Before going upstairs, Joey peeked his head into the sitting room to check on Indira and Mrs. Shins, who were deep in conversation about kitchen appliances. It was unclear if Indira actually had strong opinions about kitchen appliances or if she was just playing along with Mrs. Shins.
Joey crept back up the stairs—not that it made much difference, since these stairs were almost musical in their symphony of creaking—and positioned himself in the center of the hallway. After a moment of thought, he opened all the doors, which were no longer slamming open and shut, presumably because Caden had gone back downstairs. Sneaking a quick look down the stairwell he saw Caden standing casually. Caden spotted him and flashed him an ‘okay’ sign with one hand. Joey found a smile creeping onto his face despite the situation.
“All right?!” came Frankie’s shout from across the house.
Ugh, Joey hated yelling. Cringing, he called back, “Ready!”
“Go!”
With his left hand clasped around his brush, Joey used his thumb to flick open the clasp of the snuffbox in his right hand. Instantly a blue mist, similar to what Caden had generated before, came drifting out of the box. Feeling a mix of ridiculous and terrified, Joey waved the open snuffbox over his head. Immediately, more of that yellow light fell from the ceiling, swirling down to touch the mist from the box. Petrified, Joey held the snuffbox as far away from his body as he could, and the yellow light followed. All the doors on the landing slammed shut at once, and Joey started moving backwards towards the stairs, feeling the carpet under his feet.
Down below, Caden was swirling his mist again and the objects from the side table that had previously just been floating were now flying in rapid circles around the room. Joey climbed carefully backwards down the stairs, snuffbox held away from him, clutching with slippery fingers at the banister around the brush handle. As he approached Caden, the vase he’d seen before came hurtling past Joey’s face and smashed against a mirror on the stairway wall, shattering both the vase and the mirror. Joey flinched away from the shards of glass.
He was almost at the bottom of the stairs when Frankie came pelting down the hallway shouting, pursued by a horde of kitchen knives. She and Joey reached Caden at the same time and the yellow light above each of them combined into one huge funnel. Joey fumbled with his hairbrush, brushing it downwards on his hip twice and aiming it at the source of the light. A huge shriek tore through the house when the magical lightning hit the poltergeist, then Frankie pressed her snuffbox into Caden’s hand and flipped open the Box.
The Box pulled the poltergeist in and the poltergeist disappeared in a few seconds with a deafening screech. Then the Box closed and it went quiet, the only sounds the thumping and clattering of every formerly flying object hitting the floor.
Breathing hard, Joey let himself collapse onto the second step of the staircase, and Frankie reached out and closed the snuffbox still spewing blue mist in Joey’s hand.
“My goodness!” came Mrs. Shins’ voice from the sitting room. “And all this from carbon monoxide?”
“It causes hallucinations, Mrs. Shins,” said Indira.
Caden sat on the bottom of the stairs next to Joey. Frankie wiped sweat from her forehead with the top of her t-shirt as Mrs. Shins came tottering out of the sitting room. Frantically, Caden stood back up and made shooing motions with his hands, and to Joey’s amazement all the scattered household objects moved by the poltergeist went flying back to where they belonged. Leaning back, though, he could see the smashed mirror and vase bits stayed where they were.
“Wait, wait, I’ve always wanted to say this after a poltergeist,” said Frankie with a huge grin. “’This house…is clear.’”
Joey cracked up, then looked up at their poor, confused client. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Shins, but a couple things got knocked over.”
“We’ll take the damages out of your bill,” put in Frankie.
“Oh never mind, never mind, let me get you sweet people some tea. Go have a seat,” said Mrs. Shins, and blithely wobbled her way past Caden to the kitchen.
They all followed instructions, trooping into the sitting room and relaxing. Frankie said, “Oh, hey, Joey, you’ve got a—” She gestured to just over her eyebrow. Joey reached up to his own face and touched something wet, and when he brought it back down to look he cursed when he saw the blood.
Indira reached into the top of her corset and came back out with a travel-sized pack of tissues. She pulled one out and handed it to Joey, who thanked her.
Frankie was staring at Indira thoughtfully. “I wondered why you didn’t carry a purse when you’ve got no pockets.”
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“I do have pockets,” said Indira, and gestured to her corset.
“Fair enough.”
Joey was pressing the tissue to the stinging wound on his forehead, trying to stop the bleeding. It didn’t seem that terrible. When he looked up Caden was watching him apologetically.
“I’m sorry I can’t help this time,” said Caden. “The poltergeist…”
“Yeah, no, it’s fine,” said Joey hastily, waving him away. “Thanks, though.”
“Guys, something weird,” said Indira at the window. “I noticed this guy watching from across the street—look—” She gestured and the others reluctantly stood up and went to the window. “Silver fox,” said Indira, almost admiring.
Sure enough, across the street a handsome, gray-haired man with light brown skin, dressed in all black, was leaning against a garden wall with his hands in his pockets, looking nonchalantly down the street. After a few seconds, he turned his head and seemed to look right at Joey—but then a delivery truck rumbled down the street and when it had gone past the man had disappeared.
“Did he just straight-up vanish behind a truck?” asked Indira, incredulous. “Like in a movie?”
“Weird,” said Frankie.
“Anyway, I saw him when I was dancing across the street from the hellhound, too,” said Indira. “Bizarre.”
Just then Mrs. Shins came shuffling back carrying a huge tea tray, which Indira hurried to take off her hands. “Here, let me.”
“Oh, thank you. Let’s all go sit down. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to use the sugar right from the bag—it’s the darndest thing, but the sugar bowl my son bought me seems to have gone missing.”
“A lot of things seem to have gone missing recently,” Caden observed to the room at large, and the crew exchanged worried glances over Mrs. Shins head.
“Lose my own head if it weren’t screwed on,” said Mrs. Shins. “Who wants tea?”
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“We’ll tell Mac when we get back,” said Frankie, driving the van. In the passenger seat, Joey examined the cut on his forehead in the sun visor. It had mostly stopped bleeding. Wordlessly, Indira handed him another couple tissues from the backseat, and Joey thanked her quietly. “Mrs. Shins must be magic-sensitive, too, to attract a poltergeist when she doesn’t have protection. Least she’s not a non-human like that damned werewolf this morning. Only thing worse would have been a goblin, or a vampire, just nasty—”
“You know, Frankie,” said Joey, getting annoyed, “if you were to talk about black people this way you and me would have a problem.”
“Oh, please,” scoffed Frankie.
“No, I’m serious. You don’t like them. We get it. Move on.” Looking up at the mirror in the sun visor again, Joey caught Caden watching him from the backseat, green eyes wide.
“I see how it is,” said Frankie. “You beat one poltergeist and you think you can backtalk.”
Sighing, Joey said, exhausted, “You’re not in charge, Mac is, and if he were here he’d tell you to shut up.”
Now Frankie was getting annoyed. “I have seniority—”
“I hate it when Mum and Dad fight,” observed Caden from the backseat, and Indira started laughing, which diffused some of the tension.
Giggling, Indira said, “Do you think they’ll get a divorce?”
“Ugh,” said a frustrated Frankie, and fell silent, switching on the radio. The car went quiet except for the newscasters on NPR for the rest of the drive back to HQ.
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When they got back to the store, Mac was nice enough to take their sandwich orders for lunch and then hand them all off to Joey to put them into the deli website. Mac informed them that his hunt for the missing tuba was unsuccessful, even using the Detector. While everyone waited for the sandwiches to be ready for pickup, Frankie and Mac disappeared into Mac’s office to debrief, but they left the door open, so the rest of them hung out in the back room and pretended not to eavesdrop.
Frankie and Mac were pretty loud people, but they could be quiet when they needed to be, so most of the conversation was too soft to hear. Caden slumped in a side chair looking wiped out, while Joey began filling out paperwork. Indira drifted over to the bookshelves and started poking around at the books on them, much to Joey’s discomfort. Finally, Mac and Frankie emerged from the office, Frankie brushing past them to go lie down on a couch in the front store. Mac stopped in the doorway and said, “I hear you did good work today. Especially you, kid,” he said to a surprised Joey.
“No?” offered Joey.
“Yeah.” Mac clapped him on the back. “Now go get our sandwiches.”
The deli was close, so Joey got back pretty quickly, and they all sat around eating, dripping various condiments on the antiques, and leaving potato chip crumbs everywhere. Mac asked for the rundown on the weird guy who was watching them, and they all agreed it was an odd coincidence and that they should keep a lookout. “Silver fox,” Indira insisted, several times.
“You are a baby,” said Frankie, which sparked off some bickering.
Finally, Mac told them they could call it quits for the day, so everyone chucked their trash and started drifting out. Joey caught Caden by the arm before he could leave, though.
“Hey, uh,” he started. “Uh.”
“Yeah?” said Caden, smiling up at him.
“Would you want to…maybe go out for a drink or something?” There was a pause. Caden had stopped smiling and instead looked troubled. “No, uh, forget I asked. You’re probably too tired from today anyway.”
Caden’s brow was creased, but he shook his head and that tiny smile appeared again. “No, I’d like to,” he said.
Relieved, Joey said, “Cool.”
“Any good gay bars for day-drinking around here?” said Caden, punching Joey in the heart with the affirmation that this was, in fact, a date. Or at least that Caden was as queer as Joey, which assuaged a fear Joey hadn’t been letting himself feel.
Then he realized what Caden had asked and stalled. “Uh, I kind of only know my own neighborhood.”
Frankie was walking past them toward the exit and said, “Ralph’s, over on Bryn Mawr. Don’t say I never gave you anything,” and socked Joey on the arm.
“Right,” said Joey. “Ralph’s. On Bryn Mawr.”
“Lead the way.”