I leaned in closer to him as well. It was like coming too close to a magnet. I felt myself swaying. “I don’t like you either, you know.”
Alex smiled. I could see that his fangs had fully extended. You wouldn’t even notice if you hadn’t been looking for it. I was, though. I knew better than to get this close, and yet here I was. Too close. Too drawn. Too needy. “He’ll never be able to understand what you are. He’ll never be able to completely accept it. He’s not part of the same world you are.”
“And you are?”
“You know I am.”
I shook my head. I didn’t know any such thing. What I did know was that I seemed forever stuck between these two worlds: the one everyone else knew about and the one a lot of people suspected but couldn’t prove. I didn’t fully belong in either. How was I supposed to make a life like that?
I put my hands on his chest and shoved. It was like trying to move a tank. He waited for a second, long enough to let me know that he wasn’t going anywhere unless he wanted to, and then stepped back.
I brushed my hair back from my face and straightened my top.
“So are you off for another breakfast with him?” Alex looked at me through narrowed eyes.
“No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I’m having coffee with my aunt.”
13
AUNT KITTY SHOWED UP AT STARBUCKS IN ONE OF HER REAL-ESTATE-AGENT suits. Coffee with me was clearly just one stop among many in her busy day. I’d be willing to bet she had appointments stacked up from now until well into the early evening. You could tell what kind of day Aunt Kitty was planning on having based on her wardrobe choices. She’s a bit of a chameleon. I’ve seen her show up for coffee or even lunch wearing yoga pants and a tank top. Scrubbed free of makeup, she honestly doesn’t look all that much older than Norah and me.
If asked, she will tell you she owes it to a combination of good genes, no smoking of any substance and a good clean Citron martini once a week whether she needs it or not.
She’s also likely to show up at a Starbucks like she had today in an Ann Taylor suit with two-toned Ferragamo pumps with a matching bag and her hair sculpted into something that wouldn’t move in a hurricane.
“Busy day?” I asked, scooting in next to her, inhaling the rich dark aroma of my latte as though it were crack.
“It’s not easy out in the jungle these days,” she said. Sacramento real estate had gone from boom to bust in a precipitous fall that still had the region reeling. Somehow Aunt Kitty was weathering it better than most. I wasn’t entirely sure how, and I didn’t ask too many questions. I’d learned the hard way that asking questions about her work got Aunt Kitty thinking that I wanted to be a real estate agent just like her.
I could just imagine what would happen if I tried to show houses with imps showing up with stolen flutes and vampires hanging around with mysterious envelopes. I’m sure it’d be just great for sales. On the other hand, maybe I could make a specialty out of haunted houses. I knew where all the best ones were. People loved that kind of stuff for reasons that I can never quite figure out. If they could see how often the other world actually crept into their own without calling it up at all, they’d be way less likely to mess around with the creepy stuff in the first place.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
She smiled, kissed my cheek and then rubbed the lipstick mark away with her thumb. “It’s good to see you, sweetheart. I don’t get to see you often enough. Neither does your mother. She said so the other day.”
I sighed. There was the real reason for the coffee invitation. I hadn’t called home in a while. I supposed I was overdue. This was so typically my mom. She said that she didn’t like to meddle in my life, so instead of just picking up the phone and demanding that I show up for a Friday night dinner with the family, she’d send cryptic little messages to me through my aunt or my grandmother. “I’ll call her today,” I said.
Kitty patted my hand. “Excellent.”
“So about whatever was so interesting . . .” I prompted, giving her my best ingratiating smile. Luckily, Aunt Kitty didn’t require much ingratiation to hand over the goods.
She reached into her purse, pulled a slip of paper off of one of her ubiquitous notepads and handed it to me. Aunt Kitty always had a little notepad in her purse. They were always pretty, and it was nice to know you could always find something to give her as a little gift that she’d actually like and use. “The addresses for the tax bills, although I don’t think it’s going to help you much.”
“They’re not the addresses of the houses?” I asked before looking at the paper.
“No, but that’s not terribly unusual. Some people have those sent to an accountant or a business office.”
“So what’s so weird?”
“All the tax bills for these houses are being sent to the same address. Different suite numbers, but one address.”
“Is it an apartment building or an office building with suite numbers or something?”
“You wish,” she replied. “It’s one of those mailbox places. You know, where you can ship packages and get a passport photo taken? They also rent post office boxes. Those are all box numbers.”
“How can you tell?”
“I looked up at the address on Google Maps and hit Street view.” She looked at me as if I were dim. “You can read the street sign.”
“Do you want me to look into this further, Melina? I’m sure something’s not right here. All the paperwork looks legal. I just have a bad feeling about it. The way things have been going, there’s a lot of real estate fraud happening. Maybe I should report this to someone.”
That was a thought. Maybe the regular authorities could take care of this. But then again, I still didn’t know precisely what we were dealing with. I’d keep it in mind, but for now I just wanted to check out the addresses and see what I could see. Finally, I said, “No, Aunt Kitty, I think you should leave it alone. You don’t need to get in the middle of it.”
“I don’t think you should be in the middle of it either, honey. I don’t like this one bit.”
I didn’t either.
I HIT THE SHOWER BEFORE I DID ANYTHING ELSE. NORAH WAS in the kitchen packing her lunch when I got out.
“Hey, stranger,” she said, smiling. “What have you been up to?”
I ran through the list of possible answers: tracking down places to grow marijuana in suburban Sacramento, returning flutes to Native American deities, being warned in the person of a mutilated Asian man about things I didn’t understand. I went with, “The usual.”
She nodded and held out a piece of apple for me. I took it and got the peanut butter out of the refrigerator. Norah insists on the grind-your-own variety from the co-op. After years of dining on Skippy and Jiff it was a tough transition for me, but I’ve learned to adjust. It’s crazy. The stuff actually tastes like peanuts.
“Are you sleeping at all?” she asked.
I busied myself with the peanut butter, spreading it just so on my slice of apple. “Some.”
Then she hugged me. This is how Norah totally undoes me. She walked over and put her arms around me and held me for moment. Then she went back to packing her lunch. No questions that I couldn’t answer. No warnings that I couldn’t heed. No guilt and no demands. Just a little tiny dose of unconditional girl love. Could a girl have a better roommate? I don’t think so.
“Have you seen Ben around?” I asked, thinking about other recipients of Norah’s unconditional love.
She shook her head and then smiled. “I think he has a girlfriend.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”
“Yeah. She seems a little shy, always ducking so her hair hangs over her face. But shy’s okay. Her name is Sophie.” She shoved her lunch into her ginormous hobo bag and slung it over her shoulder. “I’ll catch you later, okay?”
“You bet.”
She paused at the door. “Remember to be gentle with yourself, Melina.” The second she opened the door, I felt the buzz. I ran to grab her, but I was too late. I was at least a step too slow. I needed to get more sleep. My defenses were down and my reflexes were too sluggish.
I heard her say, “Can I help you?”
Then I heard a very male voice with just a hint of an accent say, “Absolutely.”
“STAY AWAY FROM HER,” I TOLD KOKOPELLI. “I MEAN IT.”
“Jealous, little bird? You don’t have to be. There’s plenty of me to go around.” He grinned and looked back and forth between Norah and me as if he were already imagining himself as the filling in a girl sandwich.
Norah looked at me, one eyebrow raised. I shook my head and said, “Don’t worry about it. Go to work. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Are you sure?” Norah’s brow furrowed with concern.
“Absolutely.” The last thing I needed was Norah raising one of Kokopelli’s little bastards. I’d never get rid of him then.
She trotted off down the stairs. Kokopelli watched her go, smacking his lips as he leaned over the banister to watch her all the way out the door. Then he turned back to me. “You are bound and determined to ruin all my fun, aren’t you?”
“Nope,” I said. “It’s a fringe benefit. What are you doing here?”
“Has anyone told you that you’re cold, Messenger? It’s not becoming in a woman to be cold.” He smiled at me.
“I have been given lists of how I’m unbecoming. I really don’t think you can come up with anything new at this point. Now what do you want?”
“Fine, then.” He pouted for a second and then pulled his flute out of his pack and held it out to me. “This isn’t my flute.”
I didn’t take it. “Then whose flute is it?”
“Hell if I know. It’s old. It’s the right material. It’s just not my flute. It’s got no power.”
I remembered how innocent the flute had seemed sitting on the bench seat of the Buick. And it hadn’t given off any buzz at all when I’d held it in my hand. “You’re sure it just doesn’t need to be charged up or something?”
“It’s not an iPod, sweet cheeks. It’s a sacred object. Well, it’s not a sacred object. It’s a piece of crap. My flute is a sacred object and I want it back.”
“Exactly how am I supposed to do that?” This is not how this was supposed to work. Someone or something was supposed to give me something that I took to someone else. Occasionally I had to fetch something from one place to another, but it was always set up in advance.
“I don’t know. Find the rat bastard who gave you this one and get mine back. He probably still has it.”
“And if he doesn’t want to give me back the real one?”
“Then tell him that this is what I’m going to do when I find him.” Kokopelli then proceeded to describe doing something with the fake flute that I was relatively sure was anatomically impossible. I am not, however, an expert in imp physiology and decided to take him at his word.
“Okay, then,” I said and took the fake flute. “How do you want me to get in touch when I have the real one?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure it out.” Kokopelli slung his pack back over his shoulder and headed down the stairs, leaving me holding the flute and wondering how to go about finding Joe the Imp.
I WENT BACK INTO THE APARTMENT, STILL NOT QUITE SURE what to do with the flute, and took Aunt Kitty’s list of seven names and started plugging them into various search engines. Sadly, there really isn’t any such thing as privacy anymore. At least, there isn’t on the Internet.
My big problem was that the names weren’t that uncommon. Li, Chin, Zhang. You get the picture. There’s more than a few people around with those surnames. Narrowing it down to San Francisco didn’t exactly help loads either.
Doggedly, I scrolled through page after page of results, hoping to find some common thread besides the post office boxes in San Francisco and the grow houses in Elk Grove. One didn’t exactly advertise the latter on the Internet anyway.
I looked again at the address of the post office boxes. It was on Stockton Street near Chinatown. On a whim, I typed in
Chester Li Chinatown
. The third entry was for the San Francisco Sino-American Association. He was on the board of directors. I typed in
Mark Chin
. His announcement that he had joined the board of directors of the San Francisco Sino-American Association was the second Google entry for him. I went down the list. All seven people who owned grow houses in Elk Grove financed by the United Bank of Hong Kong were members of the board of directors of the San Francisco Sino-American Association. I googled the association. Lord love a duck, they had an online newsletter.
I clicked on it and waited for the pages to load, drumming my fingers on the edge of my desk.
It took a few seconds, but it came up. A photo of a ribbon-cutting ceremony for their new headquarters dominated the front page of the newsletter. Seven men stood gathered around one man holding a giant pair of silly scissors. I zoomed in on the face of the guy with the scissors and sucked in my breath.
The guy with the scissors was the guy who had seemed to be running the show at the temple, the one who had ordered the one priest pistol-whipped with a flick of his fingers, the one who had called the priest at the temple “brother.” His name was Henry Zhang, and he was the founder of the San Francisco Sino-American Association.
I might not know what to do with a sacred flute, but I knew where my next stop was.
BEN WAS IN HIS USUAL POST ON THE FRONT STOOP WHEN I was leaving.
