Downpour

THIRTY

The temperature kept dropping as I drove back across the top of the lake. If it continued, the sleet would turn to ice soon, increasing the pressure to finish up my inquiries and get indoors before dusk. I hoped it wouldn’t keep the magicians from showing up at Jewel’s house later. I stopped at the Log Cabin Resort to use the phone in hopes of finding Ridenour, but the ranger on duty at Hurricane Ridge wasn’t sure where the senior ranger was. I needed to find Willow also and see if I could talk her into meeting with Faith. So far, she’d always turned up on her own. I hoped she’d show up at her half sister’s house, but earlier would suit me better.

“No luck with Ridenour,” I said as I climbed back into the truck. “We’ll have to drive around and look for him.”

“If he’s still out here in this lousy weather.”

“He hadn’t checked out for the day, so chances are good he’s somewhere between here and Sol Duc. With the sleet, he might be checking on the fishery or resort buildings at Barnes Point. The resort people had started opening up the buildings for spring repairs and cleaning when I first came up here, so if this turns into an ice storm, those sites are the most likely to get damaged. Ridenour’s the sort who’ll jump in and start issuing orders or doing it himself if he thinks something needs to get done to protect his park.”

The road was a little slippery already, so I had to go carefully until the Rover was on the comparatively flat and high-traction gravel roads at Barnes Point. I didn’t see Ridenour’s truck at the Storm King ranger station or fisheries, so I turned around and drove toward the actual resort buildings around Lake Crescent Lodge. The barrier was down, but it wasn’t locked, so we lifted it and drove on toward the buildings, which clustered near the shore all along the jutting curve of Barnes Point.

I’d been up to the resort when I’d first come looking for Darin Shea and found its sprawl a little annoying. The old Lake Crescent Lodge had changed owners and names several times, been added onto, acquired outbuildings, and eventually expanded its grounds to include a large meadow and picnic area on the south end, two different sets of old cabins nearby, a new addition of detached condolike things farther north, and the remaining outbuildings and cottages of another resort that had burned down long ago on the farthest-north end, just before the point turned, sticking its stubby bulk into the lake at the narrowest part. The road split past the barrier, directing visitors north to the Marymere and Storm King buildings, or south to the lodge, and the Singer and Roosevelt cabins. The original two-story Singer Tavern was now the Lake Crescent Lodge; it was right in the middle of the shoreline buildings and seemed like a good place to start, especially when I spotted the white park service pickup behind it.

I put the Rover in the slot next to Ridenour’s—usurping the spot closest to the maintenance gate that was labeled EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH with a faded, hand-painted sign. Quinton and I bundled up with scarves and hats against the chilling sleet and got out to walk to the gate, which was locked. Peering over it, I thought the back door of the lodge was a little ajar, but it was hard to tell. The slat-sided two-story building with its weathered white paint was about one hundred years old and most of the doorways and window frames weren’t perfectly square any longer—if they ever had been.

As we walked around to the side of the building that faced the water, I thought about this being where Hallie Latham Illingworth had worked until her husband had strangled her and thrown her body into the lake to bob to the surface years later, turned to soap. I stopped a moment to look out toward where she’d been found. I could see the white smudge of the Log Cabin Resort’s parking lot and the evergreen finger of the point above Elias Costigan’s house. From this angle, they seemed to touch and cut off the northwestern end of the lake completely, creating a deceptive shoreline much shorter and straighter than reality, with Pyramid Mountain rising straight up and straight out from the short dock that belonged to the lodge as if the locations were connected. I stared at the scene.

Quinton put his hand on my arm. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure yet. I can almost put some pieces together, but they aren’t quite clicking.”

“Maybe they’ll click better inside. I saw light through the porch windows, so I think someone may be in the lodge.”

“The main doors are around on the north side,” I said, remembering the layout from the last time.

The double doors on the entry porch were locked. Through the tall narrow panes next to them, I could see into the dim lobby with its Morris chairs and the chandelier of deer antlers hanging over the fieldstone fireplace. Ghosts wafted to and fro or sat in the chairs, re-creating endless loops of memory in the flickering light of long-dead fires and the glow of wild magic. Shadows and shafts of dusty light made strange patterns on the wooden floor that looked a little like body outlines at a crime scene. I shuddered and we walked farther back to the jutting, many-windowed extension that was now the gift shop. The door was unlocked.

Apprehension tingled over my skin and sent a shiver down my spine. The lines on the floor seemed like an omen. I pushed on the door with my forearm, keeping my hand off it, just in case. The door opened with a squeal. Something out of view made a scrambling noise on the wooden floor of the lobby. Then a shadow trailing violet and blue energy darted across the next doorway and vanished into the gloom. I started to go after it but heard the kitchen door slam on the other side.

Backing away from the door, I brushed past Quinton and started toward the back, only to find a wooden wall that cut the back of the lodge and the next row of cabins off from the parking lot.

I swore and reversed direction, running around the lake side of the building with Quinton behind me. We dashed around the corner where the path pointed back to the parking lot or toward the low, fieldstone buildings of the Roosevelt cottages on the south end and ran for the maintenance gate, which was now swinging wide, blocking the view of the parking lot and the roads beyond it. We didn’t hear an engine, and the noise of the sleet on the gravel parking lot obscured the sound of running steps.

Beyond the gate, there was no one to be seen. I ran several more feet, scanning the ground for a sign of someone’s passage, but the sleet and rain had churned up the surface too much to tell, and the Grey, so full of ghosts and colored shadows, was unhelpful this time.

“Damn it,” I spat, coming to a halt and glaring into the curtains of icy rain. “How did he get the gate unlocked from the inside?” Probably the same way he’d gotten into my truck to steal my hotel key card, I realized. The same blue, gray, and violet energy I’d seen on the Rover’s doors had wound around the borrowed zombies the night before, and now I’d seen it trailing behind our mysterious escape artist. It was unlike the energy colors I’d seen around Willow and Jewel and Jin and not quite like Costigan’s, either, though it had the same strange, breathing darkness. We’d just missed seeing Costigan’s “child” in the flesh. Whoever he was, he had a way with locks.

There was no way we’d find him in the rain and unfamiliar territory of the forest between the lodge and the road. Our only option was to turn around and figure out what he’d been doing inside the lodge. We went in through the now-open kitchen door, since the gated yard and covered mudroom gave us a place to leave our coats and boots so we didn’t track any mess inside. I didn’t want to clean up or leave evidence behind that we’d trespassed.

We went through the kitchen to the main lobby. It was gloomy inside, even though the storm shutters had been removed from the ground-floor windows. I couldn’t find a source for the light Quinton had seen from outside, but it could have been a flashlight, or a reflection, or even a witch light. What we did find was a gold-colored silk suit, crumpled on the floor in front of the hearth, as if its owner had lain down and vanished, leaving the clothes behind and a thin residue of dust that smelled of camphor and sea salt.

I closed my eyes for a moment and let out an unhappy breath. I’d hoped to get some more help out of Jin, but I didn’t think he’d have voluntarily left his suit behind, and that meant he was probably gone for good. I knelt down beside the dim shape of a head above the empty suit collar and picked a scrap of fabric out of the dust. It was about the size of my thumbnail and felt strangely stiff. It was hard to see in the dimness, but it appeared to be a different color on each side. I picked two more shreds out of the mess and put them in my pocket.

“What is it?” Quinton asked.

“I think it’s what’s left when you destroy a Chinese demon. Or banish it.”

“They leave their clothes behind?”

“Maybe they can’t take anything with them back to hell—or Diyu, really. I mean, it’s not as if you banish the suit no matter how ugly, just the wearer. We’d better sweep this up and take it with us. Willow might be able to tell us more, when and if we catch up to her.”

Quinton and I found a broom, a dustpan, and a couple of plastic grocery bags in the kitchen. I folded the suit and Quinton swept up the dust. We put them in separate bags. Quinton carried the bags and the broom back to the kitchen while I continued to stare at the floor for a few more moments. I noticed there were no shoes, but Jin hadn’t been wearing any the last time I’d seen him after his original pair had been ruined, so that didn’t surprise me, but there were a couple of other things lingering on the floor once we’d gotten the suit out of the way.

Quinton returned and gave me a curious look. “You coming?” he asked.

“In a second . . .” I knelt down to get a look at the shiny things on the floor as the gift shop door squealed again. We both looked up into the business end of a revolver and a very annoyed Brett Ridenour right behind it.

“What in hell are you doing in here?” he demanded.

I kept my hands where he could see them and didn’t try to get up. Quinton remained standing, but he made sure his own hands were in plain sight.

“We were looking for you and saw someone inside. The door was open, so we came in, but whoever was in here ran out the kitchen door. We tried to catch him, but we couldn’t, and we came back inside to see what he’d been doing.”

“You should have stayed outside.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s half a step from snowing out there, Ridenour, and we had no way to secure the building. I knew you’d be back this way since your truck’s outside, so we figured it was better to wait in here for you and keep any other trespassers out than to go wandering around in the sleet and ice looking for you. We even left our shoes in the kitchen so we wouldn’t mess up any evidence.”

Ridenour huffed an exasperated sigh and slipped the revolver away under his coat. I wasn’t quite sure how he managed to conceal it, since it was big enough to bring down an elk, but maybe that was just my skewed view from the fire-breathing end. “So what did you find?”

“I’m not sure. Looks like jewelry.”

I stood up and took a step away, letting Ridenour do the honors, since it was his territory. He crouched and poked one of the small objects with a gloved finger. “Huh.” He reached under his coat again and brought out a flashlight, which he clicked on and used to illuminate the nearest of the two shiny things. “Cuff links . . .”

“Not something the cleaning crew is likely to have dropped,” I observed.

“Nope,” he agreed, picking up the closest one and looking at it. He held the cuff link out toward me. The crest was a silver oval with a blue enameled outline of the U.S. overlaid by a raised silver compass cross. “National Society of Professional Surveyors. You can bet this hasn’t been lying around since they closed up in October.” He picked up the other one and rose to his feet, leaving the floor bare as he put the flashlight away.

“Has there been a surveyor up here?” I asked.

“Not in a while. They did a survey of the buildings and property a few years ago as part of an assessment for renovation and preservation requirements, but that was more than ten years ago.”

“Steven Leung used to be a surveyor . . .” I said.

“Yes, he was. I can’t be sure these are his, but it might be a safe bet.”

“The trespasser we chased off must have dropped them,” Quinton suggested.

“Male or female?” Ridenour asked. Then he looked up and glared at Quinton. “And who are you? I know her, but I’ve never seen you before.”

“Lassiter’s an associate of mine,” I said, breaking in before Quinton could answer for himself. Not that he wouldn’t have said the same, but I wanted Ridenour focused on me, not on Quinton and his redsmeared face.

“Really.” Ridenour sounded skeptical.

I gave him a narrow, disgusted glance.

He shrugged it off. “You two find anything else disturbed when you came in?”

“Not that we could see,” I replied.

“Uh-huh. What were you after up here?”

“You. I wanted to ask you a couple more questions.”

“What about?”

“What happened up here in 1989?”

“ ’ Eighty-nine? Not much I recall. I was the new guy back then.”

“No unusual activities? No . . . construction or accidents or fires?”

He frowned, giving it some thought. “Well . . . I’m not sure of the year, but that might have been when they laid the power cable across the lake.”

“Was that when they discovered the lake was deeper than they had thought?”

“Yeah, I think it was.” He nodded. “It must have been. They had a couple of false starts because they thought the lake was about six hundred feet deep or so and they were laying the cable nearby, where the lake’s narrowest. But they ran out of cable on the first try and they couldn’t guess how much they needed since they could only measure a maximum of a thousand feet on the reel. They had to pull it back up and start over, and it was a real mess. The cable got caught on some kind of submerged snag or overhang, and they ended up hauling up a bunch of rock and weed that had tangled on it before they could get the cable up and try again.”

“What happened to the junk they pulled up?”

“Not sure, now you mention it. Usually that kind of thing is put back where you find it, but the power company might not have done so. They might have just dumped it somewhere off the park property so they wouldn’t have to deal with it.”

Lake Sutherland was just outside the park boundary. . . .

“Why are you asking?”

“Because I think something they pulled up allowed your wife, May, into this world.”

Ridenour’s jaw went slack and he stared at me for a second, the normal energy around his body sinking down as if someone had pulled his plug. Then it flashed back in a red glare. “What do you know about it?” He lunged forward. “Who are you to talk about her? Who the hell are you, anyway?”

I had to put my arms up and fend him off as he grabbed at me. Quinton clutched Ridenour’s shoulders and tried to haul him back, but the ranger was heavier and had the advantage of traction with his boots on, so Quinton only ended up trapping Ridenour’s arms and being pulled across the floor as his socks slipped over the varnished wood planks. I broke Ridenour’s grip with an outward sweep of my arms while his leverage was undermined, but we’d come to the edge of the seating area around the hearth and I stumbled backward, falling into a chair as he continued his forward momentum.

The seat was an original Morris recliner and my weight tumbling into it sloped the back down and the seat forward. I brought my left foot up and planted it in Ridenour’s chest. “Stop!” I barked.

Quinton hauled backward on Ridenour, pulling him upright and yanking his coat down off his shoulders to trap his arms at the elbow. It wouldn’t hold him long, but it brought the older man to a frustrated halt. I put my feet back on the floor with care and got up out of the chair. Ridenour struggled in the confining coat and Quinton let him go. I took advantage of his distraction to turn the ranger and shove him into the recliner I’d just vacated. He flopped into it with a woof of surprise, through the ghost of a sporty-looking fellow in an old-fashioned shooting jacket who paid him no mind and went on reading his memory of a newspaper.

I turned my palms out and raised my hands to chest height. “Calm down, Ridenour. I’m just trying to figure out what went wrong here and caused the deaths of two people. I’m not trying to upset you or degrade May’s memory.”

“Four people,” Ridenour snapped back, wriggling his coat up onto his shoulders so he could free his arms and move the chair back upright.

“Four? How do you count that?”

“Leung, Strother, Scott, and my—and May. It’s goddamned Willow’s fault.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s not,” I said, letting my hands fall to my sides. I could feel the pressure of Quinton’s presence moving back a little, keeping out of Ridenour’s focus. “And I notice you didn’t say she’s responsible for Jonah Leung’s death. So don’t you believe that anymore, or did you ever?”

Ridenour glared at me for a few seconds; then his shoulders slumped and he hung his head. “I don’t know. Ever since you showed up, I just don’t seem to think quite right. Or maybe I’m thinking too much. There are moments when I feel . . . connected to something and I think I know things I couldn’t know—as if someone whispered them in my ear—and then . . . it’s just gone. The same way May was just . . .” He raised his head and looked at me, the watery light through the windows streaking his face with age he hadn’t lived. “How did you know about May, anyhow?”

I almost turned my head toward the place Jin’s suit had lain, but I gave a rueful smile and kept my eyes on Ridenour. “Weird stuff is my territory, just as the park is yours. Someone told me.”

“No one knows. Except Willow. That’s why I always thought—well, you know what I think. Who told you?”

“Someone like May.”

He squeezed his eyes closed and his face crumpled. He had to swallow hard a few times before he could speak. “At first I didn’t know. That she wasn’t . . .”

I just nodded. To say she hadn’t been human or real would have been too much, and Ridenour was hurting enough by talking at all.

“Why did you believe Willow sent May away? Was it only because she knew about her?”

“No. There was paper . . . yellow paper with Chinese written on it. Folded like a flower.”

I crouched down beside the chair, turning a little to keep from blocking the light as I pulled one of the scraps from my pocket. “Were there other pieces around, like this?” I asked, holding out one of the bits of fabric I’d plucked from the floor earlier. In the thin, sleetbattered light it was the color of dry grass.

Ridenour glanced at it and then looked again, longer. “I—think so. That sort of color, scattered around near her clothes.”

Now I almost wished we hadn’t cleared the suit and the dust away. “How were her clothes arranged?”

“They were . . . in a pile. As if she’d stepped out of them. With the yellow paper flower on top.”

“Ridenour, there’s no reason to believe it was Willow. The flower was a spell, just like the one that—that sent May back where she came from. Someone wanted you to see it and think it was Willow’s work because she’s Chinese, but you can’t be sure. Whoever did it had two of the papers—one to use on May and one to leave for you to find. What did you do with it?”

“I burned it.”

“Who else might have made it? Who else wrote Chinese?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Jewel, maybe . . .”

I doubted Jewel would have gone to the trouble of implicating her half sister. She didn’t like Willow, but she didn’t seem to have any grand plan against her. Once again, I sensed the hand of the mysterious child—whoever he was, I’d come to hate him—and I wondered if, on his trips to Seattle for Costigan, the child had stopped in Chinatown. . . .

“Ridenour, who was working on this building today?”

The ranger still seemed dazed. “Some contractors, I suppose.”

“Building contractors, renovators . . . ?”

“No, no. The resort is run by a management group that the park service contracts with. The group hires the people they need to do the seasonal cleaning and run the place on short-term contracts.”

“What about the building maintenance? Who does that?”

“We do, but, again, we contract for it. It’s mostly done as needed, since it’s usually odd jobs and immediate repairs, not planned things like the big renovation.”

The certainty welled up in my mind so fast I gasped. Ridenour and Quinton both stared at me.