Manfred laughed, and said, “I guess I’d better check with Bobo before I do anything that drastic to the backyard.” Pulling up a stump—in an area where graves had to be blasted with dy***ite—might be a serious undertaking.
Manfred was just closing the door when he spotted Sheriff Smith parking his car in front of Fiji’s place. The sheriff’s visits were getting fewer and farther between. Apparently no new information had surfaced about Aubrey’s murder. For the first time, the thought crossed Manfred’s mind that the mystery of her death might never be solved. It would hang over Bobo forever.
And not for the first time, Manfred was profoundly glad he’d moved here after Aubrey’s disappearance.
30
The sheriff had been in Fiji’s store before, but he looked around him like he’d fallen down the rabbit hole. It was clear that he was uneasy at being in a magic shop. Especially one that was being decorated for Halloween; in the absence of any customers, Fiji had started the ball rolling.
When he entered, to the jingle of the old-fashioned bell attached to the door, Fiji was up on a ladder in the middle of the room. She was hanging a full-size skeleton from a hook on the ceiling. More accurately, she was suspending a skeleton that appeared to have been hanged with a noose.
“Can I help you?” Arthur Smith asked immediately.
“Yes, that would be great.” Fiji came down the ladder cautiously. “I seem to be an inch shorter than I need to be.”
The sheriff smiled at her, and for the first time, Fiji thought of him as a man rather than as an instrument of her discomfiture. She estimated Smith was fifteen years older than she was, but he swarmed up the ladder with an impressive amount of ease. He completed the whole job in less than a minute. “Where should I put the ladder?” he asked.
“It goes in the extra bedroom,” Fiji said. “The second door on the left.” She hurried to open the hall door for him, which she’d had installed when she’d decided to make the living room her place of business. She didn’t want customers wandering through the rest of the house as though they had a right to inspect it.
The first door on the left was the bathroom, and Fiji was relieved she didn’t leave towels on the floor or clothes strewn around. She’d gotten in the habit of keeping it orderly since, on the rare occasion, a customer needed to use it. Across the hall, her bedroom door was shut, also a habit she’d acquired through experience. She scurried ahead of Arthur to open the second bedroom door, on the left after the bathroom. There was a double bed, but primarily she used the room for storage. It was obvious where the ladder went; the objects in the room were stacked as neatly as a Tetris game.
Since he’d been so helpful, Fiji felt she had to offer him some hospitality. “Coffee? Water? Sweet tea?” she asked.
“I’d sure like a glass of tea,” he said. He retreated to the shop area. When she brought his drink, she found him sitting in one of the two armchairs facing each other across a wicker table in the center of the shop floor. The table was stacked with Modern Witch, Texas Monthly, and Crafts for the Home. She placed a coaster handy.
“So, how’s the investigation going?” she asked, not knowing what else to talk about. She was not sure why he’d dropped in.
“I’ve interviewed more right-wing nuts than I thought there were in Texas,” he said wearily. “And all of them are giving each other alibis.” He picked up the current issue of Modern Witch. “This is a serious publication?” he said. “You regard yourself as a witch?”
“Yes, it is. And I do.”
“You believe that you can affect the outcome of things?”
“I believe in the power of spells to affect events,” she said, measuring each word before she added it to the conversation.
“Why did you dislike Aubrey Hamilton so much?”
She’d been pretty sure he’d get around to asking her that. She knew she wasn’t hard to read, in some respects. “She wasn’t telling the truth in her relationship with Bobo,” she said. “I’ve been his friend for some time. I’ve seen him with other women. Aubrey was really opaque about her previous life, about how she ended up as a waitress in Davy. I thought it was a mighty big coincidence that she was working at Bobo’s favorite restaurant, that she didn’t have any sort of boyfriend to slow down the way their relationship advanced, that she seemed to agree with Bobo in every respect.”
“Most couples have some differences.”
“Exactly. But every opinion Bobo had, she had, too. Or so she said.” Fiji shrugged. “It just seemed sketchy to me.”
“And did you share these thoughts with Bobo?”
“No, I did not.”
“If you’re such good friends, why not?”
She stared at him, at a loss. Why not? Because I have a crush on him the size of a boulder. If I’d really just been his buddy, I would have spoken up. “Because his love life is none of my business. Since he’s a grown man and he obviously liked her a lot, I wasn’t going to butt in and tell tales. Especially since I didn’t have anything concrete to tell him. What was I gonna say, ‘She agrees with you too much’?”
“You didn’t think of using your witch ability to expose her?”
Suddenly Fiji’s interior alarm system went off. She was treading on eggshells now. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t cast a spell on her, or ask one of your witch friends to do something?”
“I don’t have any witch friends,” Fiji said. “Not any serious practitioners. Why?”
“When one of my deputies was going through Aubrey’s boxed belongings, she found this. It had been in her night table drawer.” Arthur pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket. In it was a fishhook, and tied to the hook were three silk threads. On the other ends of the silk threads were flat patches, the ones you’d buy at a sewing store or craft store to apply to a garment or pillow. One of them was a heart. And one of them was shaped like lips.
Though he hadn’t exactly offered the bag to her, Fiji leaned over and took it. She looked down at it with some distaste. “I can only guess about the interpretation,” she said. “I suppose the hook means the spell was cast so the person owning this could get their hooks into someone. The heart means the caster wanted to get the person to love her, and the lips are for physical passion. This is just my guess.”