Grave Phantoms

by Jenn Bennett

  “I like your shoes,” she told Sylvia in a calm voice after they’d ridden in silence for a time.

  Sylvia turned one shapely ankle and peered down at her pump. “Thank you,” she said politely, and then, “Your gown is beautiful.”

  “Thank you. I think I lost a few beads on the dance floor,” Astrid responded lightly, toying with the fringe of her beaded hem.

  They continued this too-polite small talk on a too-long ride, which was, in reality, only eight blocks. The conversation went like this: How long have you known Bo? Oh, you live in the same building, do you? Switchboard operator, eh? No, I’m not really sure what field I want to study at college. Yes, Los Angeles is certainly sunny this time of year.

  And so forth.

  Once they got to Chinatown, Bo escorted Sylvia beneath their shared apartment building’s entrance, speaking to her briefly while Astrid waited in the idling taxi. Astrid was in turns relieved (Bo was coming back to Pacific Heights, not staying here) and filled with hurt (he was hugging Sylvia good-bye?), but she waited silently. Remained silent, in fact, when Bo got back in the front seat of the taxi.

  Remained silent the rest of the way home.

  Bo paid the driver. They entered the Queen Anne together. It was quiet inside, mostly dark. He locked the door behind them as she removed her coat and hat.

  “Twice a day?” he asked in a low voice—his first words to her since the club.

  She glanced down at the brown paper bag that Velma had given her. So that’s what he wanted to talk about? All right.

  “Twice a day,” she repeated.

  He began shrugging out of his coat. She didn’t wait for him, just went straight to the kitchen and flipped on two pendant lights, which hung over a long butcher-block prep table sitting in the middle of the room. She set down Velma’s bag of herbs.

  “Need help?” his low voice said over her shoulder. She hadn’t even heard him following.

  “Think I can manage to boil water on my own.”

  She strode across the black-and-white checkered floor and looked at the pale green enameled oven. Where was the kettle? Didn’t people normally leave those out? She heard a shifting noise and saw it sliding in her direction across a small counter, prodded by Bo’s hand.

  “Thank you,” she said, not looking at his face, and added water to the kettle. Now. The stove. She’d seen this done a hundred times. How hard could it be? The matches were in a ceramic box on the counter. She lit one and stared at the range’s cast-iron coiled burner. Right. This didn’t look like the stove Lena had taught her to how to light. The pilot light should be . . .

  Bo leaned near and blew out the match. “Move.”

  “I can—”

  He turned the handle and a coil magically glowed orange. “The old range needed to be replaced, and Winter insisted the new one be electric,” he said, putting the kettle atop a burner. “Lena hates it, for the record. The teacups are in the butler’s pantry with the rest of the china.”

  “I know that,” she said, trying to sound insulted and not embarrassed. But when she stood in the wide hallway between the kitchen and dining room, staring too long at the drawers and cabinets that lined the walls, Bo’s silhouette blocked the light from the kitchen.

  “Middle cabinet.”

  Right. She turned around and opened it. Bowls. Gravy boat . . .

  Warmth covered her back. Bo reached over her shoulder to a higher shelf. “Here,” he said. One word, spoken low and deep, just above her ear, and for a moment she forgot all about being angry with him.

  His bright scent surrounded her. His suit jacket brushed the back of her gown, and beneath it a thousand chills rippled over her skin. She was taken aback by the force of it and nearly leaned . . .

  If she would just—

  If he would only—

  The sound of china clinking against the marble counter pulled her back from the deep. He’d set the cup down and was now reaching for a saucer. She spun in place to face him.

  He flinched and pulled back an inch or two. Far enough to put some space between them. His arm hovered in the air and then fell by his side as he stared down at her.

  “Why were you at Gris-Gris tonight?” she asked in a low voice.

  “I was having a drink with a friend.”

  “Sylvia Fong is too beautiful to be a friend.”

  “And Leroy Garvey is too debonair to be a dance partner. Where were all these chums of yours that you were supposed to be meeting?”

  “Were you spying on me? You were! This is Luke all over again—”

  “Luke,” he said, spitting it out like it was rotten meat. “Tell me the truth, Astrid. What happened in that hotel? Did he touch you?”

  Her mouth fell open. A trembling rage ran up her arms, and before she could stop herself, she swung her hand and slapped him, straight across the cheek.

  He reeled backward. The dramatic planes of his handsome face made severe angles. Oh, he was shocked.

  So was she. Her hand stung. She regretted it immediately and felt like crying. God! Not now. You will not cry, Astrid Cristiana Magnusson. You will. Not. Cry.

  “I am not your little sister,” she said through gritted teeth. “Not your mui-mui. And if you’d realized that a few months ago—”

  She stopped, unsure of what she’d been ready to say. That what? It could have been Bo instead of Luke in that hotel room?

  “A few months ago?” Bo said, his words heated with rising anger. “Astrid, I realized that years ago. I realized it before you did. And don’t tell me I couldn’t possibly know your mind, because I remember the exact day and time and place. I remember how the redwoods smelled, and how the setting sun turned your hair to platinum, and how you looked at me.”

  He bent his head low, leaning until the tip of his nose was a hairsbreadth from hers, and said quietly, “I remember all of it.”

  They’d never spoken of it, but she knew the day he meant. Unshed tears prickled the backs of her eyelids. But she did not cry. Did not move. She just dove into the dark pools of his intense eyes and remembered along with him.

  She’d been sixteen, he eighteen. She’d harbored something like a crush on Bo long before that afternoon—something that made her giddy at times, but it was sweeter and lighter, tempered with innocence and bound up loosely with the ties of their enduring friendship. But after that day, no longer.

  It was the one-year anniversary of her parents’ deaths. She went to visit their graves and hadn’t expected it to affect her quite as much as it did. Bo had patiently talked her through tears, and to cheer her up, he offered to take her out with him on one of the rumrunners late that afternoon. He was doing some spying on a man who operated a large whiskey still near the Magnussons’ Marin County docks, across the Bay from the city. A stretch of coastal redwood forests sat between their property and the still, and Winter had been worried one of his truck drivers was sharing client lists with the still owner.

  Astrid was usually kept in the dark about matters like these. When her parents were still alive, the word “bootlegging” was never spoken in the house. After they passed, Winter told Astrid enough to keep her safe, and Bo told her a little more—enough to pique her curiosity. But that afternoon was the first time Bo actually let her see things.

  It was a spur-of-the-moment, grand adventure. She dressed in pants and sensible shoes, and they went hiking through the majestic old redwoods together, inhaling the clean perfume of the forest. It was a warm, sunny day, and they found a place on a hill to watch the man and his whiskey still. They ate cheese sandwiches and drank Coca-Cola. They sat together, leg against leg, and told stories. About her family. About his. The sun sank into the Pacific behind them, and sometime before dusk, she looked up at Bo’s handsome face and something peculiar happened inside her chest.

  It was as though, until that moment, her heart had been set
tled all wrong inside her ribs. And then everything shifted around—organs and muscles and bones and sinews, they all conspired together to make room.

  And she hadn’t been the same since.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said angrily, shaking away the old memory. “I’m independent now. I have college and Los Angeles, whether I like it or not.”

  “You could’ve gone to school here.”

  She shook her head. “I needed to know I could do it on my own, without you and Winter and everyone else watching over me and treating me like a china doll. If Mamma were alive, she’d tell me to be my own woman. ‘Be bold,’ she always told me.”

  “You’re the most daring woman I know,” Bo said.

  “How come I don’t feel that way?” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed hard to get the rest of the words out. “I messed up everything at school, Bo. Everything! You don’t even know the half of it. And I . . . God! I was supposed to get over you. All my friends said I’d find someone new—that college would change my feelings.”

  After a long pause, he asked, “Did it?”

  She didn’t respond. Couldn’t. The answer stuck in her throat.

  “I told myself we’d grow apart, too,” Bo said softly. “I wanted to believe we could. Because I can’t keep hoping and wanting. It is killing me, Astrid. I’ve been a goddamn wreck since you’ve left, and now that you’re back . . .”

  They stood in the transitional space of the pantry, so close. The dark dining room to one side, the bright kitchen on the other. And them in the middle, in the gray area between. Not dark nor light, not friends nor lovers, this betweenness wasn’t stable. Crossroads never were. The two of them must choose to go forward or remain as they’d always been. And Astrid was all at once filled with a soaring hope, and yet utterly, numbingly terrified.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered, gripping the marble counter behind her as her fingers trembled. “What do we do?”

  His whispered answer came seconds later along with the gentle swipe of his thumb across her cheek, where a stubborn tear was falling. “Let’s—”

  A clang made her jump. Bo pulled away. They both peered into the glaring light of the kitchen, where Greta stood in her nightdress, silver hair falling down her back. She was moving the noisy teakettle off the burner.

  Astrid had never even heard it whistling.

  —

  Bo reluctantly left Astrid and Greta alone in the kitchen. Now that the house’s resident nosey parker was up and about, he’d get no chance to finish his conversation with Astrid. And maybe that was just as well, because he’d almost gone too far. Been too greedy. Too weak. His pulse pounded like he’d been running up Lombard Street with a sack of bricks, and his head was spinning with possibilities. He prowled through the dark house with her words repeating in an endless loop.

  What do we do?

  He didn’t know. At least, not what they should do. He certainly knew what he wanted to do, and that was what had crouched on his tongue, ready to springboard, when Greta had interrupted.

  But was it the right thing? Or did he even care what was right anymore?

  He just wasn’t sure.

  One thing he did know was that Astrid wasn’t safe, and that was something he could fix. Would fix. He jogged downstairs, but instead of turning right to head to his room, he took a left and stole into the community room. A black candlestick telephone stood on a table in the corner. He picked up the earpiece and waited for the operator to answer. Asked her to connect him to the Saint Francis admitting desk and prayed that a particular admissions-desk nurse he’d talked to the night of Astrid’s hospital trip was working the same late shift. He knew her outside of work, vaguely. They’d crossed paths in a small speakeasy near the hospital once before. Her boyfriend was a second cousin of Hezekiah from Gris-Gris; sometimes he thought half the people in this town were related.

  And as luck would have it, she was working tonight.

  “Nurse Sue, this is Bo Yeung.”

  “Oh, hello, Bo,” she said, cheerful and open. “What can I do for you?”

  “It has to do with those survivors of that missing yacht. I was wondering if you could tell me whether they were still at the hospital.”

  “You and everyone else wants to know,” she said in lower voice. “Reporters been calling here nonstop. But no, they were discharged a few hours after we spoke. Police chief allowed them to be transferred into Mrs. Cushing’s care. The widow who was making a scene, you remember?”

  “I do, indeed. Say, you wouldn’t happen to have Mrs. Cushing’s address on file, would you?”

  Her voice fell to a whisper. “We’re not supposed to give it out, but I can probably get back into records after my shift. Won’t be until after nine A.M., though.”

  “Would you? I’d owe you an awfully big favor.”

  “I like the sound of that,” she teased. “Oh, I just remembered something. My coworker told me that she had someone come by earlier today and ask about Miss Magnusson. Wanted to know her name.”

  “Oh really? Who was this person?”

  “The man didn’t say. But don’t worry, she wasn’t stupid enough to give out your address.” It didn’t really matter; the entire city knew where to find the Magnussons and therefore Bo.

  “Please let me know if anyone else asks about Miss Magnusson. And in the meantime, if you can get your hands on Mrs. Cushing’s address, leave me a message at Pier 26, no matter the hour. And I’ll be happy to have someone drop off a little thank-you gift for your effort.”

  “I am rather fond of gin . . .”

  “Your wish is my command, Nurse Sue. Consider it done.”

  TEN

  It took a long time for Astrid to fall asleep that night. The potent combination of Greta’s poorly timed interruption and Velma’s herbal tea were enough to give any sane person nightmares, and after she’d left the kitchen, Astrid had lain wide awake in bed, replaying every moment in the pantry with Bo.

  The things he said. How close he’d been. The way he made her feel, all raw and jumbled up. Anxious. Out of control.

  Let’s—

  Let’s what? Let’s throw caution to the wind and run away together? Let’s end this all now? Let’s cool down and discuss this later?

  When it came to Bo, she’d done her share of hoping that he might share her feelings—every day, for weeks and months and years. But before last night, she had hoped in a blind sort of way, taking whatever crumbs Bo dropped and fashioning them into some sort of shaky shelter that only partially kept out the bad weather. Now he’d given her more than crumbs. He’d handed over a few pieces of lumber, and her former lean-to was now transformed into a shack: still leaky, but a strong gust of wind might not instantly blow it over.

  She’d fallen asleep beneath that shelter, wanting him more than ever. And more fearful that if it did fall, she’d be crushed under the weight of it.

  No sense in being so nervous, she told herself the next morning. It was only Bo. No matter what happened between them, they were friends, and they would handle it with grace and good humor. Everything was fixable.

  And today Astrid aimed to fix two problems at once.

  After bathing and dressing, she took the birdcage elevator down and found the house abuzz with good cheer. In the foyer, Greta stood on a tall ladder surrounded with giggling maids who were helping to put up Christmas greenery. And even though everyone had already eaten breakfast—except Aida, who was still pale, still possibly pregnant, still trying to hide it from Winter—Astrid was happy to dine alone, and gulped down strong coffee with a slice of rye toast and a soft-boiled egg. Then she went hunting.

  Bo was not on the main floor. And Winter, who carried baby Karin around the foyer to witness the hubbub of the holiday decorating, informed Astrid that his captain hadn’t yet left for work.

  “Think he’s going in
later, after a couple of errands,” Winter said.

  Excellent. Even better, Bo hadn’t seemed to have informed her brother about their bad night at Gris-Gris. While Winter bounced his smiling daughter in the crook of his big arm, Astrid slipped away and took the servants’ staircase downstairs.

  Halfway down, she came to an abrupt stop. She’d nearly plowed straight into Bo.

  Her heart pinged.

  “Good morning,” she said, slightly breathless and nervous. Her gaze flitted over a striking lapis blue suit, expertly tailored to hug lean muscle, with a crisp white collar and cuffs peeking out from the jacket. “Don’t believe I’ve seen that suit before.”

  “You know me. Vain and frivolous.” A lie. Proud and confident was more like it. His gaze flicked to her wristwatch for a moment—ping! went her heart again—and then he smiled up at her like everything was normal, and they hadn’t done all that confessing in the butler’s pantry. Like she hadn’t cried in front of him.

  All right. Fine. She could act normal. She pasted on a smile.

  He scratched the back of his neck.

  She shifted her feet and brushed invisible lint off the front of her dress.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked. “Did you drink the tea after Greta—”

  “Booted you out?” she supplied.

  He leaned a shoulder against the stairwell wall. “She probably fantasizes about cracking a whip at my feet while I retreat down here in the dungeon. She’d put bars on my door if she could.”

  “Your door? After you left, she practically accused me of being a manipulative hussy.” Astrid did her best Greta imitation, shaking a finger. “Stop bothering that boy, flicka. You should be in bed right now. What is this strange tea? You cannot drink this! Velma Toussaint is bride of devil!”