“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.

“I’ve interviewed more right-wing nuts than I thought there were in Texas,” he said wearily. “And all of them are giving each other alibis.” He picked up the current issue of Modern Witch. “This is a serious publication?” he said. “You regard yourself as a witch?”

“Yes, it is. And I do.”

“You believe that you can affect the outcome of things?”

“I believe in the power of spells to affect events,” she said, measuring each word before she added it to the conversation.

“Why did you dislike Aubrey Hamilton so much?”

She’d been pretty sure he’d get around to asking her that. She knew she wasn’t hard to read, in some respects. “She wasn’t telling the truth in her relationship with Bobo,” she said. “I’ve been his friend for some time. I’ve seen him with other women. Aubrey was really opaque about her previous life, about how she ended up as a waitress in Davy. I thought it was a mighty big coincidence that she was working at Bobo’s favorite restaurant, that she didn’t have any sort of boyfriend to slow down the way their relationship advanced, that she seemed to agree with Bobo in every respect.”

“Most couples have some differences.”

“Exactly. But every opinion Bobo had, she had, too. Or so she said.” Fiji shrugged. “It just seemed sketchy to me.”

“And did you share these thoughts with Bobo?”

“No, I did not.”

“If you’re such good friends, why not?”

She stared at him, at a loss. Why not? Because I have a crush on him the size of a boulder. If I’d really just been his buddy, I would have spoken up. “Because his love life is none of my business. Since he’s a grown man and he obviously liked her a lot, I wasn’t going to butt in and tell tales. Especially since I didn’t have anything concrete to tell him. What was I gonna say, ‘She agrees with you too much’?”

“You didn’t think of using your witch ability to expose her?”

Suddenly Fiji’s interior alarm system went off. She was treading on eggshells now. “What do you mean?”

“You didn’t cast a spell on her, or ask one of your witch friends to do something?”

“I don’t have any witch friends,” Fiji said. “Not any serious practitioners. Why?”