Dark Waters (9 page)

She grunted in desperation and repeatedly slapped the ground.
So close, so close …

———

BLOOM TURNED TO
look. “I don’t see anything.”

“I know,” she said from behind him.

He didn’t see the knife coming either.
But Artemak was right
, she thought.
There are uses for your heart, Garrett Bloom
. And she was about to invoke one of them. Artemak would know, would
sense
, this moment of sacrifice. Then, when she presented this gift to Artemak, he in turn would help her. He
had
to.

RACHEL COULD NO
longer see his face in the darkness, or even the reflection from his eyes. He stared back over his shoulder at the lake. “Another is here,” he said.

“ ‘Another’?” She gasped, struggling to get him inside her despite this sudden threat of being watched. But he wasn’t talking to her.

He shook his head as if to clear it, and when he looked down it was again the soft, human face. “Oh my God,” he whispered, stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers, and ran his thumb across her lips. “You’re so beautiful.” He bent to kiss her.

“Don’t kiss me,” she wailed. “
Fuck me!
”

Her intensity seemed to momentarily frighten him. Then the arrogance returned. “I’m sorry, but something unexpected has come up. I will claim you another time.”

And then he was gone.

CHAPTER TWELVE

E
THAN TOOK SEVERAL
deep breaths and rolled his shoulders like he used to do before rushing from cover into a firefight. Then, with knots in his belly tighter than anything the Iraq War ever caused, he hit the call button and saw the word “dialing” appear beneath Rachel Matre’s phone number.

It rang five times before her voice mail picked up.

He snapped the phone shut and put it in his pocket, as if somehow hiding the device would also hide his use of it.

He looked at the clock. Five minutes after one in the morning. What was he
thinking
, calling at this hour? Then again, who
didn’t
answer their phone at this time of night? It could be only a wrong number or an emergency, and no responsible adult ignored the latter possibility.

“Dammit,” he hissed, and looked around his living room. He saw his reflection in the patio door, and he scowled: unshaven, in T-shirt and boxers, and visibly aroused. It was the way he’d spent every night since seeing Rachel at the park. He couldn’t keep going this way.

In the desert he’d simply strode into the thick of battle.
One way or the other
, he’d thought back then,
it’s time to resolve this
. He’d never forget the smell of bullets cooking the air as they passed near enough to singe his skin. But he also always walked away the victor.

“One way or the other,” he said to his mirror image. A firefly flickered outside, its pale glow superimposed on his reflection’s heart. “It is
definitely
time to resolve this.”

Fifteen minutes later he was parked in the empty lot outside Rachel’s diner. He’d done this once before, and Rachel had called the cops on him. Would she do the same thing now?

No lights showed in her apartment above the diner, and the blinds were all closed. He saw a shape inside on one window ledge: Tainter, the most blasé cat he’d ever met. Was Rachel in there asleep? Was she out with someone else? Or was she down at the lake, consorting with her spirit lovers?

He dialed her number again. In the dead silence, he thought he heard it ringing faintly inside the apartment. It stopped when the voice mail again picked up.

She’ll see that I’ve called twice in the middle of the night
, Ethan thought.
That should tell her something
. He started his truck again and put it in gear. For a moment he considered turning left, toward Hudson Park and the lake where they’d made love. But if she was there, she might not appreciate him interrupting. He knew he was already edging into stalker territory with this behavior, and he had no desire to frighten her.

So he turned right instead, toward home. The next move was hers.

RACHEL HAD NO
idea how long she’d lain whimpering on the grass. The comedown from the maddeningly close encounter seemed to take forever, and when she could finally think straight again, she began to cry—not out of shame but from confusion. What the hell had she been doing? This wasn’t like her!

She rolled onto her side and curled into a ball.
I want this
, she’d told Stillwater, and at the time it had been true. And why not? He was beautiful, hard and masculine, and clearly a master at these games. But something had happened that changed it from merely an impulsive quickie to … what?

Her clothes still lay where she’d dropped them. She should get dressed and go home, but she couldn’t let
this
be the end. It was a level of frustration she’d never dreamed she could feel.

She got shakily to her hands and knees, crawled to the nearest tree, and used it to stand upright. A car passed on the street, and she ducked out of sight as the headlights raked the spot she’d occupied a moment before. When it was again safe, she took a deep breath and stumbled down the hill to the lake.

Her head went woozy, and she fell with a loud splash. She tasted water and felt it burn inside her nose, but she had no strength to swim or even stand.
I’m going to drown in three feet of water
, she thought in a panic, and tried to kick herself back to the surface. But instead she sank to the rocks and soft silt along the bottom. She put her hands flat against the silt and tried to push herself up, but even with the water’s natural lift, she failed. She felt her last breath bubble out of her mouth as she tried to retain it.

Goddammit, I’m not dying like this!
she bellowed in her mind. With every last bit of strength she shoved down, got her knees under her, and lunged upright from the water.

She opened her eyes into bright sunlight.

She stood knee-deep in the water near the edge of the lake. It was day, and the park loomed before her. Then she realized she was still nude, and crouched down to cover herself. But an unfamiliar voice said, “It’s a little late for modesty.”

On the hill above her stood an old woman with white hair and deep creases in her face. A blanket covered her shoulders, and beneath that she wore a dress that appeared to be made of deerskin.

Rachel looked around. It was Lake Mendota, all right, but there was no sign of civilization anywhere. No houses, no cars, nothing. The only sounds were birds, waves, and wind.

“What the hell?” she breathed.

“Not hell,” the old woman said. “Come out of the water, where we can talk.”

Rachel forced her hands to her sides and walked, chin up, from the lake. The air was cooler than it had been before, and she gratefully wrapped the offered blanket around her. The woman gestured for Rachel to sit down, but she was too dumbstruck by the view.

The lakeside houses, the streets and sidewalks—the whole neighborhood around Hudson Park—were gone. In their place stood trees of enormous girth, thick with leaves and alive with squirrels, birds, and insects.

And the effigy mound was covered with stones chosen by weight and color to add detail to the reptilian form. It was no panther or other mammal; it was a water dragon done in a style she’d never seen before.

Rachel sank to her knees on the grass. “Okay, this may sound a little out there, but I have to ask. Am I in the past?”

“Not for me,” the woman said.

“You speak English.”

“And you speak Lo-Stahzi. The important thing is that we communicate, not
how
we do it, because this will be our one chance. The spirits who succored you are now in danger—and at the hands of the man you just let touch you.”

“You mean Kyle Stillwater?”

“I mean the thing
inside
him. And it is all your fault.”

“
My
fault?” Rachel felt abruptly outraged. “I didn’t go
looking
for him, you know. He just showed up. How could it possibly be my fault?”

“I don’t mean
that
. I mean that you made a request of your spirits, to aid a friend. A generous gesture—but they chose to fulfill it by going to her in the form of a human male. This was not easy. In fact, it left them dangerously weakened. But for you, they would try to move the sun and moon.”

Rachel felt a sudden surge of dread as the woman gestured toward the lake. “The spirits were once humans like yourself,” she continued. “Brilliant men and women in touch with the universe on a level even I can barely grasp. When their physical forms died, their spirits joined the waters. But not all brilliant men are also good men. Some were evil. Those spirits gathered in the lake you call Wingra, and they, too, can reach forth from the waters. The good spirits normally hold them in check, but when they were weakened following your request, the evil ones saw their chance. They summoned an avatar of their own.”

“Kyle Stillwater,” Rachel said.

The old woman nodded. “He has severed their connection to you. And had he been successful in coupling with you, you would have died. Soon he will be able to trap and destroy the spirits, and his brethren will spread into those waters. The only reason he has not yet done so is that he must learn to fully dominate the personality in the body he has chosen.” She pointed a gnarled finger. “And he will not merely harm you but your human lover. Your spirit sister. They will suffer as surely as you will.”

“How?”

“I do not know his methods, but he’s wily. His kind thrives on dissent, on sowing suspicion and doubt. They can be defeated only with unity and love.”

Rachel sighed with annoyance. “I’m not a hippie, you know; I have no interest in buying the world a Coke and keeping it company. Tell me what I have to do.”

“I am not your mother. I don’t know what’s happening in your world at any given time. I can see only through the narrow door that brought you here.
You
must defeat them, because only you can walk between the water and the land. You are now the sole hope for this world—and the next.”

Rachel started to speak again, but suddenly she was splashing in water, gurgling and choking as she struggled to get her feet beneath her. She found herself standing in the lake again, this time in the present, her head filled with the vividness of the information she’d just received.

She spun and looked out into the darkness. The water sparkled and shimmered, but she felt no draw from it, and no watery hands coaxed her forward.

“What the
fuck
?” she whispered.

Slowly she left the lake and dressed, and was about to climb the hill again when she spotted a shadowy figure on the sidewalk by the street. She immediately dropped flat onto the grassy slope, raising her head enough to see over the tops of the clipped grass.

It wasn’t Stillwater. It was clearly a woman, but otherwise Rachel could tell nothing. She held her breath, wondering if she’d been spotted. At least she was fully dressed and doing nothing wrong, but something about the woman’s appearance seemed as off-kilter as everything else. Had she been there all along?

Before Rachel reached any conclusion, the woman turned and walked away. Her footsteps faded almost as soon as her dark silhouette merged with the shadows.

Overwhelmed and confused, Rachel made her way back home. Running on her wobbly legs was out of the question, yet with each step, her emotions seeped back, pushing through the numbness. And the old woman’s words rang in her ears: “
You are now the sole hope for this world—and the next.
”

She fell asleep without a shower, and without checking her phone.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
HE NEXT MORNING
dawned hazy, with a low fog off the lakes that blanketed the isthmus like especially thick cotton candy. Cars drove slowly with their lights on, except for a few who never altered their driving habits in any weather.

Ethan Walker’s foreman, Luis Alazar, arrived early at the Olbrich Park construction site, but not from any professional impulse. He had come straight from his mistress’s apartment and lacked the stamina to face his wife’s fury if he went home to shower and change. He kept a set of work clothes at the other woman’s place for just such an emergency, and he would deal with Francesca that evening, after bracing himself with a few shots of vodka.

He parked on the street beside the old hospital’s driveway entrance, now blocked with sawhorses. The grounds were enclosed by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, to protect the equipment that was too big to cart away each evening. Already the Walker Construction sign had been gang-tagged, and the padlock on one of the gates showed marks where someone had tried to break in.

Luis sat in his truck and ate his fast-food breakfast while listening to the news on the Spanish-language talk-radio station. Still half asleep, he watched the rising sun grow hotter and more vivid through the fog, burning the mist from the air. He felt good. But then, he wasn’t the sort of man to dwell on the moral aspects of his behavior.

Until he saw something that made him freeze in mid-chew.

Just outside one of the fence gates was an old picnic table mounted in a buried slab of concrete. Luis blinked, squinted, and leaned forward until his forehead touched the windshield.

Something covered the table. At first he thought it was just a sack of garbage—an opinion reinforced by the half-dozen large black crows that stood along the table’s edge and pecked at it. But as the fog lifted, its contours grew disturbing.

He got out of the truck and walked three steps down the hill before the shape resolved into something he could identify.

Then he threw up.

MARTY WALKER LOOKED
down at the remains of Garrett Bloom with professional neutrality. He would react to it later, in private, when no one (except possibly his long-term partner, Chuck) was around. It played into the cliché of the inscrutable Oriental, but that made it no less effective. And he was good at it.

At least he thought he was. But this kind of brutality tested his resolve.

Bloom was tied by the ankles and neck to the picnic table. He wore dark dress slacks and a blue shirt, and was gagged with his own tie. His shirt was torn open, exposing the ragged hole cut crudely through his sternum and ribs. The crows, still awaiting their chance to return, had pecked pieces out of the wound’s edge, but they had not been the ones to remove both his heart and his right hand.

His hand was nailed through the palm to a nearby tree. Whoever removed his heart had taken it with them.

Marty lowered the plastic sheet over the body. Flies and ants, more circumspect than the crows, made their pilgrimages with slow, steady effort. The photographers had finished, and the forensics team. It was unlikely he would notice anything they had missed, but he had wanted to take one last look. Now he motioned for the paramedics to come and take the body away.

Ethan came down the hill with them. He was dressed casually, in the jeans and the Badger T-shirt he’d grabbed following Marty’s call. “Holy shit” was all he could say.

“That’s accurate,” Marty agreed.

Ethan nodded toward Luis, seated in an open police car, his head on his knees. “You’re not arresting him, are you?”

“No, but he’s a wreck. His priest is on the way.”

Two paramedics loaded the covered body onto a stretcher. A third one began the delicate task of removing the impaled hand from the tree trunk. “What the hell was Bloom doing here in the middle of the night?” Ethan said.

“I have no idea,” Marty said. “I’ve got to inform his wife, so maybe that will give me a lead.”

“I don’t envy you that.”

Marty shrugged. He used to dread those confrontations, but experience taught him that when one spouse died, the other was usually involved. He now saw the task of delivering the bad news as just another step in the investigation.

Ethan stared at the blocked-off area. A small finch tried to land on the yellow tape, found it too unsteady, and flitted away. “So what does this mean for me?”

“What were you planning to do today?”

“Getting the last stuff out of the interior so we can knock down the walls of the old building.”

“Trucks going in and out over there, on the far side?”

“Yeah.”

Marty nodded. “Go ahead, then. We’ve looked around inside, and there’s no sign anyone got through the fence. If you
do
find anything unusual, though, let me know.”

ETHAN CLIMBED BACK
up the hill. His crew huddled in a group, smoking and gossiping. No doubt they’d solved the murder a dozen different ways by now. They wore hard hats and steel-toed boots, but their eyes betrayed their worry. They dreaded what Ethan was about to tell them; they got paid only when they worked, and it seemed likely they’d be sent home.

“Good news, guys,” Ethan said. “They’re not going to shut us down. If you see anything out of place or unusual, stop immediately and call me, then the cops. Otherwise, let’s get back to work.”

The relief on their faces was almost religious. Ethan felt a small surge of pride as they quickly gathered their individual tools from their vehicles. In this economy, he was glad to be able to provide jobs to hardworking people.

He stopped one of the men and held him back while the others got to work. “Marcus,” he said quietly, “Luis is a little shaken up, so I’m sending him home. I want you to be acting foreman today, okay?”

Marcus’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Is that union?”

“No. But I’m still going to pay Luis as if he was here, so officially he’s still the foreman. I just want people to have someone to come to if they find anything.”

He nodded. “Okay, then. But I accept no real responsibility, you understand?”

“I’m all for doing that whenever you can get away with it,” Ethan agreed.

“Hey, Ethan!” someone shouted from the back of the building. “There’s something weird here.”

RACHEL BLINKED AND
shook her head a little. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

The man at the counter scowled. He was a new customer, possibly a first-timer, and she was not making a good impression. “I
said
I’d like a Texas omelet with an order of hash browns cooked extra-crispy.” He over enunciated each word as if talking to an idiot.

“Got it,” Rachel said, and turned to go.

“Can I get a drink?” the man snapped.

“Of course,” she said, forcing a smile. The man had every right to be annoyed.

“Orange juice. Without the pulp, if you’ve got it.”

“We do.”

“Thanks,” he said with no sincerity.

She put the ticket on the carousel and spun it for Jimmy. She knew Helena watched her with concern, but she deliberately avoided any eye contact. Then she did something she seldom did: She left the diner and went upstairs to her apartment, leaving Helena alone with the end of the breakfast rush.

When the door closed, she did not open any blinds or turn on the lights. She sank onto her couch and took several deep breaths. She could not put into words how she felt, except to say that it was somehow, fundamentally,
wrong
.

It had begun with her dreams during the fitful couple of hours she managed to sleep after returning from the lake. In them she was being sexually taken multiple times, in ways similar to the spirits’ approach to their trysts. Only she wasn’t in the water, and while she couldn’t quite make out the faces of the men, she sensed that they were all somehow Kyle Stillwater.

And then they all stopped just when she was about to reach climax. They would withdraw from her, laugh cruelly, and pass her to the next one. She seemed to be unable to resist them, caught in that insidious dream weakness that kept her immobilized except for involuntary grunts and thrusts.

She had showered repeatedly that morning, unable to feel completely clean. Her skin still felt damp and clammy, as if the mud from her encounter with Kyle Stillwater still clung to it. What had she been
thinking
? She wasn’t some drunken sorority girl at a frat party.

And that didn’t even begin to cover the strange near-death experience with the old woman. Had it really happened? Or was it just her brain firing randomly from lack of oxygen?

It
felt
real. Unlike conversations in real dreams, this one hadn’t faded with wakefulness. If anything, it was even more vivid.

Tainter jumped on the cushion beside her and snuggled down against her thigh. She idly scratched the base of his skull and murmured, “Kitty, your mama made a bad decision last night.”

A soft knock came from the door. “Come in,” Rachel called, expecting Helena or Jimmy.

Instead Becky opened it, peered into the gloom, and said, “Rachel?”

“Light switch is by the door,” Rachel said, getting to her feet wearily.

Becky turned on the light, then closed the door behind her. Rachel stood uncertainly, never knowing what the correct greeting was. She waited as Becky looked at the ceiling, the floor, the furniture—anywhere but at her sister.

“I think I did something terrible last night,” Becky said at last as she ran a finger idly around the framed Frida Kahlo print beside the door.

Rachel said nothing.

“You know I’ve been working for Garrett Bloom, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well … I’m also … um … I’m in love with him.”

“With Garrett Bloom?” Rachel asked dubiously.

Becky’s head snapped around. “What, you don’t think a man like that could find me attractive?”

“That’s not what I meant. I thought he was married.”

“His wife is a dried-up old harpy who he won’t divorce because he loves his kids too much. If that’s any of your business.”

“It isn’t,” Rachel agreed.

“And for your information, he’s wonderful. He’s kind and gentle.”

“Does he know how you feel?”

“He does now. I called him last night and left a voice mail telling him all about it. I was a bit tipsy.”

Rachel shook her head. She had no patience for this. “Becky, you’re a goddamned idiot.”

Becky’s eyebrows rose. She started to speak, then turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her. Her footsteps echoed on the stairs.

Rachel knew better than to follow. A scene with Becky in the parking lot or, worse, in the diner would do no one any good. Besides, she was really in no position to claim the moral high ground.

And dammit! There it was again, that sense that she had done something wrong.
Becky
was in love with a married man, not her.

She went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. She wished she had time for another shower, although she doubted what she wanted to wash away was susceptible to soap and water. Instead, she returned to the diner and worked very hard to keep her mind on her job.