“All right. Sheer curiosity, I guess. Were you out that night? The night it rained so much?”
“Only an idiot would voluntarily go out in weather like that.”
He looked at her, taking her measure. He didn’t seem totally satisfied with the conclusions he drew. “Eggleston and his buddies did make quite a scene at the funeral,” Smith said. “I understand he went to Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton yesterday and made an apology. Said it was just a tribute gone wrong.”
“Hmm. Well, he did the right thing.”
“I’ll be on my way. I’m glad I got a chance to talk to you, Fiji.”
“Same here, Sheriff.”
He left, putting on his hat the moment he stepped outside. After the door shut behind him, Manfred said, “Give the guy a break, Fiji. You could have called him Arthur.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not in the mood to make stuff easy today. You want to help me carry in the pumpkins?”
“Sure.” He needed to stretch. Too much time at the computer desk.
“I really am sorry about Creek,” she said, when they’d finished. They both sighed when they heard a car pull into Fiji’s driveway. “They’re already starting to come.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about Creek, too. But I guess this way is better for her. Where is Connor?”
“Where the two guys who came to beat up Bobo are, I guess,” she said, which was no answer at all.
“And that is?” He was impatient.
“If I can figure it out, you can,” she said, and then her first class member came in the door.
The following week, after everything had seemed to fall back to normal and the papers had stopped putting Connor’s school picture on the front page every day (due to his confession, the district attorney charged him as an adult), Manfred got a phone call. It was a number he didn’t recognize, but he got a lot of those, and he answered it without any expectation.
“Do you know who this is?” the voice said.
“Yes,” he answered, just as guardedly. It was Creek.
“We’re okay,” she said. “We’re north of where we were. It’s a lot colder! Hard to get used to.”
“Are you really okay?” He didn’t know what else to ask.
“As much as we can be. Dad got a job. Me, too. The same kind of work I did for Madonna.”
She was waiting tables.
“They treating you right?”
“Yeah, it’s okay. I miss you.”
“Same here.”
“I’ll try to call again sometime.”
“I want to hear from you.”
“I’m glad to hear your voice. I really am. Okay. Bye.”
“Bye.”
And then her voice was gone, and he believed he would never talk to her again. He thought again of the way her hair swung around her face, the smooth olive skin of her cheeks. He did not know if he should share this call with his neighbors or not. Somehow, he thought not. It seemed too personal and private.
Connecting Creek’s call with loss, he suddenly found himself punching in his mother’s number.
She was glad to hear his voice.
38
Kids didn’t trick-or-treat in Midnight. It was too remote, too spooky. But there was kind of a local tradition in Davy to take the less anxious kids to the Witch’s House. This had begun in Mildred Loeffler’s time, and Fiji had happily continued the celebration. She and other inhabitants of Midnight worked on her house and yard for two days, to the disgust of Mr. Snuggly, who thought Fiji’s time would have been better spent brushing him and stroking his fur and feeding him good things.
Fiji had pressed some of her neighbors into further service this Halloween. Joe and Chuy were wearing silver jumpsuits and huge white wings, and they stood on either side of the steps up to the porch, like patient gleaming angels. They were both wearing long blond wigs, which looked far more natural on Joe than it did on Chuy.
They took turns saying “Enter” to each child, in a deep, forbidding voice. If they’d been dressed like devils instead of angels, it would have been a rare child who had the nerve to claim his or her candy.
All of Fiji’s bushes were draped with fake spiderwebs. She’d positioned huge spiders on each one. Fiji had said a few spells over them, and the eyes of the arachnids gleamed and sparkled and moved in a thoroughly disconcerting way. There was also a huge kettle smoking over a smoldering fire, all of which Fiji had under careful (and magical) control. Parents always thought it was done with batteries, but children somehow knew better.
Prodded by his mom and dad, who’d thought his question was really cute, one boy asked Fiji (dressed in a Morticia dress and a pointed hat) if she weren’t “afraid bad kids would come egg your house someday.” Fiji leaned down to look in his eyes, and he found he was more intent on those eyes than on her cle**age. “I don’t think anyone will ever do that to me,” she said gently. “Do you?”
After a moment of paralyzing fear, he said, “I sure won’t.”
She straightened, with a slight smile, and his parents were proud of him. But for the rest of his life, he dated that as the moment he realized the world would not always think he was as adorable as his parents did.
Manfred had been called into service, too. He made a great devil, somewhat to his own surprise. He was dressed in black jeans and a black silk turtleneck. He’d grown his goatee out and colored it black for the night, he wore heavy eye makeup, and he had a black hoodie drawn up around his face. He would have looked even more striking, but he refused to wear the stretchy outfit Fiji had suggested when they’d gone to the costume store. “I’d look like Gollum,” he said, “but in black.”
“You’re not that skinny,” she’d retorted, disappointed, but he’d kept his ground. She’d asked the Rev to play a part, but he had told her that he intended to spend Halloween in the chapel in prayer for the souls of the dead. He’d stuck to his guns, no matter how she begged. However, in compensation, Bobo had agreed to participate for the first time.
Bobo was the most handsome Perseus anyone had ever seen. He carried a remarkably lifelike Gorgon’s head, and he wore a sort of toga and sandals. In the hand not clutching the head, he carried a large shiny sword from the pawnshop.
“It ought to be curved,” Fiji had said. “And you ought to have winged sandals.”
“Well, no one’s pawned any winged sandals, or sandals of any kind,” he said.