Strother seemed to consider it. “Could be. Maybe.” He nodded to himself and repeated, “Maybe.”
I pulled an envelope out of my bag and offered it to him. “These are the background notes I took to find Leung. I don’t think they’ll be a lot of help, but they’re what I’ve got. Since this is an active case now, even though it’s pretty cold, I can’t, technically, investigate it. But I can keep you in the loop if I find information helpful to you while I’m on my job. Would you feel uncomfortable reciprocating?”
“You mean tell you what I find?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose I could, mostly. I mean, not everything, of course, and not if you might tell your client something that could derail the investigation, you understand.”
I nodded, noticing he suddenly sounded a lot less “hick” than he had a few minutes ago. “That’ll be fine. My cell phone number’s on the paperwork. You might want to start with Leung’s bank records and see if all his retirement money’s accounted for, less his taxes, of course. If it’s not, that might be an interesting angle. . . .”
He sat up straighter. “It certainly would be. And you might want to keep an eye out if you go back up the mountain anytime soon for a fella named Costigan—Elias Costigan. Seems to have some noisy parties and he’s what you might call ‘a practitioner of alternate lifestyle.’ Got a place almost directly across from Jewel and Geoff’s on the west shore of Lake Crescent. Near Devil’s Punch Bowl. They say he and Jewel have been heard to scream at each other across the lake—though I imagine that’s not really possible. He’s not exactly what you’d call a friend of the family.”
That was interesting. If I had the location right, Costigan’s place would have been close to where the white thing I’d seen rise from the lake had come slogging into shore while I was interviewing Shea. “Anybody else I should keep an eye peeled for?” I asked.
“Not sure,” he said, picking up a yellow legal pad with neat rows of writing. “Kind of funny—there seems to have been a little housing boom up at the lakes about the time Steven must have disappeared. A half dozen families in a year or two sold up and moved on. Now, could be they foresaw the market collapse, but I’m thinking not all of’em could have been that smart.”
“You have a list?”
He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I could do.” He flipped the first few pages back and wrote himself a note.
“Could you indicate which of the newcomers are year-round residents and which are seasonal visitors only?”
“I think I could, but it’ll take a little while longer.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“I’ll call you when I’ve got the info, all right?”
I nodded and smiled a little. “Thanks. And I’ll let you know if I find anything that might help you.”
“All right, then.”
I noticed he didn’t offer to tell me what he found out from the bank, but I figured he’d trade information with me once I got anything he could use. He wasn’t quite the native guide I might have wanted, but he was at least a useful source of local information. And he seemed disposed to be friendly, which I couldn’t expect from a lot of others if there was, indeed, a nest of tricky mages around the lakes.
I thought it unlikely that everyone on Strother’s list was a magic user of some kind, but I could see where his thinking and mine intersected: Carefully-planned murders don’t happen out of the blue; something in the status quo changes and that triggers the violence. It could be something big, like a crime or an indiscretion, or it could be something small, such as the weather or one too many humiliations. Or it could be that someone comes to town and blows the whole thing up. Steven Leung’s ghost had said something about “them”: “We should never have let them.” His daughter Jewel was also concerned with “them.” I felt pretty confident that one of “them” was—if not the trigger—the one who’d pulled it. I just had to figure out which of “them” it was—once I met them—because, even if it wasn’t my case, I wanted to make sure that someone got special treatment when the flak hit. It takes a dangerous lack of empathy to set a man on fire.
Having picked Strother’s brain for ideas, I thought my next stop should be Ridenour to see what he thought of the names on Strother’s list and whom he might add to it. Between Strother and Ridenour, I stood a good chance of getting many pieces to this puzzle I’d never get on my own, since there weren’t a lot of neighbors in residence of whom to ask questions. Most of the houses were still closed up at this time of year and I’d have to spend some time with the tax records to figure out where the owners actually lived.
I opened my cell phone and called the main ranger station for the park; it seemed most likely Ridenour would be there or that they’d know where he was. I wondered how much damage Willow and her creatures had actually wreaked on the place Sunday evening and how she’d gotten the bears to do her bidding.
The ranger who answered the phone thought Ridenour was at the southwestern end of his territory, near the Sol Duc Hot Springs resort. That was beyond the big lake by a couple of miles, heading toward Forks. The ranger offered to call Ridenour on the radio and have him meet me at the hot springs tollbooth, which sounded like a good idea to me.
It took a while to drive to the far end of the lake and then on down the road toward Sol Duc. A sign at the edge of the road informed me I was entering the Hoh Rain Forest and another sign pointed toward the hot springs. I followed it. When I got to the quaint little booth in the middle of the road with its red and white striped traffic barriers and blinking stoplight, I found Ridenour’s pickup truck parked at the bar, but there was no sign of the ranger. I stopped the Rover and stepped out, thinking he might be in the booth itself, but no dice there, either.
As soon as my feet were on the ground, I felt a flush of sourceless heat and a strange noise took over my ears.
SEVENTEEN
I
t felt much too warm for February, yet the air had the crystalline sharpness of ice and it rang in my ears like a chorus of glass pipes singing through an electronic filter. I took a step away from the truck, and the heat plunged and cut across me in bands. It was like standing in the ghost of an electric fence. Looking down and around, I saw a rainbow array of lines much like the spectrum of energy lines I’d seen on the Fairholm shore Sunday morning. I wasn’t quite sure of my position, since the road from the lake to the hot springs had twisted and turned all along its length, but I thought there couldn’t be two similar sets of energy lines.... Could there?
They felt strange, and the high, uncanny singing pulled me toward it, away from the little guard shack and deeper into the site. I wondered where they went and started to follow.
The deeper I went into the rain forest around the hot springs, the more the sounds resonated on my chest in uncomfortable disharmonies that tweaked up and down as if someone were adjusting the tuning of a giant harp strung with souls. The colorful lines of magical energy kinked and took on odd angles, curves, and spirals that looked like screws lying along the road. Wherever the lines crossed or knotted together for a space, the chiming cry of the magic formed a chord of Grey voices that rippled colors outward. I could see them even without sliding into the Grey.
The road bent away, but the lines stayed their general course south and I stepped out of their influence for a few steps. I stumbled and felt disoriented and deafened as I stopped on the ice-packed verge of the tarmac. Looking at the lines on the far side of the road, I could still hear their noise and feel their compelling pull. In the background, if I concentrated, there were other sounds, normal and Grey, that continued without reference to the bizarre orchestra of light and noise, clashing against it in head-aching discord.
Cleaving to the Grey I recognized, I looked around, sinking as deeply as I dared toward the grid, hearing its murmur and whine. The aberrant lines and sounds continued, but in an echoing distance, as if they were in another plane somehow, or in another room. I turned slowly, trying to gaze into the more familiar structures of the Grey and see what the cause was of this unsettling development.
But I was distracted by more familiar things. Not far from me, back toward the gate, I could see two tangled energy shapes, one more radiant and red than the other, but while they both showed some connection to the deeply buried grid and not to the freakish sound and light show, neither seemed particularly strong. I’d bet one of them was Ridenour. As much as my curiosity was piqued by the strange array of energy, I wanted to know who his companion was more, so I pushed myself back up to the normal and started back along the road as quickly as I could without too much clatter and concentrating on staying out of the singing, enthralling construct that had led me down the road to begin with.
I walked toward the tollbooth through icy ground fog, still hearing the echoes of the ethereal noise in my head, which masked the voices of Ridenour and his companion. As I was rounding the last turn, coming out of a stand of trees and nearly to the gates, the sounds fell away and I could just make out the words, “Over there before she slips out,” but I couldn’t quite place the voice.
“On my way! Thanks!” Ridenour replied.
I caught a glimpse of his companion turning and jogging into the trees, but I still didn’t know who it was.
Ridenour saw me and glared, his hands on his hips. “Miss Blaine, what the hell are you doing out here?”
“I was looking for you. Didn’t the station radio you to meet me here?” I still couldn’t quite throw off the Grey completely and saw him through a thin veil of silver where the trees around us seemed to be moving without wind, shifting in the ground and glowing with green, blue, and yellow light. Their branches appeared to reach for Ridenour, the naked alders and birches looking like bony hands among the furry greenery of the cedars. I shivered, thinking the trees were aware of me, too, in some way foreign to humans, as if they watched with incorporeal eyes. Whatever strangeness was going on farther down the road had set my imagination running in creepy directions.
“I had other business and now I’ve got some more that’s more pressing than whatever it is you want,” Ridenour said, walking the last few feet to meet me. “You should have just waited by the gate until I got back.”
“I meant to, but . . . I thought I saw something and assumed it was you.”
He snorted, heading back to his truck. “Lots of people think they see things up here. The rain forest has a lot of fog this time of year, especially out here near the hot springs. It’s too easy to misstep and fall into something, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go wandering around off the road here.” He looked at the way my Rover blocked his truck in the narrow road. “Damn it! Move this truck of yours!”
“Where are you headed in such a hurry?” I asked, walking past him to get into the Rover and digging through my pockets for my keys. Ending up with the hotel key card first, I held it in my other hand as I pulled out the truck keys and unlocked the vehicle.
“I got a tip that Willow might be up at one of our greenhouses and I’d like to catch her, if you don’t mind, since it is on park property.”
I stopped and turned back to him from the open door of the Rover, tossing the hotel key onto the passenger seat. “I’d like to go with you, then.”
“What the hell business is it of yours?”
“I’d be there if you catch Willow. I’d like to talk to her and I’m not sure how long she’ll stay in custody.”
He slammed his truck door closed again and stomped to me. “Are you implying I can’t keep a prisoner?”
“No. I’m saying she seems to be hard to hold and, if nothing else, her sister may bail her out. And when you do catch her, won’t it be better if you have an unbiased witness around? Her family seems the litigious kind.”
He glowered but gave in. “All right. You’d better come along. I called Strother for backup, but he isn’t close enough. I can’t miss this opportunity! Just hurry up!”
I got in and started the Rover while he went back to his truck and lifted the barrier on the tollbooth. I backed the Rover into the interpretative center parking area a short stretch back up the road beside the sign and got out again, locking up and running to the side of the narrow road to catch up to Ridenour.
He’d turned the pickup truck through the tollbooth’s gates and lowered them again, but he was only just getting back into the driver’s seat, so I ran around and got in on the passenger side before he could do anything about it.
He rolled his eyes and buckled up. “We have to get up to the old watchtower on Pyramid Mountain. Road’s pretty rough, and it’ll take about fifteen or twenty minutes. Hang on and pray we catch her.”
The pickup lurched and leapt along the road and out onto the highway. Ridenour pointed it northeast toward Lake Crescent. I thought now was the time to ask a few questions, while the road was still smooth.
“What’s Willow doing at a park service greenhouse?” I asked.
“Forestry service and I have no idea. Maybe checking on something she put there herself. Forestry has a few greenhouses scattered around on the ridges to grow native plants for replanting in slide areas and where we’ve had to do redevelopment and construction. That way we anchor the soil and get the ecology back on track faster. But none of us check up on them frequently in the winter and one extra planter full of something might not be noticed. I wouldn’t put it past Willow to plant something illegal or dangerous and not worry too much about the consequences.”
“So you trust your tipster to have steered you right? It sounds like those greenhouses would make a pretty good spot for an ambush.”
Ridenour snorted. “Willow is dangerous and crazy, and there’s no love lost between us, but I can’t imagine she’d go out of her way to try to kill me.”
“That’s not quite what I meant. . . .”
He turned the truck sharply off the highway and onto the road that led to Fairholm where the barge was kept. I could see it tied up at the dock as the road rose a bit and turned to the west, toward the ocean and Pyramid Mountain. And there was the same bright array of energy lines that sprang out of the water and headed south toward the hot springs. It was just as it had been on Sunday, just as I’d seen it near the springs.