Chapter Text
The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our hearts,
—Richard Jackson, “Ten Things I Need to Know”
Ever since he could remember, Henry’s mother had always believed in something more: beauty, rage, creation, water to wine, greatness that scraped the stars. Here is lead and here is gold. And so on. Henry’s father believed in greatness too: corner office, fast car, rooms of people who stood when you came in. A perfectly cut suit was power; a good strong handshake and a well-timed smile were tools with which one could conquer an empire, except that empire was made of ranks of men also in perfectly cut suits with comparably good strong handshakes and similarly well-timed smiles.
But Henry was his mother’s son. So he graduated from law school, politely turned down a federal clerkship, and moved west to illegally inhabit a florist shop on the edge of Chinatown.
It was not unpleasant, considering. The drains were mildewed and there was a ghost living in the back room, but Henry had an air mattress and hot water, usually, and also the previous occupant had left behind a few potted trees and a wisteria plant, which Henry kept in the sink.
(The ghost always said he didn’t think it was wisteria.
“How do you know?” Henry asked him.
“I don’t,” the ghost said. He spoke very strangely—faint and not in any language Henry had ever heard, and if Henry thought about it too hard it hurt his head, but still they understood one another. When Henry asked him about it, he said, “It’s tree language, probably,” and would not or could not elaborate.)
He liked the anonymity of the city, and the familiar sing-song Chinese of the shop owners he heard when he walked down the street, like the sounds of his home, and the constant humidity inside his shop-house, comfortingly oppressive, like a very hot shower. The Internet said the damp was better for the plants, which Henry had begun to collect in spades: bromeliads and ferns and spider plants and a small palm and a stem of basil he had found half-dead and discarded in a yogurt tub. He learned about soil nitrogen levels and aeration and the aphids that collected on the undersides of the jagged leaves of a couple tomato plants, apologizing to the tiny honey-colored insects and thanking them for their service as he washed them off with warm soapy water in the sink, and spent an afternoon cleaning the skylights in the back room so that the plants could get more sun.
“You know florists sell flowers, right,” the ghost said when Henry brought home a jade plant.
“This is a money tree, ghost,” Henry told him sternly. “Do you want prosperity and financial success or not?”
“I have a name,” the ghost said, offended, and retreated before he could be asked what it was. The ghost was slippery like that.
Henry borrowed piles of gardening books from the library and indulged in a fantasy of locking himself in this muggy little paradise, a Turkish bath the size of a one-man island. “Like growing flowers out by the Waste,” he said to no one, quite pleased with himself.
He had yet to take down the awning out front, which proclaimed FLORIST in faded green and gold; but only two people had tried to buy a dozen tulips from him, perhaps because of the flourishing jungle that had overtaken the front or perhaps because of the perennially locked door. And he kept irregular hours, which meant he rarely saw his neighbors—a psychic and a noodle house—or, well, anyone else really. So hopefully when people walked by they saw an empty storefront and not a twenty-something juris doctor dabbling in botany. That is, until the morning Maura Sargent came storming in.
“Hello,” Henry said, startled into speaking. She was shaking out her umbrella viciously, because outside it was, literally, storming; rain sputtered onto the back room ghost, who retreated, soggily. Maura Sargent did not notice, or perhaps she did not care. “We—aren’t open.”
“The door was unlocked,” Maura said.
“Was it?” It had not been. Henry knew it had not been, but there it was, open, and here Maura was, inside.
“It’s very sticky in here.” She looked around, not critical, just curious. “Where are the flowers?”
“It’s good for the plants,” Henry said, meaning the humidity.
“I’m just saying. If you want people to think you’re a florist you should keep some flowers. I’m going to put my umbrella here.” She did. “My name is Maura Sargent.”
“Henry Cheng.”
“I’m from next door.”
Henry did not understand.
“Fox Way Psychics?”
“You’re a psychic.”
“Sure am. There’s a ghost in your bathroom. Do you have a chair? Never mind, I’ll sit here.” She was compact and she spoke very fast; Henry thought she looked more like a bird than a psychic, thick curls neatly cropped close to her head, dark inquisitive eyes.
But he liked how she spoke, and he liked that she had noticed the ghost. As a rule, nobody did.
“I need your help,” Maura Sargent said, and the least Henry could do was listen.
Maura Sargent told Henry a story.
She had moved to the city when she was twenty and had a motorcycle and two friends. She worked at a coffee shop for a while, and then she was a secretary, and then she quit to wait tables at a bad Italian restaurant, and then one day none of that mattered anymore because Artemus walked into her life.
He came into the Italian restaurant, spindly and strange with unruly curls and a shitty ukulele, the bell over the door ringing merrily at his entrance. Maura showed Henry a photo; Artemus was not particularly handsome or even particularly tall (adjectives which are often treated as synonyms when used to describe men), but he was nothing like Maura Sargent had ever seen in her twenty years in Nowhere, Virginia.
She used to take afternoon shifts so they could spend evenings together. He sat behind her on her motorcycle and they would go down to Davenport to jump from the cliffs into the cold ocean, or to Monterey to lie on the aquarium floor and watch the sunfish drift by, or to the redwoods, or the wharf, or just down the road to Maura’s tiny, awful shared apartment, where Artemus played the ukulele badly and Calla, Maura’s roommate, threw things at him. “Do you love me?” Maura would ask, and he would say something accidentally funny like, “What is love, really?” and she would laugh merrily and say, “Fuck if I know,” and then they would go get some ice cream or something.
That was summer, and Maura was twenty. So it was no surprise to anybody when Artemus walked right back out of her life. It wasn’t that big of a deal; Maura got the whole motorcycle seat to herself, and she did all those same things alone. It was a little more surprising when Maura had a baby.
The baby did not know that her father was a bad ukulele player, or a disappearing act, or the kind of grown man who still didn’t know how to tip at restaurants. She didn’t need to. Maura and Calla and their third roommate, Persephone, raised her, and she grew up into a wonderful young woman called Blue and she was perfect in every way.
And she returned to the city when she was done with school. She didn’t have a motorcycle, but she had three mothers. She walked dogs for a while, and then she waited tables at a pizza place, and then she started taking night classes but kept serving pizza, and then one day none of that mattered much anymore because Gansey walked into her life.
Blue and Gansey did all the things Maura and Artemus used to do and went all the places Maura and Artemus used to go, except in Gansey’s alarmingly orange muscle car, and when Blue said “Do you love me?” Gansey would just smile at her, because she already knew, and she would laugh merrily and say “Good,” because of course he already knew too.
Also: they preferred gelato.
That was summer. It was no surprise to anybody when Gansey asked her to marry him. And it was even less of a surprise when she said yes.
“I don’t see why this event requires a biological father,” Henry said when Maura had said all this, because of course that was what she was asking about, meaning the wedding, because of course that was why she was asking.
“I am telling a story,” Maura said sternly.
So Blue and Gansey were going to be married. The how of it didn’t matter so much to either of them so long as it happened, and so long as it wasn’t according to Gansey’s family’s specifications, so the women of Fox Way took over.
Maura disliked weddings for the same reasons she disliked organized religion and zoos and Halloween—very distasteful, she’d tell anybody who would listen, to force human constraints around things bigger than humanity—but Orla loved planning any kind of gathering, and Jimi would make sure Orla didn’t go overboard, and Calla and Persephone would make sure Jimi didn’t go overboard. It was going to be a beautiful backyard wedding, probably; at the very least it would be eventful.
One warm evening Blue had come into the bathroom in the middle of Maura’s bath. “There are people in here,” Calla said, pointedly, when Blue hoisted herself onto the counter beside her.
“Do I count as ‘a person in here?’” Persephone asked from the windowsill, half in and half out. “Maybe as a half. Or a third. One can’t be sure.”
“Your feet are in my face,” Maura pointed out, sloshing her way towards her wine glass.
“About my father,” Blue began.
“She’s going to look for Artemus no matter what,” Maura told Henry now, folded onto a stool like a small dark crane. “The thing is that I don’t know what she’s going to find.”
“So you would like me to find him first,” Henry said.
“Yes.”
“I thought you were a psychic.”
“Psychic powers are not like in the movies,” Maura said. “I am not Whoopi Goldberg. I can’t just magic up answers to anything I’d like.” She sounded alarmingly like Henry’s mother.
“You’ve looked already?” Henry said, instead of saying, “I think you misunderstood the plot of Ghost (1990),” even though he really did think she had.
“I’ve looked, Calla and Persephone have looked, every psychic this side of the Mississippi has looked. There’s nothing there. I would assume him dead if it weren’t for—well.”
She’d dreamed of a door.
It was beginning to get very old, this particular door, because this same door appeared everywhere since Maura had begun searching for Artemus: its image floating in bowls of grape juice, drawn in sand and bathroom mirror fog, scrawled onto scraps of paper and inscribed in the smoke of burning sage and incense, dreamed, dreamed, dreamed.
Maura described it like this: enormous, heavy, made of thick, wavy glass set into oxidized metal. The glass was translucent and just clear enough that you could see indistinct shapes and light shifting behind it, but no more, and every time dream-Maura reached for the knob she found she could not. “Like wading through wet concrete,” she said. Impossible. Dream-Calla could not touch the door either, nor dream-Persephone, nor Jimi, nor any of the other psychics Maura had asked.
“And you think I can?”
“I don’t know what you can do,” Maura said, “but something tells me you’re the best bet.”
“Something being psychic powers.”
“Something being instinct,” she corrected. “Less specific, but generally it has better returns.” She considered Henry then, like he was a Rubik’s cube and she was vaguely interested in whether he might be solved or not. “Instinct tells me you have a way with doors.”
“Not the greatest superpower,” Henry said. “Somewhere below super strength and above communing with squirrels, I would say.”
Maura ignored this and said, instead, “Well?”
Henry’s father would have given her his hourly rate and directed her to his secretary to hammer out the details of payment. But Henry was his mother’s son. He didn’t have an hourly rate, the closest thing he had to a secretary was a ghost hiding in the bathroom because he was afraid of the rain, and what would Henry do with payment, anyway?
(What would he have done with the time he was investing in finding Artemus? Read botany textbooks. Watch video game walkthroughs. Buy plants and video games. So really there was no loss there either.)
“I will find your mysterious ex and his strange door,” Henry told her, because the term “baby daddy” didn’t feel appropriate in this context. “Probably,” he added, because while he had quite a bit of faith in himself, Maura did not seem like the kind of person who went in for manly bravado and all that.
“Good,” Maura said briskly. “Come over on Friday. Persephone makes a mean pie. Remember what I said about the flowers.”
So this was how Henry found himself with a job.
“I think I’ve accidentally become a PI, bee,” he told a bee that had come in through the bathroom window and was fussing at the not-wisteria plant in the sink. “Henry Cheng, private eye. How does that sound to you?”
Maura had given him the photo and an address: the apartment Artemus had lived in. She said that he had rented it for a long time after she lost track of him, and he’d loved the place. Chances were he’d been there recently. “Any chance I’ll find the man kicking back at home?” Henry had joked; Maura had smiled at him, humorlessly, as if saying she appreciated the effort.
“Be careful,” she said, businesslike, ominous, like someone warning an unruly intern about falling printer paper in the supply closet. “That place was always strange. Watch the doors.”
“So, an entirely normal favor for a neighbor, right?” Henry asked the bee.
“You should have just given her a cup of sugar,” the ghost said dolefully.
“Please,” Henry said, both to him and the bee. “Detective Cheng is on the case.” He put on his coat, very pleased with the Holmes of it all. Usually he would at least do his hair, but the ghost had decided to indefinitely occupy the windowsill next to the mirror, and now it was weird doing anything over there when you knew he was sort of looking over your shoulder, in that intently gloomy way he had. So Henry unlocked the glass front door, leaving bee and ghost behind, and stepped out into the San Francisco fog.
Artemus’ building was one of those tall, old apartments stacked one on top of the other—the kinds that had bay windows and were often painted pastel for some reason—balanced on the edge of Nob Hill on a forty-five degree slope. The whole thing was very blue; according to Maura, Artemus had lived (still lived?) on the second floor. Henry tried to peek, but all the curtains were drawn.
The buzzer featured three buttons, one for each floor; little paper labels, half eroded by wind and rain and time, declared that D. ALLEN lived on the first level and a mysterious G.G. on the third. The label for the second floor was left blank. Henry pressed the button and waited.
There was a narrow alley on one side of the building, he noted—containing a single noxious Dumpster and a bunch of lilies that had once been white but were now concrete-colored, still in their plastic sleeve; whoever had thrown them out had missed the trash bin—over which a rusty fire escape hovered, ominously, thundercloud-like. Henry pressed the buzzer again, longer.
It did not seem that Artemus was going to answer his door anytime soon. This would require more sleuthing. Henry deliberated for a moment and then pressed the button marked D. ALLEN.
“Who is it,” the intercom said a moment later.
“Hello hello,” Henry told the button. He had never quite gotten the hang of buzzer etiquette. “My name is Henry Cheng and I am looking for your neighbor Artemus. Also,” he added, on second thought, “this is not a prank and I do not have a criminal record.”
A long, staticky silence. Henry should not have said that last bit. He saw that now.
“Don’t move,” the person said, and the intercom clicked off.
“Um. Okay.” He put his hands in his pockets and waited.
If Maura Sargent was a dark crane, compact and self-contained and gracelessly athletic, the man who came to the door was a different sort of crane—long-limbed, sharp-edged, waiting patiently for its prey to surface, his sepia face bisected by the chain on the door, still fastened. Perhaps more like an ibis; at the very least, like an ibis, this man was uncomfortably sharp-looking. Henry liked this kind of bird less.
“Hello,” he said again.
“Well?” the bird man said.
“Do you have an upstairs neighbor named Artemus?”
“Why should I tell you?”
It was a good point. Henry considered. “You could help a young girl find her father?” Young was a relative term, he decided. He was not exactly sure how old Blue Sargent was, but she couldn’t be older than thirty. She would definitely be considered young by somebody, even perhaps this man, whose age was indeterminate but was at least above forty, so Henry was not really being misleading.
The bird man considered and then shut the door on him.
“Fair,” Henry remarked.
The door opened again, wider; the man had unhooked its chain. “Come in,” the crane man said.
The apartment was small and old, in the way of small old city apartments, and alarmingly empty—blank walls, sparse utilitarian furniture, more like a pre-furnished rental than the deliberate minimalism of a Sunset magazine feature. Also, the bird man wore his shoes in the house. Terrifying.
In the kitchen, Henry was promptly seated at a table and handed a glass of water. The bird man stood against the counter. “Well?” he asked, when it became clear Henry was not going to drink his water.
As briefly as he could, Henry explained the disappearance of a man named Artemus and the circumstances which required his reappearance, or at least an explanation of said disappearance. He made sure to play up Blue’s sad fatherless state, embroidering on some made-up details about Artemus perhaps walking his daughter down the aisle in the hopes that the bird man wasn’t as immovable as he seemed.
When he was finished, the bird man considered him for a moment. “What did you say your name was?” His tone was completely flat: no emotion, barely a lift at the end to indicate a question.
“Henry Cheng. Uh, sir.”
“What are you, some kind of private investigator?”
Henry thought about saying yes, just for the drama of it. “Actually, a friend of the family.” The man looked skeptical. “One might even call me part of the family,” he added.
“And you said this is for his daughter?”
“Yes.”
The bird man looked thoughtful. “I rent the apartment upstairs to Artemus,” he said finally. “He hadn’t lived here for a long time, but he came back into town around a year ago and took the same unit he used to occupy.”
A lead! “Have you seen him recently?” Henry asked.
“He puts his rent payments under my door,” the bird man said. “I haven’t seen him for a couple months, now that I think about it.” He frowned at the window and then, abruptly, detached himself from the counter. “Come with me,” he said, and left.
The staircase that lurched up through the building, like the building itself, was old, and it complained loudly and at length as Henry followed the bird man up. The air was improbably warm in here, compared to the bluster of a San Francisco fall outside; Italian opera wailed faintly somewhere above their heads, and Henry kept catching motion in the corner of his eye, though when he turned there was never anything there.
Unlike the rest of the building, which—while clearly pre-war—was fairly spartan, the door to the second floor apartment was heavy and dark and elaborately carved: flying doves, an enormous tree with a twisted trunk, a flaring sun and a fingernail clipping of a crescent moon tangled in its uppermost branches. The bird man knocked. “Artemus?”
No response.
“What’s his last name?” Henry asked suddenly. He probably didn’t need it for his investigation—there probably weren’t many people running around the city named Artemus—but he had just realized that he hadn’t even asked Maura about it.
The bird man gave him a look that probably meant, I might be reluctantly helping you knock on my tenant’s door for the sake of his abandoned daughter but I refuse to give you any personal information about him, you young tall-haired whippersnapper. Or at least that was how Henry was going to interpret it. (He’d checked out his hair in a Starbucks window on the way here, and it was nice and tall today, despite the fact that his bathroom had been annexed by a ghost.) “Birth date? Mother’s maiden name? Social Security number?” Henry tried, just to be sure. The bird man did not even grace these questions with a look and returned to knocking. Henry shrugged.
It was becoming evident that this Artemus man—last name unknown, possibly in possession of a Social Security number, birth date, and/or mother—was not in the habit of answering doors. Henry made a mental note of it.
Eventually the bird man sighed and fished out a set of keys. “Don’t touch anything,” he told Henry flatly. The click of the key in the lock echoed in the small space. They went in.
The first thing Henry noticed was a mountain of mail that was almost waist height, and Henry was not a short man, no matter how hard his genes had tried. He whistled under his breath and nudged at a coupon book with his shoe. “I see our man is into indoor composting,” he remarked.
Artemus’ apartment was a funhouse mirror reflection of the bird man’s: less eerily stark, a little more lived-in. It wasn’t cluttered nor lavishly furnished, but there were a few pictures hanging on the wall, at least, mostly abstract art that made Henry’s head hurt. A pack of cigarettes lay open on a side table, as if their owner had just stepped out of the room; there was a rotting orange on a plate in the kitchen sink that made the whole place smell overripe and sickly sweet.
“Any dead bodies?” Henry called, running a finger through the film of dust that coated the stovetop. The soles of his extremely ugly and eyewateringly expensive sneakers stuck a little to the linoleum every time he lifted his feet; they made a sound like scrick, scrick, far too loud in the quiet flat. “Hello?” Nothing. “Uh, Mr. Allen?”
There wasn’t a real hallway, just a little rectangle of floor that abutted two doors, both ajar. Henry approached—scrick, scrick—and stood there for a second trying to remember a Robert Frost poem. “Hello?”
Just then there was a muffled sound behind the door on the right, which was just open enough to display a thin sliver of the room beyond: blank wall and shitty carpet. It gave Henry the illogical but overbearing feeling that there was someone just beyond that door, waiting. He dug his fingernails into his palm, hard, and thought, inexplicably, of Maura Sargent’s dream and her solemn face when she had called Henry her best bet.
There was another sound behind the door, a muffled movement.
Henry reached for it.
In the next moment the other door opened, the left-hand one. It admitted the bird man, who was saying, abruptly, “There’s nothing here.”
“Nothing?” Henry took his hand back, slowly.
“It looks like Artemus hasn’t been living here for—” He broke off suddenly and turned, sharp. The door he had just come through was swinging, slowly, as if guided by an unseen hand, until it came to a stop halfway. Just open enough to show a thin sliver of the room beyond. Blank wall, shitty carpet.
Steadily, in a manner almost dreamlike, the bird man reached out and pushed the door fully open again, then let go. He and Henry stood silently as it swung halfway shut, completely without sound.
There’s someone behind that door, Henry’s mind insisted, even though he’d seen evidence to the contrary five seconds ago. There’s someone there. Open it. Open it.
“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” he said, finally, “but have you ever considered the possibility that there might, hypothetically, be a ghost in your building?”
“We’re on a hill,” said the bird man. “The doors were probably just put in wrong.” But his gaze was still fixed on the door, mockingly half-open.
Henry reached for the door to the right. It swung open obediently enough, as if it were saying, All right, all right, I’m not hiding anything—here, see for yourself, just an empty bedroom, nothing out of the ordinary here, promise. And the moment Henry let go, it placidly slid halfway closed, mirroring its twin, opposite. Thin slice of blank wall and shitty carpet.
“We shouldn’t be here,” the bird man said.
“That is the smartest thing anyone has said to me all day,” Henry said.
And then the two of them idiomatically blew that joint.
“Doors,” the ghost said later that night for the seventh time. He had emerged from the bathroom sometime after Henry’s return and had now taken up lurking by the radiator, which was just as unnerving but much less inconvenient, both for Henry’s vanity—he now had full unrestricted access to the mirror—and for his bodily functions. “The doors scared you.”
“I totally did not say that,” Henry said, through a mouthful of noodles that had probably had a taste before he’d drowned them in sriracha but now just tasted kind of like heat.
“You did say that,” his fancy aerodynamic cell phone said, accusingly. The voice on speakerphone was Ji-hye, the youngest and least annoying of Henry’s sisters; she had earned the latter title by being only slightly less annoying than the rest. “You said it freaked you out. They’re synonyms.”
Henry was their mother’s son, but Ji-hye was indisputably their father’s daughter—clever, sharp, the kind of person who owned every room she stepped into simply by nature of being in it. She even looked just like him: tall, broad-shouldered, a serious line of a mouth that could turn amused or mocking or sweet in an instant, where Henry and their mother were brown-skinned, wild-haired, with eyebrows like a cartoon supervillain’s.
“Yeah, they’re synonyms,” the ghost said, singsong. Henry got the vague feeling that he was being mocked.
“Who are you again?” Ji-hye said, for the third time.
The ghost murmured something to himself and drifted off to peer at the money tree, like he was busy. Henry sighed. “He’s the ghost that came with the florist shop. I already told you this.”
“Hmm. Do ghosts have gender?”
“That’s a good point,” Henry said, and, addressing the ghost, asked, “Do they?”
“We can,” the ghost said, unhelpfully. “Also, that’s really gross.” He cast a disparaging look at Henry’s dinner.
“Oh, how rude of me. Did you want some? Do ghosts eat?”
The ghost said something that began with “Of course not, we…” and then trailed off into an incomprehensible mumble.
“You should really treat your undead friends with more respect,” Ji-hye said, cheerily. “It’s a matter of cultural sensitivity.”
“I’m going to demote you on the sister list,” Henry warned her. “Is this joke worth the loss of your title as Sister I Hate the Least?” (He really did have a list. It was an Excel spreadsheet that was updated biweekly.)
“I am very much dead,” the ghost said, sounding thoroughly offended. “It’s not polite to call me things.” He had now disappeared into a stand of smallish potted trees—well, so Henry assumed; he was not sure if the ghost actually existed on this plane or could pop in and out at will. So he only assumed the ghost was in the trees and not, say, in South Africa, or on Mars, or in whatever immaterial world an immaterial ghost might live in when he wasn’t colonizing your bathroom.
“So,” Ji-hye said, “what are you going to do next? You’re, like, a detective now. You can’t just go back to not-Whoopi Goldberg psychic lady and tell her, Hey, sorry, I tried to find your man but he had creepy doors and I got out of there!”
“She has a point,” the ghost said, sounding eerily disembodied.
“Thank you, dead boy,” Ji-hye said.
Henry thought. She was right; it was too soon to go back to Maura. He hadn’t found anything, really, just evidence that Artemus was either staying somewhere else or had skipped town—but he couldn’t have, because he was still slipping rent checks under the bird man’s door. And it was pretty unlikely that someone else was doing that for him; Henry reminded himself of Occam’s razor. Stick to the simplest explanation.
So what did he know? He knew that Artemus had to be somewhere nearby, and that he probably had some reason to continue paying rent on an apartment he wasn’t actually inhabiting, and that he had some very fucked up doors.
Oh . “Doors!” Henry said, springing to his feet. “The doors!”
“You lost me, man,” Ji-hye said, and the ghost, emerging from the trees, scrunched his eyebrows and said, “Like the band?” He’d seemingly forgotten their earlier conversation; Henry had discovered he had a terrible short-term memory. Possibly it was a side effect of being dead.
“No, the doors in Artemus’ apartment,” Henry said, pacing now. “I was too busy being freaked out to think of it earlier—shut up, Ji-hye—but Maura’s dreams and visions were all of a mysterious door. Then I go to our guy’s place and find what?”
“Um. Freaky doors?”
“Yeah, that was my guess too,” the ghost said.
“I think,” Henry said, “that is what you call a connection.”
“Or a coincidence,” Ji-hye offered. Her deadpan tone sounded the exact same as her normal tone and her serious tone and her devil’s-advocate tone, so Henry wasn’t sure which she was using right now.
“Please stop raining on my parade,” he told her, just in case she was being serious. “Min-ji sent me a great video of a cat sneezing last week. She’s really showing some upward mobility on the sister list.”
“Okay, okay, calm down, big man. The doors. It’s a connection and totally not a coincidence. I get you.”
“Could be a metaphor,” the ghost said, dolefully. He was ignored.
“I need to get back into that apartment. Where’s my—” Henry located his coat, flung across a pile of botany textbooks and the mini-fridge he’d purchased to keep fancy fermented tea drinks in. “Ji-hye, I’m going to hang up on you.”
“I was over this conversation five minutes ago anyway,” Ji-hye told him, and hung up on him instead.
“You’re going now?” the ghost said. “It’s pouring.”
It was, indeed, pouring, the kind of rain that made little fast-moving rivers out of the gutters. Even the hardiest of San Franciscans, a group that Henry had found to be extraordinarily hardy, were home tonight, leaving the empty streets to do their best impression of a body of water.
“Then I will put on a hat,” Henry said, and did.
The ghost looked skeptically at the hat and then at the deluge outside, said, “Well, better you than me,” and disappeared again.
“Thank you, ghost, very helpful as always,” Henry said, wrestling with the sticky lock on the front door. As he stepped outside, holding his hat onto his head with one hand, he might have heard the ghost reply, “Not my name,” but he couldn’t be sure, and the wind and the rain swallowed all sound anyway, as suddenly as a radio being unplugged—pop, one moment there, the next gone.
Henry was very much regretting his sartorial decisions by the time he reached Artemus’ apartment, which was a sort of midnight blue in the dim yellowy streetlight. He looked like a drowned rat. He felt like a drowned rat. And the hat had betrayed him; it, like the rest of his clothing, had abandoned its functions immediately and now sat on top of his head impotently, being wet and heavy and, just generally, the opposite of helpful.
Henry is very intelligent but lacks some strategic instincts, a particularly honest report card had said once, and this was, unfortunately, true, at least during moments like these. Here was how the chips had fallen: Henry was dripping, and freezing. It was nearly midnight. And he was standing in front of a building he desperately wanted to enter but had no way in.
Think, you idiot, you wonderful, ridiculous, magical idiot, he told himself.
He and his mother were cut from the same cloth, and she was always reminding him that there was always another option. Seondeok didn’t believe in choices. If someone asked her, Black or white? she’d say, Chartreuse. Aqua. Fucking fuchsia. When God closed a door, you busted open a goddamned window and climbed through it yourself.
A window.
Of course.
Henry waded over to the narrow little alley; lily petals drifted happily past him in their own eddy. The fire escape ladder was rusted, and it took Henry a few undignified hops to pull it down, but eventually something came loose and the thing went careening to the ground. “Good man,” Henry told himself encouragingly. “Now climb.” He cast aside his hat-turned-useless-disc-of-felt and stepped up.
Luckily it was not very far up. Once on the landing it took minimal jimmying with Henry’s library card before the window clasp clicked open and deposited him, along with his own personal puddle, into Artemus’ living room.
The apartment was different at night. It was not very dark—there was both moonlight and streetlight enough that he didn’t need a flashlight—but the shadows were long and misshapen; somehow they did not fit the objects they belonged to. Henry wandered around the main room for a while—noticing an empty flower pot on a windowsill, a coffee cup that had been used as an ashtray, a clay figurine of a fat naked flute-playing man whose head had broken off; the detritus of a lifeless existence, he thought. Someone had inhabited this apartment, but they were not really living; they had perhaps been not-living for a very long time.
And the doors were even worse at night. Henry kept catching movement in his peripherals, but there was never anything there; to an observer he would have looked like he was on drugs, jerking around in futile attempts to catch that flicker in the corner of his eye, and it took him several circuits of the living room to work up the courage to open a door. He picked the left one. Someone there, there’s someone there, his mind insisted as he pushed it open.
There wasn’t, of course. It was just a bedroom, featureless, sparse, smelling of dust. Henry approached the desk that was shoved into a corner. There was something on it, a flash of white among all the colorless nothing. A bit of paper—no, a receipt. Someone had bought peanut butter and printer paper at a Safeway in 2009. “Artemus, you crazy kid,” Henry joked to himself, and was just putting it into his pocket when he heard it: a muffled sound from the next room.
Henry froze, looking at the bedroom door, which was, naturally, half open, or half closed, whichever you prefer. The sound of the rain outside getting louder, just slightly, then returning back to normal. Another sound and all was quiet and still again. His mind was saying, Someone there someone there open the door open open open there’s someone—
Of all things, Henry suddenly thought of Ji-hye’s voice, saying, derisively, Are you man or mouse?
He started toward it, but before he could reach out, it swung open by itself. Slow, soundless. A voice, firm and factual: “I’m armed.”
It wasn’t a warning. The speaker just wanted him to know.
“Very cool,” Henry said. “I am personally more of a pacifist, in terms of ideology as well as in practice, but I want you to know that I completely respect you and your decisions. No judgment here.”
The light flicked on. Maura Sargent stood in the doorway.
No—it wasn’t Maura, but it looked an awful lot like her. This girl was younger, though, near Henry’s age, and smaller; her hair was in short, neat twists, and she was wearing some kind of tracksuit-coverall type thing in a garish shade of green under her raincoat.
“Oh,” she said, and lowered the hot pink switchblade in her hand. “It’s you.”
“I think so,” Henry agreed, still frozen.
The girl stepped all the way into the room. “You’re getting the carpet all wet,” she pointed out, mildly. “Haven’t you ever heard of an umbrella?” She inspected a nearby bookshelf and continued, without waiting for an answer, “I don’t think there’s much in here. Anything in the desk?”
Henry said, “No, not really,” and then, “Listen, I hate to ask, but have we met?”
“Hm. No.” She paused and thought. “Well, depends, really. I did follow you here earlier, and I do know who you are and where you live, but you don’t know anything about me, and this is our first conversation. So maybe you should define ‘met’ a little more clearly, and we can go from there.”
“You followed me here?” Henry asked, and then he took a moment to think: the dark skin and hair and staccato rhythm of speech and the serious, birdlike tilt of her head. “Oh,” he said. “You’re the daughter.”
“My name is Blue,” she said. “It’s kind of rude to talk about people like that.”
“So a ghost has told me many times,” Henry said.
“I didn’t know you’d be here. I only followed you from your place this afternoon, and when you went in I figured I’d have to come back at night and actually get a look around.”
“I’m assuming your mother isn’t aware of this?”
“Oh, no, she probably is,” Blue said breezily. “She finds everything out, sooner or later. But she won’t stop me. Actually, she probably won’t even bring it up. Did you figure out what’s causing that terrible smell?”
“There’s a rotting orange in the kitchen,” Henry said automatically, then added, “I am very confused.”
Now she actually looked at him. “Isn’t it obvious? You’re going to help me look for Artemus.”
“Ah.” He blinked and then, ridiculously, found a smile rising from the back of his throat. “Well, if that’s all. You are very decisive. Have you ever thought about going into public office?”
“I don’t think our current system can be destroyed or even substantially changed by legislation. And I’m allergic to pantsuits. But thank you for the suggestion.” She pulled her hood over her head. “Have you eaten?”
“It’s one in the morning,” Henry said. Blue just looked at him, as if waiting for the point. “I ate, but I could eat again.”
“Great,” Blue said, and snapped her switchblade shut. “I’m starving. Let’s go.”
Henry grinned. “Yes sir. Lead the way.”
They ended up at a Korean grocery-slash-restaurant-slash-cell-phone-repair-shop that was miraculously open and manned by a very surly teenage girl. Henry ordered a lot of things, as it turned out, breaking into second-floor apartments in the middle of the night when it was pouring rain worked up an appetite—dumplings, buns, galbi, extra banchan. The girl gave him dark looks and wrote down his order with more force than necessary; Henry beamed back and asked if the japchae could be made without meat, because Blue was a vegetarian. Meanwhile Blue fell into passionate love with a mung bean sprout dish thing: “It’s like heaven,” she said, stealing Henry’s portion. “Nondenominational heaven. In my mouth.”
“What about atheists?” Henry asked.
“Fine, secular heaven. I don’t know what secular heaven would be, but it would involve this dish. I’m never going to eat anything else. When I get old and lose all my teeth I want you to blend it like a smoothie and feed it to me through a straw.”
“Calm down, you’re scaring the locals,” Henry told her, and then laughed, because they were in a Korean restaurant and so that was funny.
Their booth was against the glass storefront, softly neon-lit; outside the rain came down in sheets, but inside it was warm and smelled like incense and sesame oil and barley. “Okay,” Blue said, through a mouthful of noodles. “We should strategize.”
“Excellent idea, General.”
“So I definitely got the impression that Artemus lived there a while ago but hasn’t for some time now.”
“As did I. But the landlord says he’s still paying rent.”
“Oh, good catch, Veronica Mars.”
“Thank you, I try.”
“Do you think—I mean, Artemus has to be paying rent for a reason, right?”
“I assume so. But then again, I also assumed that people paid for apartments in order to live in them, so maybe I should get out of the business of assumptions.”
Blue chewed, thoughtfully, then swallowed and said decisively, “We should keep an eye on the apartment. That’s our best lead, and we still haven’t inspected it thoroughly—there could be other stuff in there that could help, or something.”
Henry nodded. “Clues,” he said sagely. “Or maybe someone killed him as a sacrifice to a dark god and is paying his rent to cover their tracks.”
“That is always a possibility,” Blue acknowledged. “Maybe he turned into a leprechaun and disappeared at the end of the rainbow.”
“True,” Henry said. “As Ellie Goulding once said, anything could happen.”
The girl behind the counter was watching a Matyas Fust music video, and the tinny sounds of pretentious pop music drifted through the shop. Henry reached for some more mandu and thought about how to ask this question. “Why now?” he said, finally.
He didn’t specify, but Blue seemed to understand. She put her chin on her hand and thought. “It’s not because I want something from him,” she said eventually. “I am—I mean, I don’t think that I am less of a person for not having known him, or for growing up without a father. I don’t want him to come to the wedding; I don’t even know if I want to meet him. But—I love Gansey, and before we combine our lives, I want to know that we can give each other our whole selves, all of us, everything.” She stopped. Henry thought it was possible that this was the first time she had articulated this to herself. “And I thought that I knew myself, that I could say that I am everything I need to be. But I’ve been thinking about how there’s this huge black hole in my life, and it made me wonder if maybe there was something I was missing.”
“You just want to know,” Henry said.
“Yes. Exactly. I want to know.”
It wasn’t a very solid reason, as far as reasons go. It certainly wasn’t the neat little story Henry had presented to Mr. Allen.
But Henry was not really a fan of neat little stories. He liked big weird ones a lot more.
“Then of course I will help you,” he said. “But I don’t think you’re going to get a satisfying answer.”
“No,” Blue agreed. “No, I don’t think so either.” She looked at him, a little more closely. “What’s your dad like?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know,” Henry said, breezily. “Maybe contact Forbes with that question. I’m sure they’d have a better answer.”
“Ah,” Blue said. “I see. Well, thank you.”
“Of course. Who would Veronica Mars be without a mystery to solve?”
“Wow, you’re really leaning into that role, aren’t you.”
“I think we have a lot in common.”
“Uh huh,” Blue began, then saw something sitting beside their check. “Fortune cookies! I thought those were Chinese. No, wait, don’t laugh at me—”
“Americans,” Henry said, disapprovingly.
“Whatever.” She threw a cookie at him. “What’s my fortune, Veronica?”
Henry broke it open. “It says—” He grinned, and then laughed again. “It says, when God closes a door, he opens a window.”
“You’re joking,” Blue said, and Henry said, “I don’t know who opened a window tonight, but I don’t think it was God,” and they laughed until the girl behind the counter escalated her disapproval into a full-on glare.
“I am going to frame this and put it on my wall,” Henry said, tucking the slip of paper into his pocket for safekeeping. As he did, he felt something else crinkle; he fished it out. The old receipt, slightly damp but intact.
“What’s that?”
“Old receipt I found on Artemus’ desk. He bought peanut butter and printer paper in 2009, in case you were wonder—” He stopped.
“What?” Blue asked.
“There’s something written on the back.” Henry smoothed the receipt onto the Formica between their greasily empty Styrofoam containers. Black ink, a hurried, cramped scrawl, in all caps.
NONE OF THIS IS REAL.