Day Shift

5

Olivia stood opposite the hotel for several minutes, her mind not made up to action. The vehicles were gone from the curb. The banner was still flapping above the doorway, but there was no one on the sidewalk. The petunias in their pots tossed their bright heads in the wind.

The wind was one thing that reminded her of home. In San Francisco, where she’d spent a significant part of her youth, the wind off the bay was a given. She had always felt good when it brushed her face. It was part of being out of her parents’ compound, out of the high walls that sealed her in: or, as her father always insisted, kept her safe.

Kept her safe from everyone and everything but her family.

“Fucking assholes,” she said out loud. She said that every time she thought of her parents. The words slipped out no matter where she was. Here in Midnight, it didn’t make any difference. Who was there to hear, or who would question her if he did hear? But she’d startled a lot of people out in the real world. That was the way she thought of it. Here in this little hole-in-the-road of a town, with so few people remaining that a POPULATION sign would be a joke, she’d found the most unlikely place to live and the most bizarre creature to be her lover.

He siphoned off her agitation.

There was a long list of things she liked about Lemuel Bridger. But his ability to drain her of the tension and anger that propelled her into terrible places… that was priceless.

And it helped him to thrive, too. Win-win.

Looking over at the reopened Midnight Hotel, she felt that familiar anger building, at least partly due to Lemuel’s absence. And before she knew it, she was striding across Witch Light Road and pushing open the restored door to the lobby, which smelled like a mixture of new and old. There was the dust of decades buried deep between the refinished boards of the floor, and it added flavor to the smell of the paint and varnish and wax and the sharp tang of new nails and hardware. This depth of scent made possible by Lem’s blood, she thought. Lem loved it when she bit him.

A bell had chimed over her head as the door opened, the electronic rendering of a real bell. In seconds, a brisk step from down the hall to the left of the registration desk announced the approach of a woman in her fifties. She had short brown hair with a lot of gray mixed in, and she had thin arms and legs and a thick middle.

“Good morning,” the woman said pleasantly, walking behind the desk as if prepared to check Olivia in. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Olivia Charity.” She watched the woman with the close attention of a hawk who’d glimpsed a mouse, but there wasn’t any indication the woman had heard her name before. “I live here in Midnight,” she continued.

“Oh, nice to meet you. I’m Lenore Whitefield.”

“Will this be an old folks’ home?” Olivia asked, though she’d read all the material. She just wanted to engage Mrs. Whitefield (there was a plain gold band on the woman’s left hand), draw her out.

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Whitefield said, smiling. “It’s really a hotel for long-term renters. Shall I show you around? We do have a few rooms for what we think of as pre-assisted-living people, just places to stay if they have to leave their homes. Before an opening comes up in the facility of their choice. Not a nursing home.”

Hmmmm. Very definite. Olivia was sure if Mrs. Whitefield had said, “Yes, we’re a nursing home,” there would have been all kinds of government involved. This way, they were skirting the issue.

“I would like to take you up on that tour,” Olivia said, with a charming smile. (She knew she could be charming when she chose.) “If you have a few minutes? I have an elderly aunt who might be interested.” Olivia did have an aunt, a brittle and attractive widow in her fifties, who would have rather have been shot than be called “elderly.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Whitefield said. “Well, down here we have the rooms equipped for her…” Olivia looked at one of the rooms. Though each suite was on the small side, they’d been restored with some charm and talent. The chairs were low and comfortable, the beds low and comfortable, too, and the bathrooms were designed to help people who might be having a little trouble getting up and down, with handy grab bars.

Next they visited the small dining room, where Mrs. Whitefield explained the dining policy. Through an open hatch, Olivia saw a middle-aged Latina with her hair in a net. She was chopping something on the work counter in the kitchen. There were people to cook for already?

Before she could ask a question, Mrs. Whitefield steered her into a little parlor off the lobby, sort of a common room for the residents, and pointed out the card table, television, and stack of magazines.

Back in the lobby, Mrs. Whitefield showed Olivia that a small elevator had been installed in the spot where (Olivia figured) the phone booth had been. But she chose to walk up the stairs with Mrs. Whitefield. The first rooms up there had been adapted for the modern traveler. Not only was there free Wi-Fi, there were abundant and handy outlets for charging e-readers and telephones and anything else you wanted to plug in. The televisions were flat-screen. There was a deck for your iPod. The beds were high and white and looked comfortable. There was a microwave and a coffeepot and a small refrigerator. If you were stuck with being away from home for a night or a month, you could do a lot worse than stay at the former Río Roca Fría Hotel, now reborn as simply the Midnight Hotel. There were also two more “elderly” rooms.

“So you think this multipurpose type of residence is the future thing?” Olivia said.

“Oh, definitely, especially in small towns where specialization isn’t economically viable,” Mrs. Whitefield said.

“You’ll be working here full-time? In residence?” Olivia smiled, encouraging her companion to expound.

“Yes, I’ll be here, and my husband will do the handyman-type jobs. In addition, we’ll have a trained nurse stop in once a day to visit the elder residents, checking their blood pressure and so on.”

“That sounds ideal,” Olivia said. In fact, it did, if she had an aunt who needed to be stowed somewhere until an assisted-living place had an empty apartment. “I hope that the hotel is a great success. Whoever thought of reopening such an old place? Was it your idea?”

Mrs. Whitefield looked surprised. “Oh, honey, I don’t have that kind of money,” she said, laughing. “No, some big corporation has lots of projects like this, and God bless ’em, they didn’t mind hiring someone like me who’s been out of a job for a year, and my husband longer than that.”

Desperate people whose loyalty can be bought and relied upon, Olivia thought. She came from a line of opportunists who specialized in sizing up employees that way. “That’s a blessing,” she said soberly.

“You bet. We get a place to live, we get to work for our living, no handouts.”

“Do you have kids who’ll be visiting?” Olivia said, while her face was turned away to look at the new thick curtains hanging at the window of the last room.

“We weren’t blessed with children,” the woman said. “But we’re plenty glad for each other.”

“Of course,” Olivia said, infusing understanding and sympathy into her voice. “Thanks for taking the time to show me the place. I’ll call my aunt’s kids and tell them all about it. It looks wonderful to me.”

As they went down the stairs, a heavy man in his fifties was coming in the front door with several bags weighing down his hands. Plastic grocery bags from the Kroger in Davy, Olivia noted.

“Harvey, I’m coming,” Lenore Whitefield said, and hurried ahead of Olivia down the stairs. “You should have called me.”

“No problem,” Harvey said, though he was breathing heavily as if it pretty much had been a problem. “I should have parked in back and gone through the kitchen.”

His wife looked as though she wanted to know why he hadn’t done just that, but she took several bags from him to even out his load. She said, “Sorry, Miss Charity, I’ve got to get back to work. Thanks for stopping by.”

Olivia said, “A pleasure to meet you, and thanks for taking me around.” She left out the double doors that led onto the sidewalk by the Davy highway. An ancient pickup truck was parked there; that must be Harvey Whitefield’s vehicle. Either he’d wanted his wife to see how hard he was working, or he’d wanted to get a look at Olivia, or he wasn’t bright at all. Maybe all of that.

She set out walking west briskly, as if she were going to Home Cookin. She glanced down the alley. There was a battered Ford Focus parked outside what had to be the doors to the kitchen, and there was also a beautiful shiny Escalade taking up the remaining room. Was Eva Culhane still there? If not, who owned the Escalade? It was way too deluxe for the long-unemployed Whitefields.

Olivia had no sense that she was being watched, but just in case, she kept on going. She crossed Witch Light Road to go back into the Antique Gallery and Nail Salon. Joe and Chuy looked up, surprised at her return. “I took the tour, and it’s really nice,” she said. “You should go see it. The couple running it is called Whitefield. Lenore and Harvey.”

Joe said, “Well, thanks for telling us.”

Chuy grinned. “The excitement just keeps on coming.”

She raised a hand in farewell. She strolled back to Midnight Pawn, going up a few steps to the door on the right of the building and entering there, turning right to go down to her apartment. She could have entered the pawnshop and spent some time talking to Bobo, but she wasn’t in the mood. She was fond of her landlord, but she found him a little boring. She still couldn’t believe he’d hidden those books that Lem had been looking for so hard and so long. Not that Bobo had done it maliciously; he hadn’t known the smelly old volumes were important to Lemuel.

But still.

In her silent apartment, she checked her special e-mail account, the one she used only for work. Her agent said, Everyone pleased.

That was his usual comment, and it meant the money had been transferred as they’d specified.

But he’d added another sentence. Other party collateral damage?

He meant Rachel Goldthorpe. She answered immediately, No. Coincidence. And natural?

Right after she hit “Send” she got up to turn on the television. But she heard the ping that indicated she had e-mail. Surprised, she returned to her desk. The response read, Sources tell me unnatural.

“Huh,” she said out loud. “But that’s a big complication.” Should she alert Manfred? On the whole, she thought not.

She was sorry two hours later when news crews rolled into Midnight.

Sorry she hadn’t left town.