Broken Souls (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 2) (7 page)

“Did you tell Ping I wanted to talk to him?”

“Yes, now shut up and let me speak. I have to get going.”

“Speak.” Mara smiled.

“Ping seems to be having trouble with his, I guess you would call it, his inner dragon.”

“What do you mean?” Mara leaned forward.

“He kind of blew up into a cloud of dust like he does, and then it sort of started to look like a dragon.” Sam turned and walked to the door. “Thought you should be aware, you know, in case it becomes an issue.”

“Wait!” Mara said.

Sam stopped with his hand on the doorknob.

“Ping said the dragon was sleeping. That was the deal. The dragon sleeps until Ping dies, then the dragon gets to have his body.”

“So you guys told me. Looks like there might be some hitches in the plan. Talk to Ping about it. I really have to go.” Sam opened the door, turned back and said, “Oh, you should probably ask him about the gangster-looking guy who stopped by this morning. That might be a problem too.” The door closed with a rattle and a jangle from the bell above.

Mara opened her mouth to call him back but stopped herself. “Great. Sam’s got Daddy issues. Ping’s got dragon issues, and Abby’s got Bruce issues. I’m not even an hour into my workday.” She took a deep breath and decided to focus on the sewing machine. She slid it across the counter and unlatched the cover when the black rotary phone rang. She grabbed the receiver and slipped it to her ear, raising her shoulder to hold it in place while she continued opening the sewing machine case. “Thanks for calling Mason Fix-It. This is Mara. How can I help you?”

“I figured the old phone at that gadget place didn’t have a screen with my name popping up on it, so you’d be most likely to answer,” the caller on the other end said.

“Detective Bohannon. I’ve been meaning to get back to you,” Mara said, setting aside the lid to the sewing machine.

“It’s been a couple weeks. I thought you promised to explain things to me after the incident out at the office park near the airport. We’ve got a lot of open cases around here—passengers of that flight of yours who have disappeared and other strange goings-on.”

“Last I heard, you had a couple broken legs and would be laid up for a while. I didn’t think there was a lot of urgency getting back to you since you would be out for a while.”

“Turns out one broken leg. The other was a bad bruise and a sprained ankle. I’m moving around with a cast and crutches now. I want to come by and talk later today.”

“Jeez, I don’t know, Detective. I’m kind of slammed around here. Mr. Mason still hasn’t come back to work, and it’s been kind of crazy.”

“Listen, Ms. Lantern, we’ve got a host of strange reports. Now you and I can have a nice private conversation, or I can tell my lieutenant to start sending investigators over to talk to you. You’ll probably have a dozen of them over in that shop within a couple hours.”

“Please don’t do that. There’s nothing I can do to help with most of that.”

“I want to understand what is going on. I want to know what happened at the office park a couple weeks ago, why Suter turned into a monster and attacked us. Maybe if I know what’s happening, I can help steer things in the right direction around here.”

“I know I promised, but—”

“Talk to me, or get prepared to spend the next couple months in an interrogation room downtown.”

“Look, I can tell you everything I understand about this whole mess, but you’re not going to believe it, so why waste the time?”

“Let me worry about that. All you need to do is be honest with me. After seeing Suter turn into a fire-breathing nightmare, you’d be surprised at what I will believe.”

Mara sighed, and her shoulders dropped. “Okay. I need to get some work done today. Can you get over here to the shop about six o’clock this evening?”

“I’ll be there.”

“I’m assuming it will be all right with you if Mr. Ping joins us? He might be able to explain some of this stuff better than me.”

“Fine by me.”

“I’ll ask him to come by.” She hung up and absentmindedly turned the hand crank on the antique sewing machine. The needle slowly slid up and down as she turned the round wheel. “Great, the only things I can fix without a thought are the things that I really want to work on.”

Mara cranked away at the little wheel mounted on the right side of the black porcelain sewing machine. The needle jogged up and down, punching through the edge of the canvas bag, dragging the black thread through the material, creating a row of perfect stitches that sealed the top closed. At the client’s home, when she had picked up the device, it would not crank, and the needle was jammed up somehow. Now it worked perfectly, and all Mara had done was move it and unpack it. It had been weeks since she had physically repaired something. Now, it seemed, all she had to do was touch a broken device, and it would repair itself. It was taking all the fun out of her job. She’d have to ask Ping what to do about it.

Once she had completed feeding the canvas bag through the sewing machine, it occurred to her that she had rendered the bag unusable. Grabbing a pair of scissors, she wedged one blade under the thread and snipped, reopening the mouth of the bag.

The bell above the front door of the shop jangled, and Mara looked up.

A man in a green uniform was backing through the door pulling a dolly loaded with a tall narrow box behind him. Once he cleared the door, he let it close and swiveled around, revealing a grandfather clock that stood six feet tall.

“Hi, are you Mara?” the man said. She nodded, and he unhooked a clipboard dangling from his belt. “Then this here is for you.” He nodded at the clock.

“Wow. I wasn’t expecting a delivery. Who is—”

From the back of the shop, Bruce yelled, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. My grandfather called and said that Mr. Mickleson was sending over his clock for you to work on.”

“Got it,” Mara yelled back and turned to the deliveryman. “I guess I was expecting it. Could we roll it over here to the end of the counter?”

“You bet.” He tipped it up on the dolly’s wheels and rolled it where asked, sitting it next to the shelf where the Philco 90 radio sat. Mara signed his clipboard. He tipped his head and gave a small salute as he rolled the dolly back out the front door. As the door was about to close, Mara heard the deliveryman say, “Oops, almost gotcha, young lady.” The door swung back open, and Abby stepped inside.

“Almost ran me down,” she said, taking off her jacket and tossing it at the coat tree in the corner where it landed in a heap at its base. “What you fixing today? Granny’s electric butter churn?” She snorted.

“I’ll have you know I have repaired an electric butter churn before.”

“You’re making that up. There’s no such thing.”

“Yes, there is. It’s sort of like an electric ice cream maker with a motor mounted at the top of a big jar that churns the butter. Of course you don’t need to set it in a bucket of ice.”

Abby rolled her eyes. “What a geek. Butter churn. Next you’ll be setting up a still for a bunch of moonshiners.”

“It would be fun to work on a still, but that sounds more like something you’d see in the Appalachians than the Cascades, don’t you think?”

“Whatever you say, gadget dork.”

“Why aren’t you in school? Still majoring in truancy?”

“I am out today arranging an internship for my next semester. I’ve been told I can work part-time and get credit, if I write a paper or some nonsense like that.”

“I did that my last semester. Right here at Mr. Mason’s shop.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here.”

Mara turned pale. “Huh?”

“I’m here to sign up. I want to intern.”

“Here?”

“Yeah, why not? You did.”

“You’re pulling my leg. You don’t know how to hold a screwdriver much less fix a broken gadget.”

“The point is to learn, isn’t it?”

“What are you up to? Spill it.”

“I’m not up to anything. I want to do an internship, and I think I could contribute a lot around here. It’s a business, isn’t it? I don’t have to fix things to help out. I bet I could modernize your back-office operations. I’m great with a spreadsheet and numbers, and I’m very organized. I also can take orders, do pick-ups and deliveries, and run errands. And, not to be too critical, but this place could use some dusting and mopping. I can do that.”

“You want a janitorial internship?”

“Look, it’s a chance to get some practical experience, and it would be great for us to work together, right?”

“I’m not buying it. Besides, your counselor isn’t going to let you do an internship reporting to me. I only finished high school a few months ago myself, and Mr. Mason doesn’t appear to be in any hurry to come back to work.”

“I’ll work out the details. Ask Mr. Mason. He’ll do it if you ask.”

“That’s not the issue.”

“So what is the issue?”

“I don’t know. You’re a little high octane and high maintenance for a place like this. I think you will go nuts around here.”

“Let me worry about that. It’s only for a few weeks anyway. Besides, with all the weirdness you’ve got going on at home, don’t you think it would be nice to have a friend around?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Your mother just brought home a thirteen-year-old brother you didn’t know about. I’d call that pretty weird.”

“He’s fourteen.”

Abby smirked.

“So you think you’re going to make my life less weird by hanging out here at the shop? I’m not seeing it.”

Abby slouched across the counter. “Look, think about it for a day or two. If you are still uptight, I’ll go do something else. But I do think it would be fun to spend some more time together. I’ve missed hanging out since you finished school.”

“We’ll see.”

“Where is tall, dark and Bruce?”

Mara swung a thumb toward the back of the shop. “He’s in his bike garage. Why don’t you go say hi.”

Abby smiled, wiggled her eyebrows and sauntered off to the bike shop. Mara returned to the sewing machine, turning it on its side to examine what it would take to remove the bottom of the platform when the phone rang.

“Thanks for—”

“Hi, Mara. It’s Ping. Sam told me that you wanted to talk. I can’t seem to get away right now. Can it wait until I close up this evening? It’s a little busy over here.”

“Actually that will work out best. Bohannon is coming by, and I might need some backup while explaining things to him.”

“Bohannon?”

“The detective who was with me at the office park when Suter first attacked, remember?”

“Oh, yes, I recall.”

“He’s going to be here at six. Can you make it then?”

“Yes, I’ll be there. We might want to be circumspect about what we tell him.”

“He saw Suter turn into a fire-breathing monster, saw all the passengers’ bodies in that temporary morgue at the airport and saw me do my metaphysical thing a couple times already. What is it that we need to keep from him?”

“Nothing, I suppose.”

“Okay,” Mara said, glancing at the entrance to the back of the shop. She lowered her voice. “So how are you holding up? I hear you’ve been having some control issues with your own little passenger.”

“My what? Oh! Sam told you about this morning.”

“Are you okay?”

“I think so. No more incidents. We can discuss it this evening.”

“Call if you need anything. Bye,” Mara said.

Before she could replace the handset in the cradle of the old black rotary telephone, she heard static and lifted it back up. “Hello?” The static continued, but it wasn’t coming from the phone. She hung it up and swiveled her head, trying to locate the sound. She glanced toward the grandfather clock at the end of the counter. The sound came from that direction. As she took a step, the static stopped. Mara remained still for a second, cocked an ear toward the clock. Nothing.

She continued to where the grandfather clock stood and put her left ear next to its side. After a moment, the static resumed. Yet Mara heard the sound from her right ear. It wasn’t the clock. She glanced up to the nearby shelf. The static emitted from the Philco 90 radio—the one that was a casing with no mechanism inside. The static rose and fell, as if it were trying to tune into a station. Then almost imperceptibly—so woven into the background noise that Mara wasn’t sure if she had imagined it—she heard a voice, high-pitched, like a child’s. It sounded like “Mar-ree, Mar-ree.”

Mara grabbed the radio casing and slid it around so it faced away from her. She quickly removed the backing and looked into the empty wooden frame. No radio inside. Yet the static continued, and, intermixed within the noise, a little voice called, “Mar-ree, Mar-ree. I’m coming!”

Detective Daniel Bohannon had enough trouble navigating his broad frame through the cluttered maze of desks that made up the detective division of the Portland Police Bureau without a cast and crutches. Instead of taking the longer, clearer path along the walls of the room, he had tried to cut through the center and ended up knocking over a stack of files. He was having trouble picking them up while holding his crutches and maintaining balance.

“Bo! What are you doing out there?” Lieutenant Mike Simmons yelled from his glass-enclosed office twenty feet away. “Get in here.”

“Coming,” Bohannon said, dropping a pile of papers on the desk, half of which slipped back to the floor when he turned to hobble over to the lieutenant’s office.

“Shut the door,” Simmons said, pointing to a chair. “Thanks for coming in on your time off.”

“No problem, sir. I’m kind of antsy to get back to work.”

“I didn’t ask you to come in to work, at least not officially. We’re only having a little conversation, a couple coworkers catching up. You understand?”

“I think so. What do you want to converse about, sir?”

“First, when you get back, we are assigning you to the burglary detail—on the surface, that is.”

Bohannon’s shoulders slumped, and he looked crestfallen.

“What did you expect? Homicide outta the gate? Grow up, man. Anyway what I really need you to do is help out with some of these cases related to the passengers of Flight 559. Publicly we are not connecting these cases together, because we don’t have any real evidence that they are related. As far as we can tell, it’s just a coincidence that all these strange things are happening to this relatively small group of people.”