Everyone around the table froze for a moment. But Manfred got the distinct impression this was not news to several of the people at the table.
“But Smith said she wasn’t shot,” Bobo added.
Manfred said, “Great, man. Congratulations.” Then he realized that this was not the happiest wording, and he ate another bite of chicken. This is one of those nights I wish I’d stayed at home and opened a can of soup, he thought.
“What happened to her?” Joe asked Bobo. “Did the sheriff say?”
Manfred glanced up in time to see Bobo shake his head.
“So, you’re in the clear. Why are you so grim?” Olivia asked bluntly.
“Her family doesn’t want me at the funeral.” Bobo looked down at his plate. He mauled a potato with his fork.
Olivia went steely. “They can’t stop you if you want to go,” she said. “We’ll all go.”
Joe leaned forward, looked at each person at the table in turn. His eyes were very serious. “Do we want to make a terrible day worse for them? If Chuy were here, that’s what he’d be saying.”
There was an awkward silence. “No, we don’t want to do that,” Olivia said. “But if Bobo’s been cleared . . .”
“Smith told me he had let them know I didn’t kill her, but that they were still bitter,” Bobo said.
No one had a response to that. Manfred was able to finish his meal in peace.
Lemuel had not come in to sit with them that night. Fiji had taken home enough leftovers from her barbecue meal the night before that she was having her dinner at home. Chuy was visiting his brother in Fort Worth, so Joe had brought Rasta with him to the diner. The dog sat quietly in a compact circle by Joe’s chair. Joe was rigid about no one feeding him from the table.
Shawn Lovell had come in to get three to-go meals, and he’d given everyone a casual wave before carrying the bag of take-out containers back to the service station. Only Manfred, Bobo, Olivia, and Joe were left after the preacher exited.
As he finished his meal, Manfred wondered how Madonna managed to keep the diner doors open. But he was sure glad she did.
“I’m going to Fiji’s class on Thursday night,” he said. “I couldn’t say no. Anyone else want to try it out?”
“Sorry, I’m just not in the mood for strangers,” Bobo said, and Manfred felt a stab of envy that he had a good excuse.
“I have to pack,” Olivia said. “I have an early flight Friday.”
“Chuy is coming back on Thursday,” Joe said. “Sorry, buddy, seems like you’re flying solo.”
“Great,” Manfred said. He had already been kicking himself for agreeing to go to Fiji’s class, which would undoubtedly be all mystical kumbaya and talk of every woman’s inner goddess.
On Thursday evening, Manfred was kicking himself even harder. The women gathered in Fiji’s store ranged in age from twenty-one to sixty. A couple of the younger women had made an effort to look “witchy” in black dresses or leggings, heavy black eyeliner, and dyed black hair—Goth with pentagrams, he told himself. The older women tended to the scarves-and-skirts style of witchiness, though one lady in her early forties was cinched into a black leather bustier and a black lace skirt, with huge silver earrings swaying from her multiply pierced ears. Manfred felt like he’d come to a bad costume party, especially when the women stood to form a circle and held hands to begin their meditation. “The full moon will make tonight an especially favorable one for self-enlightenment,” Fiji told the group before she began the invocation.
Manfred had never linked his psychic ability to witchcraft, and he had no particular religious beliefs. Fiji’s directions to implore Hecate to help those present develop their powers left him just a bit bored and faintly contemptuous. He had no idea who Hecate was. Only his certainty that Fiji herself possessed real power kept him in the store and holding the right hand of the forty-something would-be hottie and the left hand of a white-haired grandmother in a sweeping skirt.
While Fiji implored and invoked, Manfred did the mental math about what he’d clear that month, and then abruptly his brain took a left turn down a dead-end road. He found himself catching a glimpse of the awful corpse of Aubrey Hamilton. As Fiji’s singsong voice went on and on, Aubrey’s skull, with its hanks of ragged hair, rotated toward him. The darkened teeth moved under their remnants of flesh and muscle. Horribly dead Aubrey said, “I truly loved him. Tell him.”
Manfred’s eyes flew open and he looked up to meet Fiji’s. She was looking at him steadily, as if she knew he’d had a true and direct communication. She smiled. And then her eyes shut and her head dropped again, and Manfred was left to compose a grocery list for his next trip to Davy to stave off any other unwanted revelations. As long as he told himself over and over again that he needed orange juice, bread, and peanut butter, plus lightbulbs, he could keep the dreadful vision at bay.
After those few seconds of freezing fear, he was bored silly. Two of the gray-haired women employed the Ouija board, which told them they were never too old for love. After that, there was a round of dream interpretation, though Manfred figured cynically that most of the dreams had been constructed well after the sleep session. If there was anyone approaching Fiji’s talent there that night, Manfred could not detect it. Since he always watched the money flow, he’d noticed right away that Fiji kept a pretty blue bowl on the counter, and he also noticed all the women dropped twenty dollars in it discreetly before they paraded out the door, chattering excitedly about astral projections and ley lines.
Fiji stood on her porch smiling after them, pleased with the evening and with herself, as far as Manfred could tell.
“Was that a typical class?” Manfred asked, making sure his tone was polite and respectful.
Possibly he hadn’t succeeded, because Fiji looked a bit taken aback.
“I would say so,” she said. “You got a true reading, didn’t you?”
“I had a vision,” he said, reluctantly. “At least, I guess it was a vision.”
“Tell me about it, if it wasn’t too personal.”
“It wasn’t personal at all. It was a message for someone else.” He described the brief scene. When Fiji heard about Aubrey’s corpse talking, she shuddered.
“Do you think I should tell him?” Manfred asked.
“Of course,” Fiji said immediately. But she looked anything but happy. “If you have a true vision, you should tell the person involved. He’ll be glad to hear that . . . if he believes you.”