Grim Shadows (Roaring Twenties #2)(68)

All of this was madness. Pure, unbridled insanity. Thank God Lowe had been there. If not, would she be picking out caskets for her father? Heading out to Lawndale again to make funeral arrangements? No matter what problems stood between them, she couldn’t bear to lose Father right now. Not like this.

Feeling uncharacteristically fragile, she reached across Lowe’s lap for his maimed hand. A small noise vibrated in his chest before he curled his fingers around hers. How quickly things had changed between them. When they’d met on the train, she’d avoided shaking his bare hand, but now his touch was a balm to her shattered nerves. She shoved aside her worries for the moment as exhaustion settled. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you for the lily.”

“You liked it?” He said this with a boyish tilt to his lips, as if he wanted to be proud of himself for thinking of it but needed her confirmation to be sure.

“It was terribly romantic,” she said, repeating Miss Tilly’s pronouncement.

“Oh, good.” His squinting eyes twinkled with muted joy. “My pleasure.”

“I’m not sure what the proper thing to do now is—after last night I mean.”

“None of what we did was proper,” he said in a hushed, teasing voice that sent a little shiver through her. “Just please don’t tell me you regret it.”

“No.” She smiled softly, feeling unusually shy. “Definitely not.”

“Thank God,” he said, squeezing her hand. “That’s all that matters for now.”

• • •

Noel Irving’s home was destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. Lowe made a couple of phone calls the next day and discovered the man’s name popping up again in 1910 as the owner of a small bungalow in Noe Valley. But when Lowe went there to investigate, he found it occupied by a family of Greek immigrants who didn’t speak much English—barely enough to tell him they’d purchased the house a decade ago.

He changed tactics and began searching for Oliver Ginn. The man had told Hadley he was looking for a house to purchase in Pacific Heights, but Lowe couldn’t find an address there, nor in any other neighborhood—not at the telephone company, the electric company, or the property tax office. And a quick flirtation with a young operator got him a tally of all the telephone numbers assigned to any people with the surname Ginn in the state of Oregon: zero.

Lowe took a different approach and began telephoning all his archaeological contacts from Berkeley, asking if they’d ever heard of Ginn and his financed digs in Mexico. A couple of them had, but only vaguely.

He finally thought they had something when Hadley had Miss Tilly dig through her files and they found the business card Ginn had presented when he first showed up at the museum’s offices. No telephone, and the address printed on the card belonged to a bakery in Russian Hill.

The family who owned the bakery had, indeed, heard of Mr. Ginn: he’d rented an apartment above their shop for several months. He’d also packed up and left two weeks ago. No forwarding address.

“Why would he give me one?” the shop owner asked with a shrug. “The apartment is a weekly rental. We had almost a dozen boarders come and go last year alone. As long as they paid rent, we didn’t ask questions.”

Might as well be chasing down ghosts.

If he couldn’t find either man, then he’d have to make it difficult for either man to find him and Hadley. The one person Lowe knew who could help with that was the owner of the Gris-Gris Club.

Two days after Dr. Bacall’s heart attack, Lowe called Velma Toussaint and gave her a general idea of his problem. Anyone else would laugh at his crazy request. She merely said, “You can come by on Friday. I’ll have something ready for you then.”

And so, he waited.

The hospital released Dr. Bacall. He looked weak, but was well enough to complain constantly, so Hadley thought that was a good sign. Even though she was staying with him at his house, she wisely hired two full-time nurses to oversee his care.

For his part, Lowe talked to Winter’s assistant, Bo, who wrangled two intimidating men to stand guard over the Bacall house, watching out for anyone fitting either Noel Irving or Oliver Ginn’s descriptions. Though Lowe desperately wanted to get a better idea about what Noel Irving might look like these days, questioning Hadley’s father didn’t prove helpful; Bacall hadn’t seen his partner in twenty years, and had no idea if the deathless magic would also preserve his age.

When Friday night finally arrived, Lowe ate dinner with his family before heading to Gris-Gris. Only a few blocks from Chinatown, the North Beach speakeasy’s entrance sat behind a locked door. A long line of patrons already waited to show their membership cards, but like the rest of the Magnusson family, who supplied the club’s booze, Lowe only needed to flash his smile to the doorman to receive a cheery welcome. He was waved in immediately and run through a gauntlet of handshakes—half the staff having heard about his return from Egypt—before being shown to a table on the main floor to wait for Velma.

A round of applause ended a jazz trio’s set, and after the club’s master of ceremonies announced a short piano interlude between acts, Lowe watched couples leave the dance floor to converge upon the bar for drinks. He spotted a black-haired woman in the crowd and thought of Hadley. Five days had passed since she’d patched him up in her apartment. Five days since he’d kissed her. Held her. Made her moan with pleasure.