Grave Phantoms

by Jenn Bennett

By some miracle, he finally fell asleep and woke much too late, rushing to bathe and dress at half past nine. His schedule was often nocturnal, but he was accustomed to being up early, no matter how much sleep he’d failed to get. But he especially wanted to be up early today because of Astrid.

  And to deal with the yacht. Not Astrid at all, only the yacht. Though, he supposed he needed to tell Winter about Astrid’s hospital trip . . . something he relished about as much as a hole in the head.

  After shaving and combing back his damp hair with a touch of pomade, carefully arranging an elegant swoop in the front, he grabbed a fresh suit jacket off a wooden valet stand in the corner and raced upstairs to the main floor.

  Clinking plates and chatter sounded from the dining room. He made his way there, slipping into his suit jacket as he strained to pick out the female voices. No Astrid. He strode through the arched doorway, half disappointed. The head housekeeper, Greta, was setting a plate of breakfast in front of Winter’s wife, Aida, who tended to her wriggling baby in a high chair.

  “Morning, Bo.” Aida smiled up at him with a sleepy, freckled face. As she held a tiny pewter spoon out of the baby’s reach, the wide sleeve of her oriental silk robe fluttering around her elbow. Aida’s shop was on the edge of Chinatown, and she often channeled spirits for the women who worked for one of Chinatown’s tong leaders—Ju Wong, who owned a sewing factory and ran a small prostitution business on the side; his seamstresses often paid Aida in clothes.

  “All this rain must be slowing us down,” she said, stretching her back against the chair. “Everyone slept in this morning.”

  “I did not,” a singsong voice with a heavy Swedish accent said. The silver-headed housekeeper held out a clean cloth for Aida; the baby was wearing most of the pureed fruit her mother was trying to spoon into her tiny, smiling mouth. “I was up at dawn.”

  No surprise there. Greta hadn’t slept past five A.M. since Bo had known her. She was proud, efficient, and took her duties very seriously. He’d never once seen her smile until the baby came along last spring. Seemed the solemn Swede had a soft spot for children.

  He stuck his finger in the baby’s bowl and tasted. “Pears,” he said, smiling down at nine-month-old Karin, who chirped a nonsensical, happy greeting and reached for him. The infant looked more and more like Aida every day, but when Winter showed them old photographs of Astrid at her age, it was clear that Karin had Magnusson eyes.

  “No one wants you smearing your dirty fingers all over them, little beastie,” Aida told her as she tried to capture said dirty fingers with the cloth Greta had brought.

  “Who knew girls were so messy,” he said as he lifted linen from a steaming basket and grabbed a warm biscuit. Greta’s jaw clinched. If she had her way, he’d eat all his meals downstairs. He gave her a quick wink, and that only irked her further.

  Aida scooted her untouched plate to the empty chair next to her. “Eat before the eggs get cold,” she said, tucking the front of her caramel-colored bob behind one ear. “I’ll get another plate when Karin’s done finger-painting the tablecloth.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” He sat down and settled a napkin on his leg a few seconds before Winter strolled into the room.

  “Oh, you’re up,” Winter said to him, stretching as he passed. “The warehouse just telephoned. The sandbags are holding strong and that goddamn yacht’s been moved this morning, hallelujah.”

  Multiple things went through Bo’s head at once. If the yacht was moved this morning, that meant Winter knew Bo hadn’t moved it last night. And yet, Winter was in an easygoing mood, lazily rolling up his shirtsleeves as he sat across from his wife and smiled at his daughter. This also meant he probably hadn’t heard about the hospital yet. Good.

  “You feel okay, cheetah?” he said to his wife, brow wrinkling.

  “All this rain makes me a little drowsy,” she said.

  While Winter frowned at her, Bo asked, “Who moved the yacht?” Surely not Officer Bastard.

  Winter settled a forearm on the edge of the table and leaned back in his seat. “The widow who owns it had it towed at dawn. Johnny said no one bothered to inform anyone at the pier—he would’ve slept through it if it weren’t for the officer guarding it, who banged on the warehouse door, accusing them of moving it without his permission. Took several calls for the cop to get in touch with the tugboat operator and find out what had happened.”

  “Mrs. Cushing had it moved without the chief’s permission?”

  “Is that the widow’s name? I suppose so. Good riddance, I say. Let the police deal with it far away from us.” He accepted the morning newspaper from Greta with a nod. “We’ll have to wait and see if any reporters are snooping around today. If it looks clear, we’ll go ahead and stage tonight’s runs at the pier. But either way, I’m probably going to need you to take a runabout to the Marin County dock this afternoon and deal with that new Canadian captain.”

  “And by ‘deal with,’ you mean . . . ?”

  “See if you can talk him down on the price of that Scotch he’s hoarding.”

  “All right. Rough him up, got it.”

  “Bo,” Aida scolded with a soft smile.

  “Oh, no roughing up. Let me just write that down so I don’t forget.”

  Winter surveyed the front of the newspaper. “Wonderful. The damn yacht’s already making headlines. ‘Lost-at-sea Mystery Yacht Reappears,’” he read out loud, then skimmed a short article that had little-to-no information. “Our pier number is mentioned, but not our name, so that’s something, I suppose. I take it you couldn’t get the yacht running last night?”

  Bo’s fork hovered over his eggs. “About that . . . Have you talked to Astrid?”

  “Haven’t seen her.”

  Aida snorted. “She informed us yesterday that she wouldn’t be getting up before noon during the holidays.”

  That sounded like Astrid, all right. He thought of the gift again and a little pang went through his chest. He ate a bite of lukewarm egg and had difficulty swallowing. Time to get it over with.

  “About last night,” he began, keeping his eyes on his plate. “Astrid and I ran into a strange . . . situation on the yacht.”

  Newspaper crinkled. Bo glanced up to find Winter’s sharp eyes trained on him. “Why was Astrid on the yacht?”

  “A valid question,” Bo said diplomatically. “And believe me, I wish she hadn’t been—”

  “What is wrong?” Greta asked as she set down a carafe of hot coffee.

  “Everything’s fine,” Bo assured all of them.

  Bobbed hair appeared in the doorway, blond against the dark polished wood. Astrid’s gaze met his for a brief moment, but for once, he couldn’t read her. And that made him more anxious than he already was.

  “Good morning, everyone.” The youngest Magnusson sibling flounced around Greta in a blue and white striped top and a skirt that skimmed her curvy hips. Apart from mildly bloodshot eyes and the dark circles beneath them, which he could just make out beneath a heavy layer of powder, she seemed cheery. Certainly wider awake than the rest of them.

  She set down a stack of newspapers and magazines and parked herself in the chair next to Winter, directly across from Bo. “Gotta catch up on all the local gossip I missed while I was gone,” she said when Winter looked at her as she was rapping her knuckles on the stack of newspapers. “Did you know that Darla McCarthy threw her husband out of their Russian Hill house in nothing but his underclothes? Good for her, I say. That man is a dog.”

  “What is wrong?” Greta repeated to Astrid.

  “Not a thing,” Astrid said. “I’ll have what everyone is having. It smells delightful. Oh good. Coffee. Wait, have we got any smoked salmon? I missed that in Los Angeles. The cafeteria breakfast on campus is just dreadful, and—”

  “Why were you on the yacht, Astrid?” Winter said, his easygoing mood heading downhill, fast. “
And what the hell happened?”

  She poured coffee into a china cup with a gilded rim and handle. “Stop being so grumpy. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Astrid fainted on the yacht,” Bo said in calm voice. “But she’s okay now.”

  “Fainted?” Winter said, completely abandoning the newspaper.

  “I knew it.” Greta cupped a hand to Astrid’s cheek and frowned. “It was all that champagne.”

  “It was not,” Astrid said, pushing her hand away. Silver glinted on her wrist.

  The watch. She was wearing it.

  That was good!

  And also horrible.

  Why was she flaunting it out here, where God and everyone else could see? Bo suddenly felt overwarm and guilty, as if every single perverted, obscene fantasy he’d had about Astrid was on display—and he’d had plenty of them.

  And yet . . .

  She was wearing the wristwatch. That had to mean something. She wouldn’t wear it out of pity; he knew that for a fact. He’d worried the engraving on the back was too sentimental—that it said too much about how he felt. About her. About them. About his despair over the possibility of a future together. Oh, for the love of God, why wouldn’t she look at him again?

  “Bo?”

  He blinked. Winter’s mismatched blue and gray eyes stared at him expectantly.

  “What’s that? Oh yes. The yacht. Well, this is what happened . . .”

  Bo told the whole story, forcing himself to talk over Winter’s rising anger and the suspicion that his boss’s twitching fingers were seconds away from strangling Bo’s neck. But after Winter was assured that Astrid was, by all appearances, healthy and in one piece, he finally relaxed and ate his breakfast. And no one made any other remarks until Bo mentioned the part about the yacht’s owner identifying her maid at the hospital.

  “Mrs. Cushing apparently feels so bad about lending out the boat to Miss Richards,” Bo said, “that she’s offered to house her and the other survivors until they can—”

  “Ridiculous,” Greta interrupted, her face pinched in disbelief. “What wealthy lady lets her maid borrow a luxury yacht?”

  Huh. She was probably right. Bo certainly couldn’t imagine, say, Greta asking to use one of Winter’s boats for a weekend outing. The proud housekeeper would just as soon set herself on fire.

  “Maybe it was a special reward,” Aida suggested.

  Greta crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh ja,” she said sarcastically. “I will just please ask Winter”—which she pronounced more like Veen-ter with her lilting accent—“if I can borrow the Pierce-Arrow limousine for a big-time champagne weekend with my friends.”

  Bo smiled to himself. He rather liked it when Greta got agitated. But she’d made her point, a good one—not to mention that it had temporarily distracted everyone from thinking about Astrid’s trip to the hospital.

  “The whole story stinks,” Astrid said. “Those survivors are lying. And Mrs. Cushing knows something about it, because Greta’s ab-so-lute-ly right about the maid borrowing that yacht.”

  “It doesn’t make much sense,” Aida admitted. “All of them with memory loss . . .”

  Astrid folded her arms over her chest. “My nurse said two of them acted like they were familiar with each other. And that Cushing lady got ticked off when the police chief said they needed to inspect the yacht, right, Bo?” Astrid looked at him again for the first time since she’d walked into the dining room.

  “Yes, that’s right.” He glanced at her wrist and made sure she saw his gaze linger there. But she only looked away again, damn her!

  Winter sighed heavily. “If anyone cares about my opinion, I think you should just forget all about it. The yacht’s gone. We don’t know any of those people. And I, for one, am staunchly opposed to anything magical or cursed or haunted.”

  Aida cleared her throat.

  Winter winked his scarred eye at her. “Except you, of course, darling.”

  “And your daughter,” Aida reminded him.

  “I’m still hoping that maybe we’ll get lucky with her,” he admitted with a grin. “One medium in this family is enough.”

  A maid poked her head into the dining room to inform Winter he had a long-distance telephone call from Canada. “That’ll be the captain with the Scotch,” he said, pushing away from the table to stand. “But as for you—”

  “Yes,” Astrid said defiantly. “What about me?”

  Winter shook his head. “Just try not to give me a heart attack while you’re home. And no more drinking,” he called out over his shoulder as he left the room.

  Bo slouched in his chair. That went better than he’d hoped. But he wasn’t entirely convinced he wouldn’t hear more about it later, when Winter and Bo were at work.

  Aida straightened the baby’s bib. “Well, you heard Mr. Grumpy. But if it were me, and I daresay I’m more knowledgeable about supernatural matters than my dear husband, I would certainly want to know what kind of ritual those people were doing on that boat. Magic is a funny thing. You might feel fine now, Astrid, but you don’t know what kind of energy you absorbed from that turquoise idol.”

  “Well, let’s hope it’s out of my system, because I don’t have time for any more weirdness right now,” Astrid said. “I have a new dress that looks terrific on me, and I’m meeting friends tonight. We’re going to catch up and go dancing before the whole city floods.”

  Oh, was that so? Bo didn’t like the sound of her dancing in a terrific dress. In fact, he damn well loathed it, even though he couldn’t get the enticing image out his head. Was she trying to make him jealous, or was he so far gone that he’d lost the ability to function rationally around her without his emotions bouncing all over the place?

  Aida just smiled. “That sounds nice. By the way, I was admiring that new wristwatch of yours. Wherever did you get it?”

  Shit.

  Aida knew. He could tell by the careful, teasing way she’d said it. She saw too much. Noticed too much. And now Astrid’s response was coming many seconds too late, which would only confirm Aida’s suspicions.

  “This?” Astrid twisted her arm to look at the watch. If she admitted Bo had given it to her, then it would be out in the open. Casual. Nothing important. It wasn’t lingerie, after all, or even a necklace. It was just a damn watch.

  However, if Astrid lied about it, that meant she thought of the gift as something more. Because that’s when he knew things had changed between them—when the lies started. When she started telling Winter that she’d spent the afternoon with friends instead of strolling along the docks with Bo. When she made up silly errands to run and insisted Bo drive her—only to end up asking him to take her out for subgum in Chinatown, so that they could share a booth in a restaurant together in one of the handful of places in the city at which it was acceptable for them to do so.

  Lying meant there was something to cover up.

  Bo held his breath, waiting to hear what Astrid would say. Had college changed her feelings? Were all those men she talked about in her letters a ploy to make him jealous, or was it just a spoiled girl wanting attention, unaware of how much it hurt him?

  “Isn’t it simply gorgeous?” Astrid finally said to Aida, fidgeting with the rectangular dial. “I saw it in a shop in Westwood. It was love at first sight, and I just had to have it, no matter the price. Please don’t tell Winter I blew all my pin money on it.”

  Happiness flooded his limbs, warming the space left behind by his fleeing pessimism. He didn’t dare look at her face, just slid his shoe near the side of hers beneath the table and pressed.

  She pressed back.

  Aida made a choked sound. Bo jerked his foot away from Astrid, but soon realized he wasn’t the cause of Aida’s distress. Winter’s wife stumbled away from the table and raced out of the dining room.

  “Watch Karin,” Bo told Astrid befor
e he strode after Aida. He found her doubled over the toilet on the floor of the powder room, wiping her mouth on a hand towel.

  “Aida?” he said, kneeling down beside her.

  “Oh dear,” she mumbled weakly.

  “You’re ill.”

  “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.” A guilty look spread over her pallid face as she whispered, “Please don’t tell Winter.”

  FIVE

  By nine that evening, the slow drizzle that had fallen on the city most of the day had turned into a steady rain. Astrid dodged streaming puddles after Jonte dropped her off in North Beach, a couple blocks from Chinatown. The Gris-Gris Club, much like the Magnussons’ home, sat upon a steep hill. Here, cable cars braved the foul weather, climbing Columbus Avenue, but she’d heard on the radio that tomorrow it may not be running for long: the cable car turnaround at the bottom of the hill was on the verge of flooding too deep for service.

  The rain was spoiling everything. Only two of her old friends had agreed to brave the weather to meet her tonight, and now she wasn’t even sure she felt like being out herself. She’d originally suggested they all meet here at Gris-Gris because her brother supplied their liquor, and their family was friendly with the owner; Winter had even met Aida when she was doing a spiritualism show here a year and half ago, before he started knocking her up left and right.

  Normally the streets would be lined with cars and a long line would have formed around the unmarked speakeasy. But tonight only the occasional car dotted the curb, and Astrid was able to walk straight up to the door. A tiny window in the door slid open as she shook off her umbrella. “Membership card,” the doorman said through it.

  “Miss Astrid Magnusson,” she answered confidently.

  The door swung open and a tuxedoed man with a chest as broad as an icebox greeted her. “Mr. Magnusson’s baby sister?”

  “I am.”

  He nodded slowly. “You look more like the younger brother. The treasure hunter.”

  “Lowe,” she supplied.

  He snapped his fingers and grinned handsomely. “That’s him. If you’re here to see Velma, she’s busy at the moment. But I can have Daniels seat you, if you’d like. Get yourself out of that rain.”