Night Shift(47)

And she did.

Lemuel kept his silence when she was finished. “Fiji, he’s trying to seduce you,” he said at last.

“He’s the only one,” she muttered, but Lemuel chose to ignore that.

“Who do you think it is?” Lemuel asked. He suspected he knew, but he wanted to hear what Fiji believed.

“I think it’s something bad and old, and I think it’s picking on me because, in some way, I threaten it.”

“I think you are absolutely right,” he said. “Sister, you need to leave town for a while.”

“I can’t do that,” Fiji said. “I have to keep the shop open. And I promised Manfred I would go see Mamie tomorrow afternoon. She’s being pulled to the crossroad, Lemuel.”

Lemuel looked into Fiji’s scared brown eyes. “I understand,” he said. “And I’m thinking on this as hard as I can. Don’t despair, friend.”

After she went back to her house, Lemuel left the pawnshop. With his very sharp hearing and sight, he could tell when anyone pulled up in front of the shop, and he could be back in the store almost before they’d gotten out of their vehicles. (The night he’d circled the diner and the trailer had been a case in point.) Now, he went to “visit” the Reeds almost every night, and they were beginning to have bad dreams, even Grady. Madonna and Teacher were getting jumpy and irritable without knowing why.

Lemuel didn’t care.

Lemuel had nothing against Grady, but he was not sentimental about babies. He had been born in a time when early mortality was the norm, and there were no hospitals, no medicine, no doctors for many miles in any direction. Babies routinely did not live to reach adulthood. His own mother had lost three, he knew, though he did not have clear memories of those babies.

When he returned to the pawnshop after his run, after his nightly visitation to the Reeds, Olivia was waiting for him.

“I was thinking about my childhood,” he said by way of greeting.

“Did you have siblings?”

“If you mean sisters and brothers, I was the only surviving son. I had two sisters who lived. Susan Mary died when she was pregnant with her first child at seventeen, and the baby died, too. Hester May died at twenty-seven when she had some infection in her stomach.”

“Appendicitis, maybe?” Olivia asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe. She left two children alive, their names were . . . Luke and Phillip—Webster?” Lemuel dimly recalled Hester’s husband, David, but Lemuel himself had died a year later, so he didn’t know what had happened to David and his sons.

“So it’s possible you have kin through your sister’s children.”

“I suppose,” he said. “Every now and then, I think of tracking them down.”

“Maybe your sister’s descendants are computer programmers or astronauts,” Olivia said. She obviously thought that was funny. “Shouldn’t there be written records somewhere?”

“Back then there weren’t so many,” Lemuel told her, and for a moment the past came alive to him. He remembered how it had been, and he’d told Olivia about how he’d gone to work as soon as he could ride. Lemuel had been a cowhand, working for this rancher and that, whoever could afford to pay him. He had learned to read when he was fourteen, while he was tending cattle for a man named Marvin Middleton, sometime after 1850.

Middleton had been a strange bird, as Lemuel put it when he was telling Olivia about him.

“He was a schoolteacher back east,” Lemuel said. “Then he inherited this spread when Horace Middleton got bit by a rattlesnake. Mr. Middleton was swung to come west by what he called ‘the romance of it all.’ He brought along his wife, Belle, and their daughters, Mabel and Daisy, and they became a ranch family.”

“How did they like it?” Olivia had asked him.

“Not much, on the part of Mrs. Middleton and Daisy. Mabel took to it right smart,” Lemuel said. “One night when we were out with the cattle, Mr. Middleton found I couldn’t read, and he decided to set that right.”

“I would have thought you’d have been too tired to think by nighttime.”

“Dropping in my boots,” Lemuel said. “But he was relentless. Learned a lot of words, too.”

“What happened to them all?”

Lemuel looked back through the decades. “Well, Mr. Middleton got throwed off his horse about the fifth year I worked for him, and he broke his neck. Mrs. Middleton took it pretty hard and headed back east as fast as she could pack and go. Daisy went with her.”

“What about Mabel?”

“She and I were hitched,” Lemuel said. “So we worked the ranch, and I hired someone to help me as I’d helped Mr. Middleton, a man named . . . well, I cannot remember his name. Then a gunslinger named Donald Lee Coe came to town. That name I remember.”