Stumptown Spirits

by E. J. Russell

  Riley chuckled. “We know that answer. Once per commercial break.”

  Julie slid down until her butt was at the edge of the seat. “He’s starting to ignore the script and ad lib them now. The last episode had eight instances. We had to edit them out in postproduction.” She pushed her bangs off her forehead and laced her hands on top of her head. “Scott’s the only one Max listens to, but he refuses to engage. I was stunned he actually told Max to shut up in the meeting today.”

  “I think he just wanted everyone to leave, and letting Max go on about his Houdini crush would have kept us there forever.”

  She nudged his knee with her foot. “You were right, Rile. This is a good story. Not the usual paranormal crap. A pretty heartbreaking tale, really.” With her chin resting practically on her chest, she grinned at him. “See how smart I was to get Scott to hire a real folklorist and not just a generic researcher?”

  Riley sat on the edge of his bed and fell backward. “Brilliant.”

  “Oh, come on.” Julie could wheedle with the finesse of a roomful of kindergartners. “You wouldn’t have taken the job if you hadn’t been interested in it a little bit. I know it’s not folklore fieldwork, but . . .”

  Riley glanced at her. Her eyes were focused on his laptop, her expression grim, and he raised himself to his elbows to see what had caused the sudden change.

  He stifled a groan. His wallpaper slideshow had frozen again. On that picture. The single piece of evidence that his relationship with Logan hadn’t been a product of his fevered imagination. Documentation of the only time Logan had touched him in public.

  So embarrassing. Someone had taken the picture at a barbecue during his last spring break. He and Logan, his arm draped around Logan’s shoulders, one of Logan’s hands resting on Riley’s leg, the other wiping something off Riley’s bottom lip with his thumb. Logan was smiling—laughing, probably, at Riley’s awkwardness—looking hot, as usual, his dark hair rumpled, his chin darkened by the perpetual scruff that Riley couldn’t resist. Riley just looked . . . besotted.

  Guys like Logan hated that shit, hated evidence of big stupid feelings, especially those they didn’t return. No wonder he’d walked out.

  Riley launched himself off the bed and closed the laptop lid. God, he’d been stupid to believe Logan had cared that much about him, but nothing else had made sense. Why stick with Riley for a year and a half, especially when dozens of more attractive guys had made it perfectly obvious they’d be willing to take Riley’s place? Shows how spectacularly love can blind you.

  He rested his hand on his laptop, tracing the Apple logo on the lid with a finger. “I saw him last night. Logan.”

  “Shit, Riley. I don’t believe you.” She shifted sideways on the chair, the better to glare at him. “I didn’t tell you about him being in Portland so you could stalk him. I told you so you could avoid him.”

  He dropped back onto the edge of the bed and hunched forward, hands between his knees. “Is it so wrong to want the truth from him? This isn’t the first time I’ve been ditched, but usually the guy can’t resist listing every single reason why he’d leave a loser like me. I figured Logan would jump at the chance.”

  “You’re not a loser. You’re the world’s sweetest, most caring guy.”

  Riley squinched up his face. “Kiss of death, Jules.”

  “It beats the hell out of being a user douche bag. But you—” She smacked his arm. “You can’t give up, can you, not until he tells you to fuck off to your poor little face.”

  Riley frowned. “I don’t have a poor little face.”

  “Yes, you do. Everything you feel is right there for everyone to read. If I could convince you to get in front of the camera, you’d be an instant hit.”

  “If I can’t hide anything, how could that make me an actor?”

  “Not an actor, doofus. You’re not self-absorbed enough for that. I mean a host. An interviewer. No one could doubt your sincerity.”

  “Yeah, that’d go over great.” As soon as stage fright kicked in, years of speech therapy would vanish like smoke, and he wouldn’t be able to pronounce his own freaking name. He pulled in a deep breath and blew it out. “By the way, he did tell me to fuck off. Not in so many words, but the subtext was pretty damned clear.”

  “You gonna listen to him?”

  Was he? Riley hadn’t missed the bulge in Logan’s jeans last night. For an instant, he’d let hope for something more than a closure discussion creep into his heart. That was the only reason he’d tried to invite Logan back here to talk. Yeah, to talk. That’s so not what you wanted. Then Logan had tossed that insulting twenty on the ground, and the hope had died, although the need for closure remained. The question was how to arrange the discussion if Logan wouldn’t stand still long enough to exchange more than twelve words and a sneer.

  “Guess I don’t have much choice.” The nail-gun-to-motorcycle-boots option looked better all the time.

  Julie slanted a look at him that clearly said, I’ll see your nail gun and raise you a chainsaw. “We’ll see.”

  Uh-oh. When Julie hatched a plan, virtual death and untold destruction were sure to follow. Trouble was, he didn’t know who was in the most danger: Logan or him.

  Logan dumped an armful of clean clothes onto his bed. Last load of laundry he’d ever do, so what was the point of folding it? He pulled a T-shirt out of the pile and yanked it over his head.

  He didn’t have a shift tonight, but he needed to drop by the bar to pick up his check. Enough to settle his remaining expenses. Anything left over, he could shove into the Audubon Society mail slot on his way down the trail on Saturday.

  The apartment building’s dryer sucked, so his clean jeans were unpleasantly damp. He didn’t want to wait for them to dry, so he put them on anyway, the waistband clammy against his skin. As he transferred the contents of his pockets from yesterday’s pair, his hand closed around the hard links of a chain.

  The rings. He’d taken them off last night and hadn’t put them back on.

  Why the fucking hell did Riley have to show up and remind Logan not only of what he missed, but of the only time he’d considered setting aside his obligation?

  Riley’s proximity had tormented him all day. Logan had tried to fill his time with stupid shit—laundry being a case in point—to keep his mind off the knowledge that the man was a mere ten-minute bike ride away. Facing his fucking destiny had been a hell of a lot easier when Riley was out of reach.

  What would Riley think of him if he found out the truth? Logan’s father, politically invested in keeping his son’s public nose clean, had lied to the police investigating Trent’s disappearance with a concerned frown on his face—he’d made sure Logan hadn’t been implicated.

  With anyone other than Riley, Logan wouldn’t have been worried—he’d learned plausible denial at his father’s knee, after all. But Riley was a smart guy, and it was his job to track down connections in stories. Shit, that was how Logan had found him in the first place, why he’d first been attracted to him. If Riley ever found out Logan had lied to him during their entire relationship? It wouldn’t matter that his lies were ones of omission—he couldn’t depend on Riley forgiving him for them, no matter what his reasons.

  The first year after Trent disappeared, Logan had gone back to the park every night, violating the park’s posted hours through the cold, wet winter and the colder, wetter spring. All summer and into fall, he’d continued, dodging the authorities, risking discovery and pissing his father the hell off. All for nothing, because not once in three hundred and sixty-four days had anything shown up other than bats, raccoons, and the occasional deer.

  Then exactly a year later, at midnight on October seventeenth, when he’d been huddled against the dank mossy stones of the Witch’s Castle, drinking himself into a stupor in Trent’s honor, it had happened again. Or mostly. The barrier rose, but the floating blobs of greenish light that populated the battlefield hadn’t resolved into transparent pioneers as they had that
night with Trent.

  Why had everything been so clear then? His grandfather’s story spoke of recognizable figures too. What was the difference? Was it the weather? The brand of beer? Did it need two trapped men to engage the whatever-the-hell-it-was? He’d decided he either needed to seriously consider a lobotomy, or try to find a solution. After all, Trent had somehow made the leap in, so there must be a way to pull him out again. Logan just needed to find it. The key. The trick. The fucking magic word.

  That had launched him on his quest. He’d visited every medium he could find—every spiritualist or shaman or new-age practitioner from Oregon to Florida, from Maine to Baja. Some of them were obvious charlatans. Some weren’t interested. Some seemed legit, and were more than happy to sell him powders and potions and incantations, but none of that shit did anything except make him sneeze, retch, and feel like a fucking fool.

  Although he hated to risk interference from some grandstanding paranormal investigator, on the fifth anniversary of Trent’s disappearance, he’d paid a medium from Sarasota—a woman with the unlikely name of Marguerite Windflower who looked like a new-age flake, but swore like a sailor—to go to the park with him. She’d paced around the clearing, studying the perimeter barrier, peering at the greenish blobs, at the last place he’d seen Trent alive, and at one or two other spots that Logan would prefer to forget.

  Every once in a while, she had studied a spot immediately to her left and nodded as if she were consulting with an invisible colleague, which lifted the hair on Logan’s neck worse than the Witch’s Castle ghosts.

  When the barrier finally dissipated, she’d lit a clove cigarette and said. “Can’t help you.”

  “Why not? Are you a fake too?”

  “You tell me. I don’t mind people calling me a fake as long as they pay me. But the last thing you want is for me to lay these spirits.” She speared him with a narrow-eyed glare. “‘Lay’ means exorcise. You got that, or are you going to make the usual stupid-ass remark about fucking mediums?”

  He raised his hands, palms out. “Hey. No disrespect. I just want the truth.”

  “Fine.” She blew out a stream of smoke. “I might be able to kill the manifestation. But if it dissipates, everything’ll vanish. The end. Poof. That what you want?”

  “What? No! I want to find out how to release a real person from wherever the hell he is.”

  She snorted, smoke curling out her nostrils. “These were all real people once. But you know something, Slick? I’m not sure they’re ghosts.”

  “How do you know?”

  Her gaze flicked to the left again. “I’ve got some experience with those. These don’t feel the same. I could try the banishment ritual if you want—”

  “No! Not if it means they could . . . He could . . .” Logan ran shaking hands through his hair. “Just no. I’ll find another way.”

  Pity flickered across her face, softened the hard look in her shrewd eyes. “Good luck with that.”

  “If I wanted to do that—find another way, I mean—what should I do?”

  “How the fuck should I know? I told you about ghosts. You don’t like the answer? Ask a different question.”

  “How—”

  “Don’t ask me, genius. Find someone who knows about other woo-woo shit and ask them.” She cast an irritated glance at the rain beading her flowered poncho. “Christ on a pogo stick, how can you people live like this? I’m surprised your balls don’t mildew in the wet. Get me the fuck out of here.”

  He’d delivered her to the airport—and although she’d kept up a sporadic conversation with her imaginary friend, he’d let himself hope for the first time since Trent vanished. While Marguerite hadn’t had the answer he wanted, she’d made him believe an answer existed. Just his goddamned luck that he’d found the answer from the one man who made him wish the quest was hopeless.

  “Seriously, Jules, why here? This is inviting disaster.” Riley resisted as Julie practically frog-marched him through the door of Stumptown Spirits. “Why don’t we do this meeting at Starbucks, or Burger King, or someplace else where I haven’t been kicked out?”

  The heavy door closed behind them with a final-sounding thump. Ominous.

  “That waitress told you the mean boss wouldn’t be here tonight, right? What are you afraid of?”

  “You. We could just as easily have interviewed those witnesses at the hotel and . . . Wait a minute.” He eyed her giant shoulder bag. “You don’t have your taser in there, do you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She blinked her big brown eyes as if she were as honest and innocent as Bambi instead of as wily and merciless as Shere Khan. “I’m just in a good mood. Max’s local promo spots today were very well attended. His ego is sufficiently inflated to reconcile him to being in Portland, and he’s actually stopped whining.”

  “Whatever.” Riley chose a booth that gave him a clear view of the hallway, early warning in case the waitress had been wrong and the barkeep from hell descended on him again like a cross between the Furies and the cast of The Walking Dead. As a bonus, he’d see Logan before Logan saw him, and have a chance to arrange his expression into something less than love-stricken.

  Julie flounced down onto the wooden settle across from him, humming under her breath. God, she really was in a good mood, and it freaked him out a little.

  “Seriously, Jules. This is a beer-and-burger dive. Not exactly your usual venue for interviewing potential witnesses.”

  “Both these guys live nearby, so it’s a convenient location for them.” She retrieved the file with HttM’s release forms from her bag and plopped it on the table. “The show has to pick up the tab for the meetings, and the prices here are in line with the budget. I checked. Besides . . .”

  Here it comes. “Do I want to hear this?”

  The Bambi-eye disguise vanished, and Shere Khan pounced with a roar. “Maybe I want to see what that asshat fucktard Logan Conner thought was worth breaking your heart for.”

  “Jules—” A movement in the hallway caught Riley’s attention. The gleam of the overhead light on dark, wavy hair. Broad shoulders outlined by a snug white T-shirt. A brush of black fire from the dome of the motorcycle helmet in one arm.

  Logan.

  Logan saw him. Riley was certain, because their gazes clashed long enough for his heartbeat to stutter, stop, and reboot.

  But instead of taking his place behind the bar, Logan turned on his heel and vanished down the hall, his retreat punctuated by the clang of a metal panic bar followed by the slam of a heavy door.

  No way was Riley letting the big jerk run a second time. He jumped up. “I’ll be back.”

  Julie pursed her lips. “Nothing good ever follows that particular line.”

  “Please. Cut me a little slack for once in your life.”

  “Fine.” She picked up the menu. “I’ll order french fries for you. And eat them all myself.”

  He squeezed her shoulder, craning his neck to see down the hall, but a couple of servers were blocking his view. “Perfect.”

  As he bolted for the front door, he heard her mutter, “Men.”

  Riley circled the building at a run until he found the entrance to the alley that cut behind the bar. There. The caged light over the rear door shone on Logan, who stood next to a motorcycle, his back to the mouth of the alley.

  “Logan.”

  Logan jerked and dropped his helmet. “Shit.” When he bent to retrieve it, Riley got a good look at the bike, and his mouth fell open.

  “A Harley? You’re kidding. You hate Harleys.”

  “You were expecting a Vincent ’52?”

  The air left Riley’s lungs in a whoosh as if he’d just cornered out of a steep downhill swoop of a monster roller coaster.

  Eugene. The first time. He remembers.

  When Logan had approached Riley about the Witch’s Castle ghosts, he’d dropped the name of the bar where he worked. Riley had started hanging out there on dollar-beer night in the hope of sh
aring a word or two with the gorgeous bartender, even if it was only to order another IPA.

  One night, a couple of weeks after he’d started haunting the bar, he’d been making the usual fool of himself, attempting to prove to a table full of business and computer science majors that his folklore degree wasn’t obsolete. He’d been going on and on about how Richard Thompson’s song “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” was evidence that the traditional narrative ballad structure was alive and well in modern popular music. That the forms, the patterns, the mythic cycles, were as viable in the twenty-first century as they’d been in the fourteenth.

  Logan must have heard Riley’s whole pathetic diatribe from behind the bar, but hadn’t laughed along with the rest of the audience, which, by the time Riley had finished, seemed to include half the UO student body, all of them three-quarters sloshed.

  Instead, as Riley had trudged home in the chill of the late November night, Logan had rolled up alongside him on his Ducati.

  He pulled off his helmet and jerked his thumb at the seat behind him. “It’s not a Vincent ’52, but at least it’s not a Harley. Want a ride?”

  The lopsided grin accompanying the amusement in Logan’s bedroom baritone sent its own streak of lightning down Riley’s spine. He took the offered helmet, climbed on, and wrapped his arms around that lean waist, using the excuse of the seat’s slope to snug his crotch to Logan’s ass.

  Logan chuckled, and Riley felt the vibration in his balls, with the inevitable result that his cock hardened behind the fly of his jeans. Logan pressed his legs against Riley’s inner thighs. “Hold that thought, folklore boy. I’ll get you there.”

  And he had. Over and over, for the next year and a half.

  And then, he’d disappeared.

  But still, if he remembered that first ride as clearly as Riley did after all this time, it must mean something to him. Now, another bike. Another chance.