Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 Voodoo Dolls 3

   Carla rode with Amy toward the Hypnotic Shoppe, just after English
Composition class.  Carla caught Amy up on everything, and seemed shaken
inside, worried, as if she had committed a crime, and just found out she
had been seen doing it.

   "She even knew about what I told you, remember after the cast party for
Twelfth Night, when we were at Mrs.  Caine's huge house?" Carla tried to
control the wavering in her voice, but Amy was far too perceptive.  Her
studies in dance, in dramatic studies, and psychology made her very good at
reading people.  Besides this, two years previous, as seniors in high
school, Amy and Carla turned their close friendship into a secret journey
of exploration, a journey that lasted almost a year.  Both were still
close, but that journey had ended as secretly as it begun.

   "Um, when Donald Crum and Lacey did that freaky dance?" Amy shot a quick
glance to Carla for acknowledgment.  Carla smiled, a giggle in her voice.

   "No!  Well, yes, but remember how Wendy was staring at the fish tank and
I was talking to her?  Well, she knew about that." Amy frowned.

   "What's to know?"

   "Wendy was like, tranced on the water and bubbles coming out of that
spinning crystal thing at the bottom."

   "No way!  You didn't tell me that?  Was she ok?" Amy turned against the
street, parking by a meter a half block from the shop.

   "Well, she was ok, I told you how I felt remember?" Carla's eyebrows
were raised, and her normal aloof arrogance was gone.  Amy remembered the
Carla she knew in High school.

   "Yah.  We're here.  Let's get that amulet that glowed, and we'll test it
or look it up in some of the books, see what it does." With a loud slam,
the old clunker's doors were shut, and the two friends braced against the
wind as they headed up the block.

   "So when did you all leave?" Amy stopped, pulling her keys from her
handbag in front of the door.

   "Wendy took the customer, um, Charlotte I think, into the crystal ball
room."

   "The Reading Room", Amy corrected.  The door lurched open with a strong
push from the slight goth girl.

   They quickly stepped in from the blast of icy wind and slammed the old
wooden door, creating a cacophony of jingles and jangles.  Amy turned on
the tea pot, and lights, and went about getting the store ready for
business.  Carla continued her story at the counter.

   "She gave the customer some of these little voodoo type dolls, didn't
even charge her for them!" Then the Charlotte lady leaves, and Wendy says
something messed up like, I gonna take dees body for a spin, or something
like that."

   Carla perused the counter's articles carefully.  After a minute she
shouted to Amy.

   "It's gone!  It was here!  I was the last to leave, and it was here I
swear."

   Clearly there was a spot where something had been, but the red velvet of
the counter's lining gave no clues.