Текст книги "Day Shift"

Автор книги: Charlaine Harris

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

15

Olivia had gotten a phone call from Lemuel during the middle hours of the night. Lemuel did not like the telephone, but he had overcome his natural aversion to call her because he knew it would make her feel better. The conversation had been brief.

“Olivia, I am now in New Orleans.”

She was silent for a second, dismayed at how relieved she was to hear his voice. “You learning a lot about the books?” she said, when her silence made her uncomfortable.

“I have found a woman who is knowledgeable. A female vampire.”

“Great. Are you feeling . . . Have you gotten enough food?” Olivia was always cautious about being explicit on the telephone. She knew how easily someone could listen in.

“There is abundance here,” Lemuel assured her. “I need only walk into a bar.”

She smiled. “And do you have an idea of how long you’ll be gone?”

“Not as of yet.”

“Then let me know when you’re coming back.” She hesitated. “It feels strange to walk past your apartment, since I know you’re not in it. It feels funny that you’re not here.”

“I miss you, too. Be careful and vigilant.”

“Good-bye.”

And he’d hung up without saying good-bye in return. That was Lemuel’s conversational style. She was satisfied with the conversation, though she had to repress a twinge of unease, bordering on jealousy, that Lemuel’s source for information about the long-lost and mysterious books was a female, and a vampire. Lemuel was more susceptible to women than men as bedmates, though he would take energy or blood from anyone except small children. Having two sources of sustenance was like being a hybrid car.

He preferred the energy, because it was easier and cleaner to acquire, and he could sip it from many people. Taking blood left an obvious mark, and sometimes a body, because it was certainly possible to get carried away on the odd occasion. In the same way, though he preferred sex with women, he’d had connections with men, he’d told her quite casually. “Weren’t too many women around,” he’d said, during her favorite together time—postsex. “And vampires like me don’t have the gift of the glamour.”

There had been a lot of questions Olivia had wanted to ask, but in the interest of appearing tolerant and sophisticated, she had not. And she had realized the next day, while Lemuel was in his day sleep, that no matter how curious she might be about Lemuel’s past and how he’d managed to live his life under his strange circumstances, the most important thing to her was that she had him now. Lemuel was not “hers,” like her car or her bed was hers. And she knew he would outlive her, barring extraordinary circumstances. But he was hers in a way no one else had ever been; that certainty gave her a fixed point.

Her cell phone rang, the secret one. The caller would be her agent or someone preapproved.

A man said, “Is this Rebecca?”

“I can get a message to her.”

“I have a job for her.”

“Who and where?”

“My bitch of an ex-wife has a family heirloom. She’s holding it for ransom. If I want it back, I have to make concessions in having my kids on the weekends. If I have it, I can tell her to go to hell and I’d see my kids more often.”

“I don’t need to know why. I need her name and address and a description of the item. Details about her routine.”

There was a pause. “Sure. Where can I send all that?”

Olivia gave him an address in Oklahoma.

“Okay. How do I pay you?”

“You already know that.” What was he trying to pull? The money went to her agent first, and he took his cut. Then he sent the bulk of it to her account, which wasn’t in America. Lemuel had asked her once how she could be sure her agent was honest. “I know where he lives,” she’d told him.

“When . . . ?”

“Soon. I’ll call you at this number when I’ve gotten it.”

And she hung up, as abruptly as Lemuel had. That thought made her smile. But the smile faded immediately as she thought over the man’s story. She didn’t believe him, at least not entirely. He had tailored it to make her feel good about the theft. He might be a terrible father, and his soon-to-be-ex-wife a paragon of virtue. But it didn’t make any difference to Olivia. She was not a social worker. She took the side she was paid to take.

She would not go to check the mailbox for another two or three days. It was a long drive. Maybe, in the interim, she could take care of Manfred’s problem. Then the Rev would be off her back, the news media would never again come to Midnight, and the mysterious fast-growing boy—whoever he was—would be safe. And when Lemuel returned, he would not be spotted by anyone who shouldn’t come to Midnight.

She went out that day, stopping by Manfred’s to see if he’d gotten any more news. He told her about his visit with the Bonnet Park police the day before and about his new esteem for his lawyer. “There aren’t any reporters here today at all,” he said, casting a look out the front windows. “I guess I’m not news since the more exciting developments at Rachel’s house. Yee-haw.”

“Don’t relax. All it’ll take is another accusation by Lewis Goldthorpe, and you’re back on the hot plate,” she said. She came to the window to look out herself.

A car pulled up in front of Manfred’s little house.

“Who . . . ? Oh, shit,” he said, with heartfelt disgust.

“I shouldn’t have said anything.” Olivia’s lips curled back as she watched a man and a woman get out of the aged car. The man was Lewis Goldthorpe. The woman was a news blogger, and her site had gathered a certain amount of attention from people who liked their news on a screen and on the sensational side. Olivia had seen her on a minor national show. “That’s PNGirl. You know, Paranormal Girl.”

“She’s asked me for interviews before. Should I answer the door?” Manfred said.

“Only if you want her to take your picture and put it on the Internet,” Olivia said. “And you know Lewis is going to scream and holler.” She glanced sideways (and a little down) at Manfred. “This is going to make the Rev furious.”

“Maybe he won’t find out,” her companion said feebly.

Olivia snorted. “Right,” she said, loading the word down with contempt. “See?”

The door to the chapel opened. The gaunt, small figure of the Rev was clearly visible for a moment, another person right behind him. Then the chapel door shut.

“Was that the boy?” Manfred said.

“Yep.” Olivia thought of sneaking out the back of the house to give Lewis a flat tire, but that would only mean he’d stay in Midnight longer. “If he’d come by himself,” she said, “I could have taken care of this whole situation.”

She expected Manfred to say something angry and decisive, but when she glanced over at him, he just looked exasperated. “Because finding his car here, and Lewis missing, would sure let me off the hook,” he said, in the manner of one speaking to an idiot.

“Of course I would take care of the car,” she snapped. She was offended at the suggestion she could not make someone disappear in a professional manner.

“But he didn’t come by himself, because he doesn’t really want to talk to me person-to-person,” Manfred pointed out. “He wants to rant at me in front of a witness, to emphasize how terribly I exploited his poor sainted mother. He wants to ruin me, because his mother turned to me when she’d reached the end of her tether with him.”

“Okay, Mr. Insightful, so what’s our next step? By the way, knowing why he’s doing it doesn’t really help a lot.”

Manfred looked down. He appeared to be counting to ten. Olivia smiled.

“We still have to get the jewelry back,” Manfred said. “And I think we have to show that it was there all the time. Then he’ll have no more excuse to harass me. Or if he drums something up, no one will credit it.”

“I can’t gain entry again by a ruse,” Olivia said. The knocking at the door had begun, and they both stepped away from the window, retreating farther into the house to the former dining room. “I’ve tried to break in at night, and that didn’t work. I could try it again. This time, maybe, there won’t be anyone there waiting on me.”

Though since Falco had died, Olivia’s father had to be sure she’d been in the area. Maybe other men were just hanging around waiting for her. Maybe they would come to Manfred’s place of residence to look for her now. To try to find what connection he had with her. At least her name hadn’t been in the paper; she’d finally tracked down the article online.

“Or we could ask Fiji if she could help,” Manfred was saying when she pulled herself out of the abyss.

Olivia felt her mouth fall open. “Fiji? You’ve got to be kidding me. She can’t break and enter.”

“She wouldn’t go about it the same as you,” he said. “I don’t think you know how powerful Fiji is. You don’t know what she can do.”

“And you do?”

He nodded.

Olivia felt piqued. “In what way?” she demanded.

“Olivia! You know she’s a witch.”

“Yeah, yeah. And?”

“Do you know how good a witch she really is?”

Olivia reconsidered the first answer that almost flew out of her mouth. Instead, she said, “I guess I can hardly be a big skeptic since I sleep with an energy-draining vampire.”

“Good point. Anyway, she might come up with a solution that we haven’t thought of.”

“We can’t cross the road until Lewis and his pet journalist are gone.”

Without a word, Manfred turned on the television and they watched the news, ignoring the sound of persistent knocking at the front door. Then at the back.

There was unrest in the Baltic, refugees were dying in Africa, and the stock market wasn’t doing well. Just another wonderful day on the news circuit. In a ludicrous attempt to make the future seem less grim, nutritionists had discovered that cheese curd was a miracle food.

Olivia said, “I’ve never even seen a cheese curd.”

“Me, either.”

That was the extent of their conversation until the knocking stopped and they heard a car drive away.

Manfred called Fiji right away. “We’re coming over, okay?” he said.

Olivia heard her say, “Sure. It’s so hot. Want some iced tea?”

16

Was 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.”

“So how do you feel about that?” Fiji said.

“I liked you until you said that, sister,” the old man said. “I want you to know how I feel about something, I’ll tell you. This place is dead, but it’s safe. And it gets more and more interesting. That old man in the hat? His suit looks older’n me. The boy keeps growing overnight. The two men who run the antiques store—hey, are they a couple? Ain’t we modern here? Suzie made it over to the pawnshop; she says the guy who runs it is a hunk and there’s all kinds of weird shit inside. Oh, and your cat came down yesterday, Fiji. He walked all around having a good look like he was thinking about buying the place. Then that Eva Culhane came in, and Harvey and Lenore ran up to stick their noses up her ass, and she said, ‘No pets! This is a pet-free zone!’”

“Oh, no,” Fiji said. She looked around the room. Mr. Snuggly was not in sight. He was a wise cat. “So what else did Eva Culhane do?”

“I think she was just checking to make sure we was all still alive.” Tommy laughed his wheezy laugh. “She was the one scooped us up in Vegas.”

“Really?” Olivia looked as though that was very interesting. But she clearly didn’t know what to make of it.

“This was fun,” said Tommy Quick, né Bustamente. “If you want to come down and visit, bring some of them muffins. Scones. Whatever.” He heaved himself to his feet and carefully made his way out. They heard him going down the steps slowly, and Fiji got up to make sure he reached the sidewalk without falling.

“Okay, he’s on his way back to the hotel,” she said, resuming her seat. “That was interesting.”

“You haven’t read any stories on the history of Las Vegas, I take it,” Manfred said.

Olivia and Fiji shook their heads in unison.

“Not in the earliest mob days, but not far after, Tommy Quick was a knee-breaker for organized crime,” Manfred said.

“You know this how?”

“My grandmother had a storefront in Las Vegas once upon a time,” he said. “She was full of stories. And that got me interested, so I read some books.”

“I wasn’t even worried about the hotel,” Fiji said. “Now I have to worry about the hotel.” She threw up her hands. “Every damn thing is a problem here. And my cat! He’s lucky they didn’t kick him or run him over. He crossed the Davy highway by himself! Idiot!”

“I’ve done it before,” said a sour little voice. Mr. Snuggly emerged from behind Fiji’s counter. He strolled over to the group of humans and paused to sit by the little table, his fluffy tail wrapped neatly around his legs. “I look and look and look, and then I run very fast.” Olivia, not a fan of the cat, glared at him, and he returned the look. She glanced away first.

“Why?” Fiji said. “Why did you go down there?”

“I knew they were real old people, but not helpless old people. I wanted to find out why they were here. I wanted to know if they were magic.” Mr. Snuggly began licking a paw.

“Are they?” Manfred asked, tired of being left out of the conversation, even if it was with a cat.

“No. Not at all. They are old. They’ve done bad things. They’re not mean. One of them is dotty. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what Aunt Mildred used to say. Dotty.”

Fiji looked taken aback. Apparently, she hadn’t ever heard the cat refer to her own great-aunt as “Aunt Mildred.”

“Sure, that’s right,” Manfred said quickly. “No magic there, huh?”

“None,” said Mr. Snuggly emphatically. “Plenty of ghosts at the hotel, of course. And lots of misdirection.”

“What does that mean?” Olivia glared down at Mr. Snuggly, who met her eyes without any problem at all.

“I’m going to take a nap now,” the cat said, and went back behind the counter, presumably to jump in the padded cat bed Fiji had put under the counter.

Manfred was having a hard time picking up the thread of the plan they’d been considering before Diederik, Tommy, and Mr. Snuggly had intervened. He put his head in his hands.

“The boy is growing at twenty times the normal speed,” he said. “An old hoodlum just popped in to promise us he’d keep silent in return for scones. Mr. Snuggly has uncovered bad doings at the hotel. And I still need to clear my name of these bogus theft charges, which draw attention to Midnight, and therefore to all this other shit that should remain secret.”

“That’s a good summary,” Fiji said brightly.

Olivia said, “Let’s get back to the part where you were freezing someone.”

“Bertha, the maid,” Manfred said helpfully. “And then you and I run up the stairs, Olivia, and we search the study lickety-split. We find the jewelry, we call the police, and it’s all over.”

“Except we have to explain to the police how we knew where to search.” Olivia had gotten up to pace back and forth in the limited space. At every turn, she fixed her eyes scornfully on a glass dolphin or a stained-glass rainbow. “And the maid can tell the police that Fiji did something to paralyze her.”

“Okay,” said Fiji. “So . . . we go when she’s not there. Right after she leaves work.”

“No one will be there to answer the door,” Manfred said. “Lewis lives in the pool house. Even if Lewis is in the house and decides to open the door, he knows me. And if you froze him, he’d squawk till the cows come home.”

“We’re talking ourselves into believing this is impossible.” Fiji’s generous mouth skewed to one side as she thought.

“Too bad Lemuel’s not here,” Manfred said. “He could hypnotize Lewis into showing the police where the jewelry’s hidden after we find it.”

“Yeah, because that’s what Lem lives for, to make your life easier,” Olivia snapped. “For your information, Lem can’t do that.”

Taken aback by her vehemence, Manfred stared at her. “I’m sorry,” he said, wondering what he was apologizing for. But he knew it didn’t make any difference, that just saying the words was important. He braced himself for another scathing remark, but to his astonishment, Olivia relaxed.

“I’m just missing him,” she said, not looking at either of them.

Apologies are contagious, Manfred noted. He also observed that both he and Fiji were a little embarrassed at Olivia’s moment of tenderness. He considered patting Olivia on the shoulder, but he felt he might lose his arm if he did—or even worse, somehow, he feared she might be grateful.

Just then, Fiji’s pocket made a squealing sound, and they all looked down at it, Fiji included. She pulled out her phone and said, “Hello?” Suddenly, she flushed from her throat to her eyes. “Oh, hi,” she said, and turned her back on Olivia and Manfred to walk briskly down the hall to her kitchen. They could still hear her, but she had the illusion of privacy, Manfred figured.

“Yeah, I had a good time, too,” she was saying, and Olivia raised her eyebrows. She glanced over at the pawnshop and back to Manfred. He shook his head vigorously. Whoever her caller was, it wasn’t Bobo Winthrop, which would have been wonderful.

“I’m pretty sure he would have told me,” Manfred whispered.

“What’s he futzing around for?” Olivia hissed. “She’s not gonna wait forever! A woman has needs!”

“Okay, I can do that,” Fiji was saying. “Then I’ll look forward to it. Sure, seafood is fine.” Her voice got louder as she apparently began walking back to the shop from the kitchen. “See you then.” And she was punching the “end” button on her phone as she rejoined them.

“Who’s the guy?” Olivia said. “Anyone we know?” Manfred admired Olivia’s perfectly light tone.

“You remember the bouncer at the Cartoon Saloon?”

“From when we all went there? Sure. The good-looking guy?”

“Yeah.” Fiji seemed a little proud of that. “So, I called him after a couple of weeks, because I was tired of staying at home.” That last was added a little defiantly. “And we’ve been going out from time to time.”

“Bouncers get nights off?” Manfred had no idea what a professional bouncer could expect in the way of downtime, but he felt he had to say something.

“He has a day job as an EMT during the week, and he’s a bouncer on weekends,” Fiji said. “We’re going to Little Fishes in Marthasville tomorrow night. And a movie.” She took a deep breath. “Back to the original problem. Sorry for the interruption.”