Connor checked his watch.

“On second thought,” he said. “Maybe you just better meet me here at three a.m.”

“You sure it’s wise to be here that late at night?” I shouted back down the hill. “You’re wary of the park in daylight hours.”

“Kid, the idea of being here at night terrifies me,” he said, looking around, “but I’m sick of playing catch-up on this case. If we go back to the docks now, we’d simply be wasting time. We need to catch this ghost if we’re going to get some answers. We’ve got a job to do, and even though I’m not happy about being out here at three a.m., at least I can take comfort that I won’t be alone in my misery.”

Connor smiled and turned back to the spire just in time to miss me flipping him off, which, all in all, was probably a good thing. I didn’t need to give him any excuses when we met up later tonight to push me into the path of any creepy crawlies or boogeymen we might run into.

14

By the time I got back to the office, I was thankful that my pants had finally dried from their dip in the reservoir to retrieve my bat. As I walked through the coffee shop, I noticed that Godfrey Candella was scribbling furiously in one of his notebooks. He barely looked up.

I pushed my way through the theater curtain and headed down the aisle toward the offices. Nosferatu played on-screen, and an army of young gothsicles was crowding the theater for it. I continued on, swiping through the office door and then shutting it against the stench of clove cigarettes coming from the theater.

The main office area was pretty busy this time of day, and I couldn’t find signs of Jane anywhere. I stopped by my desk, hoping to remember where I had scrawled her phone number at some point. Since I only had it programmed onto the SIM card of my now-melted phone, I didn’t know it off the top of my head. Who the hell memorizes phone numbers these days anyway?

After several minutes of looking, I shifted a growing pile of my casework into my in-box, and found the number scrawled on the corner of my desk blotter. I also noticed that someone had already printed out black-and-white copies of the obelisk photos Connor had taken and left them on his desk.

I sat down and flipped through the photos while dialing Jane’s cell phone number from the phone at my desk. It felt strange to be using a regular phone, and I wondered if I had ever actually used it before at all.

“Tome, Sweet Tome,” I heard Jane say when she finally answered. “Everything from abracadabra to zoology for the cryptozoologist. How may I help you?”

“Jane,” I said. “It’s me.” I checked the number on the caller ID. I hadn’t dialed the bookstore, had I? “I’m sorry . . . Did I call the store by mistake?”

“Shoot,” she said. “No, you got my cell. I’m back in the Stacks, and I forgot what line I was answering. I’m a bit distracted right now. Sorry.”

The sounds of her shifting books around came over the line.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just happy to hear your voice.”

“Oh,” Jane exclaimed. “Did you get your new phone from Supply yet?”

“No. I’m at my desk. I was hoping to get a little investigative work done, hoping you were here.”

“I’m not,” she said.

“We’ve established that.”

“Right . . . duh!”

She was back to her normal self, not a trace of the ol’ darkness. There was something so cute about the way she sounded that all of the paranoia that Mina had planted in me last night started melting away.

“I could probably swing by the store,” I said. “I have to log some time back in the Black Stacks anyway. We came across this Egyptian monolith thing in Central Park when Connor and I were called in to check out a dead jogger at the base of it. I have to head back out to the park at some ungodly hour of the morning tomorrow, but I need to check the Stacks in the meantime to see if there’s anything listed about Cleopatra’s Needle in them.”

In the background, I heard a male voice, and the cadence of it seemed distinctly like Director Wesker. His words gave way to laughter and Jane started laughing as well.

“Thaddeus, shh!” she said on the line. “I’m sorry, Simon. What were you saying?”

Last night’s paranoia quickly seeped back into my heart. I cleared my throat.

“The Stacks,” I repeated. “I need to use them.”

“Oh,” she said. Jane sounded distracted. I tried to imagine what she could possibly be doing there that was so damned important. Maybe she’s doing Wesker, Mina chirped up in my head. I tried to shake that image loose, but couldn’t.

“I’ll be there soon,” I said, and hung up.

Was I crazy and just simply the victim of an overactive imagination? Or was I right on the mark about there being something going on between the two of them? I grabbed my shoulder bag and stuffed the printouts of the photos into it. I headed back toward the exit, trying not to break into a full sprint across the office as I did so. The entire office didn’t need to get caught up in my private life. As it stood, there was ample material for them to ridicule me about.

In the cab heading uptown to Tome, Sweet Tome, I reminded myself to give Mina a swift kick in the ass later for causing all this doubt in me with her evil, twisted whispers last night. Not to mention the fact that because of her, I might be committing a felony tomorrow night, and that was weighing heavily on my shoulders.

The cab pulled up to the curb. After I paid the driver, I hurried toward the bookstore and swung open the front door, but no one was up by the registers. Of course not. Why would there be? Why would either of them hang out up there when they could be all alone hidden away at the back of the store? I wandered through the towering piles of books, careful not to knock any of them over, although lashing out at something felt like a pretty good idea right about now.

I entered the gated Black Stacks and was relieved to find Jane seated alone cross-legged in the middle of one of the aisles. She made notes on a PDA, but she wasn’t actually using a stylus to enter information. Jane was staring at the screen while that now-familiar sound of old-school dial-up came from her mouth and words magically appeared on the screen in front of her.

“Well, that’s new, isn’t it?” I asked.

She looked up, startled. She didn’t smile.

“That was rude,” she said, and turned back to the PDA.

“What was?”

Jane finished whatever she was working on and then set the machine down. “Hanging up on me like that before,” she said. “What was that all about?”

I looked down the aisle toward the back of the store. “Is Wesker around?”

Jane shook her head. “One of the books tried to escape again. I think they really miss having Cyrus as their owner. I know he was evil and responsible for the whole Ghostsniffing operation, but they really seem like they were attached to him.”

It had been a while since I had heard anyone say his name. Just hearing it mentioned was enough to bring back horrifying memories of the several times I had been attacked by the Black Stacks at Cyrus’s command.

“Anyway, Thaddeus went chasing off after it somewhere,” she continued, still looking somewhat disconnected. “I suggested we start chaining the more aggressive ones to the shelves but he said no.”

“Can you please not call him that?” I said, losing patience. “He’s your boss. You should call him Director Wesker. That’s just good business”

Jane rose from the floor with a sinister look in her eyes. She slammed the book she had been working with back on the shelf, then gave it a soothing pat. “I’m sorry if Other Division is so formal.”

“Don’t tell me you’re now part of the Departmental in-fighting, too? Are you telling me that you and Thaddeus are thick as thieves? Ask anyone in Greater and Lesser Arcana about him, Jane. Do you think they all live in fear of him because it’s some kind of joke?”