Manfred nodded.

“I’m Tommy,” the man said, extending a wrinkled hand scattered with age spots. “Tommy Quick. Ain’t so quick no more. Used to be Carlo Bustamente, back in the day.”

“Wow,” Manfred said. “Early days of Vegas, right?”

The old man wheezed with laughter and withdrew his hand from Manfred’s. “There hasn’t been any late days of Vegas!”

Fiji and Olivia cast questioning glances Manfred’s way, but he waved a hand. The rest of the story would have to wait for Tommy’s departure. “So, how’d you come to be in Midnight?” he asked. “Did you lose a bet or something?”

The wheezy laugh again. “You might say that, or you might say I got lucky, sonny,” Tommy told Manfred. “I’ll tell you about it. So I’m in a terrible dive in Vegas, see, the kind you wouldn’t want your mom to stay in. Not that I know your mom, but I’m just saying. It was a place so bad that only broke old people, like us, or broke young people, like your average little criminal, would choose to live there.”

They realized he was waiting for an acknowledgment, and they all nodded like puppets. “Anyways,” Tommy went on, “this woman come by the place we’re staying. Now, we’ve been praying we won’t get stabbed every time we go out to get groceries, you understand?”

He paused again, waiting. They nodded obediently. “This woman says there’s a place in the boonies in Texas where we can live, eat three meals a day, have our rooms cleaned, be comfortable. We says, ‘What’s the catch?’ And she says, ‘The catch is, it’s in the boonies in Texas.’” He laughed again.

Manfred could manage only a weak smile. But Fiji grinned. “So you agreed, then?” Fiji said encouragingly.

“Yeah, me and Mamie and Suzie. The next thing we knew, we were in the Midnight Hotel and being trotted out for every visitor. There’s one other old guy, Shorty Horowitz. He was in the hotel next to ours, but we only knew him by sight. He was the only other guy broken-down enough to take this cockamamie offer.”

Manfred exchanged glances with Fiji and Olivia. That was a lot of glances. He could tell that like him, they didn’t know what to make of this. “Are you supposed to do anything in exchange for this safe place to live?” Manfred asked, finally.

“They haven’t told us nothing yet.” Tommy was completely unsurprised by the question. “Except to act happy if we got asked any questions. If we’re supposed to do something, it must not be anything urgent. We’re bored. We got nothing to do. So the reason I came down here was, what’s up with the kid?”

Diederik came out in his new clothes, denim shorts and a striped T-shirt, and waited shyly for them to notice him.

“You look great!” said Fiji. “I’ll have to run out this afternoon to get you some more in case you grow again.”

The boy, who was less of a boy every day, smiled back at her. “You are most kind,” he said in his odd accent. “I will be glad to repay you with work.”

“I’ll be sure to save all my odd jobs for you, young man,” she said. “In fact, tell the Rev I’ve asked you over to work for me and to have lunch with me.”

His olive face lit up with pleasure, and the boy hurried out of the shop and over to the chapel.

“Weird,” said Tommy, shaking his head. “He’s the opposite of a dwarf, huh?”

“We don’t know what’s up with the kid,” Manfred said. “But we figure no one else needs to be concerned about it.”

“I gotcha. So this is one of those things the Whitefields don’t need to know about?”

“They don’t know . . .” Olivia’s voice trailed off.

“They don’t know we ain’t genuine old people waiting for a nursing home with a loving family and some money?”

“Right.”

“I don’t think so. Mamie, she told the woman—Lenore—she told her, ‘You got us for the duration, sweetie,’ and Mrs. Whitefield, she says, ‘Just until you get a bed in Whispering Creek, Miss Mamie.’ But we ain’t got no one going to pay for us to live at Whispering Creek, which from the brochures in the lobby is one of those really high-end nursing homes. Like a spa.”

“So how do you feel about that?” Fiji said.

“I liked you until you said that, sister,” the old man said. “I want you to know how I feel about something, I’ll tell you. This place is dead, but it’s safe. And it gets more and more interesting. That old man in the hat? His suit looks older’n me. The boy keeps growing overnight. The two men who run the antiques store—hey, are they a couple? Ain’t we modern here? Suzie made it over to the pawnshop; she says the guy who runs it is a hunk and there’s all kinds of weird shit inside. Oh, and your cat came down yesterday, Fiji. He walked all around having a good look like he was thinking about buying the place. Then that Eva Culhane came in, and Harvey and Lenore ran up to stick their noses up her ass, and she said, ‘No pets! This is a pet-free zone!’”

“Oh, no,” Fiji said. She looked around the room. Mr. Snuggly was not in sight. He was a wise cat. “So what else did Eva Culhane do?”

“I think she was just checking to make sure we was all still alive.” Tommy laughed his wheezy laugh. “She was the one scooped us up in Vegas.”

“Really?” Olivia looked as though that was very interesting. But she clearly didn’t know what to make of it.

“This was fun,” said Tommy Quick, né Bustamente. “If you want to come down and visit, bring some of them muffins. Scones. Whatever.” He heaved himself to his feet and carefully made his way out. They heard him going down the steps slowly, and Fiji got up to make sure he reached the sidewalk without falling.

“Okay, he’s on his way back to the hotel,” she said, resuming her seat. “That was interesting.”

“You haven’t read any stories on the history of Las Vegas, I take it,” Manfred said.

Olivia and Fiji shook their heads in unison.

“Not in the earliest mob days, but not far after, Tommy Quick was a knee-breaker for organized crime,” Manfred said.

“You know this how?”

“My grandmother had a storefront in Las Vegas once upon a time,” he said. “She was full of stories. And that got me interested, so I read some books.”

“I wasn’t even worried about the hotel,” Fiji said. “Now I have to worry about the hotel.” She threw up her hands. “Every damn thing is a problem here. And my cat! He’s lucky they didn’t kick him or run him over. He crossed the Davy highway by himself! Idiot!”

“I’ve done it before,” said a sour little voice. Mr. Snuggly emerged from behind Fiji’s counter. He strolled over to the group of humans and paused to sit by the little table, his fluffy tail wrapped neatly around his legs. “I look and look and look, and then I run very fast.” Olivia, not a fan of the cat, glared at him, and he returned the look. She glanced away first.

“Why?” Fiji said. “Why did you go down there?”

“I knew they were real old people, but not helpless old people. I wanted to find out why they were here. I wanted to know if they were magic.” Mr. Snuggly began licking a paw.

“Are they?” Manfred asked, tired of being left out of the conversation, even if it was with a cat.

“No. Not at all. They are old. They’ve done bad things. They’re not mean. One of them is dotty. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what Aunt Mildred used to say. Dotty.”

Fiji looked taken aback. Apparently, she hadn’t ever heard the cat refer to her own great-aunt as “Aunt Mildred.”

“Sure, that’s right,” Manfred said quickly. “No magic there, huh?”

“None,” said Mr. Snuggly emphatically. “Plenty of ghosts at the hotel, of course. And lots of misdirection.”

“What does that mean?” Olivia glared down at Mr. Snuggly, who met her eyes without any problem at all.

“I’m going to take a nap now,” the cat said, and went back behind the counter, presumably to jump in the padded cat bed Fiji had put under the counter.

Manfred was having a hard time picking up the thread of the plan they’d been considering before Diederik, Tommy, and Mr. Snuggly had intervened. He put his head in his hands.