From a certain angle, Jay had a slight resemblance to Al Pacino, if Pacino was about thirty-five years old and Asian. He played it up with a penchant for wearing black, and on weekends, he sometimes even sported a pin-striped suit.
“Are those your folks?” I asked, with a nod to a well-dressed older couple whose table was heaped with far more food than I could imagine them eating. It looked as if the entire menu had been brought out, though the man and woman were rail thin.
“Yep,” Jay said. “And you know what? Now that Forbidden City is a big success, my father claims my career switch was originally his idea.”
As the only son of immigrants, Jay had followed his parents’ prodding and gone to medical school.
He’d hated every minute of it, and dropped out, following his dream of running a restaurant. Originally, his parents hadn’t been thrilled.
“How’s the food truck doing?” I asked as Jay handed out menus.
He grinned broadly. “Very well. You’ve seen it?”
“It’s hard to miss a truck painted with a huge Chinese dragon on the side,” I said with a smile. “Not to mention the big kite you put up when the truck sets up shop.”
“Let me give you a minute to decide, and I’ll be back to take your order,” Jay said. Jay always went out of his way to give us the VIP treatment, and I think he also enjoyed a chance to chat a little with friends.
“Don’t go. I’m too tired to think,” I said, closing my menu. “I’ll have my regular.” Teag put his menu on top of mine. “Me too.”
Jay was back in a flash with our orders, and we headed back to the store. Sorren didn’t answer our knock, so we drove back to my house. Baxter was thrilled to see us and even happier for a few pieces of stir-fried broccoli, which he considered a treat. Go figure.
We ate first, since we were both starved. I opened a bottle of wine, and poured us each a glass. We pushed the dinner dishes out of the way and pulled out the lists we had made.
“What have you got?” he asked.
“All the pieces had some kind of tragedy in their history,” I said, looking at the first item on my list.
Teag nodded. “True. But given the age of the stuff we sell at the store, there have to be loads of other pieces with a sad story associated with them and they aren’t haunted.”
“That we know of,” I replied, and Teag shrugged to concede the point.
“None of the pieces that came from Trifles and Folly seemed haunted when they were in the shop,” he added.
“But they reacted in the presence of a strongly haunted item, like the Foo dog,” I agreed.
“We don’t know what link – if any – exists between the men who were killed near the Navy yard and the haunted objects,” Teag said, consulting his list.
“If our guess is right and Jimmy and Kevin were buying – or stealing – items from places in the Navy yard, maybe even the self-storage place, we don’t know whether any of their objects have been haunted.”
“Which means that there could be incidents happening that we haven’t heard about,” Teag replied.
I gave him a look. “The only reason we know about the haunted objects is because Rebecca knew my reputation and a bunch of items were all together at Gardenia Landing. Trinket was an accident.” The idea that there could be other haunted items whose owners had no idea what to do was really frightening.
“Think about it. Who is the average person going to call if they bring home a new antique and everything goes haywire?” Teag said.
I responded with the obvious answer. “Ghostbusters.”
Teag raised an eyebrow. “Seriously. You know folks in Charleston. The first inclination is to keep everything hush-hush.”
Teag was right. Charleston valued propriety. “They’re just going to put up with it,” I said.
Teag nodded. “Exactly. But if we can figure out what’s behind it, maybe when we deal with whatever is at the Navy yard, it will take the juice out of any other items. I think we ought to see if any of the objects we know about came from the storage place at the Navy yard.”
“And we also need to figure out how the salvage team is connected to the Navy yard,” I added. “I have a feeling they’re at the heart of this whole thing.”
Teag grabbed my laptop and started to work his Weaver magic. While he worked, I cleaned up the kitchen and put the leftovers in the fridge. Baxter had already eaten his kibble, and he curled up under Teag’s feet.
“Old articles about the crew of the Privateer aren’t hard to find,” he said. “They were among the top wreck-finders several years running. They were good, and they were careful.”
“Can you find anything about how they disappeared?” I asked.
Teag studied his screen. “That’s where it all gets sketchy,” he said. “Accounts don’t agree. Some say their ship was headed out of Antigua when it disappeared, and others say Barbados. The Coast Guard spotted them a hundred miles off the Charleston coast.” He shook his head. “There are even a few sightings days after the official reports say the ship disappeared.”
“Someone with magic could arrange confusion like that,” I said, leaning back against the counter and taking a sip of my wine.
Teag nodded. “A wizard like Corban Moran, even damaged, could make people doubt their senses, see things that weren’t there.” He scrolled through more screens, frowning.
“Was there any indication what treasure they were after when they disappeared?” I asked.
That took a little more digging, and some of Teag’s magic to crack a few password-protected sites. He cracked his knuckles, then sat back with a grin.
“They were after the treasure of the Cristobal, a Cuban pirate ship that sank off the South Carolina coast a hundred and thirty years ago,” he said. He was silent for a while as his fingers flew across the keyboard.
“That’s interesting,” he said, hunching toward his screen. I came around to stand behind him.
“What?”
Teag frowned. “When I went out on the Darke Web to see if there was any mention of the Cristobal, I got more hits than I expected.” He twirled a pencil as he thought. “Seems there’s been a lot of conjecture about just what the Cristobal was carrying when it sank. Salvage teams like the Privateer
might have been after gold, but the wizards and conjurors on the Darke Web were after more practical treasures.”
“Artifacts?”
He nodded. “Magic’s thick like molasses down in the Islands,” he said. “Just as dark as molasses, too, polluted by all the slavery and death. I recognize the pseudonyms of the people who were interested.”
He looked up at me. “They aren’t the Alliance’s kind of people.”
“The Family?”
Teag shrugged. “I’m sure they’d have liked to get some powerful dark artifacts, but if they were part of this crowd, it was through proxies.”
“Seems like the trouble started before the Cristobal even left port,” he went on. “There were several suspicious fires on the docks that day, and three men were found dead under mysterious circumstances.” He raised an eyebrow. “The Cristobal was in such a hurry to leave port that the harbor master made a note of it.” He frowned. “What’s interesting is that no one’s sure just why it sank.”
“I thought it went down in a storm?”
Teag made a face. “It did – but it was a freak storm. The most reliable witness was a sighting from the Lady Jane, a merchant ship. They saw a ship they believed to be the Cristobal sailing into a bad squall.