Grave Phantoms (Roaring Twenties #3)(75)

Easy to do when you’re basking in bliss. Because Bo made time every day to steal away and visit her at the top of the turret. And one morning he even sneaked her into a taxi and took her to his apartment in Chinatown, where they spent two glorious hours wearing out the springs of his single bed before walking a block to eat dim sum at Golden Lotus.

“I remember you,” the restaurant owner, Mrs. Lin, had said with a kind smile after she’d kissed both of Bo’s cheeks and seated them at a table with a view of Grant Avenue’s bustling sidewalk. “You are Mr. Magnusson’s sister. You and another young girl came to visit Aida when she boarded with me upstairs.”

“Benita,” Astrid said, remembering fondly and wishing her old friend was here to share her secret about Bo. She’d almost written her about it, but changed her mind; it felt too intimate a thing to share in a letter. “She was my seamstress. We’d brought Aida a new coat that afternoon. That was right before the fire in her room.”

Mrs. Lin’s face darkened for a moment, but she quickly shook it away. “Mr. Magnusson paid for the repairs and now everyone wants to rent that room because it has the shiny, new private bathroom. I charge big dollars for it. What do they call that? Silver lining,” she said with a grin.

The old restaurant owner had then proceeded to command every dim sum cart to make a beeline to their table with hot food straight from the kitchen, and Bo fed her steamed pork dumplings from the tips of his chopsticks until she nearly burst—from both the abundance of food and the sheer happiness at being able to sit beside him at a public table while he laced his fingers through hers.

Astrid carefully preserved all of these moments in her mind and tried to be grateful for today, and today only. But the morning of New Year’s Eve, she found herself unable to stop the future from leaking into her thoughts. And after some deliberation and self-honesty, she finally made a plan for what she was going to do about school. What she was going to do with herself.

What she wanted.

It was a risky plan—not a scheme, she told herself indignantly—and one that required a little more faith in herself than she was absolutely sure she had, but there it was. Her plan for the future.

She decided she would tell Bo after the clock struck midnight. A new year, a new plan, a new, more serious Astrid. No matter what happened, she would be able to say that she tried, and that was a small boon to her heart.Evening fell, and though Bo and Winter had worked until dawn the previous night, delivering the last of their liquor runs to all the hotels and clubs around town hosting big New Year’s parties, they were both taking the night off. Winter planned, he told Astrid, to be asleep with his wife and baby when the city was counting down the new year. And Bo, of course, planned to get into Heaven with Astrid.

Deciding against parking his newly repaired Buick in a sketchy part of town, Bo paid a taxicab to drive them to Babel’s Tower dance hall a few minutes before nine. The surrounding neighborhoods were lively with revelers, but Terrific Street was dark and gloomy. A few drunken people shambled down the sidewalks. Music blared from a dance hall down the block. But the area in front of Babel’s Tower seemed . . . subdued.

“The streetlights are out,” Bo said as he gripped her hand a little tighter.

“What?”

“Four of them, look. And they’re all right here.”

He was right, but Astrid wasn’t sure why he was so bothered about it. This wasn’t the best part of town. She doubted the dance halls had a civic group fighting to keep the potholes fixed and was far more concerned that the club didn’t look half as busy as it had the first night they’d been there. Maybe everyone was already inside.

Bo shook his head. “I don’t have a good feeling about this. Maybe we should ask the taxi driver to wait while—hey!” He slammed a hand on the cab’s flank as it peeled away from the curb and left them stranded. Bo said something sharp in Cantonese and looked up and down the street for another cab. It was hard to spot much of anything with the streetlights out.

A stumbling man stinking of gin approached Astrid, muttering something under his breath. Bo put a steely hand on her shoulder and pulled her away, yelling at the bum to leave them alone. “Let’s just get inside,” Bo said as the man shuffled away and crossed the street. “We can use their telephone and call another cab. We’re giving up on this. I’ll find another way—”

“How?” Astrid said. “We’re already here and you’re armed. We didn’t go to all this trouble tracking this down just to abandon it. And you heard Velma. That shadow is still on my aura. Whatever that idol did to me, I want it fixed.”

Bo exhaled heavily. “All right, but if things look suspect upstairs, we’re leaving. And if Max is here—”

“I know.” Bo had drilled her on this already several times. “I stay behind you and remain aware of my surroundings. I am a Magnusson, and no one messes with me and gets away with it.”

He smiled at that. “You are a Magnusson, and you are mine. Don’t forget it.”

Not a chance. He pulled her closer, and they hurried to the club’s front door, where the same doorman from the first night allowed them entrance. But once they were inside, Astrid understood Bo’s reservations. No band played. Most of the tables were empty, and as they crunched over peanut shells, the dozen or so men that were scattered through the bar area all seemed to look up at them with hostile faces.