“Is this the kind of thing you do?” Arthur Smith looked at her with level blue eyes.
She was tempted, so tempted, to show him exactly what she could do, but that way lay disaster. It had taken her years to learn that lesson. “I would never create such a thing,” she said. “And it doesn’t come from any school of witchcraft that I know about. It seems . . . made up. By someone who really doesn’t know anything about the craft.”
He was good at staring, she found. “I just about believe you,” he said finally.
She shrugged. “You do or you don’t,” she said, but she felt relieved. “This is not my work. I don’t know if she bought So You Think You’re a Witch or Magic Is Us, or if someone with a little woo-woo in her system made this for Aubrey. Frankly, I have a hard time believing Aubrey would be interested in making something like this. But no true practitioner would have created it.” She handed the plastic bag to the sheriff. Mr. Snuggly appeared from behind the shop counter, where one of his many pillows was positioned, and came to look up at Arthur Smith.
“Nice cat.” Smith’s admiration seemed to be genuine.
“Sometimes he’s not as nice as he looks,” she said. Mr. Snuggly’s head swiveled with uncanny abruptness as he gave Fiji what could only be described as a glare.
“Claws the furniture?” Smith asked.
“Ah, likes to wake me up in the morning,” she said. “He’s got to have his chow.” The cat turned his broad golden-striped back to her in a pointed fashion.
“It’s just like he knows what you’re saying.”
“It is, isn’t it,” she said.
Smith left a moment later. He didn’t volunteer any more information, but Fiji saw that he was driving down to the Antique Gallery and Nail Salon.
In the remaining daylight, after the sheriff had driven back to Davy, the motorcycles roared through Midnight. They all paused outside the pawnshop and milled around in a threatening manner. The inhabitants of Midnight wisely stayed inside behind locked doors. The most proactive community members, Olivia and Lemuel, were not able to respond. Olivia was on one of her mysterious trips out of town, and Lemuel was dead to the world.
Fiji called Bobo. “You okay?” she asked when he answered.
“I’ve got my shotgun and I’m ready,” he said. “I’ve called the police.”
“Good.” She called Chuy.
“You all right?”
“We’re good. We’re ready. You need us to come to you?”
“No, stay inside. Bobo’s called the police.”
In the next minute or two all the residents of Midnight had called each other, except the Rev.
Fiji asked for the help of several goddesses. She was too frightened to run out her front door and in the door of the chapel to check on him. After all, motorcycle gangs had a bad reputation when it came to women. She was ashamed of her own cowardice. Finally, she went up into her attic, a place she avoided normally, and peered out a window, the only place she could see into the pet cemetery.
To her surprise, the Rev was digging a grave, about half human size. He’d hung his coat on a tree branch while he worked. He was ignoring the loud engine sounds and the yells of the MOL. He didn’t even seem to notice the noise.
She scrambled down the rickety folding ladder and closed up the attic, feeling a flood of relief. Though the MOL were buzzing and droning, Fiji could just hear the siren of an approaching police car. She ran to the front window, hoping to see them all being cuffed and thrown in the back of police cars. There was only a single patrol, but at the sight of it, the MOL group scattered like billiard balls when the break occurs. They fled in all directions across the landscape, not sticking to the roads, and the patrol car couldn’t follow all of them at once.
In fact, it made no attempt to follow any of them.
Fiji dashed out onto her porch, her face flushed and furious, and she gestured from the patrol car to one of the fleeing motorcycles, her meaning as clear as if she’d had a blackboard behind her. But the officer inside only pulled up in front of the pawnshop and got out of the car.
The cop was a woman, and Fiji stormed across the road to her. Manfred joined her just in time to hear, “So you thought if you couldn’t get them all, you wouldn’t get any of them?” Fiji was livid.
“Car chasing motorcycle, the end’s not going to be good,” the cop said in a bored way. She was a chunky woman whom the uniform did not flatter. Her dark brown hair was pulled back into a tight knob on the back of her head, and her dark glasses were mirrors. Her face was hard and brown with crevices like a walnut’s shell. “And they hadn’t done anything.”
“Hadn’t done anything,” Fiji repeated.
Manfred was afraid she was going to freeze the police officer. Now that he was close enough, he could read “Gomez” on her name tag.
“They didn’t shoot anything, they didn’t even throw rocks,” Gomez said. “They didn’t shout threats, even. Was I supposed to arrest them for driving in circles and looking scary?”
“That would have been a start in the right direction,” Fiji said, and her hands twitched. Mr. Snuggly was standing at Fiji’s feet, looking up at Gomez with an unblinking feline stare. Gomez noticed the cat. “He’ll know me next time he sees me,” she said, and laughed, but not as if she really found that amusing. “I’m not much of a cat person.”
“Oooooh,” Fiji said with faux sympathy. “Are you scared of my kitty? Well, Mr. Snuggly—”
“Hi, Officer,” Manfred said smoothly, and Fiji felt like smacking him. But he kept on talking. “Thanks for coming so quickly. I don’t know how much you know about what’s been happening here lately, but we’ve been having trouble with people from this group coming into Midnight and attacking us.” By the time he’d finished, Fiji had calmed down a bit.
“Not exactly the way I heard it,” Gomez said.
That brought both Manfred and Fiji up short. “What do you mean?” Fiji said, holding on to her composure with both hands.
“Way I see it is you got some kind of dispute with Price Eggleston’s political group. First the widow of one of them starts living here with one of you Midnight people, and she goes missing, turns up dead. Two of them come over here to talk to the guy she was living with, and they vanish. Poof! Then two of them come over here to find out why the first two vanished, maybe go a little overboard, and they get arrested. Then their little hunting club gets burned down. Now they come over here and let off some steam, and here I am and they’ve left. Having done nothing.”