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“They don’t think he ever had anything to do with the Fellowship. They don’t understand anything about his death.”

To say I dreaded this encounter was putting it mildly. “Why talk to me?” I said in a kind of subdued wail. I was nearly at the end of my emotional endurance.

“They just . . . want answers. They’re grieving.”

“So am I,” I said. “My home.”

“Their loved one.”

I stared at Sam. “Why should I talk to them?” I asked. “What is it you want from me?”

“You need to hear what they have to say,” Sam said with a note of finality in his voice. He wouldn’t push any more, and he wouldn’t explain any more. Now the decision was up to me.

Because I trusted Sam, I nodded. “I’ll talk to them when I get off work,” I said. I secretly hoped they’d leave by then. But when my shift was over, the two were still sitting in Sam’s office. I took off my apron, tossed it in the big trash can labeled DIRTY LINEN (reflecting for the hundredth time that the trash can would probably implode if anyone put some actual linen in it), and plodded into the office.

I looked the Marriots over more carefully now that we were face-to-face. Mrs. Marriot (I assumed) was in bad shape. Her skin was grayish, and her whole body seemed to sag. Her glasses were smeared because she’d been weeping so much, and she was clutching damp tissues in her hands. Her son was shocked expressionless. He’d lost his twin, and he was sending me so much misery I could hardly absorb it.

“Thanks for talking to us,” he said. He rose from his seat automatically and extended his hand. “I’m Jay Marriot, and this is my mother, Justine.”

This was a family that found a letter of the alphabet it liked and stuck to it.

I didn’t know what to say. Could I tell them I was sorry their loved one was dead, when he’d tried to kill me? There was no rule of etiquette for this; even my grandmother would have been stymied.

“Miss—Ms.—Stackhouse, had you ever met my brother before?”

“No,” I said. Sam took my hand. Since the Marriots were seated in the only two chairs Sam’s office could boast, he and I leaned against the front of his desk. I hoped his leg wasn’t hurting.

“Why would he set fire to your house? He’d never been arrested before, for anything,” Justine spoke for the first time. Her voice was rough and choked with tears; it had an undertone of pleading. She was asking me to let this not be true, this allegation about her son Jeff.

“I sure don’t know.”

“Could you tell us how this happened? His—death, I mean?”

I felt a flare of anger at being obliged to pity them—at the necessity for being delicate, for treating them specially. After all, who had almost died here? Who had lost part of her home? Who was facing a financial crunch that only chance had reduced from a disaster? Rage surged through me, and Sam let go of my hand and put his arm around me. He could feel the tension in my body. He was hoping I would control the impulse to lash out.

I held on to my better nature by my fingernails, but I held on.

“A friend woke me up,” I said. “When we got outside, we found a vampire who is staying with my neighbor—also a vampire—standing by Mr. Marriot’s body. There was a gasoline can near to the . . . nearby. The doctor who came said there was gas on his hands.”

“What killed him?” The mother again.

“The vampire.”

“Bit him?”

“No, he . . . no. No biting.”

“How, then?” Jay was showing some of his own anger.

“Broke his neck, I think.”

“That was what we heard at the sheriff ’s office,” Jay said. “But we just didn’t know if they were telling the truth.”

Oh, for goodness’s sake.

Sweetie Des Arts stuck her head in to ask Sam if she could borrow the storeroom keys because she needed a case of pickles. She apologized for interrupting. Arlene waved a hand at me as she went down the hall to the employees’ door, and I wondered if Dennis Pettibone had come in the bar. I’d been so sunk in my own problems, I hadn’t noticed. When the outside door clunked shut behind her, the silence seemed to gather in the little room.

“So why was the vampire