Then I returned to my admiration of the cluviel dor. Did you have to be pure fairy to open it? No, that couldn’t be the case. It had been a gift to my grandmother, presumably to use in case of dire need, and she had been completely human.
I wished it hadn’t been far away in the attic when she’d been attacked. Whenever I remembered how she’d been discarded on the kitchen floor like offal, soaking in her own blood, I felt both sick and furious. Maybe if she’d had time to fetch the cluviel dor, she could have saved herself.
And with that thought, I’d had enough. I returned the cluviel dor to its velvet bag, and I returned Gran’s letter to the pattern envelope. I’d had as much upset as I could handle for a while.
It was necessary to hide these items. Unfortunately, their previous excellent hideaway had been removed to a store in Shreveport.
Maybe I should call Sam. He could put the letter and the cluviel dor in the safe at Merlotte’s. But considering the attacks on the bar, that wouldn’t be the best place to stow something I valued. I could drive over to Shreveport and use my key to enter Eric’s house to find someplace there. In fact, it was highly possible that Eric had a safe, too, and had never had occasion to show it to me. After I’d mulled it over, that didn’t seem like a good idea, either.
I wondered if my desire to keep the items here was simply because I didn’t want to be parted from the cluviel dor. I shrugged. No matter how the conviction had come into my head, I was sure the house was the safest place, at least for now. Perhaps I could put the smooth green box into the sleeping hole for vampires in my guest bedroom closet . . . but that wasn’t much more than a bare box, and what if Eric needed to spend the day there?
After racking my brain, I put the pattern envelope into the box of unexamined paper items from the attic. These would be uninteresting to anyone but me. The cluviel dor was a little more difficult to stow away, at least partly because I kept having to resist an impulse to pull it out of the bag again. That struggle made me feel very — Gollum-esque.
“My precioussss,” I muttered. Would Dermot and Claude be able to sense the nearness of such a remarkable item? No, of course not. It had been in the attic all the time and they hadn’t found it.
What if they’d come to live here in hopes of finding it? What if they knew or suspected I had such a thing? Or (more likely) what if they were staying here because they were made happy by its proximity? Though I was sure there were holes in that idea, I couldn’t shake it. It wasn’t my fairy blood that drew them; it was the presence of the cluviel dor.
Now you’re just being paranoid, I told myself sternly, and I risked one more glimpse of the creamy green surface. The cluviel dor, I thought, looked like a miniature powder compact. With that idea, the right hiding place came to me. I took the cluviel dor out of its velvet pouch and slid it into the makeup drawer of my dressing table. I opened my box of loose powder and sprinkled just a little over the gleam of creamy green. I added a hair from my brush. Ha! I was pleased with the result. As an afterthought, I stuffed the disintegrating velvet bag into my hose-and-belt drawer. My reason told me the ratty object was just a decaying old bag, but my emotions told me it was something important because my grandmother and my grandfather had touched it.
I had so many thoughts ricocheting in my brain that it shut down for the day. After I’d done a little bit of housework, I watched the college softball world series on ESPN. I love softball, because I played in high school. I loved seeing the strong young women from all over America; I loved watching them play a game as hard as they could, full tilt, nothing held in reserve. I realized while I was watching that I knew two other young women like that: Sandra Pelt and Jannalynn Hopper. There was a lesson there, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
Chapter 7
I heard my two housemates come in Sunday night, not too late. Hooligans wasn’t open on Sunday, and I tried not to wonder what they’d been doing all day. They were still asleep when I made my coffee on Monday morning. I moved around the house as quietly as I could, getting dressed and checking my e-mail. Amelia was on her way, she said, and she added cryptically that she had something important to tell me. I wondered if she had found out information about my “c.d.” already.
Tara had sent out a group e-mail with an attached picture of her huge belly, and I reminded myself that the baby shower I was giving her was the next weekend. Yikes! After a moment of panic, I calmed myself. The invitations were sent, I’d bought her gift, and I’d planned the food. I was as ready as I could be, aside from the last-minute flurry of cleaning.