Ghost Garages_A Boston Technowitch Novel Page 3

  He nodded. “Before you take them, can you go down to the kitchen? Something was bugging my dad earlier, but all he would say was that it was bad luck to talk about it.”

  Which probably meant his dad didn’t think it was worth talking to Matt, with his skepticism about all things mystical. I, on the other hand, was more than willing to listen to Benjamin’s worries — he wasn’t the sort to fret over nothing. And Matt worried about his parents enough that he’d ask me to check it out, even if he didn’t believe in luck.

  “You think he’ll tell me.” It should’ve been a question, but it didn’t come out that way. “Okay, fine. I'll go see what's up. Try not to beat them too badly at checkers while I'm gone.”

  “I make no promises.” But the words weren't as light as they should have been, and I worried again.

  I went down the back stairs, which let out next to the kitchen. As usual, the door was wide open, dispersing steam, the scents of sesame and shrimp, the clatter of cookware, and mixed Chinese, English, and Spanish chatter. Even with professional-level vent fans running, the kitchen was always hot and steamy — hence the open door. I paused on the threshold, disturbed by an undercurrent of rancor, an anger to the chop of blades. Whatever Matt had seen burdening his father, it had a wider reach than just Benjamin Liu.

  I crossed the kitchen, mindful of the movement of others and the warning calls of “Open oven!” and “Hot plates!” Benjamin stood in front of the range surrounded by stacks of bamboo steamer baskets. My mouth watered at the thought of pork dumplings, but I ignored it. That wasn't why I was here.

  “Pepper! You shouldn't be here. Matt is upstairs.”

  “Yes, I know. He should be soundly trouncing the children for the second or third time in checkers by now.”

  Silence as he shifted a stack of baskets to the counter on the right of the range and replaced them with a stack from the left. A sous chef swooped in to grab the baskets and place the dumplings inside into serving dishes.

  “He said something was troubling you, but you wouldn't discuss it with him.”

  “He tells you everything, it seems,” Benjamin grumbled as he minutely adjusted the flame on one of the burners. “I still don't understand why you two don't just get married.”

  I sighed. It was an old diversionary tactic, and I wasn't going to let him get away with it today.

  “It's pretty easy to see that everyone is upset, not just you.”

  He looked at me in surprise as if this hadn't occurred to him, then slowly looked around the kitchen. I followed his gaze, noting the tensed shoulders, the extra space people were giving each other, the physical manifestations of the anger I had already felt.

  “Easy? I hadn't noticed.” Self-recrimination tinged his voice, the anger finding a new target.

  “I don't imagine the others have, either. I don't suppose you noticed what triggered it, either.”

  “Can't say for the others, but I've been irritable most of the day. Maybe even since I woke up.” He paused to check one of the baskets, pulling out a dumpling with a pair of chopsticks and offering it to me. “It got worse when the deliveries started coming, like no one could do anything right.”

  I took the dumpling and bounced it a few times in my hand to let it cool before biting into it. I’d been burned before by rushing too much. “Were the orders wrong?”

  “No, nothing like that.” Again, he transferred baskets, moving stacks to the right. He had to wait while another assistant placed the final basket of uncooked dumplings on the stack to his left, and I could see him visibly fight not to snap at her, opening his mouth twice and closing it again with the words still inside.

  I bit into the dumpling, though it was still just a shade too hot. Ginger and pork exploded on my tongue, balanced by the crunch of cabbage, carrot, and sesame seed. I closed my eyes to focus more fully on the flavor.

  Neither of us spoke until he had the baskets steaming again, and he paused to stir soup that simmered on a back burner. “Bitter melon,” he said. “I'll fill a container for you. It's Tina’s favorite.”

  I murmured my thanks, and he went back to what he'd been saying. “The bell rang, I opened the door for the first delivery — eggs, fresh from the farm — and I just knew nothing was going to go right.” He shook his head, thinking back. “But nothing happened. No eggs broke, everything was fresh, nothing wrong.”

  “It hit you when you opened the door? Like it came in from outside?”

  “Exactly. I fear I let in an evil spirit, but I thought I was the only one it was affecting.” His gaze swept to either side. “I was wrong. Can you help?”

  “I'll do my best.” I didn't have a clue how to get rid of an evil spirit, but I could at least ward the building, the same way I would to keep out a curse. “Can you tell me any more about that first delivery?”

  “Wei was still upstairs. She had a headache, so I was trying to be quieter than usual. I had water on to boil for tea, but as soon as the bell rang, I went to answer it. I didn't want the sound carrying up the stairs, you see,” he said apologetically.

  When I nodded in understanding, he continued, “There was a smell when I opened the door, and I thought it was the vegetable delivery and they'd all gone bad, but it was my egg guy, you know, and the smell was gone quickly, so I didn't think any more about it.”

  “What kind of smell?”

  “Rotting vegetables. That's why I thought it was my vegetable guy.”

  As if his words had conjured it, a remembered wave of shore air redolent of salt and algae surged over me, and I saw once more the drowned woman in the garage. Could this be the influence of her ghost? Certainly she was a spirit, although I had no reason to suspect her of being evil.

  A far-fetched idea. Only in fiction would two things that happened on the same day be connected.

  Yet I shivered, remembering the wrongness of the area near the garage. Haris and I had recognized it as something supernatural, but others, without one foot steeped in another world, might not. They would just know something felt wrong and strike back against it.

  Which meant that the only way this was going to get better was for the ghost to go away. That wasn't going to happen on its own, and I didn't have Winchester brothers or Ghostbusters to call.

  So I was going to have to call on the resources I had and try to figure out how to perform an exorcism. But first, dumplings and bitter melon soup.

  Chapter 4

  As Benjamin had expected, Tina was thrilled with the bitter melon soup. I had moussaka in the fridge that I'd planned to heat up for dinner, but it could keep for another night. And that would give me a chance to pick up some dolmades to go with it. The crisp acidity, nutty bulgur, and leathery grape leaves were comfort food for me.

  The children and I ate the food at our simple birch table — not IKEA, but easily mistakable as such — while the soup and dumplings were still piping hot. Dinner was interspersed with comments about what their cousins had done, thoughts on wanting to learn to cook from their grandfather, and questions about why their dad couldn't have joined us for dinner. That, at least, was easy to answer — he was still watching their cousins for their Aunt Celeste.

  I enjoyed the normalcy of our evening routine, dinner and baths and cuddling with the kids while reading our bedtime stories. Their shared room wasn’t split down the middle, but it was obvious to anyone who knew them which bed belonged to which child. Both still had stuffed animals — including Wally the Green Monster, who Gavin wouldn’t sleep without and Tina’s favorite, Fluttershy — and soccer bedding, but Tina had glow-in-the-dark stars set in actual constellations on her wall, while Gavin had pictures of his favorite YouTubers. And, of course, both had the incredibly beautiful calligraphy scrolls of their Chinese names hung prominently over the head of their beds.

  Reading was driven by their personalities, too. Gavin couldn’t get enough Pete the Cat, while his sister really wanted Shel Silverstein, so we read some of each, plus a bit of Frog and Toad Are Friends — on
e of my own childhood favorites — before I tucked the kids in and wished them sweet dreams.

  A pang of guilt hit me as I turned out the light and watched their baseball nightlight flicker on. Never too early to mold them into die-hard Red Sox fans, Matt had said. He didn't have nearly as many opportunities as I did for this casual family life. I didn't know what the answer was, but I knew we were going to have to work it out.

  “Mom?” Tina’s voice floated out of the darkened room.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you and Daddy mad at each other?”

  The guilt stabbed deeper, and I closed my eyes. “No, sweetheart.”

  “He seemed upset,” Gavin said.

  “I know, but we’ll work it out.”

  I wanted to say that it was just a magical curse, that after I dealt with the bad guy, everything would go back the way it was, but that wasn’t true. Nothing ever went back. People didn’t forget. Matt and I were going to have to sit down and talk through everything, even the things that hadn’t come up yet, before everything festered.

  Tina’s voice was really quiet. “I love Daddy.”

  “I know you do. I expect you to. And we both love both of you. Now get some sleep.”

  None of us were very satisfied with that, but there was nothing else to say.

  I curled up next to the window overlooking the street. Normally, I loved looking out at the city, noting everything from the pigeons on the roof across the street to the lights becoming visible on Hancock Tower. Today, my shoulders itched, as if someone were watching me, and my eyes kept twitching toward the window, looking to see who was there. I half expected to see the drowned woman, but there was no one out of the ordinary, and certainly no one looking at my window.

  My phone screen was too small for what I wanted to do, so I swapped my phone with my laptop before getting down to work. The first search was the most obvious — death at the parking garage. There were no hits, even when I used a subroutine to search police reports. Not terribly surprising, but annoying. Next up, search on all drowning deaths in a five mile radius. There were a ridiculously large number of hits until I started cutting it down with time limits, at which point I went from too many hits to too few. Like, none in the past few weeks, and certainly nothing recent enough to have caused a ghost to show up overnight.

  Missing women? I could search for them, of course, and there were forums where people posted pictures of loved ones who the police, for one reason or another, weren’t actively looking for. Again, that was probably going to give me too many possible leads, with no way to narrow them. There was no way I would be able to pick the dead woman out of a line-up as bloated and discolored as she had been.

  Of course it would be too simple to find out who had died and what her connection to the garage was with only a few minutes work. Even if no one programmed their search engines to deal with magical circumvention. The answer might not even be out there to be found — she could be some tourist or a runaway, no one knowing she had even been in Boston.

  Still, I felt I should find out who she was if I could.

  I called up my seeker app and set it to cross-referencing missing people and unidentified bodies, whether drowned or not, over the past three weeks. I didn't know how fast bodies decomposed when they drowned, though I imagined it was faster in the summer than the winter, but I had to set some sort of parameters. I'd adjust them later if I needed to. For now, I'd done as much as I could.

  I closed the laptop but paused in thought with my hands still on the cover. Was I sure I'd done everything? I'd promised Benjamin I'd try to deal with the spirit, but more than that, I could see how much it was affecting the ones around me. I didn't want them angry and hurting.

  … and I didn't want to see if the atmosphere of anger could affect me. When my magic slipped over into vengeance, the results were out of proportion to the original wrong, and people got hurt. I didn't want that on my conscience. Not again.

  Death. Pain. Anger. I needed a break, and as one does, I called my best friend, using VoIP, since I still had the computer on my lap.

  Beth took a full minute to answer. “Pepper! I almost let this go to voice mail, you know. Here, let me show you.”

  A text window popped up with a thumbnail image of messy papers. I clicked for a larger view — sketches overlaid each other, scattered in a haphazard fashion across her table. In the middle lay a larger sheet with swaths of color on it, some of which streaked onto the table.

  “I thought you didn’t like to get paint on the furniture.”

  “It’ll clean,” she said dismissively. “I wanted to try this. I’ve been feeling on fire all day.”

  Small wonder, since she’d been hanging out with a muse.

  “That doesn’t look much like fire. More blues than reds.”

  “Pfft. You know what I mean.” Her voice dropped conspiratorially. “I might not go to sleep tonight. I want to get this down, capture this feeling. Wish I had more canvas on hand, though.”

  “I thought you usually had half a dozen or so.”

  “Those are mostly works in progress. I need new canvas, new surfaces to mark. Oh!” She broke off.

  “Oh?” When there was no response, I called, “Beth?”

  “Just a minute.” Her voice came from distance away, so I guessed she’d put the phone down to rummage in a closet. “Back! I remembered there were those impractical silk sheets I tried last year, tucked away in my closet. They’ll be perfect!”

  “That is new for you.”

  I could picture her shrug. “Old technique, even if I haven’t used it before. That’s not what’s new.”

  “Sounds exciting. All right, I’ll let you go so you can paint. We can catch up some other time and you can tell me about that guy you brought to the coffee shop today.”

  I didn’t say Haris’s name. I didn’t tell her he walked me partway home. Above all, I didn’t tell her I really wanted to see him again. I wanted to keep it casual — and find out whether she had any interest in him because if she did, I would stay away, no matter how fascinating I found him.

  “Hmm? Oh, Haris. Met him in the lobby at work. Come to think of it, you two would make a cute couple. Maybe I’ll paint that, too.”

  “Please don’t.”

  If the muse saw the picture, he might think I’d put the idea in her head — and I was still unsure about his motivations. He didn’t need encouragement. I didn’t need encouragement, either.

  She laughed mischievously. “We’ll see.”

  The conversation didn’t last much longer, and this time when I closed the laptop, I pushed it to one side, certain that I wouldn’t be using it again tonight.

  I had to grin at Beth’s excitement. She’d needed something like this.

  My thoughts were interrupted by my cell ringing, so I slid the laptop alongside the couch and grabbed the phone. My friend and fellow witch Maggie was calling.

  “Hey, good to hear from you. You’re not calling to say I don’t get to borrow that wicked dress for the reunion dinner, are you?” I stood up to make my way to the kitchen for a drink. I hadn’t had a drop of whiskey since the night Matt had shown up on my doorstep, but I usually kept a bottle or two of wine on hand. A summer night like this called for a not-too-oaky chardonnay.

  She laughed, a low and husky sound that I’d seen reduce men and women alike to open-mouthed wonder. “That hadn’t even occurred to me, although I do wonder why you’re so eager to dress up for it. I can’t remember the last time I saw you in something more formal than slacks and a sweater.”

  I shrugged, although she couldn’t see me. “I’ll admit to feeling a little self-conscious about working in a coffee shop, even if I am the assistant manager. I get enough flak from my parents about my lack of ambition. I so don’t need to hear it from my classmates, too.”

  I set my wineglass down on the table where my phone had been, tucked my legs under me, and settled in for a cozy chat.

  “Any classmates in particular you’
re worried about? Ones you might have history with, perhaps?”

  History that she knew full well, having been my TA during the disastrous semester when I discovered my then-boyfriend Brian cheating on me with Beth.

  “I don’t need to impress him. And there are other people I’d really like to see. I’ve been meaning to call your aunt to see if she’ll be there. We haven’t caught up in a while.”

  I also wanted to find out what Carole knew about ghosts. Anything Carole didn’t know, she knew how to find out.

  “Clearly not.” Maggie’s voice was drier than my wine. “Aunt Carole’s been traveling for a while. She’s checking out some rumors about witches wanting to go public.”

  I felt like my brain had stopped. That was so contrary to everything I knew about witches that I thought at first I couldn’t have heard her right. We were the type of witch who still got stoned in some corners of the world. Publicity was the last thing we wanted.

  “Pepper?”

  “I’m here. Just trying to process what you said. One of the first things you and Carole pounded into my head was the need for secrecy, the fear that any openness regarding magic would upset the balance.” And maybe start another witch hunt, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t need to.

  “So you did listen occasionally.”

  “Just because I didn’t agree with you about the patron—”

  “It’s not something you can disagree with. That’s the way magic works. We make a deal with a being that has power, and it gives some of that power to us. Just because you don’t remember doing it doesn’t mean you’re different.”

  It was an old argument, and I was pretty sure we were never going to settle it. I’d always been able to do magic. Those stories about kids who get mad at people and have windows break, showering glass on them? That was me. Mom always says my toddler years are why her hair is white. Or would be white, if she didn’t have a good hairdresser.

  Maggie thinks that just means I managed to babble something in my crib and call something from another dimension. If it were that easy — especially that easy to enter into a contract when you were still young enough to be struggling with object permanence — everyone would be wielding magic and the world would be even more chaotic than it already is. She says I’m just lucky.