Night Shift (2 page)

“But . . .” She stopped, deciding to think rather than talk, which was always a good idea around Lemuel.

“The vampire was from a long-dead culture,” Joe said.

Lemuel nodded. “Before the Romans. I believe the vampire was Etruscan. I found a rough dictionary, written by a child of the only Etruscan vampire I’ve ever heard of. That’s a help, but it’s still very slow going.”

Rasta whined at Joe’s feet, and he picked up the little dog and settled it on his lap. Chuy reached over to scratch Rasta’s head.

“Is there any way you can skip around a little in the book to find out if our crossroad is in there?” Manfred said tentatively. Offering Lemuel advice was a risky proposition.

“I dare not skip around because I may miss the very thing I am reading the book to discover,” Lemuel said. “This place wasn’t named Midnight until the late eighteen hundreds, so it’s simply described in this book, if it’s in there at all. In the meantime, I’m real sure we need to be on the watch for more suicides.”

“More?” Bobo said. He gave Fiji a dismayed look.

Lemuel said, “Why stop at two?”

“At least they’re dying at night,” Fiji said, trying to find something to be glad about. “And at least no one else knows about the first one.”

“And that’s better because?” Manfred looked at her with his eyebrows raised.

“Because we have a chance of covering it up,” Diederik said promptly. “As Lemuel did the first one.”

“Can you imagine the news coverage?” Bobo spoke quietly, but everyone listened. “The headlines? ‘What Draws Suicides to This Remote Texas Town?’”

“Honey, I think they’re urging you to read quick as lightning,” Olivia said to Lemuel.

The vampire smiled. “I can get a lot done on night duty here,” he said. Lemuel worked the night shift at the pawnshop, which was closed from late afternoon until dark, and from dawn until nine o’clock, or whenever Bobo got down to open it up. The doors were shut only between dawn and eight (or nine) a.m. and five or six p.m. to dark.

“Should we set some kind of watch?” Fiji asked. “To stop people?”

Manfred’s mouth turned down with distaste. Joe and Chuy looked grim. Olivia hunched her shoulders. Even for the Midnighters, who were used to weird and even bloody events, this seemed like an unpleasant prospect.

“I’m not sure how we could stop them,” Bobo said. They all looked at him. “If someone’s determined, he just walks out there and shoots himself, like the guy last night.” He shrugged. “No way to stop that guy, right?”

“But we had no warning, and now we know,” Fiji said.

“I don’t think we can stay awake all night for the remote chance that someone else will stop to off himself,” Manfred said. “We’d have had to have been
right by
Joshua Allen last night. He got out of his truck, took a step or two, pulled out the gun, and
blam!
What if one of us had tried to stop him? Would he have shot us, too?”

There was a scattering of nods.

“So we won’t keep a night watch,” Lemuel concluded. “But I’ll do my best to spot any others who appear at the crossroad.”

“Did you see that there’s a new guy at Gas N Go?” Olivia said.

Chuy and Joe, who lived one vacant building away from the corner convenience store, smiled simultaneously. “You should see him,” Chuy said. “He’s . . . remarkable.”

Fiji, who was removing the spell that had kept interlopers out of the store during their meeting, finished her task and rejoined the conversation. “Not going to give us any hint?” Fiji said.

“Nope. Go see.” Chuy laughed. “Teacher was in to fix our showerhead and faucet yesterday, and he was delighted to be free of the Gas N Go.”

“He didn’t have to take charge,” Joe said.

“He said the money was good and steady.” Olivia shrugged. “Hard to turn down when you have a baby. Madonna said she enjoyed knowing where he was all the time. But even she’d gotten pretty aggravated at him always being busy.”

“I’m surprised she talked to you enough to tell you that,” Joe said.

It was true that Madonna was not much of a talker. None of the Midnighters felt they knew her. And no matter how friendly her husband Teacher was, he never seemed to tell them anything of importance about his life or his past. These reasons were good enough to keep the Reeds out of town meetings.

“I’ll go down to Gas N Go soon. It’s always nice to have a new community member,” Fiji said brightly, as they all stood up to leave.

Joe and Chuy laughed.

Before Fiji could ask them to explain what was so amusing about the newcomer, a customer came in.

They all turned at the ringing of the bell over the door.

The customer was haggard, and very young, and he was towing a girl by the hand. She was in her teens, but she hadn’t gotten there easily. From the way her eyes ping-ponged around, she’d enhanced her world chemically.

“Here!” the boy said to Lemuel, shoving the girl toward him. “I want to pawn her!”

They all froze, waiting to hear what Lemuel would say.

“I don’t take live people or live animals,” the vampire said mildly. “And lest you should think that means I want her dead, you best think again.”

“Then I’ll pawn my soul!” The boy laughed again, defiant and dramatic, obviously feeling he was making a grand gesture.

“Never say that.” Chuy made his way through the chairs to where the boy stood. “You only have one. You can’t imagine the price of it, or the cost of losing it. What is it you need money for?”

Under Chuy’s serious eyes, the boy wilted a little. “I owe someone a lot of money, and I was going to sell some Ecstasy, but she
took it all
,” he said, giving the girl a petulant slap on the butt.

“You mean she ingested it all?” Manfred said, alarmed. “Doesn’t she need to go to a hospital?”

This had obviously not occurred to the boy, who gave a violent sort of shrug, as if to throw off this petty concern when his own problems were so much vaster. “So anybody want her for anything?” he demanded. “She won’t mind. She won’t even remember.”

Manfred’s fists clenched and he took a step forward. Fiji had the same reaction. Somewhat to Fiji’s surprise, Chuy was faster than either of them. He’d been pulling out his keys, but now his hand went instead to the boy’s face. He put his thumb in the middle of the boy’s forehead and spoke a word, though Fiji could not remember afterward what the word was. Immediately, the tension drained out of the boy’s body, and he let go of the hand of the addled girl, who sagged into a chair the minute she was free.

Chuy removed his thumb.

The boy said, “I’m sorry.” His gaze was almost as blank as the girl’s, but his stance was relaxed and receptive. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I should be getting home. To figure out my problems. I shouldn’t involve anyone else. Selling other people is bad.”

“Yes,” said Chuy sadly. “It is, boy. You are a bad one, but a young bad one. You may be able to change.”

“I’m going to try,” the boy said. Without another word, he left the pawnshop, and they heard his car start up and drive away.

Fiji said, “What do we do with her?”

Joe crouched by the girl’s chair and took her limp hand. “Her parents are Margaret and Louis Hatter. They live in Davy,” he said with assurance, and no one asked how he knew.

Manfred looked the address up on his phone, which he then laid down on the counter and forgot. “I’ll run her home,” he said. “Feej, you want to come with me, in case they think I took advantage of the little idiot?”

“Okay,” she said, casting a glance at Bobo, who was looking at her (again!) with an expression she couldn’t read. He appeared to be lost in some unpleasant place, and as she watched he went out the side door leading to a landing. He was mounting the stairs to his apartment in the last glimpse Fiji had before the door swung shut.

Fiji sighed heavily, not even aware she did so, and she turned back to help Manfred. Between them, they supported the Hatter girl across the pawnshop driveway to Manfred’s. With some difficulty, Fiji taking her head and Manfred her feet, they maneuvered her into the back seat of Manfred’s car. During the short drive to Davy, the girl’s eyes were open. She seemed to be admiring the texture of the roof.

The search for the Hatters’ house took longer than Fiji had anticipated, since street signs were not abundant in Davy and Manfred had run out without his phone. Finally, Manfred parked in front of a small ranch-style home on a modest street.

Manfred tugged the girl’s hands until he got her out of the back seat. Then Fiji looped one of the girl’s arms around her neck, and Manfred did the same with the other one. With the girl propped between them like a barely ambulatory sack of laundry, they lurched across the small lawn to the front door and rang the bell. A fortyish woman opened it. When she saw the girl her shoulders sagged with relief. Or maybe it was resignation.

“Oh, Marilyn,” she said sadly. “Again.”

“You’re Margaret Hatter?” Fiji asked. “Her mom?”

“Yes.” Margaret Hatter didn’t sound happy about it. “Here, I’ll take her.” She didn’t ask Fiji any questions or level any accusations during the awkward process of transferring the limp young woman from two people to one.

Fiji said, “We found her like this.” She wanted to make it absolutely clear she and Manfred had had nothing to do with Marilyn’s condition.

“All right,” said the woman, as if Fiji had asked her to believe something quite impossible. “Sure, honey.”

Stung, Fiji opened her mouth to protest this implied judgment. “I hope she gets better,” Manfred said rather loudly, and yanked Fiji away from the door.

It was closing, anyway.

On the drive back to Midnight they were mostly silent. When he dropped her off at her house, Fiji said, “I just didn’t want her to think . . .” The conversation had been gnawing at her.

“Give it up, Feej,” Manfred said. “Mrs. Hatter didn’t ask a single question. She was going to think the worst if we’d had wings and white robes and a heavenly choir.”

“I can’t really blame her,” Fiji said.

Manfred sighed. “Neither can I,” he said.

“I hope this is the end of the trouble,” Fiji said after a short silence. “We all do. But you know it’s not.”

From her front porch, Fiji watched Manfred’s car begin moving. Since there was no one coming, he backed across Witch Light Road. She stayed outside for a few more minutes, looking at the crossroads. She half-expected to see another hapless soul staggering toward the center, some weapon of self-destruction in hand. But the only thing to see was Midnight’s one traffic light, resolutely following its pattern. The intersection of Witch Light Road and the Davy road was the reason Midnight was alive. The little community had been founded because of those roads, when they were just trails. Catty-cornered from where she stood, Fiji could see that the lights inside Gas N Go were still on, and someone was moving around inside. As she watched, the lights went out and a man emerged, locking the doors behind him. He walked north, to the house where the previous Gas N Go manager had lived. He moved quickly and lightly, though Fiji couldn’t tell anything more about him. Now she was curious about the new resident. She would have to bake something for him.

After a moment, Fiji went inside and opened a locked drawer under the counter in the shop. There was a curious selection of items in the drawer: a crumpled tissue, a lipstick, a napkin, a knife, an ink pen, a squeeze bottle of hand sanitizer, and other mundane items. All of them were used. To this odd group, she added a folded dollar bill that had fallen from Chuy’s pocket in the pawnshop. She put it on top of an index card already prepared with Chuy’s name. She slid the drawer closed very gently, and relocked it.

Instead of going to read in her bedroom, her original thought, Fiji returned to the window to look out at the traffic light and the pavement below it.

Fiji tried to detect something different about the intersection, but there was nothing visible, even to a witch.

But Fiji was sure this particular crossroad was exerting some malignant pull. She hoped it would not spread a pall over all the people who lived around it, but she could not believe they’d all escape it.

No coincidence in the world would allow for two people, who presumably did not know each other, to commit suicide in the same place within a few days. This crossroad was not a famous site like the Golden Gate Bridge or Niagara Falls. This was a place where two small roads crossed in a very small town not particularly close to anywhere notable.

Or was there? Wasn’t that the kind of cosmic joke that made regular people decide places were haunted, or cursed?

“Well,” she told her marmalade cat, Mr. Snuggly, who’d come to stand beside her, “I guess we’ll know soon.”

T
he next morning, Fiji was working in her yard, one of her favorite pastimes. Getting her fingers in the dirt, watering, planting good things and removing weeds, checking for bugs and harvesting herbs and tomatoes in season . . . these were all good things for a witch to do to keep in touch with the elements of earth, air, and water, and for a Fiji to do to keep herself grounded and content. The shop was fun for connecting with humans, but it wasn’t organic.

The Inquiring Mind stocked everything pertaining to “witchcraft lite,” as Fiji called it. She carried very little of what she thought of as the heavy-duty stuff, because there was very little local market for such things. She’d never met another real witch besides her great-aunt Mildred Loeffler, who had owned the cottage before her. Aunt Mildred had been a widow, obliged to support herself, and she’d done okay with selling herbal medicines out her back door and occasionally casting a spell or two for a few people. She had also been an excellent cook and had had a sporadic business as a caterer.

Fiji was thinking about Aunt Mildred that morning while she worked. She’d been a little rattled when Joe and Chuy admitted they saw Aunt Mildred around Midnight, all these years after her death. Fiji had to wonder what that meant in terms of Aunt Mildred’s soul. Did she dare to ask Joe or Chuy if Aunt Mildred was roaming the earth because she wasn’t fit for paradise? Did she herself even believe there was a heaven, or Hell?

On the whole, Fiji thought she did.

As she turned over the soil in the vegetable bed, Fiji wondered about the soul destination of Tabby Ann Masterson, the first suicide. Catholicism had always given suicide a really bad rap. For all Fiji knew, it was a counted a terrible sin in any religion. But how could you find out for sure? You couldn’t. What if you were in terrible pain and there was no hope for recovery? Would she ask someone to help her depart this earth? She chewed around the edges of that dilemma for a few minutes before abandoning the train of thought.
No point wondering about something you can’t know,
Fiji figured.
At least Tabby Ann won’t pee on my porch again.

Though it might be fall in most of America, in Texas it was still summer, though the nights and mornings were cooler. Fiji was grateful for the early-morning temperature. Mr. Snuggly came to sit with her. He liked to watch her work, especially when she was working in the sun. Mr. Snuggly had caught a mouse the day before, and he couldn’t stop preening himself.

“Don’t tell me about that mouse again,” Fiji said.

The cat shot her an injured look.

“And don’t give me the look, either,” she said. “You’d think it was a lion, the way you go on about it.”

Mr. Snuggly said, “Fine. Next time I’ll let it chew on your bread.” He stalked off, tail upright and stiff, and located a sunny spot on the other side of her garden.

“What’s up with the cat?” Bobo Winthrop said. She’d heard his footsteps, so she wasn’t startled, but she kept her face down. She knew she had a habit of smiling too much when Bobo was around.

“Oh, he’s pissed off because I’m tired of listening to his story about killing the mouse,” Fiji said, pulling another weed and tossing it into her bucket. “I might be willing to hear about it again, if he hadn’t put the corpse in my shoe.”

Bobo laughed. He did it well, because it was natural for him. In the past few months she hadn’t seen him laugh enough. He’d been running; he was wearing an ancient sleeveless sweatshirt and even more ancient gym shorts. And he was sweating, though the air was pleasantly cool.

“Pull up a chair and tell me what you know,” Fiji suggested. She sat back on her haunches. Instead of getting a stadium chair from the porch, Bobo folded down onto the ground to sit with her. She sighed inwardly. Bobo was flexible and fit, the right weight for his height, though he was years older than her. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly, giving in to gravity and settling on the ground, too.

“Thirty-five,” he said. “How come?”

Fiji felt heavy and depressed. “Oh, nothing!” she said, doing her best to sound upbeat. “What brings you over here today?” He was due to open the pawnshop soon. And she would have to shower and unlock her own business.

“You know what we need, Feej?” He was looking very serious, and her heart began thudding, just a bit.

Fiji could think of several things they needed, or at least she needed.

“What?” she said, trying not to sound as though she were strangling.

“We need a vacation.”

She wanted to be absolutely certain what Bobo meant before she made a fool of herself. Cautiously, she said, “Do you mean we need to go to a desert island? Or the Grand Canyon? That kind of vacation?”

“I don’t know of any other kind,” he said, smiling. “Yes, that’s what we need. How long has it been since you’ve been out of Midnight for more than a couple of hours?”

“Four years,” she said promptly.

“I’ve been gone overnight maybe three times, but I can’t remember being gone longer than that. Even Lemuel went traveling when he was trying to find someone to translate the books. Chuy visits his kin, Joe goes to antique shows. Manfred goes to Dallas or Los Angeles or Miami for a couple of days every few months. Olivia is gone half the time!”

“Not the Rev,” Fiji said.

“No, not the Rev, I’ll give you that one. And not the Reeds. And Diederik’s only lived here for a few months, so he doesn’t count.”

Fiji was thinking that it surely
sounded
as though Bobo was proposing they go somewhere together. Like a couple. But she could hardly believe it. She tested the idea. “You think you and I should go to see Hawaii, or Death Valley?”

“That’s what I’m saying.” He looked serious enough to mean it. The morning wind blew his light hair around.

Fiji had waited for this moment for so long. It was like a clear, perfect, shimmering crystal of happiness. Then Bobo shifted slightly and looked anxiously into her face.

“Of course, we can get two rooms,” he said.

For the life of her, she could not interpret his tone. The crystal shattered.

Fiji mustered every smidgen of self-control she could summon to keep her face from showing her painful disillusion. Something inside her snapped, and she lost hope. “I just can’t do this,” Fiji said into her hands. “You have to leave now.”

Her dearest friend and longed-for lover looked shocked, but maybe not so shocked that he could claim ignorance of his offense. “Let me backtrack,” Bobo said urgently.

“No.”
She stood up, pushing off the ground to rise to her feet, for once not caring how heavy and clumsy she might look in the process. “No. I’m going in. Do what you like.” She flicked her hand to show how little she cared. She walked away, into the back door, and closed and locked it behind her. Somehow Mr. Snuggly had beat her inside.

“I’m done with him,” she told Mr. Snuggly. “I can’t live like this anymore.”

Wisely, Mr. Snuggly said nothing.

In the shower, you could not tell the water beating down from the tears.

“Fiji,” Fiji told herself out loud, “you are a fucking idiot.”

It was a harder, tougher witch who turned off the water and toweled herself dry just in time to unlock the front door. A car stopped in front of the shop.
Good, I need something else to think about,
Fiji told herself. But then she took a second look. To her puzzlement, the car was a familiar one. Fiji was even more amazed when she recognized the woman who got out.

Her first customer of the day was her sister.

“Kiki?” she said, incredulously.

“One and the same,” her sister called gaily.

Waikiki Cavanaugh Ransom was four years older than Fiji. Though all the Cavanaugh women were inclined to be well-rounded, Kiki had starved herself and exercised herself so she would never reach that pleasant state. Kiki was a little taller than her sister, and she wore bright green contact lenses that made her eyes extraordinary. That was new. So was the color of Kiki’s hair, a sort of golden wheat. In the time it took to register all this, Kiki had reached the front porch.

The sisters hugged. For about six seconds, Fiji was simply excited her sister had driven up from Houston to see her. Then her knowledge of Kiki’s nature reasserted itself.

“Not that I’m not glad to see you . . . but I’m surprised,” Fiji said, trying to soften her actual impulse to say, “What the hell are you doing here?”

It wasn’t like
any
member of her family had come to see her since she’d claimed her inheritance. And her one trip home for Christmas two years before had been a terrible mistake.

“Well, it was just time, Fiji! You’re the only sister I’ve got! You know I’ve regretted that big scene. Mom thought she should have gotten the house, and it may have seemed like I sided with her, but I thought the better of it. I know there were a lot of hard words spoken.”

“You’ve waited two years to tell me this? After maybe three phone calls in the intervening time?”

“Give me a break! I’m trying to make nice!” Kiki held her sister away and gave her an admonishing smile.

But Fiji was not having any of it, not today. She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not in the ‘giving a break’ business. Out with it. There must be some reason you left Houston and drove all the way up here. Let’s have a seat. You tell me about it.”

Fiji gestured to the two armchairs on opposite sides of the little table in the middle of the shop, and Kiki sank into one.

Since she sat down when I asked her to, now she’s going to ask me for something,
Fiji thought.

“All right,” Kiki said. “By the way, I could use a cup of coffee.”

Right on the money.
“I’ll do the polite hostess thing after you tell me what your trouble is,” Fiji said. She didn’t know where this new tougher Fiji was going, but so far it felt good.

“I left Marty,” Kiki said, almost tearfully. “I just wanted to get out of town for a while, but I don’t have any money, so Mom said I should come stay with you, since you had a house all your own.”

“Fake house envy,” Fiji said. “You didn’t like Great-Aunt Mildred, you never spent any time with her, and you thought this place was a dump. You didn’t keep that any secret. And yet you and Mom have the gall to be surprised that Aunt Mildred left it to me.”

“I never told
her
I felt that way,” Kiki said childishly. “Aunt Mildred, I mean.”

“You think she was dumb? You think she didn’t know?”

That was exactly what Kiki had thought. As if a few smiles and hugs and flattering comments would pull the wool over Aunt Mildred’s eyes.

“So you really
like
this place?” Kiki was truly amazed.

“I love it,” Fiji said fiercely. “I love the house, I love my business, I love the town.”
Despite everything,
she added to herself, without spelling out what “everything” was.

“I just figured you’d fix it up and sell it.” Kiki laughed.

“To whom? You noticed a booming housing market around Midnight?”

“Well, no.” Kiki said, still smiling. “You really do like living here?”

“I really do.” Fiji smiled back, just a little, showing her teeth. “So you left Marty, huh? What did he do to break the camel’s back?”

“He stole some of my jewelry and pawned it. Then he tried to tell me I’d lost it.”

“Why’d he need the money so bad?”

“He’s developed a gambling addiction,” Kiki said stiffly. “He isn’t getting any help, and he’s lost almost all his money, so to save myself and my own things, I had to get out. I put some stuff in Mom’s attic, and then I lit out.”

“So you came here.” Fiji smelled a large rat, much bigger than the little creature Mr. Snuggly had stowed in her shoe.

“Yeah, I came here.”

“Mom wouldn’t let you stay?”

“She made it clear that if Marty came by her house, I couldn’t expect any help from her.”

“What about Dad? He used to be pretty much ready to defend his darling.” Fiji had always been sure she wasn’t included in that defense.

“I don’t know how much you talk to Mom. . . .”

“Hardly at all. What?” Fiji was suddenly alert. There was a serious note in Kiki’s voice, a note that said, “Sit up and listen close.”