Grave Phantoms
Page 23

“Why were you at Gris-Gris tonight?” she asked in a low voice.
“I was having a drink with a friend.”
“Sylvia Fong is too beautiful to be a friend.”
“And Leroy Garvey is too debonair to be a dance partner. Where were all these chums of yours that you were supposed to be meeting?”
“Were you spying on me? You were! This is Luke all over again—”
“Luke,” he said, spitting it out like it was rotten meat. “Tell me the truth, Astrid. What happened in that hotel? Did he touch you?”
Her mouth fell open. A trembling rage ran up her arms, and before she could stop herself, she swung her hand and slapped him, straight across the cheek.
He reeled backward. The dramatic planes of his handsome face made severe angles. Oh, he was shocked.
So was she. Her hand stung. She regretted it immediately and felt like crying. God! Not now. You will not cry, Astrid Cristiana Magnusson. You will. Not. Cry.
“I am not your little sister,” she said through gritted teeth. “Not your mui-mui. And if you’d realized that a few months ago—”
She stopped, unsure of what she’d been ready to say. That what? It could have been Bo instead of Luke in that hotel room?
“A few months ago?” Bo said, his words heated with rising anger. “Astrid, I realized that years ago. I realized it before you did. And don’t tell me I couldn’t possibly know your mind, because I remember the exact day and time and place. I remember how the redwoods smelled, and how the setting sun turned your hair to platinum, and how you looked at me.”
He bent his head low, leaning until the tip of his nose was a hairsbreadth from hers, and said quietly, “I remember all of it.”
They’d never spoken of it, but she knew the day he meant. Unshed tears prickled the backs of her eyelids. But she did not cry. Did not move. She just dove into the dark pools of his intense eyes and remembered along with him.
She’d been sixteen, he eighteen. She’d harbored something like a crush on Bo long before that afternoon—something that made her giddy at times, but it was sweeter and lighter, tempered with innocence and bound up loosely with the ties of their enduring friendship. But after that day, no longer.
It was the one-year anniversary of her parents’ deaths. She went to visit their graves and hadn’t expected it to affect her quite as much as it did. Bo had patiently talked her through tears, and to cheer her up, he offered to take her out with him on one of the rumrunners late that afternoon. He was doing some spying on a man who operated a large whiskey still near the Magnussons’ Marin County docks, across the Bay from the city. A stretch of coastal redwood forests sat between their property and the still, and Winter had been worried one of his truck drivers was sharing client lists with the still owner.
Astrid was usually kept in the dark about matters like these. When her parents were still alive, the word “bootlegging” was never spoken in the house. After they passed, Winter told Astrid enough to keep her safe, and Bo told her a little more—enough to pique her curiosity. But that afternoon was the first time Bo actually let her see things.
It was a spur-of-the-moment, grand adventure. She dressed in pants and sensible shoes, and they went hiking through the majestic old redwoods together, inhaling the clean perfume of the forest. It was a warm, sunny day, and they found a place on a hill to watch the man and his whiskey still. They ate cheese sandwiches and drank Coca-Cola. They sat together, leg against leg, and told stories. About her family. About his. The sun sank into the Pacific behind them, and sometime before dusk, she looked up at Bo’s handsome face and something peculiar happened inside her chest.
It was as though, until that moment, her heart had been settled all wrong inside her ribs. And then everything shifted around—organs and muscles and bones and sinews, they all conspired together to make room.
And she hadn’t been the same since.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said angrily, shaking away the old memory. “I’m independent now. I have college and Los Angeles, whether I like it or not.”
“You could’ve gone to school here.”
She shook her head. “I needed to know I could do it on my own, without you and Winter and everyone else watching over me and treating me like a china doll. If Mamma were alive, she’d tell me to be my own woman. ‘Be bold,’ she always told me.”
“You’re the most daring woman I know,” Bo said.
“How come I don’t feel that way?” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed hard to get the rest of the words out. “I messed up everything at school, Bo. Everything! You don’t even know the half of it. And I . . . God! I was supposed to get over you. All my friends said I’d find someone new—that college would change my feelings.”
After a long pause, he asked, “Did it?”
She didn’t respond. Couldn’t. The answer stuck in her throat.
“I told myself we’d grow apart, too,” Bo said softly. “I wanted to believe we could. Because I can’t keep hoping and wanting. It is killing me, Astrid. I’ve been a goddamn wreck since you’ve left, and now that you’re back . . .”
They stood in the transitional space of the pantry, so close. The dark dining room to one side, the bright kitchen on the other. And them in the middle, in the gray area between. Not dark nor light, not friends nor lovers, this betweenness wasn’t stable. Crossroads never were. The two of them must choose to go forward or remain as they’d always been. And Astrid was all at once filled with a soaring hope, and yet utterly, numbingly terrified.