Midnight Crossroad

30

The sheriff had been in Fiji’s store before, but he looked around him like he’d fallen down the rabbit hole. It was clear that he was uneasy at being in a magic shop. Especially one that was being decorated for Halloween; in the absence of any customers, Fiji had started the ball rolling.

When he entered, to the jingle of the old-fashioned bell attached to the door, Fiji was up on a ladder in the middle of the room. She was hanging a full-size skeleton from a hook on the ceiling. More accurately, she was suspending a skeleton that appeared to have been hanged with a noose.

“Can I help you?” Arthur Smith asked immediately.

“Yes, that would be great.” Fiji came down the ladder cautiously. “I seem to be an inch shorter than I need to be.”

The sheriff smiled at her, and for the first time, Fiji thought of him as a man rather than as an instrument of her discomfiture. She estimated Smith was fifteen years older than she was, but he swarmed up the ladder with an impressive amount of ease. He completed the whole job in less than a minute. “Where should I put the ladder?” he asked.

“It goes in the extra bedroom,” Fiji said. “The second door on the left.” She hurried to open the hall door for him, which she’d had installed when she’d decided to make the living room her place of business. She didn’t want customers wandering through the rest of the house as though they had a right to inspect it.

The first door on the left was the bathroom, and Fiji was relieved she didn’t leave towels on the floor or clothes strewn around. She’d gotten in the habit of keeping it orderly since, on the rare occasion, a customer needed to use it. Across the hall, her bedroom door was shut, also a habit she’d acquired through experience. She scurried ahead of Arthur to open the second bedroom door, on the left after the bathroom. There was a double bed, but primarily she used the room for storage. It was obvious where the ladder went; the objects in the room were stacked as neatly as a Tetris game.

Since he’d been so helpful, Fiji felt she had to offer him some hospitality. “Coffee? Water? Sweet tea?” she asked.

“I’d sure like a glass of tea,” he said. He retreated to the shop area. When she brought his drink, she found him sitting in one of the two armchairs facing each other across a wicker table in the center of the shop floor. The table was stacked with Modern Witch, Texas Monthly, and Crafts for the Home. She placed a coaster handy.

“So, how’s the investigation going?” she asked, not knowing what else to talk about. She was not sure why he’d dropped in.

“I’ve interviewed more right-wing nuts than I thought there were in Texas,” he said wearily. “And all of them are giving each other alibis.” He picked up the current issue of Modern Witch. “This is a serious publication?” he said. “You regard yourself as a witch?”

“Yes, it is. And I do.”

“You believe that you can affect the outcome of things?”

“I believe in the power of spells to affect events,” she said, measuring each word before she added it to the conversation.

“Why did you dislike Aubrey Hamilton so much?”

She’d been pretty sure he’d get around to asking her that. She knew she wasn’t hard to read, in some respects. “She wasn’t telling the truth in her relationship with Bobo,” she said. “I’ve been his friend for some time. I’ve seen him with other women. Aubrey was really opaque about her previous life, about how she ended up as a waitress in Davy. I thought it was a mighty big coincidence that she was working at Bobo’s favorite restaurant, that she didn’t have any sort of boyfriend to slow down the way their relationship advanced, that she seemed to agree with Bobo in every respect.”

“Most couples have some differences.”

“Exactly. But every opinion Bobo had, she had, too. Or so she said.” Fiji shrugged. “It just seemed sketchy to me.”

“And did you share these thoughts with Bobo?”

“No, I did not.”

“If you’re such good friends, why not?”

She stared at him, at a loss. Why not? Because I have a crush on him the size of a boulder. If I’d really just been his buddy, I would have spoken up. “Because his love life is none of my business. Since he’s a grown man and he obviously liked her a lot, I wasn’t going to butt in and tell tales. Especially since I didn’t have anything concrete to tell him. What was I gonna say, ‘She agrees with you too much’?”

“You didn’t think of using your witch ability to expose her?”

Suddenly Fiji’s interior alarm system went off. She was treading on eggshells now. “What do you mean?”

“You didn’t cast a spell on her, or ask one of your witch friends to do something?”

“I don’t have any witch friends,” Fiji said. “Not any serious practitioners. Why?”

“When one of my deputies was going through Aubrey’s boxed belongings, she found this. It had been in her night table drawer.” Arthur pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket. In it was a fishhook, and tied to the hook were three silk threads. On the other ends of the silk threads were flat patches, the ones you’d buy at a sewing store or craft store to apply to a garment or pillow. One of them was a heart. And one of them was shaped like lips.

Though he hadn’t exactly offered the bag to her, Fiji leaned over and took it. She looked down at it with some distaste. “I can only guess about the interpretation,” she said. “I suppose the hook means the spell was cast so the person owning this could get their hooks into someone. The heart means the caster wanted to get the person to love her, and the lips are for physical passion. This is just my guess.”

“Is this the kind of thing you do?” Arthur Smith looked at her with level blue eyes.

She was tempted, so tempted, to show him exactly what she could do, but that way lay disaster. It had taken her years to learn that lesson. “I would never create such a thing,” she said. “And it doesn’t come from any school of witchcraft that I know about. It seems . . . made up. By someone who really doesn’t know anything about the craft.”

He was good at staring, she found. “I just about believe you,” he said finally.

She shrugged. “You do or you don’t,” she said, but she felt relieved. “This is not my work. I don’t know if she bought So You Think You’re a Witch or Magic Is Us, or if someone with a little woo-woo in her system made this for Aubrey. Frankly, I have a hard time believing Aubrey would be interested in making something like this. But no true practitioner would have created it.” She handed the plastic bag to the sheriff. Mr. Snuggly appeared from behind the shop counter, where one of his many pillows was positioned, and came to look up at Arthur Smith.

“Nice cat.” Smith’s admiration seemed to be genuine.

“Sometimes he’s not as nice as he looks,” she said. Mr. Snuggly’s head swiveled with uncanny abruptness as he gave Fiji what could only be described as a glare.

“Claws the furniture?” Smith asked.

“Ah, likes to wake me up in the morning,” she said. “He’s got to have his chow.” The cat turned his broad golden-striped back to her in a pointed fashion.

“It’s just like he knows what you’re saying.”

“It is, isn’t it,” she said.

Smith left a moment later. He didn’t volunteer any more information, but Fiji saw that he was driving down to the Antique Gallery and Nail Salon.

In the remaining daylight, after the sheriff had driven back to Davy, the motorcycles roared through Midnight. They all paused outside the pawnshop and milled around in a threatening manner. The inhabitants of Midnight wisely stayed inside behind locked doors. The most proactive community members, Olivia and Lemuel, were not able to respond. Olivia was on one of her mysterious trips out of town, and Lemuel was dead to the world.

Fiji called Bobo. “You okay?” she asked when he answered.

“I’ve got my shotgun and I’m ready,” he said. “I’ve called the police.”

“Good.” She called Chuy.

“You all right?”

“We’re good. We’re ready. You need us to come to you?”

“No, stay inside. Bobo’s called the police.”

In the next minute or two all the residents of Midnight had called each other, except the Rev.

Fiji asked for the help of several goddesses. She was too frightened to run out her front door and in the door of the chapel to check on him. After all, motorcycle gangs had a bad reputation when it came to women. She was ashamed of her own cowardice. Finally, she went up into her attic, a place she avoided normally, and peered out a window, the only place she could see into the pet cemetery.

To her surprise, the Rev was digging a grave, about half human size. He’d hung his coat on a tree branch while he worked. He was ignoring the loud engine sounds and the yells of the MOL. He didn’t even seem to notice the noise.

She scrambled down the rickety folding ladder and closed up the attic, feeling a flood of relief. Though the MOL were buzzing and droning, Fiji could just hear the siren of an approaching police car. She ran to the front window, hoping to see them all being cuffed and thrown in the back of police cars. There was only a single patrol, but at the sight of it, the MOL group scattered like billiard balls when the break occurs. They fled in all directions across the landscape, not sticking to the roads, and the patrol car couldn’t follow all of them at once.

In fact, it made no attempt to follow any of them.

Fiji dashed out onto her porch, her face flushed and furious, and she gestured from the patrol car to one of the fleeing motorcycles, her meaning as clear as if she’d had a blackboard behind her. But the officer inside only pulled up in front of the pawnshop and got out of the car.

The cop was a woman, and Fiji stormed across the road to her. Manfred joined her just in time to hear, “So you thought if you couldn’t get them all, you wouldn’t get any of them?” Fiji was livid.

“Car chasing motorcycle, the end’s not going to be good,” the cop said in a bored way. She was a chunky woman whom the uniform did not flatter. Her dark brown hair was pulled back into a tight knob on the back of her head, and her dark glasses were mirrors. Her face was hard and brown with crevices like a walnut’s shell. “And they hadn’t done anything.”

“Hadn’t done anything,” Fiji repeated.

Manfred was afraid she was going to freeze the police officer. Now that he was close enough, he could read “Gomez” on her name tag.

“They didn’t shoot anything, they didn’t even throw rocks,” Gomez said. “They didn’t shout threats, even. Was I supposed to arrest them for driving in circles and looking scary?”

“That would have been a start in the right direction,” Fiji said, and her hands twitched. Mr. Snuggly was standing at Fiji’s feet, looking up at Gomez with an unblinking feline stare. Gomez noticed the cat. “He’ll know me next time he sees me,” she said, and laughed, but not as if she really found that amusing. “I’m not much of a cat person.”

“Oooooh,” Fiji said with faux sympathy. “Are you scared of my kitty? Well, Mr. Snuggly—”

“Hi, Officer,” Manfred said smoothly, and Fiji felt like smacking him. But he kept on talking. “Thanks for coming so quickly. I don’t know how much you know about what’s been happening here lately, but we’ve been having trouble with people from this group coming into Midnight and attacking us.” By the time he’d finished, Fiji had calmed down a bit.

“Not exactly the way I heard it,” Gomez said.

That brought both Manfred and Fiji up short. “What do you mean?” Fiji said, holding on to her composure with both hands.

“Way I see it is you got some kind of dispute with Price Eggleston’s political group. First the widow of one of them starts living here with one of you Midnight people, and she goes missing, turns up dead. Two of them come over here to talk to the guy she was living with, and they vanish. Poof! Then two of them come over here to find out why the first two vanished, maybe go a little overboard, and they get arrested. Then their little hunting club gets burned down. Now they come over here and let off some steam, and here I am and they’ve left. Having done nothing.”

Fiji and Manfred darted a glance at each other. Fiji could tell Manfred was as shocked as she was at this interpretation of events. She left it to him to answer.

“But we don’t know what happened to the two that disappeared,” he said, looking flabbergasted. “And we didn’t go set anything on fire.”

Gomez’s eyes went from him to Fiji. Her mouth pulled up at one corner in a distinctly skeptical way. “Right,” she said. “Well, they’re gone now, no one’s hurt, and I’m going back on patrol.”

“I’m glad Sheriff Smith doesn’t share your views,” Fiji said. She’d found her voice. Mr. Snuggly stood and stepped closer to Gomez, who took a step back.

“That’s your assumption, that he doesn’t,” Gomez said, and got back into her car. “Better pick up your cat,” she said out of the open window. “It would be a shame if he got run over.”

Mr. Snuggly hissed. It was the most malevolent sound Fiji had ever heard from the cat. She was proud of him.

Gomez shut her window hastily and sped away. After her car was a cloud of dust on the Davy highway, all the people of Midnight came out of their houses and stores in the thick dusk. They gathered in front of the pawnshop, even the Rev—except for Bobo, the Lovells, Lem, and Olivia.

“I can understand why Shawn wouldn’t want his kids to come out after that little invasion,” Manfred said, though no one had said a word. Fiji raised an eyebrow at Manfred, who looked embarrassed. Just then, the door of Midnight Pawn opened, and Bobo came down the steps to join them.

He looks better, Fiji thought, like he’s put the worst behind him. She noticed, all over again, that he still looked as though he’d lost an appreciable amount of weight, but he was clean and shaved, and his clothes weren’t wrinkled. Overall, this version of Bobo Winthrop seemed more like the man she’d known than he had since the picnic. However, he was exasperated, as his first words proved.

“Why don’t I just go to this Eggleston’s house and turn myself over to the MOL,” Bobo said to the silent gaggle of Midnighters. “Might as well get it over with.”

“No!” said Fiji. “You better not, or I’ll kick your ass, Bobo Winthrop!”

The rest of them said something similar, though in less passionate ways. Even the Rev (though he kept glancing at his watch) told Bobo that God helped those who helped themselves. Teacher said, “Man, you might as well hang yourself as do that,” and they all nodded.

Manfred murmured to Fiji, “I wish Olivia and Lemuel were here.”

“I think they’ve done enough,” Fiji said.

“What do you mean?” Manfred said.

“Oh, use your brain!” she said impatiently. She turned her attention back to the conversation whirling around Bobo. Joe and Chuy were telling Bobo he could sleep in their guest bedroom, and Teacher was offering to install an alarm system. Manfred offered him a couch to sleep on, and Fiji said she had a guest bedroom. The Rev informed Bobo that he would pray for him and that the Almighty Father would protect the righteous.

At that, Bobo laughed. Then he apologized. “I’m sorry, Rev. I wasn’t making fun of your religion. I was just doubting I was righteous.”

The Rev said seriously—as he said all things—“Never doubt that you are a good man, Bobo Winthrop.” Then he saw that a car had pulled into the driveway at the side of the chapel. “I have a funeral to see to,” he said.

“This late? It’s almost dark. Whose funeral?” Fiji was curious.

“I turned on the lights. Blackie the cocker spaniel,” he told her, and crossed the street to attend to Blackie and his owner.

As Fiji had expected, Bobo was thanking everyone and turning down their offers. “Thanks, Chuy, Joe. Manfred. Feej. But I’ll stay here at the shop. After all, I have to work during the day. Lem can’t. And if someone threw a firebomb or set a fire . . . well, I’d have to get him out. If they come at night, he’d do the same for me. Teacher, I’ll take you up on the alarm system. But you may not want to fill in here until this situation is resolved.”

“I say yes to that,” Madonna said instantly. She was gently swaying from side to side, Grady asleep on her chest, his head on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Bobo, and you tell Lem we said so, too. But Teacher shouldn’t risk his life to keep a store open.”

“Absolutely,” Bobo said, nodding.

Teacher looked as though he had his own thoughts on the subject, but he kept his mouth clamped shut. Madonna began to walk back to the diner, and after a second of looking very unhappy, Teacher followed her.

Fiji, frazzled and exasperated, bent and swooped up Mr. Snuggly, who nestled in her arms. “You crossed the road by yourself,” she scolded the cat. He looked up at her with wide golden eyes. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. I know you’re a grown-up cat.” He stared some more. She relaxed, smiled.

“If you’re through communing with the cat,” Bobo said mildly.

“Yeah?” She looked at him, still smiling.

“I’m gonna go clean a few guns,” Bobo said.

Manfred stopped him. He said, “Bobo, I really think you should take Chuy and Joe up on their offer. Or sleep at my place. It’s really your place, after all, and you’d be right next door to the shop. We’d know if anything happened.”

“Or come to my house,” Fiji offered. “There’s not a lot of room in the guest room since that’s where I store all my extra stuff, but there’s a bed and it’s made up.”

“It wouldn’t be so crowded if you had a storage shed,” Bobo said, as if that were the most important thing in the world. “That’ll be the next thing I work on, I promise. If I’m still around to work on anything.” He smiled to take the sting out of his words.

“A storage shed is not at the top of my list of worries right now.” Spots of color burned in Fiji’s cheeks. She looked at Manfred, silently asking him to think of something persuasive to say.

Manfred tried. “This Price Eggleston is trying to spy on you and scare you in all kinds of ways. Are you sure it’s the mythical arms of your grandfather he wants? Or is there something more personal in this?”

“I don’t know him,” Bobo said. “I only met him that one time when he came in the pawnshop. I can’t think what he’d have against me unless he got involved with Aubrey at some point, either while she was married or after her husband was shot. Maybe he honestly thinks I killed her.”

Mr. Snuggly opened his mouth, but Fiji looked down at him and the cat yawned instead of whatever he’d been about to do.

Manfred told Fiji, “It almost looked like he was going to say something.”

“That’s silly,” she said.

The cat winked at him.