Oh and her mom had the same eyes and the same California skin that didn’t fit with the cloud-covered drizzle of the northwest. She went so far as to open the car door for Oh and then step in before her and sit down next to Milo.
“This a taxi?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. He just likes sitting in the backseat. He’s funny that way,” Milo said.
“Mm-hmmmm,” she continued, running the palm of her hand along the cracked dashboard of Milo’s car. She glanced at me and Milo, inspected the Taco Bell wrappers on the floor beneath her feet, and checked how much gas Milo had in the tank while Oh stood outside looking embarrassed.
Ms. James’s gaze settled on me in the backseat, and I knew by the look on her face that I was dead if anything happened to her daughter. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
It was the last thing she said, followed by a narrow-eyed look that more than matched the blistering stare of her daughter. We would do something reckless at our own peril.
Oh got in, exasperated, and we waved to her mom as Milo pulled away from the curb.
“You weren’t kidding about her,” said Milo.
“Yeah, well, we’ve been through a lot together. She’s protective.”
I wanted to lay into her about her wild behavior earlier in the day, but when she turned to look at me, I couldn’t do it. Her simmering smile disarmed me, and we were already downtown. Five or six blocks and we’d be at the loft. Better to wait until we were safely tucked away inside Coffin Books.
“Looks like my dad is still here,” Milo said. We’d entered Coffin Books and closed the door behind us, hearing someone moving around in the private office where we couldn’t see.
“How do you know it’s him?” asked Oh. “It could be anyone. Maybe it’s an ax murderer.”
“He does keep axes in there,” said Milo. “And hammers.”
“Stop that,” said Oh.
Mr. Coffin stepped into the main part of the store, casting blurry shadows on the shelves of books. His silhouette looked like a bigger, slightly stooped version of Milo.
“Hey, Dad!” yelled Milo.
At the sound of Milo’s voice, Mr. Coffin practically dove back into his office like a startled cat. Some sort of “Jeez! What the!” came out of his mouth and then, seeing it was us, he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Thanks for the warning.” He looked like a barrel-chested gorilla in the shadowy light, all two hundred stocky pounds of him on the approach.
“ ‘Hey, Dad’ seemed to cover it,” said Milo.
Mr. Coffin took on a different appearance as he emerged from the darkened recesses of the bookstore. He had black hair, balding on top, and a five o’clock shadow that made you almost positive his back was covered with fur. I liked Mr. Coffin—a very friendly guy—but I kept thinking, Milo, this is your future. You better get married quick.
“You finished picking on your old man?” asked Mr. Coffin.
“Maybe.”
Mr. Coffin glanced past me, and Oh reached out her hand, stepping forward.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Coffin. I love your store. And your unusual name.”
Mr. Coffin shook her hand pleasantly.
“Bill’s not that unusual, but thank you.”
“Very funny, Dad.”
Mr. Coffin looked at Milo with a raised eyebrow that said, What? I’m not charming enough for your friends?
“It’s a long story, the last name.”
“She knows,” said Milo. “Already got her up to speed.”
Mr. Coffin shrugged, but looked like he wished he could have told Oh the story of his last name himself. Then he turned his attention to me.
“Holding up?”
I frowned, shrugged. “Yeah, holding up.”
He looked at Oh and Milo.
“You two go ahead. Couple new arrivals I want to show Jacob, strictly sci-fi super fan stuff.” Mr. Coffin had a gift for hunting down obscure and out-of-print stuff and totally got off on sharing his latest finds.
Milo was more than happy to be free of his dad’s presence and moved off toward the loft with Oh trailing behind.
“It was nice to finally meet you,” said Oh, looking back as she walked away.
“Have a look around. First book’s on me.” Mr. Coffin really knew how to charm the new customers.
“He got the story of our name wrong, I’m sure of it,” he then mumbled.
“What does it matter?” I asked.
“A guy changes his last name, it’s a big deal.”
The story wasn’t actually all that complicated. It would be hard for Milo to screw it up. Bill Coffin was William Coflyn, but when they got into the scary book business, he named the store and dropped the L. Cofyn wasn’t quite right, but Coffin was perfect. He didn’t get out that much, so I’m not sure that many people even knew he’d ever changed it.
“I killed the name, you know?” he said.
“Huh?”
“I killed it. Only child and my folks are both dead. I was the last Coflyn.”
This was getting awkward.
“Is there something you wanted to show me, Mr. C?”
Mr. Coffin pulled me into the sci-fi section, down a narrow row where it was darker and the sound of our voices was crushed by a million dense and dusty pages. He rubbed the stubble on his chin, a nervous habit, but his eccentricities didn’t really bother me.
“It was a nice funeral.” Mr. Coffin coughed. “I mean, as nice as something like that can be.”
“Thank you for being there. He’d have appreciated that.”
It was the last time we’d seen each other, and we hadn’t talked much at the graveyard service.
“Not a lot of folks at the funeral,” said Mr. Coffin. “That surprise you at all?”
I didn’t know what to say. “I guess not. He was a private person, kind of like you.”
Mr. Coffin nodded his agreement, leaned a hand against a row of paperbacks.
“Listen, Jacob, I feel I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
“About what?”
He looked toward the loft, making sure we were alone, I guess.
“I knew Mr. Fielding for a while, you know that, right?”
“Sure I know. So what?”
“Did he tell you anything about the work I did for him? Ever mention that?”
“You mean like finding books and stuff? He mentioned it once in a while.”
“I looked for more than just books.”
We both heard Milo yelling at me from the loft to get my butt up there. Mr. Coffin put his hand on my shoulder, trying to hold my attention a little longer.
“Um… okay.” I was starting to feel uncomfortable again. “What else did you look for?”
“Look, Jacob, there’s a certain kind of person I tend to attract. Collectors, people with a lot of interest in, you know…” He waved his hand over the store. “All this kind of stuff.”
I couldn’t see much from the corner where we stood, but I knew what he meant: strange theater props and posters, and the even more bizarre stuff hidden in the Coffin basement.
“And…?”
“And Mr. Fielding was the most curious guy I ever met. Deep pockets, too. Always looking for very specific kinds of items from certain dates, and not always books.”
I had always known the two of them talked. Even when I’d met Milo at the store the first time, before Holy Cross, Mr. Fielding and Mr. Coffin had hunkered down together. I’d never given it a second thought, figuring they were just chatting about books they were reading.
“He didn’t want me saying anything to you or anyone else,” said Mr. Coffin.
“Jacob! Get your sorry ass up here!” Milo yelled.
“Just start without me,” I yelled back. “Almost done.”
“Whatever,” a softer but more irritated Milo answered.
“What are you not telling me?” I asked Mr. Coffin.
He hesitated, leaning in a little closer. “Some of the things I found for him? They were k
ind of, I don’t know, unusual, I guess.”
“How do you mean?”
“Notes and drawings and artifacts relating to magicians, props for tricks that were ultimately too dangerous or didn’t work like they were supposed to, stuff that never saw the light of day. Things that circulate in a very small circle of collectors.”
I was beginning to have a feeling about where some of these things might be and even what many of them were, but I didn’t let on.
“There’s one item I found that he wouldn’t let me keep for him,” said Mr. Coffin. “Paid me a lot of money for finding it. I’ll be damned if I ever got to read it myself.”
“A book?” I asked.
“Not sure, maybe. Or possibly a story. Either way it was in a locked box and I didn’t have a key. I would have busted it open, but then Mr. Fielding wouldn’t have paid me. He made that pretty clear.”
I was starting to understand Mr. Coffin had motivations of his own.
“You want it back, and you think I know where it is. Is that it?” I asked.
“No. I don’t want to keep it. I just want to see what was inside.”
“Jacob! Get—your—ass—UP HERE!”
“They can’t do the homework without me,” I lied. “Let me think about this, okay? Maybe I can figure out where he put this box.”
I started for the loft and Mr. Coffin grabbed my arm so hard that it scared me.
“That priest knows some things,” he said. “He might know where to find it.”
I pulled my arm free and started walking away. Father Tim? The connections were starting to fire in my head. Father Tim, Mr. Coffin, Mr. Fielding.
I was beginning to see that a lot had already been happening before I came on the scene.
“All I’m saying is what if our timing had been off? We’d be driving to your funeral.”
I arrived in the loft to find Milo and Oh fighting. Mr. Coffin had already yelled up to us, leaving the bookstore and locking up on his way out. We were alone, the three of us, free to talk in peace.
“At least I didn’t smash my thumb.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“No, not even a little bit. This whole thing is getting way out of hand. You could have been killed, Oh. How do you think that makes us feel?”
“Milo is right,” I added, Oh’s eyes darting between the two of us.
“I told you it was a mistake. I’m not going to do it again.”
“Why do I find that hard to believe?” I asked. My encounter with Mr. Coffin had put me in a defensive mood.
“Are you saying you don’t trust me?”
“No… yes… I guess I don’t know. The thing with Ethan and Boone was scary. The two of them together are a time bomb waiting to go off. They’re curious and they’re jerks. Not a good combo.”
“Then don’t give it to me anymore. I don’t need it.”
“Cool it, you two,” said Milo. “I can’t handle any more broken furniture in this place. My mom already gave me a load of grief over that lamp.”
“None of this matters, you guys,” Oh said. “Don’t you see? We’ve got something amazing and now we know the rules that govern it.”
This was becoming a habit of Oh’s: taking ownership of something that was mine.
“And better yet, I don’t think this power has a Kryptonite. At least I can’t find one.”
“We haven’t tried drowning,” I said.
“That’s not exactly true,” said Oh, a little embarrassed.
“You did not,” said Milo, staring her down until he caught her eye and knew she was telling the truth. “Unbelievable. You’re out of control. Totally out of control.”
I just shook my head, dumbfounded.
“It wasn’t even dangerous. I did it in the kitchen at home.”
Oh explained that she’d never gone looking for a hammer. Instead she had filled the sink with water and dunked her head all the way under.
“I sucked in a deep breath while I was under and figured if it didn’t work the worst thing that would happen would be a lot of coughing and spitting. But nothing happened. I don’t know if I was breathing water or not. I thought I was, but maybe it was like a dream or something. All I know is I stayed under trying to breathe for at least a couple of minutes and nothing happened.”
“You see? There it is again,” I complained bitterly. “What if I had taken it away when you were blissfully trying to breathe water? What then?”
“But you didn’t.” Her voice was at once pleading and apologetic. “I’m sorry, Jacob. I really am. I’m not going to do anything like that again. We don’t need to take any more unnecessary risks, honest.”
“We didn’t need to take the ones we’ve already taken,” I corrected. “This whole thing is leading nowhere good, I can tell you that.” I sounded like someone’s father. But everything about my life felt dangerous and out of control.
We sat in silence. I was pushing Oh away. I could see it in the way her shoulders slumped and she retreated to her pink pad, making notes as she so often did. I thought about the Pandora’s box I’d opened up by simply writing three words on Oh’s pink cast.
But it would take a lot more than my scolding for Oh to change her mind. She stood up and laid out a plan. “We know you can give the power of protection to whomever you want, whenever you want. We know it’s basically bulletproof.”
I had the feeling then that she’d rushed through more tests she wasn’t telling us involving guns and knives and arsenic, but I didn’t ask, and she didn’t elaborate.
Instead she pulled what looked like a complicated walkie-talkie out of her bag and turned it on. The sound of static filled the loft as she set it on the table between us, its oblong screen glowing orange.
“We’re obligated to do some good,” said Oh. “We have to.”
“What is that thing?” I asked. Something about the object on the table made me nervous.
“It’s a police scanner. I got it at Larry’s.”
“Who’s Larry?” I said, setting aside for a second that we were probably doing something illegal.
“Larry’s Telecom in West Salem. It’s no big deal,” said Oh. “Lots of people have them. It’s so you can listen in on what’s going on in the underbelly of our fine city. Cool, huh?”
The radio sparked to life with the sound of two voices. One sounded like a dispatcher, the other a police officer. They were talking about a domestic disturbance at a house on Franklin Street.
“Oh, you can’t be serious about this,” I said.
“Of course I’m serious! How could I not be? You’ve got an incredible gift and you have to share it. What’s not to be serious about?”
“You want me to break up domestic disputes? In case it’s not obvious, I don’t have any ninja skills.”
Oh didn’t find my joke humorous. “You’re always making light of things, Jacob. Who knows how long this is going to last or how many people you could save? Last night I listened to that thing in bed for hours. It was mostly accidents or heart attacks, not crimes, but there was plenty of mayhem going on while you slept.”
“This is actually starting to sound pretty cool,” said Milo.
“You’re both out of your minds!” I yelled. “Forget it, forget the whole thing. And while you’re at it, forget I ever found out about the diamond or the argyle or whatever you want to call it. I’m not doing this anymore.”
I was so frustrated I wanted to throw myself out of the loft, and being unkillable, I went ahead and did it. I got out of my chair and dove right off the edge toward the floor. It would have been better if I hadn’t hit the table full of books and broken one of the legs off, but either way, it was just what the doctor ordered.
“You okay down there?” asked Oh.
“Stop breaking stuff, man!” said Milo. “You’re killing me!”
They both came down the ladder and found me sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by books that had fall
en off the small table. Oh put her hand on my back and made little circles, which was electrifying right down to my toes.
“Lemme fix this table,” said Milo. He was monkeying around behind us trying to fit the busted leg back into its slot.
“I know it’s scary and weird,” Oh said quietly, “but we can’t do nothing, Jacob. We can’t.”
“Why not?”
I was loaded with confusion, but Oh’s amazing hand on my back was helping me feel better.
“Do you want to know why we moved here?” she asked. It felt like Oh was switching tactics, searching for a way to convince me of her point of view.
I looked in her eyes, searching for what kind of answer she might give to her own question.
“My mom’s boyfriend went a little haywire after he lost his job. They fought all the time.”
“Dude, that sucks,” said Milo.
“Sorry,” I added, not knowing what else to say. It wasn’t new territory for me.
“He never touched us, but my mom had a bad feeling after a while. Too much yelling and a couple of things got thrown across the room. It wasn’t like her to put up with that kind of thing for very long. We packed up in the middle of the night while he was passed out in front of the TV,” said Oh.
She paused, took her hand off my back, and ran it across the words I’d written on her cast. “I never felt safe at home. But I do now.”
I could imagine myself stepping into Oh’s old house to the sound of yelling. I could see the bloodshot eyes of a drunk man in jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. He’d be good-looking in all the wrong ways, trying to look younger than he really was. He’d see me enter the front door and yell some profanity at me about what was I doing in his house and who did I think I was. He would push me out the door, thinking I was a kid, but I would resist. He’d punch me, which would hurt his hand but not my face. He’d get uncontrollably angry and grab an empty beer bottle by its neck, raising it to clobber me…
“This is getting super heavy,” said Milo, backpedaling toward the wall where he pretended to peruse the mystery books.
“How can we know what we have and do nothing?” Oh asked in a guarded whisper. “Maybe you can, but I can’t.”
I imagined the same scene at Oh’s old house with her in it instead of me, vulnerable, in the kind of trouble no teenager deserved.