Downpour

SEVEN

I was a little reluctant to have Jin in my truck, but I didn’t see an alternative that might not ruin the deal, so I shrugged and led him to the Rover. He made a face as I opened the passenger door for him, and the ferret—who’d been sleeping in her travel cage in the back—pushed her face up against the grille and hissed at him. Then she began pawing at the door and making angry little grunts.

“I don’t think she likes you,” I observed.

Jin didn’t hide his distaste. “The feeling is mutual. Horrible little monster.”

“I have my monster; you have your buddies by the road.”

“Those pathetic guai? Strays, slip-gates. Not any friends of mine,” he added with a sniff.

Even monsters have pecking orders. Apparently, Jin was higher up this mysterious food chain than his brachiating relatives—another tidbit to put in my mental file. If I ever figured out what sort of creature Jin was, it might come in handy. There was nothing I could do to pacify Chaos about his presence in the truck, though, so I ignored the ferret and hoped she wouldn’t do herself an injury in her frenzy to take a bite of him. I drove.

The road I was already on turned into East Beach when it crossed Highway 101. About one twisty mile beyond that, Jin told me to stop only a few yards from where I’d first seen the spectral image of Steven Leung’s burning Subaru and directed me down a dirt track so narrow and overgrown, it was visible from the paved road only as a thinness between the trees. The truck’s paint was going to suffer, but I didn’t care to leave the vehicle beside the road and walk this time. I wasn’t entirely sure of Jin or what he was leading me into and I preferred to have as many escape options at hand as possible. The narrow way petered out only a few yards from the water. Once we were out of the truck again and standing on the shore of Lake Crescent, I could see a large house with floor-to-ceiling windows off to my left where the lake formed a sharp cove and a scattering of smaller houses along the shore to the right, past the Log Cabin Resort and nearly to the spot where I’d seen the ghastly figure rising from the water a few days earlier. The ghostlight and whispers were as strong as before and the colored energy mist still flowed and puddled along the shore. Straight ahead was nothing but deep, cold water for twelve miles to Fairholm.

Deep as it was, the lake was beautiful, not just along the heavily forested shore in a hundred shades of green, but the water itself was so clear, it reflected and intensified the colors of foliage and sky so the surface seemed to be made of colored glass.

Jin gazed at it with gleaming eyes and began taking off his shoes, revealing long, weirdly clawed feet. He handed the expensive shoes to me without another word and squatted down at the absolute edge of the lake, plucking fussily at the creases in his trousers as the water covered his toes. It must have been icy, but he didn’t shiver. His illusory human form faded to a ghostly shroud and he stretched his arms out toward the center of the lake.

Jin crouched, his white monstrousness bizarrely clothed in his Italian suit, chanting in a low voice in a language that rose and fell, rose and fell, breeding lassitude and casting a green glow around him. The emerald energy brightened and burned as he continued to call to it, blues and yellows flowing into it like water from nearby patches of surface energy and the thin shadows of ghosts along the shore. Then he threw his arms out farther and gathered something in, as if bodily grasping the sunken car.

I could feel the strain of magic in my gut and across my skin as I waited, watching, sinking into the Grey to see what Jin was doing. The sun, a glittering disk in the Grey, shifted in the open slice of sky above the lake. Through the clear, colorful water I saw something moving, coming toward us, carried in the bright green energy Jin had cast into the lake. The colors around the thing writhed with strange shadows and as I stared, the green light showed a swarm of horrible, wax white things with gaping, toothy jaws and staring eyes pushing and lifting the shape toward the surface. I held my ground, though I wanted to recoil from the sight of this army of swimming undead coming to Jin’s command. Slowly he unbent, standing, then rose to his feet and stepped back from the shore....

The shadowy thing came up, broaching out of the lake like a whale from the sea as the hellish swarm burst to the surface and then plunged back into the depths, flinging their burden toward the shore. It was the car in double image—real and Grey—and it tumbled above the water for a moment before it fell back in only a few yards out from the edge where we stood.

I pulled back to the normal before Jin could see me and studied the car. Though dented and misshapen by pressure, rusted where the paint had burned off, it was still undeniably a Subaru Forester. It sank back into the shallow water on its side, leaving one door just below the surface, the rest covered by the clear water, but still visible.

Jin leaned back against the Rover, reassembling his human appearance in haste as a trio of ghostly shapes shivered and then blinked out of existence beside him as they were sucked away into the lake, leaving a moment’s strange silence. In the Grey, Jin was panting a little, but the normal image wore a superior smile. “There is the car.”

I made a show of peering toward the hulk in the water, shading my eyes from the sun that was much brighter in the real world, and taking a surreptitious glance at my watch. It seemed ridiculous, but an hour had passed and it was nearing noon. The Grey has a strange way of warping time, but I felt as if I’d labored every minute of the elapsed time, even though Jin had been doing the real work. “How do I know it’s Leung’s?” I asked, hiding my own relief that the magic and its ugly cohort had dissipated.

He rolled his eyes and snapped at me. “How many of these do you think there are in this lake? You’re oblivious trash-mongers, but even your kind don’t go tossing dozens of these stinking conveyances into water like this!”

I put up my hands to calm him. “All right, all right. I’ll assume you’re as good as your word. It does look like Leung’s car.”

Jin resettled his face in a disdainful sneer. “Of course it’s his. Now you tell me about the asetem. Why did they leave?”

“Because I killed their king.”

Jin straightened so fast, the air cracked. “You what? You what? You what?” he babbled, rushing close to me.

I shrugged and pushed away from him, getting back into the Rover. “I killed him. Whacked him. Discorporated his nasty, manipulative hide,” I replied, closing the door between us. Jin reached for me through my open window as I started the engine. I pushed his shoes into his elongating black-clawed hands. “Tell you the rest later. Gotta go get someone to haul this car all the way out of the lake before dark.” I pushed the power window switch and let the window roll closed as I put the truck into reverse. Jin stared at me. Then he sat down hard and howled. I backed the Rover the hundred feet or so onto East Beach Road at a dangerous speed and pointed the truck toward Highway 101 and the nearest ranger station. Jin didn’t pursue me and I could hear his uncanny, grinding howl for miles as I drove away. I wondered why he was so upset and if I would later regret giving him that piece of information. The ferret made a huffing noise in her cage and I hoped she wasn’t privy to something I didn’t know, since she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell me what was making her chuff. But I had promised Jin I’d tell him the rest and maybe that would hold him off for a while. I hoped.

The closest place I thought I might find anyone was the Storm King ranger station where the ferret and I had taken our break the day before. Technically it was closed until May, but there’d been signs of life around and there was a pay phone. The mountains cut off cell service, so the old landline was the best bet I had. If that failed, I’d have to drive to Fairholm or Piedmont. At least it wasn’t raining at the moment; that would have made getting the waterlogged car out of the lake nearly impossible.

By the time I reached Storm King’s ranger station, Jin’s howling had died away. Once I parked in the lot, I got the ferret out of her cage again and wrestled her into her harness for a walk around the station in search of a ranger or any other help, hoping Jin hadn’t followed us or wasn’t interested in taking a piece out of me if he had. Chaos was nonplussed about the recent encounter with whatever he was, but she settled down to some intense exploring once I got her leashed and on the ground.

Chaos headed straight for the water, hopping and scampering across the chilly clearing in front of the ranger station. She diverged twice to check something on the ground, each time pausing only long enough to dig at a bright knot of Grey-stuff that had buried itself in the dirt. She lost interest in the hot spots after a few paws full of gravel and skipped back to her original path, but I noticed that the lake and the ground that sloped down into it had an unusual gleam, similar to the intrusive Greyness I’d seen near Lake Sutherland in the morning. I’d have expected so much effort to have drained, rather than added to, the freakish energy around the lake. The area near the car had seemed quieter and more normal. But here, near the ranger station, there were actually more bright lines shooting southwest than I’d seen the day before. The phenomenon seemed to ebb and flow to some rhythm I didn’t know. The power lines in the lake were apparently the source of massive energy, but . . . where did it come from in the first place?

A white pickup truck bearing a green stripe and the U.S. National Park Service emblem on the side was standing to the left of the boat ramp and dock that pointed at the northeastern shore, just a few degrees west of where Jin had raised Leung’s car from the depths. I couldn’t make out the spot from the dock as Chaos humped and skipped her way along the planks, but I found myself straining to see if there was an angry white monster on the other side. I didn’t see anything. The ferret looked over the side of the dock at the water and I did the same.

Below us, scattered branches and stones rested on pale green sand and gravel a dozen or more feet below the surface. Looking straight down into the incredibly clear water, I could see every bump and knot as well as if the branches still grew in air. As I stared down, Chaos—the ferret version of Kipling’s ’satiable Elephant’s Child—made a barking noise and jumped into the water.

“Damn it!” I spat, hauling her back up by her harness and leash as she attempted to paddle across the lake. She squirmed and wriggled as I picked her up and tried to brush the worst of the water off her, but she was soaked and shivering and stopped fighting me as soon as the cold really penetrated her skin. Then she wanted only to burrow into my clothes as quickly as possible.

“Moron tube rat,” I muttered, turning back and heading for land, just in case she tried another fool’s leap. I yanked off my scarf and started wrapping her up in it. “What are you trying to do—turn into an otter and swim out to sea?” I glanced up, gauging the distance back to the Rover, and saw a man in a dark green park service uniform and heavy jacket walking toward the white pickup. “Hey,” I called out. I wished I could wave to get his attention, but I had my hands full of wet ferret-in-velvet. I started running toward him, cradling Chaos against my chest and calling out again.

The ranger shot a glance over his shoulder, then stopped and turned to face me, waiting patiently for me to catch up. He was a middle-aged man, wings of gray spreading from his temples into his brown hair, though judging from the way his uniform hung, the park service kept him pretty fit. His nose was a little crooked, and constant cold had made the veins spiderweb across it, but there wasn’t much else about him that stood out. His aura was small and neutral yellow; he seemed totally normal—dull, even.

“Hey,” he said as I drew near. “What happened? Your dog fall in the lake?”

“My crazy ferret wants to join the Polar Bear Club, I guess,” I said, unwrapping the miscreant’s face so she could wave her whiskers at the man. She didn’t react to him at all except to sniffle piteously, so I wasn’t missing anything Grey about him, and that was reassuring: I’d begun to wonder if I’d lost more ability than I’d realized. “She jumped right into the water.”

He chuckled. “That water’s so clear, it’s like glass. Maybe she didn’t think it was there.”

“I have no idea. I’d think she could smell it, but maybe it’s too cold for her nose to work well.”

“It’s been colder. It’s above freezing today.” He glanced at a long, low building beside the water, nearly hidden by shore grass and winterdead water iris. “Why don’t you come in here and I’ll find you a towel for her.”

I thanked him and followed him into the building. It was only a little warmer inside than out and the long open room held two long water-filled troughs. “What is this place?” I asked.

“Fish hatchery. We keep the lakes stocked with trout and a couple of other sport species so they don’t get overfished. We almost killed off the native trout with introduced species and overfishing in the past. We try to learn from our mistakes.” He took a small towel out of a cabinet near the door and handed it to me. “I was just up checking on the tanks, making sure they hadn’t frozen over. Lucky for you we had a spate of subzero temps last week or I might not have come out here today.”

“I do seem to have really good luck,” I agreed, taking the towel and unwinding the ferret from my now-wet scarf. Actually, I don’t have luck, according to another Greywalker I’d met in London; I have a gift of persuasion, and that includes persuading circumstances to favor me. I think that’s probably bull, but I’ve learned not to let my natural cynicism ruin perfectly good magic: I’ll take all the luck I can get.

I wrapped Chaos in the dry towel and rubbed the water out of her fur while the ranger held on to my wet scarf. “So, do you just do fish or do you take care of the whole lake?” I asked.

“No, I do pretty much the whole lake. Name’s Ridenour,” he added, starting to offer me a hand to shake, then realizing I didn’t have one of my own free and stuffing it back into his jacket pocket. “Brett Ridenour. I’m the senior ranger for this district of the park.”

“Well, then you’re probably the man I need to see.”

“About what, Miss . . . ?”

Chaos was shivering in my hands and I paused to stuff the mostly dry ferret inside my coat to warm up. “Harper Blaine.” Now I shook his hand and went on. “I’m a private investigator and I was up here doing some pretrial work for a lawyer in Seattle when I noticed a car in the lake.”

“A car?” Ridenour questioned, half frowning and half smiling. “There aren’t too many places in the lake where a car would be visible if someone were fool enough to drive one in. It’s pretty deep out there.”

“So I hear, but there certainly is a car up near the northeast shore, about a hundred feet off East Beach Road.”

“Seriously?”

I nodded. “Yes. Bit of a lonely stretch just west of where the lake comes to a point behind that big house . . .”

“East Beach. Well . . . yeah, I suppose that’s about the one place a car wouldn’t just sink all the way to Hades out there. That’s an old landslide area; filled in part of the valley about eight thousand years ago and formed the two lakes here. The rest of it’s all glacial and deep as hell. I wonder what cabin-crazy son of a bitch drove his damned car into my lake.”

I made a clueless face and shrugged. “No idea.”

“You didn’t scare someone into the lake, now, did you, Miss Blaine?”

“Hell no. I was just looking for my witness and someone said he might be farther out along the shoreline. I got a little lost and ended up going down the wrong tiny dirt road.” I’m not too proud to make myself out to be a fool if it serves my purpose. “I got down to the end, realized I was in the wrong place, and got out of my truck to see if I could turn around or if I’d have to back out. And there’s a car in the water—just under the water, really, but, as you said, the water’s so clear that you can see down a long way. This isn’t even down more than two feet on the highest bit.”

Ridenour’s frown deepened. “Huh,” he grunted, staring into the distance. “I guess you’d better come show me, if you think your ferret’s all right now.”

“She’s dry enough to warm up on her own now.” I handed him the damp towel and he returned my wet scarf. “Thanks.”

He opened the door and we left the hatchery, heading for our respective trucks. “Do you need to take that critter home first?”

“No, I’m staying at a hotel in Port Angeles tonight. I have her cage in my truck and it’s warm enough. She’ll go to sleep no matter where she is—kind of like a kid.”

Ridenour’s stride faltered and for a second his face paled; then he caught back up to me. “I’ll bring my truck around and join you by yours. Then we can both drive out to the site.”

“All right.” I’d half expected him to ask me to come with him, but something had distracted him enough that he didn’t question whether I was leading him on a snipe hunt.

I walked back across the clearing and past the ranger station to the visitors’ parking lot. Chaos was more than happy to snuggle into her dry nest and give me the cold shoulder as if her aborted attempt to be a Popsicle were my fault. I rolled my eyes at her and shut the back hatch. By the time I was in my seat, I could hear the ferret crunching away on her kibble as if swimming in icy, haunted lakes was nothing unusual for her.

Ridenour pulled up and waited for me to get my engine started and pull out ahead of him. He followed me all the way to where the dirt track down to the lake lay exposed and churned up by my abrupt departure earlier. I rolled down my window and pointed to the road. Then I drove a bit past it, to the place I’d first seen Leung, and parked the Rover so I could walk back and join Ridenour, who’d parked his own truck beside a stand of frost-burned bracken ferns on the other side. The area now seemed almost unnaturally dull and quiet, the bright Grey overlay faded to thin mist for the moment.

“This it?” he asked as I joined him.

I nodded. “Just down there. You can see I made a bit of a mess.”

“Well, I won’t cite you, this time,” he said in a forced jocular tone. “This path is supposed to be cleared up in the summer, anyway, so we have access to as much of the shoreline as possible without having to bring out the boats.” We both glanced down the track and I was relieved to see no sign of Jin. “Stick close,” said Ridenour, starting down the trail. “I heard a cougar across the lake earlier and it might still be around.”

“You mean that awful screeching sound?” I asked.

“Yeah. Some people say it sounds like a woman screaming. Me, I just think it sounds like cougars.”

I wasn’t sure if he’d made a really horrible joke or no joke at all, so I said nothing and followed him down to the water’s edge, back to the place I’d last seen Leung’s car. It was still there, just visible as the daylight began to slant onto the lake from the west, illuminating the intrusive rust color of the wrecked car in the glowing greens and blues of the lake.

Ridenour glanced toward the water, apparently not quite convinced I’d really seen a car, and did a visible flinch when he spotted it. “Jesus! ” He started forward as if he was going to jump in and swim to it, but the knowledge of how cold the water was must have stopped him at the brink. He hovered at the edge, rocking from foot to foot as if he could barely restrain himself from action but wasn’t sure which one to take.

“I’m pretty sure there’s no one in there,” I said, not sure at all, but the last thing I wanted to deal with was a ranger with hypothermia. “The car looks like it’s been in the water a while.”

He stopped his indecisive swaying and turned back to look at me, his expression mournful. “If there was someone in it, they’d be dead by now,” he said with a sad nod. “I guess all we can do is have it hauled out.”

“How are you going to do that?”

He bit his lip and frowned at the ground. When he spoke he seemed to be talking to himself more than to me. “This road’s too narrow and soft to support any truck that could pull a waterlogged car out of the drink. We’ll have to get the barge. It’s docked down at Fairholm, but it’ll take an hour or more to get it up here and then another hour and a half to haul the car on board and take it to the boat ramp where we can get it on a flatbed and out to the county yard. We’ve got about three hours of light left. Then the sun goes behind the hills and it gets darker than the inside of a grizzly out here.” He rubbed one hand through his hair. “They’re not going to like working on Sunday . . . but I can’t give ’em a choice. They’re just going to have to do it. Can’t let that sit there any longer than we can avoid—it might slide down and sink.”

“Who aren’t going to like working on Sunday?” I asked.

He stopped staring at the drowned car and turned his head to talk to me. “The boat crews don’t work weekends in the winter—usually they don’t work up here much at all this time of year. Most of ’em have other jobs in the off-season. Damn it, I wish I had a diver with a dry suit up here! I want to know if I’ve got a body in that car.” He glanced up at the sky and muttered, “Don’t let this be a goddamned crime scene. I do not need a murder in my park!” He turned his gaze back toward the lake, rubbing his hands over his face and muttering something I couldn’t quite hear, but I thought he said, “Kill you my damned self.”

I stepped closer and put my hand on Ridenour’s shoulder. “Hey, you all right?”

Ridenour jumped as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Yeah, yeah. I’m just . . . I gotta wonder what the hell a car’s doing in my lake. It doesn’t look like it drove in here recently, so . . . I have to think the worst, and I’ve already got the culprit in mind. . . .”

“Don’t start fitting someone for handcuffs. Wait until you have some real information before declaring this a major crime.” As if I could talk. So far, everything was pointing to the ghost having told the truth, and the car was evidence of murder. But it wouldn’t be reasonable of me, a stranger, to agree to Ridenour’s visions of the worst.

He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. “OK. All right. We’ll assume it’s just an abandoned car for now, but it’s got to get moved tomorrow. I’ll head back to the center and put in calls for the crew and equipment. I’ll get the county in on it so they can take the car once it’s out of the lake and then we’ll see.... Which hotel are you staying at, Miss Blaine? If I need you, can I call on you?”

“Sure,” I said, and I gave him the name of my hotel. “I’ll come back tomorrow, if you don’t mind. I’d like to see what’s in that car myself, if that’s OK.”

Ridenour nodded absently. “Yeah, sure. First thing, about eight in the morning, then.”

“OK. Eight tomorrow.”

I followed him back up to East Beach Road, watching him shake his head and mutter the whole way. He plainly took the situation personally and was angry as hell at someone.