Day Shift (Midnight, Texas #2) (14 page)

W
as that the guy?” Fiji asked as she opened her door. They’d passed an exiting customer as they’d come in, a smiling white-haired lady who’d wished them a good day. She’d been carrying a cloth shopping bag, and it looked heavy.

“She sure looked happy,” Manfred said, glancing after the old woman, who’d climbed into an aged Cadillac.

“Yes,” Fiji said. “She did.” She waited, looking pleasant.

“Yes, that was the amazing Lewis and a blogger who’s evidently a big name if you love the Internet. Oh, your spell worked great at the police station,” Manfred said.

“Good!” She turned to lead the way in. The shop area was less crowded; when some of Fiji’s display cases had been destroyed the previous year, she’d liked the look when the room had been cleaned up. When she’d gotten her insurance payment, she’d added more wall shelves and fewer freestanding cabinets. Now Fiji retrieved her office chair from behind the counter and rolled it out to the two
upholstered chairs flanking a little wicker table. On the table was a tray with a pitcher of tea and a plate of cookies.

Olivia and Manfred both helped themselves, though Olivia looked as if she were thinking sarcastic thoughts.

“What did your visitors want?” Fiji asked.

Manfred said, “Here’s our problem.” He went on to explain (in what he felt were clear terms): the charges by Lewis, the consequences of Lewis’s harassment to the whole community, and (to Olivia’s anger) the attack she’d faced at the Goldthorpe house.

Fiji said, “Well, I feel like Don Corleone when the undertaker comes to see him about the rape of his daughter.”

Manfred began laughing, then stopped in midcackle. “You mean, we should have come to you first? That you could have taken care of it better than we have from the get-go?” Olivia was not laughing a bit.

Fiji smiled. “Hey, don’t push the analogy too far. I just meant it’s appealing to have someone ask me for help instead of treat me like an extra appendix.”

“I’ve seen what you can do,” Manfred said. “With great respect.”

Fiji nodded, her eyes on Olivia. After a moment, Olivia nodded in agreement. Fiji’s shoulders relaxed, and Manfred saw that he hadn’t read the situation right, at all. Fiji had been very anxious about what they’d come to her for, and his request had been a relief. He had to wonder what she’d thought he might say instead.

“So what you know is: No one stole the jewelry. It’s in the library in Rachel’s house. It’s inside something, maybe one of the books, but there are hundreds of books in the library. And also, Olivia’s enemies are hot on her trail, the people she came here to hide from.”

Olivia looked surprised for a second, and then she said, “Exactly. But I’m not completely sure which enemy has found me.”

“You’re rich in enemies.” Fiji made the comment with a complete lack of judgment.

“There are plenty of people who want to find me, for whatever reason.”

“You don’t want to talk about why.”

“No.”

She’s so damaged,
Manfred thought. This image of Olivia was far more disturbing than her tough-woman exterior. It gave him the creeps. He took a bite of cookie. Oatmeal, with raisins and spice. He said, “These are great,” indistinctly.

Fiji smiled at him before shifting her attention back to Olivia. “Do you have any ideas about how I can help you?”

“Not specifically, no,” Olivia said. “But we need to get in the house to search. I went once in disguise, but Lewis might recognize me, no matter how well I disguise myself. Lewis is very suspicious. If I watch to make sure he leaves, I don’t think the maid would let me come in under any pretext, much less give me the time to rummage around in an upstairs room. There was a gardener, too, who seemed pretty interested in everything that went on. There’s no explanation or disguise that would give me the freedom to search.”

“And this hidden jewelry needs to be found by the police, and the hint as to where it is can’t come from Manfred.”

“Right,” Manfred said. “If it came from me, the big question would be ‘How?’ I can’t answer that in a way that would satisfy a policeman.”

“I guess I could freeze the maid when she answered the door,” Fiji said. “She’d stay that way for about seven minutes. Would that be enough time?”

Olivia’s mouth was hanging open.

“I’m afraid not,” Manfred said. “We probably need at least forty-five minutes, since we don’t have that much information.”

“Can you try another séance to see if you can learn something more specific?” Fiji asked.

“I can try, but I don’t have any guarantee that’ll be successful.”

“Frozen?” Olivia said.

“Not frozen cold, but frozen in the moment,” Fiji explained. “As in, she couldn’t move. On the other hand, she’d remember what had happened to her. That’s usually not good, unless the person really needs to be taught a lesson.”

Diederik came into the shop. They all looked at him, and then Manfred said, “Damn.” Diederik now looked perhaps thirteen.

“I bought those clothes yesterday,” Fiji said. “Yesterday. Or maybe the day before? But . . .”

“Damn,” said Manfred. Again.

“If you have any more?” Diederik said. The boy looked embarrassed.

“I do,” she said, looking only mildly pleased with herself. “Go look in the bag on my guest bed. Where you changed the last time.”

Diederik looked vastly relieved. As he passed Fiji, he bent to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you,” he said. His voice was breaking.

“What the hell,” Olivia said, very quietly. “I hadn’t gotten past the ‘frozen’ yet. And now we have a teenager instead of a little boy.
What the hell.
”

“I don’t know why he’s growing so fast,” Fiji said, quietly. She leaned forward. “The Rev isn’t saying anything. I don’t know if he expected this or not. Or maybe the dad left Diederik here because he knew what was going to happen?” She rolled her eyes. “Be that as it may, the last thing we need is
anyone’s
eyes on Midnight.”

The bell over the door chimed. One of the old men from the hotel came in, a wizened man who was God knows how far up in years. He carried a cane, he was slightly bent, and he had wispy white hair protruding at all angles from under his straw hat. Manfred had seen him on the sidewalk outside the hotel, walking very slowly. He recognized the hat and the hair.

“Lady, is that your boy?” he asked Fiji, in a very hoarse voice.

“Why do you want to know?” Fiji said, standing up, in as polite a tone as anyone had ever asked a rude question.

“He’s growing all over the place! You better put a weight on his head! Someone’s gonna call the TV stations.”

Manfred said, “Are you the only one at the hotel who’s noticed?” He could tell from the expressions on the faces of Olivia and Fiji that they were as astonished—and wary—as he was. None of them had spoken to any of the hotel residents. Manfred had thought,
They’re only in Midnight temporarily
, and he hadn’t put himself out to speak to any of the old people the few times he’d encountered them.

“Hell, no!” the old man huffed in his hoarse, wheezy tone. “We all have. We ain’t dead. We’re old. We got nothing to do but watch. You understand me?”

“We understand you,” Olivia said.

“Can I have one of them cookies?” He hobbled closer to the table, and Manfred stood to offer him the chair. “Thanks, sonny, don’t mind sitting for a minute.” He backed up to the chair and lowered himself into it.

“Please have one,” Fiji said. “And some tea.” She fetched another glass and handed the old man a cookie on a napkin.

It was not pleasant to watch the old man eat the cookie, though he seemed to enjoy it a lot. “We’re always getting healthy shit for breakfast, oatmeal and egg whites,” he said, spraying a few crumbs. “Makes you want something with a lot of sugar and fat in it.”

“I’m Fiji Cavanaugh. I made those, and I’m glad you like them.”

“We got two women down at the hotel, they want to know if they can come to your Thursday night shindig,” he said. “Your class.”

Manfred thought Fiji looked completely taken aback. “Of course. Do they need help getting down here?”

“Mamie does. Suzie rolls along like a tank.”

“I’ll be sure they get here and get back,” Fiji said. “Maybe my friends Manfred and Olivia here can help.”

The old man turned his beady eyes on them. “You’re the tough girl from the pawnshop,” he said. He turned his gaze on Manfred. “And you’re the phone psychic guy?”

Manfred nodded.

“I’m Tommy,” the man said, extending a wrinkled hand scattered with age spots. “Tommy Quick. Ain’t so quick no more. Used to be Carlo Bustamente, back in the day.”

“Wow,” Manfred said. “Early days of Vegas, right?”

The old man wheezed with laughter and withdrew his hand from Manfred’s. “There hasn’t been any late days of Vegas!”

Fiji and Olivia cast questioning glances Manfred’s way, but he waved a hand. The rest of the story would have to wait for Tommy’s departure. “So, how’d you come to be in Midnight?” he asked. “Did you lose a bet or something?”

The wheezy laugh again. “You might say that, or you might say I got lucky, sonny,” Tommy told Manfred. “I’ll tell you about it. So I’m in a terrible dive in Vegas, see, the kind you wouldn’t want your mom to stay in. Not that I know your mom, but I’m just saying. It was a place so bad that only broke old people, like us, or broke young people, like your average little criminal, would choose to live there.”

They realized he was waiting for an acknowledgment, and they all nodded like puppets. “Anyways,” Tommy went on, “this woman come by the place we’re staying. Now, we’ve been praying we won’t get stabbed every time we go out to get groceries, you understand?”

He paused again, waiting. They nodded obediently. “This woman says there’s a place in the boonies in Texas where we can live, eat three meals a day, have our rooms cleaned, be comfortable. We says,
‘What’s the catch?’ And she says, ‘The catch is, it’s in the boonies in Texas.’” He laughed again.

Manfred could manage only a weak smile. But Fiji grinned. “So you agreed, then?” Fiji said encouragingly.

“Yeah, me and Mamie and Suzie. The next thing we knew, we were in the Midnight Hotel and being trotted out for every visitor. There’s one other old guy, Shorty Horowitz. He was in the hotel next to ours, but we only knew him by sight. He was the only other guy broken-down enough to take this cockamamie offer.”

Manfred exchanged glances with Fiji and Olivia. That was a lot of glances. He could tell that like him, they didn’t know what to make of this. “Are you supposed to do anything in exchange for this safe place to live?” Manfred asked, finally.

“They haven’t told us nothing yet.” Tommy was completely unsurprised by the question. “Except to act happy if we got asked any questions. If we’re supposed to do something, it must not be anything urgent. We’re bored. We got nothing to do. So the reason I came down here was, what’s up with the kid?”

Diederik came out in his new clothes, denim shorts and a striped T-shirt, and waited shyly for them to notice him.

“You look great!” said Fiji. “I’ll have to run out this afternoon to get you some more in case you grow again.”

The boy, who was less of a boy every day, smiled back at her. “You are most kind,” he said in his odd accent. “I will be glad to repay you with work.”

“I’ll be sure to save all my odd jobs for you, young man,” she said. “In fact, tell the Rev I’ve asked you over to work for me and to have lunch with me.”

His olive face lit up with pleasure, and the boy hurried out of the shop and over to the chapel.

“Weird,” said Tommy, shaking his head. “He’s the opposite of a dwarf, huh?”

“We don’t know what’s up with the kid,” Manfred said. “But we figure no one else needs to be concerned about it.”

“I gotcha. So this is one of those things the Whitefields don’t need to know about?”

“They don’t know . . .” Olivia’s voice trailed off.

“They don’t know we ain’t genuine old people waiting for a nursing home with a loving family and some money?”

“Right.”

“I don’t think so. Mamie, she told the woman—Lenore—she told her, ‘You got us for the duration, sweetie,’ and Mrs. Whitefield, she says, ‘Just until you get a bed in Whispering Creek, Miss Mamie.’ But we ain’t got no one going to pay for us to live at Whispering Creek, which from the brochures in the lobby is one of those really high-end nursing homes. Like a spa.”