Page 31

There was nothing about potions or spells, however, and there was nothing in the history of the Milaflores Building about hauntings or paranormal stuff. I did find a report of a robbery in one of the apartments in the late 1920s that involved an old Detroit gang. Those had flourished during Prohibition. The city had been a huge source of illegal alcohol into the United States from Canada, which was just a short trip across the river or Lake St Clair. Detroit had been nicknamed Whiskeytown and alcohol smuggling during that time period had been the second largest industry (after making cars, of course).

That was all very interesting and I enjoyed finding out about the city where I now lived. However, it did nothing to answer any questions I had about the situation with the song. It actually made me a little more confused, since Jasper the Great wasn’t what I had imagined. He was a guy who did card tricks and made doves disappear, not an imposing man in a cloak who waved a wand and confronted magical creatures. He was a nightclub act and it didn’t seem like he’d been particularly successful at it, like Vera Doyle in the garden apartment had told me. I had also looked up the venues where he’d performed and they hadn’t been anything like the Fox Theater downtown. He had made enough to get by and afford his rent at the Milaflores Building, but there were no property records with his name and he had died without leaving any grand legacies. It didn’t seem that he’d had any family to leave anything to.

I sat back in the chair and rubbed my eyes carefully, so I wouldn’t mess with my contacts. It had been fun to do this research, but it hadn’t really gotten me anywhere. The only thing I had learned for sure about the music problem was that it didn’t exist at this library. I had gone to the bathroom and I hadn’t heard anything unusual except for a woman telling her son that he couldn’t climb up the walls, which she had meant literally. His head had appeared over the top of the partitions between the stalls and it had been really startling.

After a little while, Oliver came to join me. He had a file folder with him but he also looked disappointed. “Did you get anything?” he whispered.

“I read a lot about speakeasies, rum runners, and bootleggers during Prohibition.” But I shook my head. “It was all interesting but I didn’t come across anything important about our situation.”

“Me neither. I have copies of some documents relating to the construction and I looked at the original building plans, but there was nothing that jumped out at me.” He sat in the chair next to mine. “This was a bust.”

“It erased a possibility,” I said quietly. “I had been thinking that Jasper the Great might have done it.”

“Done what? Cast a spell?” he asked. He shook his head. “No, he used to do mind-reading tricks and tell lonely people that they were going to get married. He wasn’t mixing up eyes of newt or making curses.”

“You said that things used to smell in his apartment,” I reminded him. “You told me that once.”

“It was because he constantly cooked onions. I think he lived on them.” His eyebrows raised. “I wasn’t connecting the odor to his profession. Did you think he was the Middle Earth kind of wizard?”

“Maybe,” I confessed. “Or I thought there would be some kind of history of weird stuff, like mysterious knocking in the walls or glimpses of a ghostly maid riding the elevator. The Milaflores Building used to provide maid service, by the way.”

“That’s the most interesting thing I’ve heard today,” he sighed. “I spent hours looking at blueprints that I didn’t understand and trying to decipher handwriting from the Department of Buildings and Safety Engineering. Letter formation seems to have changed over the last hundred or so years and it could almost have been a different language.”

“You read my handwriting when I left you the slightly passive aggressive note on your door. You’re probably better at deciphering things than the average person,” I consoled him. “Are you ready to go?”

“Very. Let’s get Gramps for dinner.”

It seemed natural to do that, like we’d been behaving that way for years. “I hope that when you move away, you’ll come back to visit,” I said as we approached the record shop.

“He’s my grandfather. Of course I will.”

“Right, you’ll have a reason to be on our street.” And I also had a reason to be there: it was where I lived and I didn’t want to move.

Gramps was already standing in the door of the shop as we approached it. “I guess with the windows clean, he saw us coming,” Oliver said. “He also tracks me on his phone.”

“Now it’s a lot brighter inside, with more sunlight getting in during the day,” I noted. “I think that might improve his mood.”

“He’s naturally grumpy but you can hold out hope. Hey,” he called to his grandfather. “It’s too cold to stand out here.”

“Move your asses and come inside, then. Aren’t you two always bragging about how many miles you ran? And that’s the speed you walk down the block?” Gramps waved his hands at us and disappeared.

“The extra sunlight isn’t doing much for him,” his grandson remarked.

It turned out that Gramps had a specific reason for wanting us to come in quickly: he was very excited about something he had in the store, and it wasn’t a new pile of old records. He pointed at a black case on the counter. That area also looked slightly cleaner, as if he might have worked on the glass there as well.

Oliver seemed less thrilled, though. “Oh. That’s mine,” he said.

“I had your clarinet cleaned and serviced.” Gramps opened the case and displayed the black and silver instrument inside. He started to reach for the parts and then said, “You put it together for us.” He whipped out a cup of water from behind the counter and put a little stick in it.

“You’re all ready,” Oliver said. He still didn’t seem happy about that but he did slowly pick up two of the pieces. “What do you want to hear?”

“Anything,” Gramps answered eagerly. “Anything you feel like.”

I watched them, wondering what was going on. Oliver had told me that their argument over the piano wasn’t really about the piano. Would this clarinet set it off again?

He had fitted it all together and now reached for the little stick. “The reed,” Gramps told me when I mentioned it. “Where have you been that you don’t know anything about anything?”

“Not everybody’s interested in woodwinds.” Oliver moved his long fingers over the instrument. He cleared his throat, put the reed part into his mouth, and took it back out. “Ok,” he said, kind of to himself. “Ok, I could play.”