3. Chapter Three

Chapter Three

" S o, how was your lesson last night with your new pupil?" Grandpa asked while slicing a banana into his bowl of wheat flakes cereal.

I'd just rolled out of bed, still in my flannel sleep pants and gray tee, and was not in the least caffeinated enough to talk Phil Kestrel.

"He was fine," I mumbled, moving to the kettle to make tea. "His tones are terrible."

Grandpa shrugged before pouring some skim milk on his cereal. "Most Americans struggle. He has shine. He'll do well."

Shine meaning he was shiny, bright, and glowing. Not the Stephen King variety. That was me. Yay, Archie.

"Maybe I'm still confused about how he can just leap from course to course when it's already October." I poured hot water into my favorite yellow mug and watched the tea begin to color the water, tiny bits of flotsam floating out of the infuser.

"Maybe because he is a star athlete?"

"Probably," I said with a sigh. Seemed the jocks could get away with anything. Imagine the uproar if a dweeb commoner tried to switch courses after the first few weeks? Sure, it could be done, but it was frowned upon, heavily, especially by Professor Hayashi, who usually insisted a student be fluent in an Asian language as a prerequisite to taking her class. Now that I thought about it, Phil had never mentioned his major. I couldn't imagine it was something that would require knowing a foreign language, such as international diplomacy. He was affable enough, sure, and his dad was a senator he'd mentioned, so maybe he was looking to get into some sort of governmental work in a country that spoke Mandarin. There were several. Having money and prestige opened lots of doors.

"Seems the jocks get all the breaks," I grumbled.

Grandpa started to reply but was interrupted by the thud of the Liverswell Ledger arriving. The paper hit the front window with a thunk. My grandfather cussed in Chinese. I rose to fetch the weekly paper from the fire escape. When I flung open the window, there was no sign of the kid who delivered the skinny newspaper. Leaning out, I plucked the paper from where it had landed in the oregano. Closing the window soundly, I padded back to the table and placed the now herbal-infused paper next to Grandpa.

"His aim is getting better. He cleared everything but the oregano," I said and sat down to pour some cereal into the bowl that was placed there for me. Grandpa made a sound as he snapped open the paper, his dark eyes scanning the front page as I cut the other half of the banana over my flakes.

"He could just leave it on the stoop," Grandpa said behind the thin front section. News was a rare commodity in our little burg of six thousand and two living souls. "Oh did you see the news about Paul Kilpatrick?"

"No, you have the paper. Can you pass the sugar?" I asked while peeling those gross banana strings off my half of the banana. Grandpa always left them hanging. It was cringe and then some.

He shoved the paper under my nose instead of the sugar. "They say he went missing four days ago while camping out near Lake Killikee." I glanced up from the large headline to see Grandpa staring daggers at me. "This is four men in a year, Archie."

"Grandpa, seriously, every person that leaves this town for greener pastures isn't a victim of Aradia Flores," I replied by rote. "From what I've read, she was a healer falsely accused of witchcraft. Maybe the Kilpatrick guy is gay and got fed up with the small minds around here and just left. Maybe he's in Brazil now getting a wax before heading to the beach in Rio to enjoy a Mai Tai and a slim waiter named Raul." We'd had this discussion at least ten times in the past five years. Yes, people turned up missing. That happened all the time. Yes, the people who disappeared had been wandering the thick woodlands surrounding Lake Killikee. Yes, all who had gone missing had been male, but that did not mean a witchy spirit was lying in wait to pull unsuspecting men to their doom in a cold, dark Connecticut body of water.

"Oh I would wager a month's wages that Aradia had something to do with it," Reggie announced, appearing behind my grandfather in his uniform. Shame he couldn't change out of that blood-stained outfit. I could totally see him in a sleeping gown with a dorky Ebenezer Scrooge nightcap on his head. "She was a raging termagant, according to several reliable sources. The rumors that she was an innocent little flower are grossly untrue."

"And who told you she was a bitch?" I asked over Grandpa tapping his finger on the picture of an older man, probably in his 60s, smiling at the camera without a care in the world.

"Miss Angelica Tewberry. And no, she is not simply a cranky poltergeist stuck in an attic with her sister, Miss Polly Tewberry. Granted, most would grow a touch peevish if one had been locked in an attic while their house burned down around them."

"They were trying to invoke a demon," I reminded our resident redcoat.

"Pish, posh, they were merely toying with things as young girls do at that age."

"Pentagrams, candles, and goat blood are not the typical things girls of twelve years old toy with to occupy their time. You just tend to believe everything they tell you across the alleyway because they insist on saying that you resemble Tom Hiddleston."

I rolled my eyes while Grandpa thundered on in his speech. "It is the duty of those blessed with the spiritual eye to seek out ghosts that seek to harm those who are still living."

"Grandpa, we've been over this. The last time someone went missing near the lake, we went out there and all I got was a migraine from trying to call forth something that obviously isn't haunting that lake."

"She could be," he insisted, glowering at the newspaper as if he could pull some sort of info from the newsprint. It upset him that we didn't do grand things with my gift like many of our ancestors had over the centuries. It was probably much easier to root out water ghosts for the emperor back in 4 BC than it was to poke around a private lake looking for angry specters today. I had no great wish to have my skinny ass filled with buckshot. "Perhaps she is just more active near Halloween night. Many ghosts are, and this year the moon is full! She was drowned on witches' eve. And the men go missing near that date!"

I felt tension creeping up the back of my neck. "Grandpa, I know you think we should be doing amazing things with my gift but things aren't that easy nowadays. I can't just go snooping around town in the dead of night talking to the undead. I'd get locked up for trespassing and then admitted to a ward in the hospital for a mental health examination. I'm sorry. I know you're disappointed, but we're just going to have to learn to accept that we're going to be stuck listening to the undead moan about the lack of male organs in every damn book he reads for the rest of our long, boring, lonely days!" I barked tired onto death—okay that was a poor word choice—tired onto madness of this ongoing litany about my role as a Kee who had the gift.

"I feel that was a very pointed barb aimed at myself and my resemblance to a well-favored thespian. Since you find me so distasteful, I shall remove myself from your presence!" Reggie snapped, flung the sugar bowl to the floor in a pique, and sailed through the wall. Grandpa looked at the mess on the floor.

"Reggie is having a tiff," I explained. All I wanted was some cereal and a cup of tea before I had to open the shop and wait on nobody. Was that asking so damn much?

"I will tiff too if you don't stop hiding away in this shop and do what our family line would wish of you to do," Grandpa barked as he rose to his feet, grabbed his cane, and stalked off as fast as an eighty-six-year-old man with fallen arches could stalk.

I ate my cereal with no sugar and a headline screaming at me to honor my ancestors. What a great way to kick off a Friday. TGIF. Pfft.

***

My Friday night was party central.

If you consider going through old books that need to be sorted into keeper old books or give away to the library old books. And this is the gay agenda the bigots are so against.

Grandpa had gone out to dinner with his friends from the senior center. Mexican. He'll be a Gassy Gus tomorrow. The nook was gradually filling up again. Each armful of dusty tomes that I carried there reminded me of Phil. After about two hours of utter boredom shared with a ghost that was pointedly ignoring me while being blatant about ignoring me, I wiggled into a space between two cardboard boxes filled with unsold women's fiction novels, pulled out my phone, and searched for something I had never searched for before.

Football.

Not that I had anything against the sport. I'd played flag football once when I was around fourteen and tried my hardest to be straight and athletic. It had not gone well. Sport just wasn't my thing. A year later I'd come out, which cemented my fame at Liverswell High School as that weird Asian gay kid.

I knew the game would be telecast on our local cable services, so I just had to find the app, download it, and open it. The game was already in progress, and it looked like the Liverswell Lions were trouncing the Colesville Coots by over twenty points. I found Phil right off on the field. He was one of about ten or so huge men trying to smear the Coots quarterback. Phil broke through the offensive line like a freight train that had jumped the rails. The smaller Coots QB never had a chance of avoiding big number 99 as he crashed into him. The ball popped free from the quarterback's hand as Phil lay on top of him. Ten men jumped into a pileup. Whistles blew. The announcers were extolling Phil's amazing strength and speed. When the mound of muscle was peeled back, the ball was in the arms of one of the Lions. The home crowd went wild.

"Well, this is not your usual online viewing. This is quite rousing, though! Much more enjoyable than the dry British murder mysteries you're so fond of."

I threw Reggie a look as he sat atop a box of books, his snit apparently over. "Why are you talking down British TV? You're British."

" Am I? Lords and crumpets, that's shocking news to me. Here, all this time, I thought I was one of your beloved rebellious upstarts. No wonder Mr. Revere never asked me to ride about the countryside shouting to the simple folk that the Britons were coming."

"Okay, fine, be that way. Just go be that way somewhere else." I hunkered down, trying to block the sarcastic spirit from my phone. He popped into view right beside me, one half of his form on the cushion and one half in an empty box. "That's not what I meant."

"Ooh, I see that Phil Kestrel is on the green. Oh my, those tight white pants do look good on him. So, is this sudden interest in whatever this masculine endeavor is due to your new tutoring student?"

"No. I just wanted to check the score. I like to keep up on…" He was tittering now. "Don't you have somewhere to go? The twins are probably at the window in the Connors' attic looking to spread untruths about a lonely woman who was misunderstood and berated by her community."

His eyes narrowed, making his long thin nose look more like a beak than normal. I wasn't sure how the Tewberry girls even knew who Tom Hiddleston was—probably spying on what the Connor family boys watched online—but Reggie and Tom were not that similar. Aside from dark hair and being from the United Kingdom. I suspected those two poltergeists were trying to wheedle Reggie into something dark and dangerous.

"No, Archimedes, I do not have anywhere else to go."

Oh. Right. "Sorry," I softly apologized. "Why don't we watch something else?"

"No, no, this is fine. I've not seen so much firm young male flesh since I paid a rather notorious molly house in Southwark a visit the day before we sailed for the colonies. Did I ever tell you about the triplets that worked there? Identical they were, right down to the moles on their arse cheek. Left one if memory serves…"

Thankfully, he drifted off in his memories of male prostitutes from a brothel by the Thames, leaving me to openly admire Phil's rump. Reggie was right. Those white pants were downright sinful. As were Phil's bright blue eyes, engaging smile, and sincerity. I had no idea how to deal with the attraction I was feeling toward him. He and I were on opposite sides of the social spectrum, yet he seemed to want to be friendly. Maybe he was just that rarity. A gorgeous man who didn't let his looks poison his personality. Phil was like a white peacock or a Ming dynasty vase or an "Amazing Fantasy 15" comic book. Something unique. Something that was probably as straight as Michael Bay movies.

I exited out of the app and tossed my phone aside. Reggie blinked at me, his walk down memory lane interrupted by the edge of my phone bouncing off the box he was partly occupying.

"Time to get back to work," I stated as I pushed to my feet. "These donations won't fly into the boxes all by themselves." I pointedly looked at Reg.

"Oh my gods, fine . I'll help, but I expect to be well compensated for my labors. I'd like to view a cinema on your mobile device after we are done for the night."

"Okay, yeah. What do you want to watch?"

"Anything with my twin in it."

I was tempted to point out that he and Mr. Hiddleston were not twins, not even close, but seeing how I was sorting books and conversing with a ghost on a Friday night, I opted not to comment. The last thing I wanted was to be sorting books alone.

Besides, what was one more viewing of Avengers after you had watched it hundreds of times? Sue me. Thor was hotter than Chinese mustard and I had a thing for beefy blonds, it seemed.