Grave Phantoms

Book 3: A Roaring Twenties Novel

by Jenn Bennett

Genres: Female Sleuths; Historical Romance; Paranormal Romance

Synopsis

From the author of Grim Shadows and Bitter Spirits comes the new Roaring Twenties novel in the series hailed as “Boardwalk Empire meets Ghost Hunters, but so much better” (Molly Harper, national bestselling author of the Jane Jameson series).

Feisty flapper Astrid Magnusson is home from college and yearning for the one thing that’s always been off limits: Bo Yeung, her notorious bootlegging brother’s second-in-command. Unfortunately her dream of an easy reunion proves difficult after a violent storm sends a mysterious yacht crashing into the Magnussons’ docks. What’s worse, the boat disappeared a year ago, and the survivors are acting strangely…

Bo has worked with the Magnusson family for years, doing whatever is needed, including keeping his boss’s younger sister out of trouble—and his hands to himself. Of course, that isn’t so easy after Astrid has a haunting vision about the yacht’s disappearance, plunging them into an underground world of old money and dark magic. Danger will drive them closer together, but surviving their own forbidden feelings could be the bigger risk.

Release date: May 5, 2015

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 320

Sample

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

September 15, 1928

University of California, Los Angeles

Dear Bo,

I got your letter in the mail today and was so eager to read it, I completely forgot to attend my history class—no great loss. My professor never smiles and doesn’t seem to like me. Besides that, everything is wonderful here. My dorm mate, Jane, and I took a streetcar to Hollywood Boulevard this weekend. Unfortunately, we saw zero motion picture stars.

Sorry to hear someone scratched your new Buick, but not half as sorry as they’ll be when you find out who did it. Sounds like you’re working too much at the warehouse. Just because Winter promoted you to captain doesn’t mean you’re his personal slave. Tell him to give you some time off. Perhaps a weekend in sunny L.A. would do you some good!

I have to go. My next class, Physics, starts in ten minutes and I’ve already missed it too many times. Luckily, that professor thinks I’m cute.

Your friend,

Astrid

P.S.—Don’t tell Winter I’ve skipped any classes.

September 25, 1928

Magnusson Fish Company

Pier 26

San Francisco, California

Dear Astrid,

Your brothers both send their regards. In fact, Lowe came by the warehouse with Hadley and Stella today. They have booked a trip to Egypt next month. (All three of them.)

The mystery of the Buick’s scratch is solved. It was Aida. She ran into it with the baby carriage—an accident, of course. It’s hard to stay mad at a pretty woman. By the way, I’m thinking of naming the Buick “Sylvia.”

Sounds like you’re having fun, but you need to stop missing classes. If they expel you, Winter will blow his top. He’s mad enough that his baby sister isn’t going to Berkeley and still moans about your Southern California campus being a “poor substitute for the real U.C.” And while we’re on the subject, who is this Physics professor? Old men shouldn’t be telling you that you’re cute. Be careful around him. Don’t make me worry about you.

Your friend (and enemy to lecherous old men),

Bo

October 5, 1928

University of California, Los Angeles

Dear Bo,

Egypt? Stars above. Please give Stella lots of kisses for me when you see her again and tell her Auntie Astrid misses her. I’m not sure how to make the word “miss” in sign language, but Lowe will know.

My dorm mate, Jane, and I are not on good terms right now because her sweetheart asked me to join him and some of his friends last night when Jane was at a sorority meeting. We saw the Bruins play football—that’s our collegiate team. I thought it might be boring to spend time with all those boys, but they were cutups, and called me Queen of Sheba, joking that they would be my male harem.

You don’t have to worry about dirty old men. Professor Barnes is only twenty-six. This is his first year teaching. He thinks I’m “delightful,” and not just cute, so he’s not only interested in my good looks. He told me if he has time this semester, he might take his best students to visit Mount Wilson Observatory, to look through the giant telescope there. It’s up in the mountains near Los Angeles, so we will stay there in a hotel overnight. More soon. Sylvia is a great name for the Buick!

Your friend,

Astrid

October 15, 1928

Magnusson Fish Company

Pier 26

San Francisco, California

Mui-mui,

Your professor is up to no good. Teachers should not be staying in hotels with students. Lowe, being a professor himself, agrees with me. I am very concerned about your well-being. If you need to wire me a message for any reason, please do so. Never mind the train ticket, I will drive down there and come get you. I haven’t mentioned this to Winter, because he would already be down there. Please use common sense.

Your friend,

Bo

October 30, 1928

University of California, Los Angeles

Dear Bo,

I can’t believe you told Lowe. That was personal, between you and me. I am perfectly capable of making decisions without anyone’s help, you know. And for your information, I had a wonderful time with Luke at the observatory. He is kind and sensitive, and he sees me as none of you do: as a woman.

Your adult friend (not your “little sister”),

Astrid

December 5, 1928

University of California, Los Angeles

Dearest Bo,

I am sorry about my last letter. I suppose I was upset with you, but that was silly. It’s really very touching that you’re concerned about me. It means a lot. I just wish you’d trust me to make my own decisions, even if they are the wrong ones sometimes.

Are you receiving my letters? I’ve heard on the radio that terrible storms are heading up the coast toward the Bay, so please stay safe.

My favorite wristwatch broke, which was upsetting. I will look for a replacement in S.F. There are no decent jewelry stores here. Oh, I bought my train ticket home and leave in ten days. That’s December 15th at noon. (Does that date sound familiar?) I can’t wait to see you at the station.

Your true friend,

Astrid

P.S.—I’m sorry I got mad about you calling me mui-mui. I actually miss hearing you saying that. No one here speaks Cantonese.

ONE

DECEMBER 15, 1928

Astrid Magnusson was mad as hell. She furiously wiped the fogged-up window of her brother’s Pierce-Arrow limousine with the mink cuff of her coat, but it didn’t help. The hilly streets were nothing but darkness punctuated by the occasional streetlight as they drove through more rain than she’d ever seen in her life.

“I can’t believe it’s been like this all week,” she said to the family driver over the half-raised window divider between the front and back seats. “It never rains like this here. Never.”

“Ja,” Jonte replied in Swedish as they turned onto the Embarcadero. “You shouldn’t be down here with all this flooding. Winter will be angry.”

Whoop-de-doo. She’d been back in San Francisco since noon and had barely spoken to her oldest brother. Half the city was barricaded, and she knew that’s why Winter was down here working at nine in the evening—to help sandbag the warehouse. She also knew that’s why Bo was here; however, him she wasn’t ready to forgive.

She hadn’t seen Bo in almost four months, he’d stopped answering her letters, and now that she was home, he couldn’t step away from the warehouse for one hour? Not even a telephone call or a note?

At least the staff had made her a nice dinner to welcome her back, and she’d had a little celebratory champagne. A little too much, possibly, but she didn’t feel very drunk. Then again, she wasn’t very good at drinking. A couple of months back, she’d downed five glasses of bathtub gin and ended up with a sprained ankle after falling off the dormitory balcony. But the post-drinking sickness had been far worse than the sprain, and she swore to all the saints she’d never drink again.

But really, that was a pointless promise to make, considering that Winter was one of the biggest bootleggers in San Francisco.

The limousine slowed in front of a long line of bulkhead buildings that sat along the waterfront. Warm light spilled from windows that flanked an open archway marked PIER 26. Magnusson Fish Company’s waterfront dock. At least, that’s what it was in the daytime; at night, it was a staging warehouse for citywide liquor distribution.

Astrid grabbed her umbrella and began opening the Pierce-Arrow’s door before it came to a complete stop. “Don’t wait for me,” she told Jonte. “I’ll get someone to drive me back home.”

“But—”

“Good night, Jonte,” she said more forcefully and erected the umbrella against the blustery night rain.

Ducking under the building’s gated Spanish stucco archway, she splashed through puddles and immediately smelled exhausted engine oil and shipping containers. Familiar and oddly pleasant. Just past a fleet of delivery trucks parked for the night, men stacked sandbags against the warehouse walls, where water ran across the cement floor. Winter was there, talking to someone as he directed the sandbagging.

But no Bo.

Before Winter could spot her and yell at her for coming out here at night, she folded her umbrella and took a sharp right into the warehouse offices. The reception area was empty, but a light shone from the back office. She marched with purpose, head buzzing with champagne, and stopped in the doorway.

The office was exactly as she remembered. Framed ancient photographs of her family lined the walls, slightly askew and dusty: their first house in the Fillmore District, her brothers as small children, and every boat her father had ever owned—even the last one, right before he died in the accident three years ago. Watching over those photographs was Old Bertha, a stuffed leopard shark that hung from the ceiling.

And hunched below that spotted shark was Bo Yeung, stripped from the waist up and dripping wet with rainwater. A soaked shirt lay on a nearby chair; a dry one was draped across a filing cabinet.

A sense of elation rose over the champagne singing in Astrid’s bloodstream. He was here, her childhood friend, the person she trusted more than anyone else in the world, and the only man she’d ever cared for.

Stars, she’d never been so happy to see his handsome face. She wanted to rush forward and throw her arms around him, like she used to do when they were both too young to recognize things were changing between them . . . when she was just the boss’s baby sister, and he was only the hired help.

No longer.

And with that realization, all her hurt feelings rushed back to the surface.

“So you are alive,” she said.

At the sound of her voice, he stood and turned to face her, and the sight of his sleek, sculpted chest momentarily took her aback. She’d seen him without a shirt a dozen times before—working outside in the sun, in the Chinatown boxing club where he sometimes went to blow off steam, or when they’d find each other in the kitchen raiding the icebox at midnight. But as he stood there in front of her now, holding a damp towel as if poised to fight, the elegant sheen of his finely muscled arms seemed almost risqué. Virile. She felt hot all over, just looking at him.

It was unfair, really.

“Astrid,” he finally said in a rough voice. Straight hair, normally neatly combed, fell over one eye like a stroke of black calligraphy ink. He pushed a damp lock of it back and stared at her like she was a mirage—one that he hadn’t expected to see.

Too bad. Astrid wasn’t going be ignored. She’d worn her best fur and a stunning beaded amaranthine dress that showed off her legs, and she’d practiced exactly what she was going to say to him.

Only, now she’d forgotten most of it.

“You didn’t pick me up at the train station,” she said.

“I was working.” He shrugged with one shoulder, as if he couldn’t be troubled to lift both of them. “Besides, I’m not the family driver. That’s Jonte’s job.”

As if that were the point? Truly.

“And you didn’t come to dinner. Lena made almond cake.”

“Did she? Sorry I missed that,” he said lightly.

“Is that all you missed?”

“Don’t tell me she made lemon pie, or I really will be sorry.”

Anger heated her cheeks. “I’ll give you something to be sorry about, all right. Be serious for one moment, please. I think you owe me at least that for not bothering to say hello to a girl you haven’t seen in months.”

He snapped the edge of the towel toward the ceiling. “Do you not see what’s going on out there? We’re nearly underwater.”

“But it’s my birthday.” Even as the words came out, she knew they sounded petty and childish, and wished she could take them back.

“I know,” he said.

And that made her livid.

“A simple ‘Happy birthday’ would be the polite thing to say. But I’m not sure why I expected you to even remember, because you haven’t answered any of my letters.” He hadn’t even bothered to write and tell her the disappointing news that her friend and seamstress, Benita—who lived downstairs in the Magnusson house—had left for Charleston two weeks ago to tend to a sick relative. “I suppose you just forgot to write me back?”

Bo grunted and avoided her eyes.

“Don’t tell me you were busy working, because I know damn well it hasn’t been raining all that time.”

“No, it hasn’t.” He turned away from her, toweling off his hair.

“Then what? Out of sight, out of mind—is that it? Am I that forgettable?”

“Damn, but I wish you were.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? God, Bo. Is it because you’re not being paid to wheel me around town anymore, huh? Is that it? You get promoted and now I’m just a job responsibility you can shuck?”

He tossed her a sharp glance over his shoulder. “Stop being ridiculous.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“You came down here in the middle of the night to tell me that?” He tossed the towel aside and pulled on a dry undershirt.

“What if I did? At least I remembered where to find you after four months, which is more than I can say for your crummy sense of direction.”

Swearing under his breath, he snatched up a clean shirt and glanced up at her as he shrugged into it. His fingers paused on the buttons. “Have you been drinking?”

“Drinking?” Astrid repeated, as if it were the most ludicrous thing she’d ever heard.

“You keep squinting at me with one eye shut.” He marched toward her. Before she could get away, his fingers gripped her shoulders. She dropped her umbrella and leaned back, trying to avoid him, but his neck craned to follow her movement. His attractive face was inches from hers, all sharp cheekbones and sharper jaw.

He sniffed. Clever, all-seeing eyes narrowed as he tracked her sin with the precision of a bloodhound. “Champagne.”

“Only a little,” she argued, breathing in the mingled scents of the dusty warehouse and rainwater, and beneath those, the brighter fragrance of Bo.

All her anger disappeared for a moment because—damn it all!—she’d missed him so much. She didn’t care if his position in the Magnusson household meant they shouldn’t be together, or that societal rules regarding their cultural differences meant they couldn’t be together. If she had to make a vow never to leave him again, she would. And unlike the no-drinking promise, she’d be able to keep this one, because if going away to college had taught her anything, it was that Bo was what she wanted.

Only Bo.

She softened in his grip and dazedly blinked up at him with a small, hiccupped laugh.

“Ossified,” he proclaimed. For a moment, the slyest of smiles curled the corners of his mouth. She loved that smile. He was the shiniest, most vibrant person she’d ever known, and she wanted to soak him up like warm sunlight.

His gaze fell to her hand, which had drifted to her neck like a shield, as if it could somehow prevent her runaway feelings from escaping. “I thought you said you broke that wristwatch,” he said in a lower voice.

“I did. But my arm feels bare without it.”

For a moment, she thought he might reach for her hand. But he merely released her, stepping away to button his shirt. “You shouldn’t be drinking.”

“So what if I’ve had a coupe or two of champagne? A girl’s entitled to that much, freshly back from college and on her birthday,” she said, following him around the desk. Never mind that she’d had five glasses, possibly six. She could still walk straight. Mostly. “Besides, I’m an adult now, if you haven’t noticed.”

“College magically transformed you, huh? To think I’ve been doing it wrong all these years, what with this pesky hard work and responsibility.”

“You’re a jackass.”

“So I’ve been told. By you, several times, if I remember correctly.” He tucked in his shirt and donned a leather shoulder holster and gun, a sobering reminder of this warehouse’s purpose and Bo’s role in it.

“Why are you avoiding me?” she persisted. “Why did you stop answering my letters?”

“I’m sorry—were you waiting on me to answer?” He combed his damp hair back with his fingers, cool as you please, but his words were delivered with tiny barbs. “It sounded like you had your hands full, what with that harem of college boys salivating beneath your skirt.”

Her cheeks heated. “I never said that!” Not that crassly, anyway. Sure, the boys at college were a lot more open and forward, which was probably due to the fact that, unlike her suitors in high school, they didn’t know she had two older brothers who would pummel anyone who so much as winked at her.

“Not to mention that you seemed pretty busy gazing at stars with what’s-his-name,” Bo said, snapping his fingers. “Professor Hotel Room.”

Astrid was too tipsy to convincingly feign shock over his implication. Yes, she’d told him about Luke and the hotel. But she certainly hadn’t said what they’d done there. It was none of Bo’s business. Besides, she hadn’t spoken to Luke since that night. She merely stopped showing up for class, and he never bothered to track her down.

So much for her sensitive professor.

But it didn’t matter. She was a grown woman. So what if she’d made a few mistakes her first semester at college? Well, a lot of mistakes, actually. Luke may have been the worst of those, a lapse in good judgment, but there was nothing she could do about that now. Life went on. And everything else was perfectly fixable as long as Winter didn’t find out. Now, as for Bo . . .

Hold on just one second. Her drunken brain oh-so-slowly began piecing Bo’s words and tone together. Was he jealous? Her heart skipped a beat.

“Listen,“ she said as he slipped into his suit jacket, but the rest of her words were lost under a horrific wrenching noise that was so long and loud, it rattled all the family photographs on the back wall for several seconds. Beyond that wall was the northern pier.

They both glanced at each other. Bo drew his gun, and without another word, they raced through the offices and into the warehouse. The workers had abandoned their sandbagging and were running through an open cargo door onto the docks. Cold rain and a howling gale cut through Astrid’s clothes as she jogged behind them into briny night air.

Industrial lights lit up the pier. Foaming waves, impossibly high, streamed over the creaking dock boards and splashed over her ankles. No wonder Bo was sandbagging the warehouse; she’d never seen the Bay this high. And it was storming so hard, she couldn’t see past the men thronging the edge of the pier. Winter shouted something at Bo, who pushed his way through the crowd. She shielded her eyes with one hand as a bolt of white lightning pierced the sky.

And that’s when the source of the noise came into view.

A luxury motor yacht, encrusted in barnacles and draped in seaweed, had crashed into the Magnussons’ pier. Inside the main cabin, a group of people stared out the windows, unmoving and silent. And for a dizzying, terror-struck moment, Astrid was convinced they were all ghosts.

TWO

The Plumed Serpent wasn’t precisely a ghost ship, Bo decided, after helping to moor the crashed yacht. But the strange people who filed off its deck were certainly spooked. None of them knew who they were. Names, family, homes . . . all forgotten. No one remembered where the yacht had been or how they’d gotten on it. They all claimed to have woken up a few minutes before they’d crashed into the pier.

Six survivors. Six men and women wearing white robes, and whose cheeks and foreheads were covered with blue greasepaint, like they’d been staging some kind of theatrical performance. They were terrified. Confused. And yet, apart from looking weak and dehydrated, seemingly unharmed.

And while the police questioned them, Bo had sent Astrid back inside the warehouse to safety while he watched the chaos from a healthy distance, mumbling an old Cantonese folk saying to ward away evil—along with a bit of the Lord’s Prayer and a line from a popular song for good measure. Whatever had cursed the yacht, he wanted nothing to do with it. Granted, the Plumed Serpent was a damn fine boat. Only a handful of yachts like it in the Bay Area, and Chief Hambry confirmed this one belonged to a wealthy widow who had reported it missing during an investigation last year.

Lost at sea for an entire year.

A boat doesn’t just reappear after being gone that long.

Ambulances carried the stunned survivors to Saint Francis in Nob Hill. And when the hubbub finally died down, Bo shivered in his wet clothes as he watched the police chief’s car pull away from the pier.

“I’ve seen a lot of strange things in this city . . .” Winter murmured from his side as they huddled together beneath a narrow overhang outside the warehouse.

Bo snorted. “I’ve seen a lot of strange things in your house.”

The dark-headed Swede chuckled and pressed the heel of his palm against his scarred eye. “True. But this feels wrong. Something happened to those people, and I don’t want any damn part of it. We don’t need this headache right now.”

Winter wasn’t just Bo’s employer. Five years back, after Bo’s uncle (and last living relative) had died, the burly head of the Magnusson clan had taken then sixteen-year-old Bo out of Chinatown and given him a home in Pacific Heights. More than a home. A job. Education. Purpose. A family.

The entire city saw Winter as one of the biggest bootleggers in town—someone respected and feared, no one to screw around with—but Bo knew the man behind the mask. And knowing this man had changed Bo, for good and for worse. Bo was neither wholly Chinatown nor Pacific Heights. Not part of his old life, not fully accepted into all corners of this one, either. He was between cultures and classes. Between worlds. And that was unstable ground.

Bo rubbed warmth back into his fingers. “I’ll make sure the yacht’s not taking on water and poke around in the engine room. See if she can be started up. If so, I’ll move her to that empty pier next door, so that she’s off the property and out of sight from the road. Otherwise, I’ll get a tugboat over here to move her in the morning.”

Gawking reporters and nosy crowds were the last thing an illegal enterprise needed, so the less the public could see of the yacht, the better—at least until the police could track down the owner and get the damn thing off Magnusson property. They didn’t need the cops poking around out here, either. Sure, Winter paid them off. But it was one thing for them to look the other way, and another to operate right in front of their faces. Tomorrow night’s distribution runs would need to go through their secondary Marin County docks across the Bay, which would mean more time spent in the cold rain.

Bo had little faith he’d ever feel dry or warm again. All of this weirdness with the blue-faced survivors was a bad ending to a bad day, and he was impatient for it to be over.

A lie.

He was just impatient to see Astrid again. After she’d left for college at the end of the summer, he’d hoped time apart would tame his feelings. Instead, the yearning turned him into a deranged man, one match short of combusting with obsession. Absurd, really, that one tiny girl had that effect on him. So he told himself it was merely a case of mind over matter, and prayed when he saw her again she’d appear less dazzling. He would merely look upon her fondly. Platonically. Like the old friend she was, nothing more.

But now that he had seen her, he knew all of that had been a pipe dream. It was so much worse now. Because the truth was, college had changed her. He didn’t know how or why, only that if it had anything to do with that Luke fellow she wrote about, it would take every man in the warehouse holding Bo back to stop him from driving down to Los Angeles to bloody the professor’s face against the classroom chalkboard.

No, time apart hadn’t helped one bit. His blood still heated at the sight of her. His heart still ached, wanting what it couldn’t have. And no matter how he tried to pretend she was still the same fourteen-year-old, gum-smacking, know-it-all live wire he’d first met years ago, she hadn’t been a little girl for a long time. Seeing her tonight did strange, bewildering things to him. The sound of her voice alone sketched a secret road map from his heart to his brain, with a looping detour down to his cock.

Aiya, she made him miserable. Weak. Crazy. Stupid.

He absently glanced toward the light of the office window and spotted her silhouette.

“She’s angry with you,” Winter said, startling Bo out of his thoughts.

Not half as angry as he was with her. But he didn’t say that, because then he’d have to explain why. And as much as he confided in Winter, he wasn’t dumb enough to admit that Astrid had yanked out his heart and stomped on it with a few careless words in a weeks-old letter. Some lines you just didn’t cross, and pining over the Viking Bootlegger’s fox-eyed baby sister was one of them.

He tore his eyes away from the girl and stared straight ahead at the yacht. “She’ll get over it when she goes back to Los Angeles after the holidays.”

Three weeks. He might survive three more weeks of Astrid (devious smile, stubborn chin, blond curls, scent of roses, soft skin) if he stayed busy, out of sight. Found excuses to sleep at his old apartment in Chinatown instead of in his room at the Magnussons’. Kept his cock and balls locked up in some kind of medieval chastity cage . . .

“I’m going home,” Winter said in a weary voice. “I haven’t had more than an hour of sleep since yesterday, and Aida will divorce me if I stay out another night. She hasn’t been sleeping, either. She’s had a few unsettling séances lately. Heard strange messages . . .”

“About what?” Winter’s wife, Aida, was a trance medium who conducted séances for a living, temporarily able to summon back the dead to talk with their loved ones. Plenty of frauds out there, but Aida was the real thing. “Not about all this, I hope,” Bo said, motioning toward the yacht.

Winter shook his head. “No, something else is coming. It’s probably . . . well, hopefully she’s wrong about it, but it’s making her worry.”

“Go home, then,” Bo encouraged.

“Suppose I should take Astrid back with m—”

“I won’t be much longer,” Bo said a little too quickly and tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice. “The sandbagging’s finished, and squaring away the yacht shouldn’t take long. I’ll drive her back.”

“She’s not your responsibility anymore,” Winter said softly. “You’re my captain now, not a driver, and not her guardian. She can take care of herself while she’s home for the holidays. She’s a grown woman.”

Oh, he’d noticed, all right. But that didn’t stop him from worrying over her safety. Hell, it made him more anxious. The Magnussons might be wealthy, and Bo might be better paid than ninety-nine percent of the other Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, but that money was hard-earned and came with a list of threats so long, he couldn’t keep them all in his head at once: rival bootleggers, cheap club owners, crooked cops and politicians. Mobsters from out East. Smugglers hunting new cargo. Disgruntled customers