Downpour (26 page)

He laughed again. “No! He never knew her plans. He wasn’t smart enough. He knew she was a fox-woman, but he thought she was one of the old people—an Indian spirit come to help him. He was so surprised when he found out she was Chinese.”

“Who told him that? And what happened afterward?”

“Willow told him. She used to gather herbs with the huli-jing and Ridenour didn’t like it, so she taunted him with the knowledge. He was very angry—angry at May, angry at Willow. Then, when the telephone man died, May tried to help Ridenour catch Willow. When May disappeared, Ridenour thought Willow had killed her in revenge.”

For a second I was thrown by his reference to “the telephone man,” but I guessed he meant the lineman Willow had supposedly shot. Still, I caught his main implication. “But she didn’t, did she?” I asked. “Willow didn’t kill or banish May.”

Jin looked startled. “No.”

“Who did?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t or you don’t know?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“All right.” I stood up and squeezed my scarf and the sleeves of my coat to see how wet they still were. The sheriff’s car would be along soon, I thought, and I wondered how uncomfortable the ride to my truck was going to be. Judging by the squelching and dribbling, it would be awful.

“When she was banished, could anyone else slip through from Diyu?”

“The other little guai came, but the way wasn’t open very long.”

“Why not?”

“The one who banished her was very careful. Not like the one who opened the gate in the first place.”

“So who opened that first gate?”

He spoke with care. “I am not certain.”

“Could you guess?”

“I could.”

It was frustrating that he would volunteer some information but make me work for other bits, and he seemed to enjoy the pure arbitrariness of it. Maybe he hoped that making me angry would lead to a mistake he could exploit. I put a lid on my irritation. “Tell me your guess. And be specific.”

“Jonah Leung. He was Willow’s brother. A middle child. I don’t know that he opened the gate, but he was there when I came out.”

I had a bad feeling, but I asked anyhow. “What happened to him? What did you do when you came through the gate and found him?”

The white demon face grinned, but the human face seemed surprised. “I killed him.”

TWENTY-ONE

A
s I stared at Jin, I could hear a vehicle coming close, the engine grumbling while snow tires roared on the road’s rough surface. I wanted to keep on questioning Jin, but I figured the only person who would be driving this way now was the sheriff’s deputy on his way to pick me up. I grabbed my wet coat and scarf and struggled into them as we went outside.

“You’d better get out of here and lock up when I’m gone. I’ll find you again tomorrow.”

Jin made a face. “Bring something nice with you or I won’t come.”

I wanted to smack him with the heaviest object I could find, but I didn’t have anything but my bag and I didn’t have time, either. “I’ll meet you at the hot springs gate. I need to talk to the ley weaver and you’re coming with me.”

The demon looked unhappy but nodded and slid away around the corner of the lodge, lopsided and strange in his torn, legless suit and limping, barefoot, past the soup of ghosts and lambent magic along the shore. I gave a bitter laugh and the ghastly shadows in the yard echoed it as headlight beams swept down from the road and caught me on the porch.

A white Crown Victoria with Clallam County sheriff’s office stripes and decals rolled into the parking lot. I stepped into the rain and onto the asphalt, away from the building, hoping to discourage the deputy from inspecting the lodge and seeing any telltale boot prints.

The man, whose name tag read TRIPP, wasn’t too pleased with his errand, especially when he saw how wet I was, but he bundled me in and drove the thirty minutes to Sol Duc so I could get my Rover. He waited with his lights on while I approached the car. The noise and light of the ley weaver’s work had dwindled, banked like a fire for the night, I guessed. If it had been brighter or louder, I might have missed the lingering streaks of gray, red, and blue that clung to the edges of the driver’s door. I paused and stared at it, not caring that I was getting further soaked in the persistent rain. I pressed the automatic lock switch on the fob, which I usually ignored since I’d long ago developed the habit of locking doors manually and hadn’t broken it, in spite of the Rover’s automated lock-and-alarm system.

The car honked once, already locked and armed. But I knew there hadn’t been any tattered threads of Grey on it when I’d left it. Unless the ley weaver’s work had rubbed up on the truck in some way and left the energetic shreds behind, someone magical had been in my truck.

I unlocked it from a distance—another thing I rarely did—and let myself in, checking for further signs of the intruder as I got into the driver’s seat. A few things had been moved around, but I could have written that off to the rough road, if I hadn’t seen the other indicators first. I checked the glove compartment and under the seats. Then I made the deputy wait while I got out and went around to check the back. I couldn’t see that anything was missing, nor did there seem to be anything new. . . . But something had happened.

I checked my pockets. Something
was
missing: my hotel key card. I’d had it earlier. I could remember it in my hand when I’d been trying to persuade Ridenour to take me with him to the greenhouse. I’d tossed it on the passenger seat, but it wasn’t there now. I got back out and walked to the Crown Vic.

Tripp lowered the window and gave me an expectant stare. “Something wrong?”

“Yeah, I think someone’s been in my truck. My hotel key’s missing and I left it in there. Would you follow me to my hotel? Just in case?”

“I can do that. Strother wanted to talk to you anyhow, and I can have the dispatcher call him to meet us there. That way I’ll know you got there all right.”

“And didn’t run away,” he implied, but he was polite enough not to say so. “Thanks,” I said. Whatever his motives, I would be glad to have some backup if anyone was lying in wait for me at my hotel. I was wet and tired and sore from my hike down the mountain, running from zombies, and sitting in an ice-cold cabin while bargaining with a demon. I was not too proud to ask for help. I’d keep an eye out for Grey things at the hotel while the deputy played tough guy. That suited me fine.

I took off my wet coat and grabbed a dry jacket from the rear so the drive to Port Angeles wouldn’t be quite as itchy and miserable as the stretch from East Beach to Sol Duc had been. I cranked the heat up to maximum as I drove. The deputy followed me down Highway 101, keeping a safe but observant distance all the way to the hotel.

My room was on the back of the building and I drove around to park the Rover near it before walking up to reception. I don’t know if Tripp was afraid I’d bolt or if he thought I was being silly, but he stuck with me every step of the way. He’d been chatting into his radio as I asked for a new key, and as the clerk handed it over, the deputy stepped up beside me.

“Pardon me,” he said to the clerk. “Has another sheriff’s deputy been in asking about this woman here?”

The clerk looked a bit nervous and gave me a sidelong glance. “Um . . . yeah.”

“About when was that?” the deputy asked.

“ ’Bout an hour ago, maybe an hour and a half.”

“Where’d he go after that?”

“He . . . uh . . . he headed on back to her room. ’Cuz he asked for her and she didn’t answer the phone when I called her and he said he’d just go on back and try the door himself, so I told him the room number and he started walking that way.”

Tripp nodded. “Thank you. And he hasn’t come back up here to leave a message or passed by on the way out?”

The clerk shook his head.

The deputy bit his lip. Then he added, “All right, then. We’ll go take a look ourselves.”

This time, Tripp walked in front of me with his flashlight in one hand and his other resting on his gun. I looked for things in the Grey but didn’t see much I hadn’t seen the night before. The only things new in the thin soup of mist and a small cluster of ghosts were a few streaks of black and red near the jamb of my steel-clad door. There were no bright lines of magic or bolts of streaking light; no knots of pain or spiked figures of malevolent spells.

I stood to the side and unlocked the door. Tripp pushed it open and took a step inside.

“Ah, shit.”

He stepped back out, trying to pull the door closed, but I stuck my foot in the way and swung it open again.

“Ma’am, don’t go in there.”

I just stopped in the doorway and doubled over, not from the sight, which was bad enough, but from the blast of recent death that hit me like a giant fist. I spun back out of the doorway and let the door slam closed, wishing I hadn’t looked.

I collapsed in a crouch against the wall and put my head between my knees, trying to squeeze away the pain in my chest and gut and the nausea that twisted through me. I retched. I hadn’t seen it coming. The steel door had blocked it, holding in all but the tiniest threads of horror.

Even in the dim light from the hallway, there’d been enough illumination to see the man lying facedown on the floor, a few thin strands of blond hair showing above the gruesome pulp someone had made of the back of his head. The uniform, the height and build, all told me who it was; I didn’t even need the confused, aching tangle of ghost hovering there to know it was Alan Strother.

TWENTY-TWO

T
he problem with murder is that it makes a mess and attracts a crowd. I couldn’t get close to Strother’s lingering ghost and I could see it fading as I watched; sucked away into Lake Crescent the way the ghost of Anna Petrovna had been. The kid from La Push heading for the same silent end as the town’s famous castaway. At least this time there was a body, but I didn’t think I’d get another chance to look at that, either.

I wondered why he’d come to the hotel looking for me instead of staying on the mountain. And why was he looking for me at all? Had he been the intended victim or had I?

The cops and more sheriff’s department people arrived in record time. The rooms on each side of mine were already empty since there wasn’t much demand for hotel space in February, so the cops put me in one while they investigated the scene. As soon as the door was closed, I sank down into the Grey, pressing as close to the wall as I could to see if I could attract the attention of Strother’s ghost. Even with the wall between us, the blunt, churning trauma of death reached for me, and I had to kneel on the mist-covered floor or risk falling from the nausea and pain.

I could see him as a dissipating scatter of red and blue beyond the cloud shape of the barrier between us. I put out my hand, hoping no corporeal person on the other side could see the apparition of a hand poking out of the wall.

“Strother,” I whispered, willing him to notice, to have enough presence left to do anything.

The broken energy shapes stirred and drew together, making a sketch of the man that was fast unraveling. The ghost floated toward me slowly, as if weighted. I stretched myself harder against the wall, panting against the pain and pushing my hand toward him until I could feel the agonizing slash and stab of his remaining energy against my fingertips. I scrabbled in the mist, half-blind from the tears that welled over my lower eyelids, until I could hook my fingers into the waning coil of his life.

Held to shape by my touch, he firmed up a little and I had to swallow hard to keep from crying out or throwing up. He wasn’t going to last; I could feel the energy slipping like sand from my grasp.

“What happened to you?” I gasped.

“Don’t know,” he said on a sigh.

“And you don’t know who?”

“The list . . . recent . . . residents . . .” Then he fell apart, and the burning strands of energy tore out of my grip, leaving my palm feeling burned and raw.

I tumbled back onto the floor of the new room, gasping as even the sensation of recent, violent death yanked away and vanished. I dragged myself up onto the bed and hunched into a miserable huddle. My body didn’t hurt as badly as it had a moment ago, but my mind was a startled mess.

Strother might have known who killed him or he might not have, but he’d tried to give me information he thought was more important. The list was the key to the murder of Steven Leung and it didn’t matter whether I or Strother had been the intended victim; the killer’s name had to be on that list.

I straightened myself out, trying to breathe deeply and slowly, pulling myself back together before I staggered to the door and opened it, looking for the nearest cop. I must have looked appalling if the guy’s reaction was any indication; he stared and then jumped away from the wall where he’d been leaning to rush to me.

“Are you all right?”

I was shaking a little and my voice came out unsteadily. “I—I think I know why Strother was here. He was making a list . . . of the year-round residents at the lakes. The ones who moved in about the time Steven Leung went missing. Does he have it? I mean, with him?”

The cop glanced back toward the open door of the other room, and then back at me. “Why are you interested in this list?”

“We were going to discuss it. Strother and I. See if any of the residents knew anything about that time.”

The cop gave me a narrow-eyed once-over, then pulled me with him to the edge of the other doorframe. “Hey, Faith, you guys find a list of any kind?”

A husky man with mussed hair turned away from his observation of the corpse to stand in the doorway and block the view. “So far, nothing like that. Why?”

“Strother told me he was making a list of the year-round residents—the people who might have been around when Steven Leung went missing,” I explained again. “I’m working for the family on this and Strother was going to discuss the list with me. I think that’s why he came here. He should have it with him. If he doesn’t . . .”

“You think his killer took it?” Faith asked, rubbing the side of his head and revealing a glimpse of a long scar under his messy locks.