Day Shift
Page 21

“Thanks,” the boy said, to all of them, and he seemed pleased, though his tone was noncommittal.
“In the meantime,” the Rev said, obviously coming to his main point, “what are all these people doing in town? The hotel was bad enough.” He’d taken off his dusty hat, and his thinning black hair was combed across his skull, damp with sweat.
“Sit down,” Bobo suggested. “I’ll tell you.” They all sat, except the boy, who didn’t seem much interested in what the adults were saying. He roamed around the shop making scarcely a sound, his big purple eyes taking in all the oddities and peculiarities around him, his mouth slightly open in wonder. Olivia remembered the first time she’d been in Midnight Pawn, and she could understand his fascination.
Four years ago. She’d been on her way to Dallas to get a flight to—where? Somewhere east. She’d completed a job east of Marthasville, an old rancher who wouldn’t sell his land to a man with a lot of money. She almost never left from the same airport she’d flown into, and never under the same name. That day, for the first time, she’d seen the exit for Midnight and Davy on the highway.
A town called Midnight. The name had caught her fancy.
She’d been in no hurry, so she’d taken the exit. And she’d seen the closed storefronts, but the pawnshop . . . stuck at a crossroad in what seemed like to her the middle of nowhere . . . had been fascinating.
She’d had to go in.
And she’d been captivated by the cases full of old things, mysterious things. The shelves had seemed crowded with objects she had to handle. She’d looked for a long time. When Bobo, the new proprietor, had told her gently that he needed to close for an hour to get his supper, she’d driven up to eat in Davy (not trusting the Home Cookin Restaurant, wisely, because then it had been run by an old couple who had never been able to cook as well as Madonna Reed). But after a hasty hamburger and tonic water in Davy, she’d found herself going back to the pawnshop, which was so much larger inside than it appeared to be on the outside. Since it was dark by then, she’d met Lemuel.
She had never met anyone like him before. She didn’t know how he’d felt about her that night, but she’d been drawn to him, powerfully. Olivia had been in the presence of hundreds of men who were better looking and richer and more powerful in a worldly way. And she’d known Lemuel for what he was immediately. But Lemuel . . . something in the age of him, the strength of him, the ruthlessness of him, drew her in.
That night, the little sign behind the cash register, which she hadn’t noticed at all during her earlier visit, suddenly seemed to leap out at her. APARTMENT DOWNSTAIRS FOR RENT, with no other information. “It was waiting for the right person to read it,” Lemuel had said afterward, and Olivia believed that was so.
They hadn’t become lovers right away. They were both cautious people, even when biology and inclination were herding them in the same direction. It was like they took their honeymoon first, their time of learning each other, in a bubble large enough only for two.
Lost in remembering something rare, Olivia only came back to the pawnshop and the little boy when the Rev said, “When is Lem coming back, Olivia?” That was very direct, for the Rev.
Olivia said, “He’s taken those books and gone to consult friends of his. Right now he’s in New York.” She didn’t spell it out; the magic books, the ones Lemuel had been searching for in the pawnshop all those years, had been found by Bobo by sheer accident, and Lemuel was having a wonderful time looking through them. But some had been in a language so ancient Lemuel didn’t have a clue as to how to translate the text, so off he’d gone, the first time he’d left Midnight for any length of time in over a hundred years.
She hadn’t offered to go with him. He’d have asked her to go if he’d wanted her to, and though she’d hoped, and mentally shifted her obligations around just in case, he hadn’t mentioned it.
The Rev waited, expectant.
“I don’t know when he’ll return,” she said calmly. “When he’s done what he set out to do, I suppose.”
“Can you call him?”
“I can, but I won’t,” she said. “He’s having a great time, and he deserves it.”
She did not know that at all. She had heard from Lem only twice since his departure: once after he’d found no help in Atlanta, and again when he’d tracked down a possible translator in Minnesota, who’d not been able to help but had referred him to a vampire in New York.
She had told herself that to Lemuel, a week was like a moment. To her, it was like a week. Or two. And she had reminded herself that he did not like the telephone, though he knew how to use it. Lemuel had a cell phone, and from it he had texted her briefly at each stop. Nothing else.
The Rev looked grave, as if he could read her thoughts. But he didn’t say anything more about Lemuel. Instead, he said, “We have to get all those people out of Midnight.” He jerked his head to his right, to indicate Manfred’s house. The boy had his back to the Rev. He’d wandered to the first set of shelves to stare inside a glass case at a ukulele. It appeared to be older than any of the people in the room.
“We all want that,” Bobo said, between sideways looks at Diederik. Olivia knew they were all trying to figure out what made Diederik so special. “But I don’t think there’s a short-term way to make that happen.”
Fiji was fidgeting, and finally she said, “Bobo, do you have a brush or comb handy?”