The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [67]
“What’s happened?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Boo said. “I just brought Rory round.”
“Why?”
No. They didn’t want me here. Boo had not caught on to this.
“I was thinking,” she said. “We should go ghost-spotting. Rory’s never been.”
Stephen stood there for a minute, gripping his newspaper.
“Can I speak to you in the other room for a moment?” he said.
Boo got up, and the two of them disappeared into another room. Callum continued to sip his tea and watch me. In the other room, I could hear a very animated conversation, one low voice (Stephen’s) and one relatively higher voice (Boo’s). I distinctly heard Stephen say, “We are not social services.” The higher voice seemed to be winning.
“I didn’t ask to come here,” I said. “I mean, here, to this apartment. Today.”
“Oh, I know.” Callum stretched lazily and turned to watch the door where the conversation was going on. Last time, I had taken in the basics about Callum—he was black, he was shorter than Stephen, he was extremely well built, and he wasn’t thrilled about my presence. All of those things remained true today. In the daylight and in slightly less shock, I could take in some more. Like Boo, Callum had an athlete’s build—he wasn’t huge, just well developed in what looked like a very deliberate way. His face was round, with wide, appraising eyes and a mouth that always seemed to be cocked in a half smirk. He had very thick, very straight eyebrows, one of which was sliced through by a scar.
“What’s the thing on your arm?” I asked, pointing at his tattoo. “Is that some kind of monster?”
“It’s a Chelsea lion,” he said patiently. “For the football club.”
“Oh.”
I wasn’t being stupid. It didn’t look like a lion. It looked like a skinny dragon with no wings.
“So how do you like England so far?” he asked.
“It’s kind of weird. You know. Ghosts. Jack the Ripper.”
He nodded.
“Where are you from?” he said. “That accent?”
“Louisiana.”
“Where’s that again?”
“In the South,” I said.
The conversation in the other room had gone down in volume.
“I don’t even know why he bothered,” he said, stretching again. “Boo was always going to win. Better get dressed.”
He got up and went out of the room, leaving me alone. The apartment, I noticed, looked very much like Boo’s part of the room—stuff everywhere. Maybe seeing ghosts made you give up on cleaning. I could see that certain parts of the room were reserved for certain activities. The coffee table was for eating—it was covered in tinfoil takeout dishes and mugs. The table by the window had a computer and lots of files, with boxes full of more files on the floor. The walls around the table were covered in notes. I had a look at them. They all seemed to relate to the Ripper—dates, locations. I recognized some of the names and photographs of suspects from 1888 from the constant news coverage. What was unusual, though, is that there were comments about these people—places of burial, locations of death, home addresses. It looked like Stephen and Callum and Boo had gone to these places and checked them out, adding notes like “uninhabited” or “no evidence of presence.”
I moved away from the wall of notes when I heard someone returning. Stephen and Boo came back in, followed by Callum, who was now wearing jeans.
“Perhaps we should do an hour or two of ghost-spotting,” Stephen said, not sounding very enthusiastic. Boo was beaming and doing some hamstring stretches.
“We should take her underground,” Callum said. “It’s easier there. It’ll take five minutes, tops.”
“Maybe in the train tunnels,” Boo said. “But not on the platforms.”
“I work there. I should know. I saw about fifty once.”
“You never!