Olivia’s eyes widened. “I haven’t talked to Lemuel enough lately,” she said. “There hasn’t been time with everything else he’s trying to accomplish. I’ve wondered about the Reeds for a while, and he asked me to avoid them.”
Manfred grinned.
“That does sound snobbish, doesn’t it?” she said. She got some sterile gauze and wound it around Manfred’s hand, tying it off neatly with a bright purple self-adhesive strip.
Manfred snorted. “It might sound snobbish if being a real Midnight person were something anyone else in the world aspired to,” he said. “That’s like saying someone doesn’t really fit in with the Weirdo Club.”
Olivia laughed for the second time. Manfred looked up at her, smiling faintly. “So you avoided them physically but tracked them online? Do you think that’s what Lemuel really meant?”
“Nope, but I gotta be me,” she said cheerfully.
“Thanks for the first-aid job,” he said. “If you ever need a career to fall back on, you might want to think about being an EMT.”
“I’ll write that in my diary,” she said.
“To revert to the previous topic. It would be too good to be true that a great cook like Madonna really chose to live in the back end of nowhere,” Manfred said. “And I’ve said at least ten times that I didn’t know how they kept Home Cookin open, with only a small circle of steady customers.”
“And we didn’t listen,” she said. “Because we were so glad the restaurant was open at all.”
Manfred started to say something, stopped. Started again.
“Out with it,” Olivia said.
“I hope the same thing doesn’t happen with them . . . that happened with the Lovells.” He was aiming for “firm but not threatening” and he hoped to hell he’d gotten it right.
“No need for it to,” Olivia said, not even pretending to sound surprised. “Did that upset you?”
He stared at her incredulously. “Of course it upset me,” he said.
“Do you blame Lemuel for the outcome?”
Lemuel had taken decisive action when the rest of them had been paralyzed.
“Do I blame him?” Manfred thought about it. “No. I don’t. Because no matter what we did, there was no fixing that situation.”
“It didn’t make me happy,” Olivia said.
“I never believed it did. But I also believe you can’t rearrange the world to suit yourself, like we did, and not pay for it some.”
“Not pay for it a lot,” Olivia said quietly. After looking his bandage over and nodding in a satisfied way, she added, “I think that’s what we’re doing now.”
Manfred sat at the table for a few minutes after the door closed behind his neighbor, thinking about that awful night and the anguish on Shawn Lovell’s face. When the reckoning had come, Manfred hadn’t been living in Midnight long. While he’d fallen into the Midnight way of thinking pretty quickly, Lemuel’s justice had been brutal. But they’d all tacitly agreed with his verdict.
Manfred wondered how Creek Lovell was faring. He’d had a crush on her the size of a boulder, and he’d never figured out if it was returned. She’d called him once without saying her name, to tell him that she was okay, with her dad, and working as a waitress. By now, he hoped she’d gotten to go to college somewhere. Now Creek was free of the millstone she’d carried around her neck for years. She should have the chance to make a life for herself.
Manfred also hoped she’d moved away from her father. If anyone was to blame for the situation they’d all found themselves in, it was Shawn Lovell.
12
Olivia returned to her apartment to think. She could not think of a single thing that would make her feel happier with life right at the moment, except helping Lemuel with his all-important task.
When Price Eggleston had taken his own life at the crossroad the day before, Olivia had been in for a hard time with the police, especially Officer Gomez, who did not like Midnight or its citizens. After all, the arrow that Price had stabbed through his own neck had belonged to Olivia, a fact she freely admitted.
Though the police didn’t know the half of Price Eggleston’s history with the people of Midnight, much less what Lemuel and Olivia had done in retaliation, it was still hard for the police to take Olivia’s word that she hadn’t had anything at all to do with his bizarre suicide.
Fortunately for Olivia, Price had killed himself in front of witnesses—not only herself and Bobo, but also an insurance agent from Davy, who would regret to the end of his days that he’d been stopped at the red light when Price had stabbed himself in the neck. And one of the guests at the hotel had been looking out a window, too, which Olivia thought was a little strange. But as a result, Olivia wasn’t seriously worried about her legal position. She could not have had anything to do with his death besides inadvertently providing the weapon which had killed him.