite.

Gran hummed with a faint tone of reproach. "Yes, and I'm sure it has nothing to do with your late-night visitor."

I froze mid-chew.

"Please inform Mr. Northman that I expect him to leave and enter my home through either the front or backdoor—and not your bedroom window."

My cheeks felt as if they were on fire. "Gran, I-"

"No excuses, Sookie. This is my home and while you live under my roof, I say what goes."

A flash of anger coursed through me. "So, it was no problem when you were sneaking your own boyfriend around, but when it's me, it's suddenly wrong?"

"What do you mean by that?" Gran asked curtly. She finished pegging up the next tea towel and gave me a hard look.

"I think you know exactly what I mean." I was a grown woman, one who got a start all too late on her love life and through no fault of her own. I refused to have my love life shamed when I'd done nothing wrong.

"No, in fact, I don't. Please enlighten me."

"What I mean is that there's a whole other side to this family that until recently no one but you knew about. And when I say other, I mean other." The second the words left my mouth I regretted it. I clapped a hand over my mouth to shut myself up. This was the last possible way I wanted to bring this up.

Gran paled and let out a soft exhale. "Oh…" She placed her handful of pegs back in the basket. "I take it Fintan has been in contact with you."

No," I said with a slow shake of my head. "His father."

Gran didn't know what to make of that.

"Sookie, there's a lot you need to understand. I think you should come back inside so we can talk." Her eyes shone with emotion, and I sighed heavily. I wasn't sure I was ready to hear what she had to say, especially when a quick brush with her thoughts confirmed what Niall had told me was true.

"I can't right now. I have somewhere I need to be. I'll be home in a couple hours, okay?"

She nodded, though she seemed a million miles away.

Jock Fortier and his girlfriend Junie Odell lived in a single-story white clapboard home that had seen better days maybe a generation or even two ago. Jock invited us inside, and Andy and I sat beside one another on a creaky old tapestry couch. Through yellowed curtains, thin morning light illuminated the dank home. It smelled stale like old cigarette smoke and hopelessness. It made me antsy. All I wanted to do was jump up and throw open all the windows and curtains to let the fresh air, sunshine and current decade inside.

"Y'all want a drink of water?" he asked, "Sorry, I can't offer you much."

We declined and Jock seemed relieved to not have to shift from the armchair where he'd just lowered himself down into with a wince. He was a thin, wiry guy with a mess of sandy brown hair that sat like a scraggly nest on his head. His right eye was completely swollen over and bruised, as was his lip. He'd taken a severe beating.

"I take it Junie stayed away last night," Andy said.

"Haven't heard from her. I left a bag of her stuff out on the street, I guess she came and got it last night when you released her."

Andy then introduced me formally, using the same line on Jock as he had with Junie— that I may be able to 'corroborate' some of his testimony. Although, this time Jock asked how that was possible. Andy shifted uncomfortably in his seat, evidently not having thought this far ahead into the conversation. Idiot.

"I was walking past your house at the time of the assault," I said. Unlike Andy, I'd already predicted he'd ask me this.

"Fine, well, like I told y'all yesterday… I was home alone and all of a sudden Junie was here. She was meant to be at the college library in Shreveport studying till late, but I guess she finished up early. I didn't even hear her come in. I was on the X-Box playing a game." He shrugged, and from his mind I gleaned he'd been playing some shooting game online with teammates, so he'd had his headphones on. "She started flicking the lights on and off and when I got up to check what was going on, she jumped me."

Andy kept asking him questions, and after a while my attention wandered, my eyes drawn instead to the room we were sitting in. The front door was directly off the living room. By it, sat a squat wicker basket piled with shoes and, above it, a wooden shelf holding keys and stacks of opened letters.

"Is that where you sit when you're playing the Xbox?" I asked, pointing to armchair Jock was currently in.

"Uh-huh."

"How do you and Junie normally come and go, through the front door?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"So you would've seen her had she entered through the front door on Wednesday night." Yet she'd still caught him by surprise.

"She must've come through the back."

"Can I go take a look at your backdoor?"

He nodded and Andy continued questioning him. I walked through to a small kitchen that resembled a ship's galley and through a narrow laundry room to the back door. The sink was piled with laundry waiting to be washed and my feet scuffed again the ratty, abused linoleum. I paused to examine it more closely. Drops of what might have been dried blood covered the flooring like old confetti. I carefully stepped around it.

The backdoor was dead bolted. I rattled it in place to see if it would budge. Nope, not an inch. Weird. Junie wasn't lying, I saw in her mind that she'd let herself in through the front door. But Jock wasn't lying either. He would've plainly seen her if she'd come in through the front. How was that even possible? How could both be true? She said she came home through the front door to find him curled in the corner beaten black and blue. He said she arrived home through the backdoor and pounced on him.

Neither party had been glamoured.

I rattled the door one last time and let go. One of them had to be lying. They couldn't both be telling the truth. Unless Jock was mistaken, and who he thought was Junie was in fact someone else. But if that were the case, how could they have gotten in the house? A brass key sat on the sill of the laundry room window. I picked it up and slid it into the deadbolt lock. It sank smoothly in place and turned without resistance. I opened the door and examined the handle from the outside. There was no signs of forced entry. I wonder who else had a key? I decided to return to Andy and Jock and ask that very question. I locked everything up again, returned the key to its resting place and turned to leave, when, without warning, the door rattled in its hinges. I spun on the spot and stared agog.

"Hello?" I peeked through the window's lace curtains. There was no one of the other side. How bizarre. The wind? The door rattled again. This time I jumped back in fright. What. On. Earth. I grabbed the handle and turned it, but of course the door didn't budge – it was dead bolted. The handle began shaking violently under my grasp. I released it like it was on fire.

"What in God's green earth?" I walked backward, slowly, step by step, until I was in the kitchen, my eyes trained on the back door the whole time. Without warning, the door separating the laundry room and kitchen slammed shut. I shrieked. Moving air, like a giant gust of wind, blew right through me. It knocked me clean off my feet, and I landed ass-first on the floor.

I scrabbled back to my feet and ran out into the living area.

"Everything okay?" Andy asked standing, hand poised on the butt of the pistol holstered at his hip.

"What's wrong with your back door?" I asked Jock.

"What do you mean?" He looked at me strangely. I could hear the hysterical tone in my voice and took a deep breath.

"I mean, have you locked it or been near it since the night of the attack?"

"No, I only got home this morning. I never use the backdoor."

"So Junie locked it up?"

"I guess..."

"She came home, let herself in through the back door – which you admitted she never does, and she bolted it behind her and then decided to attack you."

"I don't know, I guess. What did you see that night?"

I stared at him blankly, heart still racing, before the question made sense. Oh, right. The night I'd supposedly heard the attack.

"I didn't see anything."

"Well, what did you hear when you were walking past?"

"Uh…" I trailed off and looked at Andy, who in turn looked at me like I'd grown a second head in the few minutes I'd been out of the room.

"I just heard yelling," I told Jock. I glanced nervously back in the direction of the kitchen. What the heck had just happened to me? My hands were shaking, so I crossed my arms, tucking them underneath. What was it that Junie had said yesterday? That the house had felt like it was haunted? Doors moving and objects shifting? She hadn't been hysterical. She hadn't been making it up.

"They can't both be lying," Andy grumbled after we'd left Jock to nurse his wounds on his own, which I gathered from his thoughts, meant playing some first person shooting game on his X-Box.

"I understand that. I can't explain what's going on, but it's something hinky." I briefly considered telling Andy about my strange encounter in the kitchen and laundry room but couldn't work out a way to phrase it that didn't make me sound crazy too.

"Vampires?"

"No." I shook my head. "I can sense when they've messed with someone's memories."

"Well one of them is lying. It has to be her. He was conscious during the attack. He saw her. If you're telling me his memory is true, then there's no faking that."

"You can't lock her up without proof," I said.

"Testimony is proof in the court of law."

"I get that... but she didn't do it. I know she didn't. You can conscionably charge her."

"Yes, I can. You told me he wasn't lying. That he remembers her attacking him."

"Junie couldn't fake her memories of not attacking him. Why does he get the benefit of the doubt?"

"Because maybe she blacked out in her rage. Or maybe she's one of those nutcases that believes her own lies. She wouldn't be the first."

"Jesus, Andy. This goes beyond your clearance rate or Bud riding your ass for poor work performance." I stared back at the house. Sure enough, Jock was inside where we'd left him, back on his Xbox, his thoughts slowly turning fuzzy from the pain meds he'd taken partway through our conversation. "Something about this stinks. You can't mess with someone's future like that if you're not sure."

Andy scoffed. "Welcome to law enforcement, Sookie."

I left Andy standing there and decided to walk the few blocks back to the station. If Andy wanted to close the case, then I was determined make sure it was closed properly. That meant I needed time and the space to think.

Gran had baked my favorite—pecan pie. When I returned home, the whole house smelled of warm caramel and buttery pastry. We sat on the front porch on the small three-piece wicker patio setting Gran must've moved around from the back garden specifically for this conversation. Gran served us both large pieces of pie with whipped cream. She then poured me a glass of sweet tea. I felt her gaze briefly land on me as she poured, so I turned my focus to the way the chunks of ice and lemon slices bustled in the pitcher as if in a strange race to reach my glass first.

"Mitchell had mumps when he was a teen," Gran said. She set the pitcher back down.

"Uh…" The fork hovered in front of my mouth, pecan temptation a breath away but now the furthest thing from my mind.

"An unfortunate, but rare, side-effect of mumps is infertility."

I set my fork down back down on my plate. "Okay."

"I think you can gather what I'm telling you…"

"Grandpa couldn't have babies."

"We tried for years… things got tense. Difficult. I'm not proud of the arguments we had."

She stared at her plate, and I bit back my retort. I wanted to tell her that was no excuse to cheat. No excuse to go behind someone's back, but I sensed there was more to Gran's tale than a dissatisfied wife wanting children.

"He appeared one day. It was a hot day, early June in '54 or '55, I believe. I was outside, hanging sheets on the washing line, and Mitchell had been working long hours at the sawmill. Fintan was beautiful, like God had sent me a ray of sunshine. At first he would come and talk to me, keep me company. I never thought it was strange, a beautiful man emerging from the woods like that just to talk to me. It was like I was bewitched. Or maybe it was the loneliness that let me overlook the oddity of it all. Some time passed and I came to look forward to his visits. Everyday, like clockwork, he would arrive after Mitchell had gone to work. He would help me around the house, talk to me, bring me small gifts.

"He made me laugh, my, did he make me laugh. And he loved to hear about my life, and learn about how I lived... It was all so strange to him. I thought he was from Europe." Gran focused on straightening the napkin her glass sat on, seemingly embarrassed by this admission. "I never considered he was from somewhere completely different. Who would believe that fairytales were true? Then one day, we were sitting having a picnic in the yard. He'd brought the most exotic foods, and sweet wine. I was telling him something, I can't remember what, and I realized he was looking at me in a way a man had never looked at me before."

"What way's that?" I asked, my voice hushed.

"His heart was in his eyes." Gran drew a steadying breath, her eyes glassy with unshed tears. "He was in love with me, and though it made me terrified to realize it, I was in love with him too."

"Oh, Gran..."

Gran took a clean napkin from the small pile she'd brought with her and dabbed at the corner of her eyes. "He knew of the troubles Mitchell and I were suffering through. He offered the unthinkable... And I said yes. Corbett and Linda arrived within two years of one another."

"And then what happened?" My heart felt like it had risen from my chest and it was all I could do to try swallow it down.

"He continued to visit." She then told me to sit tight and disappeared inside. She returned a moment later with a leather-bound photo album and sat it on the table. I was familiar with it. It held all the family photos from when Daddy and Aunt Linda were children. Gran flicked through a few pages before settling her finger on a photograph. "That's him there."

"Gran... That's Grandpa." It was a family photo, Daddy was only little, his little ruddy cheeks and eyes shiny with good humor. He was sitting on the lap of Grandpa Mitchell, who looked like he'd been saying something when the photo was taken. His face with bright with mirth. She shook her head and smiled gently.

"Fintan could disguise himself, he did it so he could spend time with the kids."

I felt as if my breath had been stolen from me. She'd kept this secret from absolutely everyone her entire life. Even me, a telepath. The idea was explosive. How could a person hold onto a full-heart's worth of love and guilt and never tell a single soul?

"He made me feel like I was the center of his universe. And maybe I was in a way for him. He resented the responsibilities his father placed on him, but visiting Bon Temps, visiting me, was a respite." She moved to the back of the album and slipped her fingers under the very last photograph. It was a picture of Linda's prom night; she'd worn a floor length blue floral dress and her hair was swept over her head in a ridiculous wave. Gran retrieved a photo hiding underneath and passed it to me.

The man in the photo was striking. His cheekbones angular, his nose pointed and stately. The relation to Niall was uncanny. I could see Daddy in him too. Fintan was laying back on a grassy hill, propped up on his elbows, smiling broadly at the camera.

"He's beautiful," I whispered.

"He was a gas lantern, and I was a moth." Her words were steeped with sadness.

I traced my finger lightly across the photograph. She was right about one thing. His heart was in his eyes.

"Gran…" I said softly. "Fintan passed away."

She held still for a long moment, and then nodded once. Gran took this better than I anticipated. I clasped her hand tightly as I handed the photo back, and this time I didn't pry into her thoughts.

A/N: I hope everyone has been safe and healthy. I've been busy writing another (as yet unpublished) E/S story, so I apologize for not updating this one as frequently as I have in the past. I won't leave this story hanging forever. I will finish it. Thanks for your patience.