“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.
Ma
nfred 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.