Chapter 8: The Second Anchor

The nearest open door belonged to a woman who had threatened to sell a stranger's car as a paper offering.

Callum judged that safer than the dark intersection.

He followed the ghost into Fong's Paper & Incense and pulled the glass door shut behind them. A bell clipped to the frame gave one irritated ring.

Warmth, smoke, and commerce pressed close. Paper houses occupied the upper shelves, three stories high and furnished down to painted televisions. Below them hung paper phones, wristwatches, handbags, and sneakers with gold laces. Red candles stood in ranks beside packets of incense. Stacks of gold and silver joss paper caught the fluorescent light, and along the back wall cartons of seventh-month stock rose to the ceiling: hell money in bales, folded ingots, candles shaped like peaches.

A Cantonese radio host spoke from behind the counter while two women compared paper refrigerators. One opened a door to inspect the shelves.

"Eighteen dollars," Winnie told her. "Twenty-two if you want the one with the ice dispenser."

The woman held up the larger refrigerator.

"Your father used ice?"

"He complained when restaurants didn't give enough."

"Then twenty-two."

Winnie wrote the sale in a clothbound ledger, accepted two twenties, and counted the change twice. White welcome packets from Ashby Merritt occupied a milk crate beneath the counter, each crossed out in red.

The ghost stopped beside a display of paper shoes. Color had returned to her face, taken from him one degree at a time. Callum's fingers had begun to ache with cold.

Outside, the dead streetlights made a black channel through the fog.

Winnie glanced past him through the door. "Whatever you brought, take it away when you leave."

"I didn't bring it."

One of her eyebrows rose.

Callum corrected himself. "I didn't bring that."

"Better."

The customers took their refrigerator and a packet of silver paper. Winnie rang up a man buying two red candles for six dollars, then told him the incense he wanted had gone up to nine.

"Everything goes up," he said.

"Except the amount people think I should charge."

He paid nine.

Callum waited until the door closed behind him. "I need you to identify something."

"You need to buy something."

"I bought something here already."

"No. Your brother did."

Winnie turned a page in her ledger. Her reading glasses hung on a red cord against her shirt. She wore a gray cardigan with one sleeve pushed above the elbow, and her hair had escaped its clip over one ear.

Callum set a five-dollar packet of gold paper on the counter.

She wrote it down before taking his money. "Now you are a customer with a question."

He retrieved the evidence sleeve from inside his jacket.

Only half the talisman remained. The red marks had flared white that night and then gone black, and the heat had scorched one edge of the yellow paper. The iron bar had punched a ragged hole through the center. Several strokes had browned where the cold struck them.

Winnie's pen stopped above the ledger.

"Where did you get that?"

"Declan's apartment."

"Where did he keep it?"

"With his research. Burial maps, photographs of this building, your receipt."

"And you decided that made it equipment."

Callum laid both palms on the counter. "Can you tell me what it is?"

Winnie shut the ledger.

"No."

Behind him, she moved closer. He felt the heat leave the back of his neck.

"Winnie."

"Mr. Rourke."

"A man is dead. That paper was connected to his death."

"Your brother had a name."

"I know."

"You call this evidence. You call her it."

Callum glanced toward the ghost.

Her attention was fixed on Winnie with open interest. She stood beside a paper house with a tiled courtyard and watched him face an examination he had not scheduled.

"I haven't called her it today," he said.

Winnie folded her glasses and set them on the ledger. "Your voice does."

"I was trying to determine what she was."

"She was standing there."

"I didn't know what I was dealing with."

"You knew enough to put iron through it."

"The paper."

"The paper cannot hear you."

She examined a pair of paper sneakers. Her expression suggested she would pay full price to keep the conversation going.

Callum took his hands from the counter. "She won't give me her name."

"Then use a pronoun. They are free."

"I called her Qian."

"That belongs to the tour guides."

She looked up from the sneakers. "Mrs. Fong has always had sound judgment."

"Do not enjoy this so much," Callum said.

"I have had a difficult day."

Winnie waited.

Callum had interviewed owners who lied about electrical fires while soot remained above their outlets. He had questioned contractors who swore a stairwell door had always been nailed shut. None of them had made him account for a word before answering a technical question.

He nodded toward the ghost. "The charm was used in a rite involving her. I need to know what I did."

Winnie put on her glasses.

"Take it out."

Callum opened the sleeve and laid the burned paper on the glass counter. Winnie did not touch it. She bent over the red marks, followed the surviving edge with one finger, and turned the paper so the burned crescent faced her.

The radio host laughed at something. A string of paper firecrackers stirred above the door although the air in the shop had settled.

Winnie said, "I made this."

The ghost's hand stopped on the paper sneakers.

"For Declan?" Callum asked.

"Who else would pay cash for a custom charm and ask for an itemized receipt?"

"When?"

"Weeks before he died."

Winnie opened the ledger again. She turned back through pages filled with dates, names, quantities, and prices. Joss paper. Candles. Funeral bundles. Association dues collected for an elderly customer who did not trust online payment.

Her finger stopped beside an entry written in blue ink.

"Severance charm," she read. "Materials and work, one hundred eighty dollars. Consultation, no charge, because he brought food."

"What kind of food?"

"Pineapple buns."

She lowered the shoes.

"Declan hated pineapple."

"They do not contain pineapple."

"He knew that."

"Then perhaps he bought them for me."

That sounded like Declan. He had treated pastry as an access credential and friendliness as a lock he could worry open through repetition.

Winnie frowned at the damaged charm. "He was polite. Too polite when he wanted something. He came back four times after I told him the old records were none of his business."

"What records?"

"Association records. Burial lists. My mother's boxes in the back."

Callum looked toward the curtain behind the counter.

Winnie shifted into his line of sight. "You are not a customer for those."

"What was Declan looking for?"

"People who paid to have their dead sent home. Names missing from the later lists. He kept asking where the bodies went."

Her hand loosened. One paper shoe bore a shallow crease under her thumb.

"Did he mention her?"

Winnie glanced at the ghost. "He asked me to make something that could cut a bound ghost free of what held her."

Callum looked down at the charm.

"Severance," he said.

"That is the word on my ledger."

"I thought it was a ward."

"You thought."

"The red work was unfamiliar. Declan left no instructions."

"So you made your own."

"Show me," he said.

Winnie turned the paper until the ragged hole sat nearest Callum. She indicated two red lines that curved away from each other before the fire had consumed them.

"This side receives what is bound. This stroke opens the joining. These carry the claim away."

Her finger moved to the surviving lower edge.

"Declan was supposed to place the ghost's anchor here and direct the severance outward. The charm would cut between her and the holder."

"I put the hairpin in the center."

"You nailed it there."

"The marks were already flaring."

"After you turned it around."

Callum remembered the iron nail he had turned outward, the salt line dragged through its circle, the circle closing around the paper instead of the mirror. From his side of the room that night, the strokes had seemed to close around the hairpin. They had closed because he had faced the receiving end toward himself.

Winnie tapped the hole.

"You made the cut run backward. The old claim stayed. The open end found the living person holding the rite."

"The second anchor."

Winnie pushed her glasses higher on her nose.

Callum's delayed heartbeat struck. Across the counter, a red candle guttered inside its plastic sleeve.

He had blamed the ghost's counter-move. Mara had called it a double anchor, his rite and hers tangled together. Both descriptions had left him room to treat the tether as an accident inflicted on him.

He had taken a tool meant to free her and converted it into another restraint.

She set the paper sneakers back on their hook, carefully, smoothing the crease with her thumb.

Callum could not make himself look at her.

"What did Declan know?" he asked.

"Enough to be frightened."

"Of her?"

Winnie opened her cash drawer and tucked his five-dollar bill under the clip. "He said his brother would do something stupid if he found out."

Callum swallowed. "That is not specific."

"He had met you."

The radio moved into an advertisement. Outside, a delivery van stopped in front of the shop. Its hazard lights flashed against the window while a driver unloaded three cartons marked CANDLES.

Winnie went around the counter and opened the door for him.

"Back room," she said. "Keep them dry."

The driver wheeled the cartons past Callum without glancing at the half-burned charm. Winnie checked the invoice, disputed a surcharge, and made him call his office. By the time the fee disappeared, Callum's hands had gone numb.

Living commerce resumed around the thing he had done.

Winnie signed for the delivery and returned to the counter. "You want more help?"

"Yes."

"Stop working for Ashby Merritt."

Callum raised his head.

"All work," she said. "This building and every other property they send you."

"They're my largest client."

"I know."

"I have payroll."

"You work alone."

"Insurance. Equipment. The van. Six years of a business that does not survive on good intentions."

Winnie leaned against the counter. "Neither does my shop."

The milk crate of refused packets sat between them. Ashby Merritt's tree showed through the red lines Winnie had drawn over every page.

"They want this space," Winnie said. "They want the apartments empty. They send keys, checks, inspectors, cleaners."

"The fifteenth is the night this whole street burns paper for the dead," she added. "My year's margin comes from that one night. They picked this month on purpose, so the building is empty before anyone watches."

Her voice hardened on the last word.

"I don't like cleaners. They throw away whatever belongs to someone else and charge for making the room blank."

Callum looked across the shop. Paper houses waited above the shelves, made to be burned because someone had chosen them for a particular dead person. Phones, shoes, money, candles. Nothing blank. Nothing cleared without a name attached.

Ashby Merritt paid on time. The retainers covered months when frightened homeowners did not. Their referrals had made Rourke Remediation look legitimate to brokers who preferred their hauntings invoiced as thermal defects.

He had spent six years building a business no bank would lend against.

Giving up its largest client would hurt.

The hesitation lasted long enough for Winnie to see all of it.

"That is my price," she said.

Callum slid the charm back into its sleeve. "I heard you."

"That is not acceptance."

"No."

Winnie opened her ledger to a clean line. "Good. At least Mrs. Leung taught you something."

He put the gold paper under his arm and left the shop.

She followed him onto Waverly Place. Behind them, the bell rang for another customer, and Winnie quoted twelve dollars for paper sneakers without pausing the radio.

The dead patch of street remained one block away. Fog filled it from curb to curb. Callum kept close to the shop windows and matched his pace to hers.

She said nothing about the charm.

He had spent the night treating the tether as her attack and the day bargaining to recover her remains. Declan had walked into the same shop weeks earlier and commissioned a tool for her freedom.

At the corner, Callum stopped.

She took one more step before the tether checked her. She turned.

He asked, "Was Declan helping you?"

Her face changed before the constraint reached her. The black point in Callum's palm drove deeper, and pain traveled up his wrist. Her lips parted on an answer and produced only a breath of cold that fogged the air between them.