“Perhaps, but I want to.”
Felipe held his gaze with an intensity that nearly hurt. Oliver wanted to look away, but when he felt that warm thickness in his chest, he couldn’t let go.
“Let’s have lunch sometime,” Galvan said, a small smile quirking the corner of his lip.
“Sure.” Oliver shouldn’t read into it. He had been wrong so many times before. It would only hurt to hope. “I— I guess I should go, then, and type my notes. I promise you’ll have them by dinner.”
Before Galvan could see the heat rising to the tips of his ears, Oliver ducked his head and made for the safety of the basement. By the time he got his bag unpacked and all of his equipment cleaned and in the pot for sterilization, his head was spinning. Maybe he needed food, he had missed lunch after all, but he doubted that was it. The box of specimens Felipe Galvan had brought back for him from California still sat in the doorway of the closet. He had boxes and feelings to sort out, but he would do that once his work was done.
Taking out a sheet of paper, he jotted down all he could remember from Sister Mary Agnes’s body: the hemorrhaging in her eyes, the broken blood vessels in her face, the signs of strangulation, and the absence of other violence. Compared to his other autopsy notes, it looked scant without the weights and measures of her organs or tests for poisons, but confirming a magical attack didn’t require that sort of data. From his mind’s eye, he sketched the outline of her form and marked off the major injuries. Quickly tracing a second copy, he set it aside to type up his notes for Galvan. The click of each key sounded loud to his ears in the stillness of the laboratory with only Mr. Henderson and a handful of skeletons for company. At the end of the final line, Oliver sat back and rubbed his face. He could go upstairs and hand-deliver the notes to Galvan, maybe even ask him to accompany him across the street to get something to eat, but the thought of being somewhere full of clatter and unwanted smells turned his stomach. After a whole day spent out of the Paranormal Society, it would be too much.
Sighing, he folded the documents into an envelope marked with Galvan’s name, loaded them into a cannister, and sent them up the pneumatic tube in the corner to the mailroom. Oliver quickly wrote another note and sent it up the other tube for the kitchen before he could change his mind. He stared resentfully at the cluster of pipes that led to the rest of the building. He hated knowing how easily they snaked through the buttresses that held up the society, how they were able to go with a little push. It was stupid to compare himself to a cannister, but sometimes he wished he could propel himself and move without the mental friction, without worrying he would become snappish or lose himself because he was too tired to cope with things that other people barely noticed.
Oliver glanced at the clock hanging above the lab table. While it wasn’t officially the end of his day, he had done enough. His instruments were sterilizing, his case files were typed, and there was no time to begin anything new without making hours of clean up for himself, so he set to work making coffee while he waited for his dinner to arrive. The coffee had just finished brewing right as a knock sounded at his door. A smile crossed his lips at the timing. The covered tray waited outside the door, though the person who brought it was long gone. They rarely lingered in the basement.
Locking the door behind him and turning off the lights in the anteroom, Oliver retreated to the laboratory. If Gwen wanted to get in, she certainly could, but she usually ate dinner with her sister in the dining room. She stressed that Oliver was always invited, but he felt like he was intruding upon their time together. He bolted the back entrance and carried his dinner into the closet. In the back corner, tucked between shelves of supplies stood a black door. Most people who came into the lab never knew it existed, and Oliver liked it that way.
When he initially arrived in New York and began his work at the Paranormal Society, he had stayed in a boarding house and hated every second of it. While the room was clean and he hadn’t seen many vermin, though he knew they were there, the housekeeper touched his things without his permission. At first, he thought he was losing his mind when his cufflinks turned up in a different place and his books moved from the order he liked. Then, one day, he had come back midday to grab clean socks after a particularly wet job and caught her “tidying up.” She hadn’t stolen anything, but between knowing someone else regularly touched his belongings without his permission and the noise that came in sudden bursts from the other boarders constantly setting him on edge, he wondered how much longer he could stay before it utterly frayed his nerves. Perhaps a quiet medical practice in the countryside where people were so desperate for a doctor they wouldn’t care about his other peculiarities would be better for him.
The day he found the door, his mind kept drifting back to the thought of leaving as he worked. He desperately didn’t want to leave the city, but he couldn’t afford a better flat and he didn’t feel comfortable taking a room down the hall from other members of the society when he barely knew them. In the short months he had been at the Paranormal Society, he finally felt like he found what could be home. With the weight of his decision hanging over his head, he went into the supply closet to find a new bottle of hydrochloric acid. As he dug through the former medical examiner’s disorganized cache, he saw the outline of a door behind a shelf. He expected to find another closet or perhaps something far more grisly, but when he cleared the clutter, he found an empty room with a radiator, a small, high window that opened to the alley above, and a single bed covered with a tarp. It wasn’t as nice as his room at the boarding house, but it was quiet and it would be his.
After ten years in that room, Oliver had replaced the old, rickety furniture with sturdy pieces he had bought or built and stained himself in his off time. The population of spiders had greatly diminished, and the room looked nearly as homey as those he had glimpsed in the apartments above the society. Placing his tray and coffee pot on the table, Oliver returned to the closet to grab the box from Galvan before shutting the door behind him. The world fell to a dim roar beyond the stone walls of the Paranormal Society. In his room, there was no murderer or creature on the loose, no bodies that could spring to life at his touch, no one to disappoint. It was where he felt safe.
Hunkering close to the radiator, Oliver ate his roast beef and vegetables with the latest issue ofNational Geographic Magazinepropped open on the table. He rinsed his dishes in the lab and would return them in the morning when he stopped by the dining room for breakfast. With the cream from the tray, he made his coffee the way he liked it and changed into his nightclothes and robe. Oliver settled on the edge of the rug with the box from Galvan and the warm coffee at his side. When he stared down at the stacks of jars and pile of journals at his feet, he couldn’t help but think of Galvan. The man hadn’t brought him back everything in a haphazard assortment; he had taken the time to find things Oliver would like, and from what he could see, he had done a good job.
Looking around his room, Oliver frowned. This little room had everything he wanted: a warm bed, a shelf to put his books, a place for his tools, and plenty of solitude, which was a luxury worth its weight in gold in Manhattan. But unlike Galvan’s room, there were no armchairs before the hearth where he could invite a friend to sit and chat after work. When he built his table, he had only bought two chairs because they came as a set, and the one had migrated to the corner as a makeshift coatrack. At first, he had been too afraid to invite people in for fear he would be kicked out since he had never been given formal permission to move in. After a time, he grew accustomed to not letting others in.
Biting his lip, Oliver held the battered heart up to the light. Perhaps now was the time to change that.
Chapter Five
A Family Reunion
Felipe stood outsidehis family’s home on East 17thStreet, listening to one of the dogs bark inside. He had been milling down the street within eyeshot for a good five minutes before he took a walk around the block to his favorite tavern for lunch. Then, he dipped into a department store to pick up something for Louisa and Agatha. He told himself it wouldn’t do to show up emptyhanded after five months away. By the time he finally convinced himself to go up the stairs and ring the bell, he had managed to stall for over two hours. When the door didn’t immediately open, he debated slinking away and coming back when he was a little braver, or a little less sober, but before he could escape off the stoop, the door opened to reveal Agatha Pfeiffer standing eye-to-eye with him. The Pre-Raphaelite beauty’s hazel eyes lit up in delight as she caught Felipe in a hug so tight he could scarcely breathe. Blowing a lock of dark blonde hair out of his mouth, he hugged her back.
“Felipe! You are a sight for sore eyes.” All he could get out was a pained whoosh of breath as she continued, “We had no idea you were back in town. This is a marvelous surprise.”
