Chapter 8 Thalassa #2
When she doesn’t offer more, I ask, “The artist—are they local?”
“They are indeed,” she says, pale eyes gleaming. “Would you like to commission a painting?”
“No,” I tell her before I can change my mind, before I can come to my senses or recall that I gave all my money away only days ago. “I’ll take the one in the window.”
I slap a credit card down on the counter and realize a beat later that it’s not mine but the corporate one I borrowed—stole—from Calvin.
There is a split second where I can take it back.
I’m already in enough trouble, no need to add to my sins.
But a familiar twinge of adrenaline stays my hand, growing inside me reckless and unchecked.
That old sense of freedom I felt whenever I would light a stolen cigarette or mist myself with pilfered perfume, like I’m slipping out of a corset, taking a deep breath of air.
My eyes meet the woman’s as I pull my fingers away, leaving the card on the counter. “Wrap it up.”
LEVI’S SHOP IS empty when I step inside; I’ve obviously come during a lull. I try, and fail, to bustle the bags of Korean barbecue toward the counter quietly, willing my anxiety from a rolling boil to a simmer. When he looks up, I say brightly, “I come bearing gifts!”
The idea struck me when I stepped out of the gallery and spotted the restaurant across the street.
He helped me once before. Maybe he can again.
But it’s an imposition, to be sure, and I thought this would make it more transactional, level the playing field a bit.
I couldn’t ask him for something again without offering something in return.
His eyes widen. “Don’t you mean, this time? You come bearing gifts this time.” But the slow smile smearing across his face like honey tells me he’ll accept.
“I hope you’re hungry,” I tell him, more than a little embarrassed by my display. My guilt is evident in the sheer volume of food I brought. I don’t mention that his meal is courtesy of Pacific Creative, just like my new piece of art.
He lifts the receipt stapled to the front of one of the bags. “Barbecue.” He drops it and levels his turquoise gaze on me. “It looks like you bought the place out.”
I feel the blush creeping up my cheeks and drop the last of the bags on the counter. “There’s an edamame dish in there, too, in case you’re vegan or kosher.”
“I don’t keep kosher, but even if I did, this would likely not qualify. And I’m certainly not vegan,” he responds.
I sink against the countertop. “Well, it’s a good thing it doesn’t matter, then.”
“You know, if you wanted to take me to dinner, you could have just asked.” His hair is in its customary bun, and his face is stubbly today where it’s usually clean-shaven.
I imagine rubbing my cheek against it. And then I imagine rubbing against other, lower parts of him and heat overwhelms me. “I figured I owed you one,” I say, brushing off his date jab.
“I see what this is.” He looks skeptical. “Bribery.” But he still locks the front door and turns the sign to CLOSED. Then he pulls a second stool from behind the counter and scoots it over for me to sit while he sits on the one near the register.
There are several packets of silverware and a couple of bottled waters in one of the bags, and I dig them free as Levi begins pulling out containers of pork belly, bulgogi, hot wings, spicy squid, rice, and brisket, his eyes growing rounder at each one.
“I have a way of overdoing things sometimes,” I tell him, my cheeks burning. “And I didn’t know what you liked.”
“I’d say you have a way of doing things just the right amount,” he replies, digging in.
I like a man with an appetite. Roger preferred miniature foods—tapas and quail and sushi and caviar—as if they were controlled substances.
Once he read that food should be chewed a minimum of thirty times before swallowing, and I would catch him counting for months afterward, dragging out every meal.
I have to make a point not to stare at Levi as he eats.
After several bites, he asks, “Am I allowed to ask you a few questions this time?”
My stomach drops. “Sure,” I answer, but it comes out flat, doubtful.
His eyes flick toward me, but he doesn’t remark on my tone. “How long have you lived in Seattle?”
Even questions as simple as this are something I try to avoid.
But I’m curious about Levi in a way I haven’t ever felt, hungry for him in a way that is shocking and new to me.
And if I’m honest with myself, that keeps bringing me here as much as anything else.
If I want to know more about him, I have to let him know more about me. “Most of my adult life. You?”
“Born and raised,” he says. “Where are you from?”
“Oregon.” My eyes meet his. “Middle of nowhere on the coast.”
“Must have been beautiful,” he says, watching me, noting, I think, the way the words are forming heavy in my mouth, landing with a thud.
“It was,” I admit. “While it lasted.” An unguarded note of trauma brims behind the words.
“Sounds painful,” he remarks. When I don’t respond he says quietly, “If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so.”
I shrug. I don’t want to talk about it. Shouldn’t anyway. But somehow, with him, it feels different. “It wasn’t an easy childhood,” I confess.
He smiles sadly. “I know all about those.”
When I look surprised, he adds, “My mother died when I was young. My dad was a great father, but no one could take her place. I didn’t have siblings.
It was lonely until my grandfather moved in.
He did his best to take up the slack, impart a sense of connection to something larger.
He’d teach me what to say when lighting the Shabbat candles, how to bake her mandel bread recipe—stuff like that.
But at times it just made her absence feel more pronounced. ”
“Sounds familiar,” I tell him. “The lonely part. Only for me it was my father who died young and my mother who did her best. And we moved in with my grandfather, not the other way around.”
“Did it help?” he asks.
I finish chewing and swallow, take a very long drink of water, and then wait a moment before saying, “Not exactly.”
He looks like he wants to ask more, but thinks better of it, looking down at his food.
“Yeah, well, that’s how I fell in love with books and this store,” he says between bites.
“Reading made me feel less … abandoned. And my grandfather liked having me around, always gave me little jobs to do like organizing a drawer in his office or changing the register tape.”
I try to imagine what it must have been like to have a grandfather who wanted you, to have all of this at your disposal as a kid, when I panted for whatever scrap of attention and novels Nina would give me. “I envy you,” I tell him. “No one much liked having me around.”
“That can’t be true,” he says with a good-natured smile, but it falls when he sees my face, reads the truth there.
I could give him the ugly facts, lay it all out in excruciating detail so he understands, so he knows. But I decide against it. I’ve already said too much. “Anyway, I loved books for the same reason, but they were much harder for me to come by.”
He pauses, waiting to see if I’ll say more. When it’s clear I won’t, he replies, “Then I’m glad we found each other.”
A smile plays at my lips. Me too.
“So how did your scavenger hunt turn out the other day?” he asks to lighten things up, finishing his bowl and wadding his napkin into it.
I swallow the beef I’m chewing on and push the rest away, full. “Umm, good, I guess. In fact, I wanted to ask you something else about that.”
His eyes close, and his lips press together. “I knew it,” he says. “This is bribery.” Then he looks at me. “And here I thought it might be flattery.”
“It is flattery,” I tell him. “But also bribery,” I admit.
“I know what you’re involved in, Judeth.” He gives me a sly grin, irresistibly attractive on him. I squeeze my knees together.
My heart pauses, skipping a beat or two before resuming a faster rhythm. How could he know? Has he been in on it this whole time? Am I that foolish? “You do?”
His smile widens, knowing, confident. “Geocaching.”
The word hangs between us, expectant. I have no idea what it means. I make a mental note to google geocaching the second I get in the car.
“The look on your face tells me all I need to know,” he says. “It took me a minute to figure it out, but once it clicked, I realized it was the only thing that made sense.”
I blink, dumbfounded. “Geocaching. Right.”
“You don’t have to explain. I always thought it sounded fun. It’s a passionate hobby for a lot of people even though it’s still kind of underground,” he says, validating me. “I just didn’t know you were the treasure-hunter type.”
I give a weak smile. “It’s … new.”
“Well, don’t worry. I won’t give any of your clues away. I’d hate for someone to beat you to the loot.” He rubs his hands together, so satisfied with the conclusion he has drawn, however wrong it may be.
“Speaking of,” I tell him, “I have another one to solve. That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”
He cocks his head. “This is deep, this group you’re involved with. Anyone I’ve heard of?”
His words are so accurate they sting, even if he doesn’t understand how. “I doubt it,” I say, pulling out the note card. Handing it to him, I ask, “What do you make of this?”
He holds it out, studying it intently as if there is more written there than three numbers and two letters. “This all you got?”
I nod, then remember Brennan’s tip. “Well, that and the statement ‘Tell the dead I said hello.’”
He glances up at me, a trace of concern lingering in his eyes before he looks back down at the card.
After a minute, I add, “My friend thought it might be an address to a place on the Ave. But I went there this afternoon and didn’t find anything with that number.”
His eyes slide to mine. “This is dark, Judeth.”
My stomach rolls over its meal of beef and pork. “So, it is biblical? I was afraid of that.”
“Biblical?” he echoes.
“The number—six six six. I thought it might be a reference to something satanic.” I chew my lip as I wait for him to respond.
“I don’t think so,” he tells me. “That’s likely just a coincidence.”
“But how?” I stammer. What kind of place or person would knowingly use the number of the beast? I might not have been an altar boy like Aaron, but most people have a little superstition in them.
Levi presses his lips together. “I think your friend is right. Or closer to right anyway. It’s an address of sorts, but not a street address.”
My heart kicks up a notch, beating faster for reasons it can’t yet determine. There’s something in Levi’s eyes that has me worried. “What do you mean? What other kind of address is there besides a web address?”
He pulls out his phone. “About an hour north of here is a ruin.”
“Like a castle?”
He shakes his head. “Not exactly. It’s an old psychiatric hospital. Went by the name of Northern State Hospital back when it was still in use, but it’s been shut down, abandoned for over fifty years.”
A sudden chill creeps into the store despite the door being locked fast. Outside, the night raps at the windows with windy knuckles, greedy and gruff. I curl my hands around my arms and squeeze. “Is this the address for the hospital?”
Levi’s eyes soften. “It was a terrible place. Psychiatric care has come a long way, and still we’re woefully short of where we need to be, so you can imagine what these patients suffered.
Most of them never left after being admitted.
Their bodies were disposed of on-site, buried or cremated and interred in old food cans, whatever the staff could find. ”
A shudder courses through me. “That’s horrible.”
“Whatever patient records there were have been sealed off. It’s left a lot of holes in people’s genealogies and a lot of questions.”
I swallow and meet his gaze. “I don’t understand what this note card has to do with all that.”
“It’s a marker,” he says gravely. “For a headstone in the Northern State Hospital Cemetery.”