And not for the first time, Manfred was profoundly glad he’d moved here after Aubrey’s disappearance.

30

The sheriff had been in Fiji’s store before, but he looked around him like he’d fallen down the rabbit hole. It was clear that he was uneasy at being in a magic shop. Especially one that was being decorated for Halloween; in the absence of any customers, Fiji had started the ball rolling.

When he entered, to the jingle of the old-fashioned bell attached to the door, Fiji was up on a ladder in the middle of the room. She was hanging a full-size skeleton from a hook on the ceiling. More accurately, she was suspending a skeleton that appeared to have been hanged with a noose.

“Can I help you?” Arthur Smith asked immediately.

“Yes, that would be great.” Fiji came down the ladder cautiously. “I seem to be an inch shorter than I need to be.”

The sheriff smiled at her, and for the first time, Fiji thought of him as a man rather than as an instrument of her discomfiture. She estimated Smith was fifteen years older than she was, but he swarmed up the ladder with an impressive amount of ease. He completed the whole job in less than a minute. “Where should I put the ladder?” he asked.

“It goes in the extra bedroom,” Fiji said. “The second door on the left.” She hurried to open the hall door for him, which she’d had installed when she’d decided to make the living room her place of business. She didn’t want customers wandering through the rest of the house as though they had a right to inspect it.

The first door on the left was the bathroom, and Fiji was relieved she didn’t leave towels on the floor or clothes strewn around. She’d gotten in the habit of keeping it orderly since, on the rare occasion, a customer needed to use it. Across the hall, her bedroom door was shut, also a habit she’d acquired through experience. She scurried ahead of Arthur to open the second bedroom door, on the left after the bathroom. There was a double bed, but primarily she used the room for storage. It was obvious where the ladder went; the objects in the room were stacked as neatly as a Tetris game.

Since he’d been so helpful, Fiji felt she had to offer him some hospitality. “Coffee? Water? Sweet tea?” she asked.

“I’d sure like a glass of tea,” he said. He retreated to the shop area. When she brought his drink, she found him sitting in one of the two armchairs facing each other across a wicker table in the center of the shop floor. The table was stacked with Modern Witch, Texas Monthly, and Crafts for the Home. She placed a coaster handy.

“So, how’s the investigation going?” she asked, not knowing what else to talk about. She was not sure why he’d dropped in.