Catacomb (19 page)

“So they’re not real then?” Dan asked coolly. “These Bone Artists?”

Finnoway laughed and turned back to look at the candles. “I didn’t say that, did I?”

Abby rolled her eyes and reshuffled her papers. “Now you’re just teasing us.”

“A cautionary tale doesn’t work, my dear, if nobody believes it.”

The curtain over the shop’s door rustled, and Dan twisted to look, finding that Finnoway’s assistant had come in, too. She appeared to be looking for the councilman.

Dan didn’t mean to stare, but she was mesmerizing, so precisely coiffed and dressed she looked ready to stroll onto a movie set. He heard Abby cough lightly, then cough a little louder.

Idiot. Abby was
right there
.

“Excuse me for one moment,” Finnoway said, going to confer with his assistant by the entrance.

After an awkward moment of silence, Abby said, “This trip hasn’t been even close to what we were expecting, has it? But things are okay, right? Are you doing okay?”

“Sure, let’s go with okay,” he said. He raked both hands through his messy hair and dodged around the case of necklaces to the wall. There was a globbed line of paint running horizontally across the plaster. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’m feeling, Abby. Sad? Confused? Angry?”

He traced the thick, painted line with his fingertips, reading the numbers penned above it. It was just a date, and Dan shivered, realizing the line was marking how high the water had risen in here during the hurricane. It was a miracle anything in the store had survived.

“Angry?” Abby paused, her fingers hovering over a rotating display of postcards and laminated newspapers. “Angry at who? Your parents?”

“A little bit, yeah. And at Oliver, too. He should have just given me that damn box. It’s not like he needs the stupid thing, and it might actually tell me something about why my parents gave me up. Maybe I’m looking too hard for something that isn’t there. Maybe they thought they were doing something good. But I just can’t figure out why I was shuffled around Pennsylvania while they were killed in a car crash in Louisiana.” He sighed and leaned against the wall. “The point is, I don’t think I should have to bargain for something that should be mine.”

He trailed off, watching Finnoway wander back to them.

“I was hoping to borrow you for a moment,” Finnoway said, but while Dan expected that to be directed at Abby, it wasn’t.

“Oh. Wait, me?”

“Yes.” The councilman nodded toward a quieter corner away from the counter and his friends. “I didn’t get a chance to say this yesterday, but when Steve mentioned you were hanging around with the owner of Berkley and Daughters, well . . .”

“Oliver?” Dan narrowed his eyes, wondering why exactly they needed to be speaking in hushed tones. “What about him?”

“He’s not exactly the most savory fellow. His father had a reputation for being a notorious drunk. And in this city, that’s saying something.” Clearing his throat, the councilman glanced over his shoulder at Abby, watching her for an uncomfortably long moment. “I’m not here to help your girlfriend pick out souvenirs, young man. I’m here to give you a bit of advice.”

“Why do you care what I do?”

“I don’t.” He put his hands in his pockets, twisting away from the shelves of knickknacks. The politician’s smile from yesterday was gone, replaced with an angry grimace. “Oliver Berkley is a pimple on the ass of this city, just like his father and his father’s father. Steve Lipcott is an old friend, and if his nephew is going to be living here, I wouldn’t want his reputation or Steve’s to be tainted by . . . unfortunate associations.”

Dan ground his teeth together, staring up into the councilman’s inscrutable green eyes. “Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

Smiling, Finnoway glided away from the shelves, smoothly cutting into Abby’s conversation with Madame A. Dan abandoned his spot at the wall, joining Jordan instead. Apparently Madame A had talked Jordan into buying a large handful of candles; they peeked out of Jordan’s bag as his friend swung around to greet him.

“They’re for Steve,” he said immediately. “I thought I’d pick him up something while we were here.”

“Uh-huh.” Dan peered at Madame A behind her counter. She looked persuasive enough to get a person to buy just about anything.

“Any luck with the friendly councilman?” Jordan asked. A complimentary tea tray had been set out on a countertop near the door and Jordan was headed there, beelining for the sugar-dusted cakes arranged on a silver plate.

“Not really. Before he had some not-so-nice things to say about Oliver, he said the poem was just some dumb fairy tale used to spook children into behaving.”

Jordan’s brows shot up as he shoved a teacake into his mouth. “Really? No way, that’s not what Madame A said.”

“Oh? And what did Madame A have to say about it?” Dan lowered his voice, shooting a glance over his shoulder to make sure Finnoway and his assistant weren’t listening in. The assistant was on a phone call, hissing into the mobile and pacing.

“She said the Bone Artist thing started out as a legend, yeah, but that there was a kernel of truth to it.” Jordan matched Dan’s conspiratorial whisper. He leaned in, pouring himself a cup of pale, greenish tea. “Back during the Depression, people were so desperate for money that they started grave robbing. Apparently, around here, there was a group of people called the Bone Artists who would pay money for
bones
. The bones supposedly contained some of the dead person’s personality, and the Bone Artists claimed they could turn the bones into talismans to sell back for even more. So if you wanted luck, you found a lucky person’s bone and turned it over, or if you wanted money you
took a rich person’s.” Jordan blew the rising steam away from his cup of tea and dunked a second cake into it. “It was big business. I guess people get real superstitious when shit hits the fan.”

Dan shivered. “Jesus.”

“Yeah. Sounds a bit like Oliver’s Artificer guy, doesn’t it?”

It did. Dan checked on the councilman again, who was chuckling in his supremely infuriating way with Abby over some article they had found. “Why would Finnoway lie about it?”

“Who knows? Maybe he legit didn’t know. I mean, he said he liked history, but I think Madame A has been here since like the beginning of time. It’s pretty awesome.”

“Well, last night, Oliver acted like he had never heard of the Bone Artists,” Dan pointed out. “And now this stuff with Finnoway? I feel like one of them is covering something up.”

“Or both of them.”

If those thugs—the Bone Artists—were still operating, then maybe that was what Micah had gotten wrapped up in. And if so, Dan really didn’t like the idea of them holding on to his bones, planning to turn them into supposed magical talismans. Which led to his next question. “So, do they work?”

“What?” Jordan coughed on his tea.

“The bone talismans they were making. Were they just superstition, or did they really do something?”

Jordan put down his empty cup, worrying his lip piercing again. “I asked, but Madame A wouldn’t answer,” he whispered. “Frankly, I think that tells you everything you need to know.”

“C
an we just talk about the fact that this Oliver bozo is definitely lying to us?” Jordan had maybe had a little too much of the sangria Uncle Steve had put out at dinner. He weaved as they walked the familiar route to Berkley & Daughters, gesturing wildly and colliding with Dan every few steps. “He lives here, right? He runs an antique shop. How could he not know about this bone-thingie legend?”

“I’m sure he has an explanation,” Dan grumbled.

“Are you?” Abby had brought along their combined research—both the articles and pictures she had gathered on Jimmy Orsini and the papers Dan had collected about his parents. “I know he was Micah’s friend, but that’s not much to go on. If we can trust him, why would he give us only half the story?”

Dan wanted badly to answer, but there was nothing to say; his friends were right. Oliver and Sabrina owed them answers, and more than that, they owed him that box and whatever was inside it.

Berkley & Daughters sat shuttered and dark, but they were expected. Dan strode up to the door and went in without knocking, determined to show Oliver that he was leaving with that box, no matter what.

And then what?

The question haunted him as he stepped into the simmering candlelit darkness of the store.

“Really? Another séance?” Abby muttered. She sighed and skirted around Dan, then walked briskly to the counter, where Sabrina and Oliver were counting the cash register money and locking it away in a small deposit box.

“We need to talk,” Dan said, following her.

Oliver shushed him. “Later.”

“No,
now
.”

“We’re in the middle of something here,” Sabrina whispered testily. “You can wait fifteen minutes, Crawford, it won’t kill you.”

“Trying to commune with your dear old granddad again?” Jordan slurred, not bothering to lower his voice. Dan winced.

“That’s real sensitive of you. And no, for your information, we are not.” But Oliver shifted uneasily; it was hard to tell in the low light, but he might have been blushing. “We’re trying to reach Micah.”

“Have you tried sending a text?” Jordan shot back.

“Would you just give it a rest? I know it might seem silly to you, but there are energies in this world, real, tangible energies that can be tapped into.” Oliver disappeared into the back room for a moment to lock away the day’s money. When he returned, he handed Dan a bowl. It smelled strongly of flowers.

“It’s just rosewater,” Oliver said in response to Dan’s perplexed expression. “Dip your hands in and dry them off, then join us.”

“That’s not why we’re here. We have questions for you,” Abby replied. “We want Dan’s box, and we want to know why you pretended not to know what the Bone Artists are.”

“Look,” Oliver said with a sigh, “you can have your goddamn box, all right? But Micah was reaching out to you, too, Dan. I want you sitting in on this with me.”

It was a waste of time, but if fifteen minutes of playing along got him that box, Dan would do it. He flopped his hands around in the rosewater and then dried them on his T-shirt. Abby and Jordan stayed at the counter, watching, while Sabrina and Oliver escorted Dan to the round table in the corner.

He took one of the empty chairs, sitting between Sabrina and Oliver, looking down at the clean, white tablecloth and the strange symbol drawn across it. A handful of carved runes had been spread across the table, and a small basket with trinkets sat in the middle—a scrap of fabric, car keys, a curled-up canvas belt, and a picture of Micah and Oliver together as teenagers. Dan tore his eyes away from the photo. The two boys looked so happy, so innocent, arms around each other as they posed in front of Oliver’s car. It was probably the day Oliver first got it, a monumental day in any boy’s life.

Dan’s hands were taken and grasped, then rested on the table.

“What do I do?” he whispered.

The other people sitting around the table regarded him solemnly. There were seven of them, including Dan. One of the two girls to his right looked like she could be Sabrina’s sister. The others he recognized from the séance he’d witnessed on the previous visit, including the woman with the ginger hair. He shuddered.

“Just close your eyes and focus on memories of him. If I sense his presence, I’ll ask him where his bones are being kept,” Oliver instructed. His hand was warm and slightly sweaty, but Sabrina’s was cool in Dan’s grasp.