“Yes,” I said, stabbing a potato. “I don’t need anyone else’s doubt and paranoia—I have plenty of my own.”
She smacked the back of my hand with her napkin in a gesture exactly like her mother’s dish-towel reprimands to anyone who tried to sneak a taste from her pots. “Don’ start that. Doubt and paranoia are part of your job—you don’ got to take them home. Besides, those rawboned men got no wind—how’s he gonna keep up with you, all skinny like that? You’d wear him out. You need a man with some strength. Strength of character at least. Imagine saying you’re too difficult for him!” Phoebe snorted. “Jackass.”
I laughed. That was not a word I’d ever have applied, but the vision of slender, silver-haired Will with donkey ears à la Pinocchio was irresistibly funny.
Phoebe grinned at my laughter. “That’s better. Now, what’re you gonna do the rest of the day? Don’ say you goin’ back to work. Nor home mopin’.”
“No,” I replied, still chuckling. “I have to buy a new coat—I wrecked my old wool one last night and it’s too cold to go without. You know how I shop for clothes.”
She nodded. “You buy whatever’s closest to the door and get the hell back out.” Which was exactly what I did, so I nodded, too. “All right then. You finish your breakfast so I don’ be tellin’ Poppy you starvin’ yourself and I’ll take you shoppin’.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Mom.” That earned me a stern look that went completely awry on Phoebe’s round, good-natured features, but I did finish most of my meal before we left.
We were shoulders deep in the racks at Private Screening—a vintagewear shop down the street from Phoebe’s bookstore— when my phone went off and what passes for normal life reared its head.
“Hi, Miss Blaine. This is Fish from the morgue. Sorry to call on the weekend, but I found some stuff and I thought you’d want to know.”
“You work on Sunday?” I asked, tangled in a mohair monstrosity from the fifties.
“People die seven days a week. And my boss usually stays home on Sunday, so I could search the database without him getting mad.”
Phoebe glared at me. “Is that work, girl?” she asked, her voice rising and falling in annoyance.
“Yes.”
She snorted. “I shoulda known from the way you perked up.” She helped me out of the coat as I tried to talk to Fish.
“What did you find?”
“Some of the records are pretty old, but I’ve got a few other deaths with similar wounds and blood loss, and they go back to just after the fire, during the reconstruction. Not a lot of them, but a few in dated clusters. All Pioneer Square and the lava beds.”
“Lava beds?”
“The area around the new stadiums was the red light district. They called it the lava beds. Most of the matching deaths were south of Yesler, and they coincide with periods of destruction or construction. Just like the recent ones.”
“How many?”
“I got . . . eleven solid over the fifty years or so between the fire and the earthquake in 1949. There might be more, but they didn’t come up specifically. I might find them if I did the search by hand.”
“No, Fish, please don’t bother. This is fine—it establishes a pattern over time and an area to search. Thanks.”
“What are you going to do with this information?”
“Would you believe me if I said I was going to go hunting for monsters?”
He laughed. “I might. Could be anything down there, and with this long a pattern, it’s not a human—unless it’s a copycat, but they like to copy high-profile crimes, not obscure accidental deaths.” Interesting: Fish was taking the idea of a nonhuman killer in stride—or seemed to be. I filed that mental note for another time.
“Is that what the coroner is calling them, officially?” I asked.
“Not officially. Misadventure is most likely, but he hasn’t closed any of these except Cristus, so far—and only because the family pressured him. The deaths are strange, but they don’t look like murder or accident or natural causes and there’s not much else.”
“So Robert Cristus had family.”
“From what I saw, not the sort you’d want to snuggle into the bosom of.”
“Maybe that’s why he lived on the streets.”
“Could be. Uh-oh . . . Gotta get back to work. Call me if you find any monsters. I want to get first shot at the necropsy.”
Fish cut the connection and I stuck the cell phone back into my pocket.
“What you was saying about monsters?” Phoebe asked, holding out another coat.
“Oh . . . a joke.”
Phoebe frowned at me. “Don’t be tryin’ that on me. You up to something.”
“And I’m not going to tell you what.”
Phoebe made another snort. “How’s that one?”
I put on the dark wool coat and felt wonderful. The sleeves were long enough to cover my wrist bones and the hem came all the way down onto my thighs, both of which were rare for me. I gave it a suspicious stare, half expecting some Grey gleam, but it was just a coat—a nice coat—and that pleased me even more. Of course, it turned out to be an expensive nice coat, but that wasn’t unusual. I bought it anyway, hoping it wouldn’t go the way of the previous one.
Another fine flurry of snow had started up by the time we left the shop. I thought I had spent enough time feeling bad about my morning and the weather, so I thanked Phoebe and took off, much to her disapproval. I needed to get started on interviewing ghosts before the weather got any worse.
The voice from a coffee shop’s radio assured listeners that the snow wouldn’t last and the temperature would soon be rising, but it didn’t feel that way to me. The kids I’d heard shrieking in the snow that morning were probably hoping he was wrong as much as I hoped and doubted he was right.
The darkening sky seemed bleak and portentous overhead as I headed for work. I’d have to contact Quinton; I needed someone to watch out for me down in the tunnels and out in the streets. I wasn’t always sure how safe or visible I was when I went Grey-walking. I’d dodged a ghost through the layers of time once, but I didn’t want to repeat the feat, especially if there were other people around who might cause problems—or get upset. I’d had my fill of that for a while. And Quinton not only had a stake in the proceedings, he didn’t mind my oddities, which made me downright happy.
I called Quinton while I waited for the Rover’s heater to kick in, and he agreed to meet me outside my office so we could begin hunting for long-dead witnesses to whatever was killing people in the underground. I took off my new coat and redonned my old leather jacket, missing the warmth but hoping the hide was tough enough to withstand crawling through the Grey. Then I headed back to Pioneer Square on foot. Quinton was waiting as expected, wrapped in his stiff waxed duster.
I told him what Fish had discovered about the long pattern of deaths. “So,” I concluded, “we’re looking for something that’s been down there quite a while. Questioning the living hasn’t helped.” I drew a long breath. “So I’m going to start asking the dead.”
“You mean . . . the ghosts of Go-cart and Jenny?”
“No. They don’t seem to have left much trace. I’m going to have to look for ghosts who are aware enough to talk and who also were alive during the periods and in the places the . . . thing has killed people in the past.” I didn’t want to get used to thinking of the creature as one thing or another and risk closing my mind to clues, but the vision of a giant man-eating spider still flitted through my head and I shuddered. “The area of most activity has been down here in what Fish called the lava beds, south of the old skid road,” I added, pointing at Yesler Way.
“The bricks.”
“Is that the whole area? I never heard the term before you and the undergrounders used it.”
“Yeah, the corridor flanking Occidental a block on either side from Pioneer Square south. The whole place is full of those big, white bricks they used to pave the park and the Square. There’s a lot of stuff under those bricks.”
“Fish said most of the deaths had been south of Yesler, so let’s leave the Square for later, when there are fewer people in it—it’s a bit exposed for what I need to do.”
Quinton looked at the sky, as bright as it would get all day, even with the cold white flakes still drifting down. “We’d better start in the alleys.”
We walked around the corner and went down the nearest alley, plodding through the slushy filth of snow, garbage, and urine that had built up between the buildings. I let my hand run along the striations of time that tipped up near the alley wall and felt the edges of years ruffle against my fingertips. I stopped and peered at them, fanning the time shards out enough to look into them. I heard Quinton make a noise and turned back to him.
He gave me a curious frown. “What are you doing?”
“Remember I said I can see layers of time?”
“Yeah.”
“Some places they’re slanted up, like broken bits of riverbed— layers and layers of time—and they’re easier to get at. They’re physically displaced, though, so I may not be able to go very far before I run into an obstacle or the bit of time just breaks off.”
He shook his head like a dog irritated by a flea. “You’re implying you can time travel. . . .”
“No. I can wander around in a tiny
piece
of time associated with this location. Most of it’s just a recording—a kind of persistent memory—of this place. If I’m lucky, I’ll find a ghost who’s awake enough to talk to me, but most won’t even know I’m there. What I need you to do is keep an eye on me and the area so I don’t freak someone out or end up banging into something out here. I don’t know what happens at this end and I wasn’t worrying about it too much the last time I had to do this, but I can’t see this bit of time well while I’m in the other one.”
Quinton narrowed his eyes. “OK . . . But what if I can’t see you?”
“Let’s find out,” I said, pushing one of the planes of time and sliding onto it.
I slipped sideways into another version of the alley. There were two young men in cloth caps and knee-length trousers who paid me no attention as they sprinted along, darting in and out of doorways and yelling to the proprietors something I couldn’t quite hear. I followed one of them a few feet before I heard a sharp whistle blast behind me.
I whirled and was caught in a flood of policemen who poured into the doorways just as a lot of civilians tried to surge out of those same openings. The noise was deafening and the two groups clashed, yelling. But none noticed me.
I slid back out of the fragment of time and found myself closer to the opposite end of the alley than when I’d started. Quinton was a few steps away, wide-eyed.
“What happened?” I asked. “Are we all right?”
“Yeah, but you were pretty hard to see. If I hadn’t known to look for you, I might have dismissed you as a shadow in this light. Where did you go?”
“When. Looked like sometime during Prohibition. Not the period I need. We may have to go down below.”
“There’s not much access on this block. Some places, the underground’s been cut off or is in use. This is one of those bits. What else can you find up here?”