Grave Phantoms

by Jenn Bennett

  Only, now she’d forgotten most of it.

  “You didn’t pick me up at the train station,” she said.

  “I was working.” He shrugged with one shoulder, as if he couldn’t be troubled to lift both of them. “Besides, I’m not the family driver. That’s Jonte’s job.”

  As if that were the point? Truly.

  “And you didn’t come to dinner. Lena made almond cake.”

  “Did she? Sorry I missed that,” he said lightly.

  “Is that all you missed?”

  “Don’t tell me she made lemon pie, or I really will be sorry.”

  Anger heated her cheeks. “I’ll give you something to be sorry about, all right. Be serious for one moment, please. I think you owe me at least that for not bothering to say hello to a girl you haven’t seen in months.”

  He snapped the edge of the towel toward the ceiling. “Do you not see what’s going on out there? We’re nearly underwater.”

  “But it’s my birthday.” Even as the words came out, she knew they sounded petty and childish, and wished she could take them back.

  “I know,” he said.

  And that made her livid.

  “A simple ‘Happy birthday’ would be the polite thing to say. But I’m not sure why I expected you to even remember, because you haven’t answered any of my letters.” He hadn’t even bothered to write and tell her the disappointing news that her friend and seamstress, Benita—who lived downstairs in the Magnusson house—had left for Charleston two weeks ago to tend to a sick relative. “I suppose you just forgot to write me back?”

  Bo grunted and avoided her eyes.

  “Don’t tell me you were busy working, because I know damn well it hasn’t been raining all that time.”

  “No, it hasn’t.” He turned away from her, toweling off his hair.

  “Then what? Out of sight, out of mind—is that it? Am I that forgettable?”

  “Damn, but I wish you were.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? God, Bo. Is it because you’re not being paid to wheel me around town anymore, huh? Is that it? You get promoted and now I’m just a job responsibility you can shuck?”

  He tossed her a sharp glance over his shoulder. “Stop being ridiculous.”

  “You’re ridiculous.”

  “You came down here in the middle of the night to tell me that?” He tossed the towel aside and pulled on a dry undershirt.

  “What if I did? At least I remembered where to find you after four months, which is more than I can say for your crummy sense of direction.”

  Swearing under his breath, he snatched up a clean shirt and glanced up at her as he shrugged into it. His fingers paused on the buttons. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Drinking?” Astrid repeated, as if it were the most ludicrous thing she’d ever heard.

  “You keep squinting at me with one eye shut.” He marched toward her. Before she could get away, his fingers gripped her shoulders. She dropped her umbrella and leaned back, trying to avoid him, but his neck craned to follow her movement. His attractive face was inches from hers, all sharp cheekbones and sharper jaw.

  He sniffed. Clever, all-seeing eyes narrowed as he tracked her sin with the precision of a bloodhound. “Champagne.”

  “Only a little,” she argued, breathing in the mingled scents of the dusty warehouse and rainwater, and beneath those, the brighter fragrance of Bo.

  All her anger disappeared for a moment because—damn it all!—she’d missed him so much. She didn’t care if his position in the Magnusson household meant they shouldn’t be together, or that societal rules regarding their cultural differences meant they couldn’t be together. If she had to make a vow never to leave him again, she would. And unlike the no-drinking promise, she’d be able to keep this one, because if going away to college had taught her anything, it was that Bo was what she wanted.

  Only Bo.

  She softened in his grip and dazedly blinked up at him with a small, hiccupped laugh.

  “Ossified,” he proclaimed. For a moment, the slyest of smiles curled the corners of his mouth. She loved that smile. He was the shiniest, most vibrant person she’d ever known, and she wanted to soak him up like warm sunlight.

  His gaze fell to her hand, which had drifted to her neck like a shield, as if it could somehow prevent her runaway feelings from escaping. “I thought you said you broke that wristwatch,” he said in a lower voice.

  “I did. But my arm feels bare without it.”

  For a moment, she thought he might reach for her hand. But he merely released her, stepping away to button his shirt. “You shouldn’t be drinking.”

  “So what if I’ve had a coupe or two of champagne? A girl’s entitled to that much, freshly back from college and on her birthday,” she said, following him around the desk. Never mind that she’d had five glasses, possibly six. She could still walk straight. Mostly. “Besides, I’m an adult now, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “College magically transformed you, huh? To think I’ve been doing it wrong all these years, what with this pesky hard work and responsibility.”

  “You’re a jackass.”

  “So I’ve been told. By you, several times, if I remember correctly.” He tucked in his shirt and donned a leather shoulder holster and gun, a sobering reminder of this warehouse’s purpose and Bo’s role in it.

  “Why are you avoiding me?” she persisted. “Why did you stop answering my letters?”

  “I’m sorry—were you waiting on me to answer?” He combed his damp hair back with his fingers, cool as you please, but his words were delivered with tiny barbs. “It sounded like you had your hands full, what with that harem of college boys salivating beneath your skirt.”

  Her cheeks heated. “I never said that!” Not that crassly, anyway. Sure, the boys at college were a lot more open and forward, which was probably due to the fact that, unlike her suitors in high school, they didn’t know she had two older brothers who would pummel anyone who so much as winked at her.

  “Not to mention that you seemed pretty busy gazing at stars with what’s-his-name,” Bo said, snapping his fingers. “Professor Hotel Room.”

  Astrid was too tipsy to convincingly feign shock over his implication. Yes, she’d told him about Luke and the hotel. But she certainly hadn’t said what they’d done there. It was none of Bo’s business. Besides, she hadn’t spoken to Luke since that night. She merely stopped showing up for class, and he never bothered to track her down.

  So much for her sensitive professor.

  But it didn’t matter. She was a grown woman. So what if she’d made a few mistakes her first semester at college? Well, a lot of mistakes, actually. Luke may have been the worst of those, a lapse in good judgment, but there was nothing she could do about that now. Life went on. And everything else was perfectly fixable as long as Winter didn’t find out. Now, as for Bo . . .

  Hold on just one second. Her drunken brain oh-so-slowly began piecing Bo’s words and tone together. Was he jealous? Her heart skipped a beat.

  “Listen,“ she said as he slipped into his suit jacket, but the rest of her words were lost under a horrific wrenching noise that was so long and loud, it rattled all the family photographs on the back wall for several seconds. Beyond that wall was the northern pier.

  They both glanced at each other. Bo drew his gun, and without another word, they raced through the offices and into the warehouse. The workers had abandoned their sandbagging and were running through an open cargo door onto the docks. Cold rain and a howling gale cut through Astrid’s clothes as she jogged behind them into briny night air.

  Industrial lights lit up the pier. Foaming waves, impossibly high, streamed over the creaking dock boards and splashed over her ankles. No wonder Bo was sandbagging the warehouse; she’d never seen the Bay this high. And it was storming so hard, she couldn’t see
past the men thronging the edge of the pier. Winter shouted something at Bo, who pushed his way through the crowd. She shielded her eyes with one hand as a bolt of white lightning pierced the sky.

  And that’s when the source of the noise came into view.

  A luxury motor yacht, encrusted in barnacles and draped in seaweed, had crashed into the Magnussons’ pier. Inside the main cabin, a group of people stared out the windows, unmoving and silent. And for a dizzying, terror-struck moment, Astrid was convinced they were all ghosts.

  TWO

  The Plumed Serpent wasn’t precisely a ghost ship, Bo decided, after helping to moor the crashed yacht. But the strange people who filed off its deck were certainly spooked. None of them knew who they were. Names, family, homes . . . all forgotten. No one remembered where the yacht had been or how they’d gotten on it. They all claimed to have woken up a few minutes before they’d crashed into the pier.

  Six survivors. Six men and women wearing white robes, and whose cheeks and foreheads were covered with blue greasepaint, like they’d been staging some kind of theatrical performance. They were terrified. Confused. And yet, apart from looking weak and dehydrated, seemingly unharmed.

  And while the police questioned them, Bo had sent Astrid back inside the warehouse to safety while he watched the chaos from a healthy distance, mumbling an old Cantonese folk saying to ward away evil—along with a bit of the Lord’s Prayer and a line from a popular song for good measure. Whatever had cursed the yacht, he wanted nothing to do with it. Granted, the Plumed Serpent was a damn fine boat. Only a handful of yachts like it in the Bay Area, and Chief Hambry confirmed this one belonged to a wealthy widow who had reported it missing during an investigation last year.

  Lost at sea for an entire year.

  A boat doesn’t just reappear after being gone that long.

  Ambulances carried the stunned survivors to Saint Francis in Nob Hill. And when the hubbub finally died down, Bo shivered in his wet clothes as he watched the police chief’s car pull away from the pier.

  “I’ve seen a lot of strange things in this city . . .” Winter murmured from his side as they huddled together beneath a narrow overhang outside the warehouse.

  Bo snorted. “I’ve seen a lot of strange things in your house.”

  The dark-headed Swede chuckled and pressed the heel of his palm against his scarred eye. “True. But this feels wrong. Something happened to those people, and I don’t want any damn part of it. We don’t need this headache right now.”

  Winter wasn’t just Bo’s employer. Five years back, after Bo’s uncle (and last living relative) had died, the burly head of the Magnusson clan had taken then sixteen-year-old Bo out of Chinatown and given him a home in Pacific Heights. More than a home. A job. Education. Purpose. A family.

  The entire city saw Winter as one of the biggest bootleggers in town—someone respected and feared, no one to screw around with—but Bo knew the man behind the mask. And knowing this man had changed Bo, for good and for worse. Bo was neither wholly Chinatown nor Pacific Heights. Not part of his old life, not fully accepted into all corners of this one, either. He was between cultures and classes. Between worlds. And that was unstable ground.

  Bo rubbed warmth back into his fingers. “I’ll make sure the yacht’s not taking on water and poke around in the engine room. See if she can be started up. If so, I’ll move her to that empty pier next door, so that she’s off the property and out of sight from the road. Otherwise, I’ll get a tugboat over here to move her in the morning.”

  Gawking reporters and nosy crowds were the last thing an illegal enterprise needed, so the less the public could see of the yacht, the better—at least until the police could track down the owner and get the damn thing off Magnusson property. They didn’t need the cops poking around out here, either. Sure, Winter paid them off. But it was one thing for them to look the other way, and another to operate right in front of their faces. Tomorrow night’s distribution runs would need to go through their secondary Marin County docks across the Bay, which would mean more time spent in the cold rain.

  Bo had little faith he’d ever feel dry or warm again. All of this weirdness with the blue-faced survivors was a bad ending to a bad day, and he was impatient for it to be over.

  A lie.

  He was just impatient to see Astrid again. After she’d left for college at the end of the summer, he’d hoped time apart would tame his feelings. Instead, the yearning turned him into a deranged man, one match short of combusting with obsession. Absurd, really, that one tiny girl had that effect on him. So he told himself it was merely a case of mind over matter, and prayed when he saw her again she’d appear less dazzling. He would merely look upon her fondly. Platonically. Like the old friend she was, nothing more.

  But now that he had seen her, he knew all of that had been a pipe dream. It was so much worse now. Because the truth was, college had changed her. He didn’t know how or why, only that if it had anything to do with that Luke fellow she wrote about, it would take every man in the warehouse holding Bo back to stop him from driving down to Los Angeles to bloody the professor’s face against the classroom chalkboard.

  No, time apart hadn’t helped one bit. His blood still heated at the sight of her. His heart still ached, wanting what it couldn’t have. And no matter how he tried to pretend she was still the same fourteen-year-old, gum-smacking, know-it-all live wire he’d first met years ago, she hadn’t been a little girl for a long time. Seeing her tonight did strange, bewildering things to him. The sound of her voice alone sketched a secret road map from his heart to his brain, with a looping detour down to his cock.

  Aiya, she made him miserable. Weak. Crazy. Stupid.

  He absently glanced toward the light of the office window and spotted her silhouette.

  “She’s angry with you,” Winter said, startling Bo out of his thoughts.

  Not half as angry as he was with her. But he didn’t say that, because then he’d have to explain why. And as much as he confided in Winter, he wasn’t dumb enough to admit that Astrid had yanked out his heart and stomped on it with a few careless words in a weeks-old letter. Some lines you just didn’t cross, and pining over the Viking Bootlegger’s fox-eyed baby sister was one of them.

  He tore his eyes away from the girl and stared straight ahead at the yacht. “She’ll get over it when she goes back to Los Angeles after the holidays.”

  Three weeks. He might survive three more weeks of Astrid (devious smile, stubborn chin, blond curls, scent of roses, soft skin) if he stayed busy, out of sight. Found excuses to sleep at his old apartment in Chinatown instead of in his room at the Magnussons’. Kept his cock and balls locked up in some kind of medieval chastity cage . . .

  “I’m going home,” Winter said in a weary voice. “I haven’t had more than an hour of sleep since yesterday, and Aida will divorce me if I stay out another night. She hasn’t been sleeping, either. She’s had a few unsettling séances lately. Heard strange messages . . .”

  “About what?” Winter’s wife, Aida, was a trance medium who conducted séances for a living, temporarily able to summon back the dead to talk with their loved ones. Plenty of frauds out there, but Aida was the real thing. “Not about all this, I hope,” Bo said, motioning toward the yacht.

  Winter shook his head. “No, something else is coming. It’s probably . . . well, hopefully she’s wrong about it, but it’s making her worry.”

  “Go home, then,” Bo encouraged.

  “Suppose I should take Astrid back with m—”

  “I won’t be much longer,” Bo said a little too quickly and tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice. “The sandbagging’s finished, and squaring away the yacht shouldn’t take long. I’ll drive her back.”

  “She’s not your responsibility anymore,” Winter said softly. “You’re my captain now, not a driver, and not her guardian. She can take care of herself while she’
s home for the holidays. She’s a grown woman.”

  Oh, he’d noticed, all right. But that didn’t stop him from worrying over her safety. Hell, it made him more anxious. The Magnussons might be wealthy, and Bo might be better paid than ninety-nine percent of the other Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, but that money was hard-earned and came with a list of threats so long, he couldn’t keep them all in his head at once: rival bootleggers, cheap club owners, crooked cops and politicians. Mobsters from out East. Smugglers hunting new cargo. Disgruntled customers looking to save a buck . . . and hungry, delinquent kids looking to steal one.

  He should know.

  To someone slinking down dark alleys, trying to stay alive, Astrid Magnusson’s blue eyes looked like easy money. A kidnapping waiting to happen. And that’s why Bo had been both relived she’d chosen to attend college in Southern California, so far away from all this—yet at the same, time terrified that it was too far. That he couldn’t watch out for her anymore. That he couldn’t protect her.

  His absolute nightmare.

  “I don’t mind taking her home,” Bo told Winter, as if it were only a mildly irritating hardship. Casual. “It’ll give her a chance to yell at me some more.”

  “Better you than me,” Winter replied with a tired smile and slapped him on his shoulder. Then he bid Bo good night and left the warehouse to drive home to his waiting wife.

  Bo sighed heavily.

  Before he could punish himself by being confined in a small automobile with Astrid, he had to take care of the crashed boat. He grabbed a chrome-handled flashlight from the warehouse and headed back out into the drizzle to track down the single cop the police had left behind to guard the yacht.

  “Officer . . . ?” Bo said, bending down to peer into the cracked window of the black Tin Lizzie squad car.

  “Barlow,” the man supplied.

  “Officer Barlow,” Bo said with a smile and a polite dip of his chin. “Sorry to bother you. Just wanted to let you know that I’m going to step onto that yacht to see if she still runs. Boss wants me to move her. We got crabbers coming in tomorrow.” Fishing was still the legitimate part of the Magnusson business. Never mind that the storm was moving into the Bay too fast and scattering all their Dungeness pots to hell, filling them with sand; he just needed an excuse to move the damn yacht.