If this had happened even a week, two weeks ago, I could have been confident that Eric, or even perhaps my great-grandfather Niall (prince of the fairies), would have me out in the wink of an eye. But I'd burned my bridges with Eric, and Niall had sealed himself into Faery for complicated reasons.

Now I had Jason.

I knew every single person I saw during the process of being booked. It was the most humiliating experience of my life, and that was saying something. I discovered I was being charged with second-degree murder. I knew from Kennedy Keyes's discussion of her time in jail that the penalty for second-degree murder would be life in prison.

I do not look good in orange.

There are worse things than humiliation and worse things than wearing a jail outfit (baggy tunic and drawstring pants). That's for sure. But I have to say, my cup was full and overflowing, and I was ready for some goodness and mercy. I was so agitated that I was glad to see the cell door. I thought I'd be alone. But I wasn't. Jane Bodehouse, of all people, was passed out and snoring on the bottom bunk. She must have had a few adventures after Merlotte's closed the night before.

At least she was out of it, so I had plenty of time to adjust to my new circumstances. After ten minutes of processing, I was bored out of my mind. If you'd asked me how it would be to sit without work to do, without a book, without a television, without even a telephone, I would have laughed because I couldn't have imagined such a situation.

The boredom - and my inability to get away from my own fearful conjectures - was awful. Maybe it hadn't been so bad for Jason when he'd been in jail? My brother didn't like to read, and he wasn't much on reflection, either. I would ask him how he'd managed, the next time I saw him.

Now Jason and I had more in common than we'd ever had in our lives. We were both jailbirds.

He'd been arrested for murder, too, in the past, and like me, he was innocent, though evidence had pointed in his direction. Oh, poor Gran! This would have been so awful for her. I hoped she couldn't see me from heaven.

Jane was snoring, but seeing her familiar face was somehow homey. I used the toilet while she was out of it. There would be plenty of awfulness in my future, but I was trying to forestall a little bit of it.

I'd never been in a jail cell before. It was pretty disgusting. Tiny, battered, scarred, concrete floor, bunk beds. After a while, I got tired of squatting on the floor. Since Jane was sprawled across the bottom bunk, with some difficulty I hauled myself to the top level. I thought of all the faces I'd seen through the bars as I'd gone to my cell: startled, curious, bored, hard. If I'd known all the people on the free side of the bars, I'd also recognized almost all those men and women on the other side, too. Some were just fuckups, like Jane. Some of them were very bad people.

I could hardly breathe, I was so scared.

And the worst part - well, not the worst part, but a real bad part - was that I was guilty. Oh, not of Arlene's death. But I had killed other people, and I'd watched many more die at the hands of others. I couldn't even be sure I remembered them all.

In a kind of panic, I scrambled to recall their names, how they'd died. The harder I tried, the more the memories became jumbled. I saw the faces of people I'd watched perish, people whose deaths I hadn't caused. But also I saw the faces of people (or creatures) I'd killed; the fairy Murry, for example, and the vampire Bruno. The werefox Debbie Pelt. Not that I'd gone out hunting them because I had a beef with them; they'd all been intent on killing me. I kept telling myself that it had been okay to defend my life, but the reiteration of their death scenes was my conscience letting me know that (though I was not guilty of the crime that had put me here) jail was not a totally inappropriate place for me to be.

This was the rock-bottom moment of my life. I had a lot of clarity about my own character; I had more time than I wanted to think about how I'd landed where I was. As unpleasant as the first hours in the cell were, they got worse when Jane woke up.

First, she was sick from both ends, and since the toilet was sitting completely exposed, that was just . . . disgusting. After Jane weathered that phase, she was so miserable and hungover that her thoughts were dull throbs of pain and remorse. She promised herself over and over that she would do better, that she would not drink so much again, that her son would not have to fetch her again, that she would start that very evening to cut way back on the beers and shots. Or since she felt so horrible today, maybe tomorrow would be soon enough. That would be much more practical.

I endured a few more mental and verbal cycles like this before Jane realized she had a companion in the cell and that her new buddy wasn't one of her usual cell mates.

"Sookie, what are you doing here?" Jane said. She still sounded pretty puny, though God knew her body should be empty of toxins.

"I'm as surprised as you are," I said. "They think I killed Arlene."

"So she did get out of jail. I really did see her, not last night but the night before," Jane said, brightening a little. "I thought it was a dream or something, since I was sure she was behind bars."

"You saw her? Somewhere besides Merlotte's?" I didn't think Jane had been in Merlotte's when Arlene had come to speak to me.

"Yeah, I was gonna tell you yesterday, but I got sidetracked by that lawyer talk."

"Where did you see her, Jane?"

"Oh, where'd I see her? She was . . ." This was clearly a big effort for Jane. She ran her fingers through her snarled hair. "She was with two guys."

Presumably these were the friends Arlene had mentioned. "When was this?" I tried to ask this very gently, because I didn't want to risk knocking Jane off course. She wasn't the only one who was having a hard time staying on track. I had to concentrate hard to both breathe and ask coherent questions. After Jane's episodes of illness, it smelled pretty awful in our little bunkhouse.

Jane tried to recall the time and place of her Arlene encounter, but it was such a struggle and there were so many less taxing things to think about that it took her a while. However, Jane was at heart a kind person, so she fumbled through her memories till she arrived at success. "I seen her out back of . . . you remember that real big guy who repaired motorcycles?"

I had to clamp down on myself to keep my voice casual. "Tray Dawson. Had a shop and a house out where Court Street turns into Clarice Road." Tray's large shop/garage stood between Tray's house and Brock and Chessie Johnson's, where Coby and Lisa were living. There were only woods behind those houses, and since Tray's was the last one on the street, it was a secluded spot.

"Yeah. She was out there, in back of his house. It's been closed for a while now, so I got no idea what she was doing."

"You know the guys she was with?" I was trying so hard to sound casual, trying so hard not to inhale the terrible miasma, that my voice came out in a squeak like a mouse that was being strangled.

"No, I ain't seen them before. One of 'em was kind of tall and skinny and bony, and the other one was just plain looking."

"How'd you come to see them?"

If Jane had had enough energy to look uncomfortable, she would have. As it was, she looked a tad woeful. She said, "Well, that night I thought about going by the nursing home to see Aunt Martha, but I stopped off at the house to have a little drink, so by the time I got to the nursing home, they said the place was closing to visitors, it being pretty late and all. But I run into Hank Clearwater there, you know, the handyman? He was leaving after visiting his dad. Well, me and Hank have known each other forever, and he said we could have a drink in his car, and before you know it one thing led to another, but we thought he better move the car somewhere a little more private, so he pulled into the woods across the street from the nursing home, there's a little track through the woods where kids run four-wheelers. We could see the backs of the houses on Clarice Road. They all got those big security lights. Helped us see what we were doing!" She giggled.

"So that's how you were able to see Arlene," I said, since I didn't even want to think about Hank and Jane.

"Yeah, that's how come I saw her. I thought, 'Damn, that's Arlene, and she's out, and she tried to kill Sookie. What's up with that?' Those men were real close to her. She was handing them something, and then Hank and I . . . got to . . . talking, and I never saw them again. Next time I looked up, they were gone."

Jane's piece of information was very important to me in a dubious kind of way. On the one hand, it might help clear me or at least give the law grounds for doubting that I'd had any part in killing Arlene. On the other hand, Jane was not what you would call a reliable witness, and her story could be shaken up with one arm tied behind a policeman's back.

I sighed. As Jane began a monologue about her long "friendship" with Hank Clearwater (I'd never be able to have him in to work on my plumbing after this), I had some random thoughts of my own.

My witness, Karin the Slaughterer, would not rise until full dark, which would not be achieved until quite late. (Not for the first time, I told myself how much I hated daylight saving time.) Karin was a better witness than Jane because she was obviously sharp, alert, and in her right mind. Of course, she was dead. Having a vampire as a witness to your whereabouts was not a glowing testimonial. Though they were now citizens of the United States, they were not treated or regarded like humans, not by a long shot. I wondered if the police would get around to interviewing Karin tonight. Maybe they'd already sent someone to Fangtasia before she'd turned in today.

I considered what Jane had told me. A tall, thin guy and a plain guy, not locals or Jane would have recognized them. With Arlene. In the area behind the house next door to where her children were staying with Brock and Chessie Johnson. Late, on the night Arlene was murdered. That was a big development.

Kevin, in a clean, crisp uniform, brought us lunch an hour later. Fried bologna, mashed potatoes, sliced tomatoes. He looked at me with as much distaste as I'd looked at the food.

"You can just cut that out, Kevin Pryor," I said. "I no more killed Arlene than you can tell your mama who you're living with."

Kevin turned bright red, and I knew my tongue had gotten the better of me. Kevin and Kenya had been living together for a year now, and most people in town knew about it. But Kevin's mom could pretend she didn't know because Kevin didn't tell her face-to-face. There wasn't a thing wrong with Kenya, except for Kevin's mom she was the wrong color to be a girlfriend to Kevin.

"You just shut up, Sookie," he said. Kevin Pryor had never said a rude thing to me in his life. I suddenly realized that I didn't look the same to Kevin now that I was wearing orange. From being someone he should treat with respect, I'd become someone he could tell to shut up.

I stood and looked into his face through the bars separating us. I looked at him for a long moment. He turned even redder. There was no point in telling him Jane's story. He wasn't going to listen.

Alcee Beck came back to the cells that afternoon. Thank God he didn't have the key to our cell. He loomed outside it, silent and glowering. I saw his big fists clench and unclench in a very unnerving way. Not only did he want to see me go to jail for murder, he would love to beat me up. He was spoiling for it. Only the thinnest thread kept him anchored to self-restraint.

The black cloud was still in his head, but it didn't seem as dense. His thoughts were leaking through.

"Alcee," I said, "you know I didn't do this, right? I think you do know that. Jane has evidence that two men saw Arlene that night." Even though I knew Alcee didn't like me, for reasons both personal and professional, I didn't think he would persecute (or prosecute) me for his own reasons. Though he was certainly capable of some corruption, some graft, Alcee had never been suspected of being any kind of vigilante. I knew he hadn't had any personal relationship with Arlene, for two reasons: Alcee loved his wife, Barbara, the librarian here in Bon Temps, and Arlene had been a racist.

The detective didn't respond to my words, but I could tell there was a question or two going on in his thoughts about the righteousness of his actions. He departed, his face still full of anger.

Something was so wrong inside Alcee Beck. Then it came to me: Alcee was acting like someone who'd been possessed. That was a key thought. I finally had something new to think about; I could spend infinite time picking the thought apart.

The rest of the day passed with excruciating slowness. It's bad when the most interesting thing that happens to you all day is getting arrested. The women's jailer, Jessie Schneider, sauntered down the hall to tell Jane that her son couldn't pick her up until tomorrow morning. Jessie didn't speak to me, but she didn't have to. She gave me a good long look, shook her head, and walked back to her office. She'd never heard anything bad about me, and it made her sad that someone who'd had such a good grandma had ended up in jail. It made me sad, too.

A trustee brought us our supper, which was pretty much lunch revisited. At least the tomatoes were fresh, since there was a garden at the jail. I'd never thought I'd get tired of fresh tomatoes, but between my own burgeoning plants and the jail produce, I would be glad when they were out of season.

There wasn't a window in our cell, but there was one across the corridor, high up on the wall. When the window got dark, all I could think of was Karin. I prayed very earnestly that (if she hadn't been already) she would be contacted by the police, that she would tell the truth, that the truth would literally set me free. I didn't get a lot of sleep that night after the lights went out. Jane snored, and someone over in the men's section was screaming from about midnight to one a.m.