Grave Phantoms (Roaring Twenties #3)(32)

TWELVE

Sitting atop a hill studded with palms, the domed Conservatory of Flowers was a great, frilly skeleton of white wood and glass. When Bo was younger, and had just started making deliveries for Winter—deliveries that took him into new parts of the city he’d never seen—he’d thought the Victorian-era building looked like an enormous wedding cake. Today it looked decidedly less festive, streaked with rain and bereft of visitors, but just as inviting as ever. Especially with Astrid on his arm.

He huddled under an umbrella with her as they sloshed from their parking space, traipsing past manicured lawns puddling with water. Fields of pansies were flooded, and a display of flowers on the face of a hill that had once been carefully groomed to spell out MERRY CHRISTMAS 1928 now looked like a drowned rat with a head cold.

None of that mattered, though. Because inside the gabled entry it was dry and warm, and the bored docent at the ticket desk who may or may not have discreetly turned Bo away on a busier day didn’t even give him a second look. She only momentarily came to life when Bo plopped down a bill five times the entry fee and told her to keep the change. They were given a printed brochure describing the exhibits, and then forgotten. And upon stepping inside the main gallery, Bo quickly realized:

They were the only visitors.

And they were completely alone.

In public.

Buddha, Osiris, and Jehovah were all smiling down upon him.

“Ooaf,” Astrid said, peeling off her damp coat in the steamy heat that dripped water onto ferns and primeval jungle plants. “I forgot how warm it is in here. Feels marvelous. And it’s so beautiful. I don’t know what to look at first. Can you imagine living in a world like this? I can practically imagine dinosaurs hiding behind that . . . whats-a-doodle. Oh, the sign says ‘philodendron.’ Fifty years old! How marvelous . . .”

Bo couldn’t hold back his smile. For maybe the first time since she’d come home, Astrid was spilling words faster than she could think. She was radiant, head tilting this way and that as her gaze scanned the thousands of glass panels circling the conservatory’s dome above and the lush tropical foliage below.

She was happy.

And in Bo’s proud mind, he gave all of this to her—him, Yeung Bo-Sing. It didn’t belong to the city; it was his. His to share with her. To provide escape from the all the nastiness of the turquoise idol and the gruesome visions, all the anguish and uncertainty they’d faced in reuniting. All the long months they’d spent apart.

It all just lifted away with the tropical steam.

“What’s the plan?” Astrid said, running her hand over a fern frond.

“Plan?”

“Well, you said no more talking about the idol and the survivors and the pirate club once we got here. You said it was an adventure, and you said yesterday we should pretend we’re other people, so we must be playing roles. The real Bo would never ask me out on a date.”

She had that wrong. The real him would. The real him would have already married her and whisked her off on a yearlong honeymoon around the world. Society and circumstance did not allow him to be himself.

“Let’s see. If we didn’t already know each other, how would we have met? I think it must have been at Gris-Gris,” Astrid said, deciding upon their story. “You were staring at me dancing. I was so enchanting, you couldn’t take your eyes off of me.”

Bo strolled next to her, his coat over one arm. “That’s true enough. It was your smile that did it. I knew you were a girl who liked adventure when I saw that smile.” It was an unruly, disruptive kind of smile, and was the entrance to Astrid’s unruly and disruptive mouth, which had a way of saying whatever flitted through her brain without filter. And Bo liked this quite a bit.

“My smile, huh?” she said.

“And your hips.”

“What about my hips?” she said defensively, moving her coat to cover herself. “You know I hate them.”

“Too bad, because I don’t. They are so shapely, I was instantly magnetized. And that’s why I had to meet you when I saw you at Gris-Gris. Smile and hips, a one-two combination.”

“Shapely,” she said, like it was ridiculous, but blue eyes slid toward his, and Bo did not miss the delight hiding beneath their surface.

“Like a professional dancer’s,” he assured her. “But what would a beauty like you see in someone like me?”

“The most dashing, handsome bootlegger in the entire city?”

“Well, when you put it that way . . .”

“But it was your wicked tongue that did me in. You made me laugh, and you didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.”

“Is that right?”

“Maybe it’s my Viking blood. Mamma used to say she fell for Pappa because he never hesitated to take what he wanted, and if a mountain got in his way, he wouldn’t just walk around it—he’d move it.”

Bo had spent a good bit of time with the Magnussons’ father before he died. He knew the old Swede had balls of steel to build the bootlegging empire he’d passed along to Winter, but the last couple of years, the man had struggled with a mental illness that greatly affected his moods and decisions. Bo didn’t say this to Astrid, though. She’d been through enough. Let her keep that image of her father. It was a good one.

“So that’s why you agreed to let me call on you,” Bo said, leaning against a wooden railing along the conservatory path, where Astrid had stopped to read an iron plaque that marked an old tree.