Grave Echoes: A Kate Waters Mystery (31 page)

Erin Cole grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where dusty combines, water skipper-filled rivers, and shadowed forests were her playgrounds. After obtaining her B.S. in psychology she naturally progressed into penning mystery and horror. She is the author of the
Kate Waters Mysteries
, the dark fiction collections,
Of the Night
,
After Dusk
, and
Between Feathers and Fins
, a short horror,
The Shadow People
, and the novella,
Feral Things
. You can visit her at www.erincolewrites.com

(Book 2 in the Kate Waters Mysteries):

Prologue

Another wave crested and slapped against Jim Kelley’s head as he bobbed precariously in the giant swells of the Pacific Ocean. The frigid, salty body of water sprawled out blacker and deeper than the night above him. Months of preparation to locate the sunken ship and thousands of dollars invested for all the necessary equipment to find it had led up to this moment—him finally holding the gold, gem-studded statue of Rán in his hand. He checked the regulator on his tank. It wasn’t responding. He didn’t want to relinquish his oxygen until the boat spotted him…but where were the other divers? He hadn’t seen them since they entered the starboard side of the Nuestra Señora, the only entrance to the interior of the sunken ship after an underwater landslide had almost swallowed it whole.

Between every other swell, he glimpsed their diving boat, the Dawn Maiden, jostled in the turbulent waves as if it were a plastic toy model. Someone with a halogen spotlight darted the beam back and forth, searching for him and the others, but in the massive waves, he might as well have been an ant in a lake. If he still had his whistle—it must have loosened from his belt when he was below—he could at least alert them to his direction. He didn’t have his mirror either. He needed to get closer, which meant dropping some of his weight.

He unclipped the strap to the weight belt and let it fall into the depthless dark beneath him. He wouldn’t need it anymore, not after what he had seen below in the cold black water. He never wanted to go back down there again.

A shiver slid over him, same as that thing below. Not a hand, but something had reached out to snag him. Funny, he thought, calling it a thing, but what else was it? Not human and certainly bigger than any fish he had ever seen. Panic rose into his chest when he considered it might still be trailing him. He tried to convince himself it was a Giant Pacific octopus. It moved like one, gliding around the coral and rocks. But there was hair. Oil-black hair. He wrestled with that thought. Fish and octopi didn’t have hair. Fins? The frayed ends could sometimes mimic the angelic movement of hair underwater.

Another massive wave rocked into him. The boat drifted farther away. He drifted away. He swallowed back a cry but it escaped as a hoarse gasp. A cramp tightened around his kicking heart as the cold of the ocean started to numb him into a slow death.

  The band of light from the spotlight on the boat glided near him once more. He tried hoisting himself above the breakers so the crew could spot him, but the tanks on his back constricted his movements and weighed him down. He would have to ditch them too. But not the statue. He would hold on to that through death.

Unsure if it was bravery or stupidity, he slipped out of his pack, pulled the regulator from his mouth, and released them into the ocean. Wearing only his wetsuit and mask, he felt naked and vulnerable as ever, but he had to do it if he were ever going to reach the boat. Paddling with his arms, he sloshed in the waves and barely crested out of the water. Mere sandbags they were.

With his eyes to the stars, he swam backwards, the statue still clutched firmly in his frozen fist. He remembered warning the crew about the statue’s curse, and realized now that he had become a part of it. The vengeance of Rán. None of them had believed him. He suspected that whoever made it out of this alive, would believe now.

Numbness stiffened his limbs, and he grew exhausted. He twisted around in the water, searching for the boat. He couldn’t see it until he turned once more. The Dawn Maiden was far off to his left and now at a distance where they would never see him. Worse than that was the sight of the boat's red port light—the Dawn Maiden was leaving, leaving him behind in the dark, deep Pacific.

“No!” he shouted. “No!” He kicked his legs and arms, but they wouldn’t move anymore. He could barely keep his head out of the water.

“I have it! I have the statue!”

His face splashed beneath a wave, causing him to suck in a mouthful of saltwater. He coughed violently, and pushed himself on his back to float. His legs were like sodden logs and pulled him down. “Don’t leave—”

Oh God. I’m still alive. You can’t leave me!

A falling sensation slipped into his gut. That is when it really hit him, hard as a swung bat to the stomach—the truth of his fate. This was it. Ominous shadows enveloped him like the cold, opaque wing of a vampire. It draped over the Nuestra Señora too, and tonight, he would join it in its silent, dark grave at the bottom of the ocean.

He laughed, a sound more like blubbering—desperate humor bubbling out of his throat. After all these years of wondering how and when he was going to die, the moment had finally come. No one would ever find him. Or the statue. Both of them would soon be lost to the sea forever.

He stopped swimming and looked up at the sky. The stars blinked back at him. There were a gazillion of them, if that were even a number, he thought. He held the statue up, scarcely making out the Goddess’ silhouette against the tinseled night.

“I did it. I found her,” he said. “And it’s mine, forever.”

A stiff grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. The waves lifted and lowered him, seemingly to rock him into an endless sleep. His throat constricted with the horror of his impending death. Hot, sour tears streamed from his eyes and down his lips. It was difficult to surrender, to accept the end, but there was no other choice. The ultimate, last thing we were all forced to do, no matter what.

Flashes of his life, the people he knew, and all his daily responsibilities crammed into his consciousness in a dizzying blur. The movie reel of his life. How would his children react? Who would take in his Basset Hound, Titan? What would his mother do without his help? She was old, and couldn’t always help herself.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…”

  A tug on his fin woke him from his grieving. He kicked his leg, told himself it was only seaweed, but seaweed didn’t grow in the middle of the ocean. He couldn’t see anything in the black water. Twisting around, he searched for what could have tugged on his fin. If it was something floating in the water…a faint surge of hope crossed his mind. Maybe he could use whatever it was as a flotation device.

Then, something grabbed both of his ankles. A fierce grip. Not a flotation device, his mind whispered with the darkest of dread. It wasn’t something. It was that thing!

“No!”

Sharp points dug into his ankles and tore through his flesh. Though the icy water had numbed him from pain, he could still feel the crude ripping of his flesh. He tried to scream again, but his face dipped beneath the surface of the water. The last thing he saw before the cold blackness swallowed him under was the constellation that drove him to his death, Rán.

CHAPTER 1

The car lurched back and forth, like a chain of hiccups, and then rolled to a puttering stop. The afternoon clouds had turned to a pouring drape of rain, and it whipped across the street and rattled against the roof of Thea’s car. It was the kind of rain that twisted and curled violently, as if full of a spirit of its own. The kind of rain Kate Waters didn’t want to have to walk five blocks in.

“You’re kidding me?” she said to Thea, looking at the red engine light on the dashboard.

Thea turned the ignition again, but the car whined and cut to silence. “No. I wish I was.” Thea grabbed her purse, keys, and phone. “It is only five blocks. We can run.”

“Wait…” Kate said, in no hurry to open the door to the weather outside. “Tell me again why we’re really going over to Brooke’s? Having a bad feeling that someone is about to die is a little awkward and Brooke will likely feel the same. It’s just not something you go to visit someone about, Thea. People don’t want to know about that kind of stuff, even if it’s true.”

Thea paused at Kate’s coarse remarks, then shrugged. “I would think anybody would want to know if their life was in danger.”

“Yeah, if you’re at the doctor’s office or in a burning building, but if someone came to my doorstep and told me that I was going to die, I don’t think I’d take it very well or seriously.” Kate eyed Thea, searching for some rationality behind her dark eyes, shaded even more by long, wavy, chestnut bangs.

“Well, we’re all different.”

Especially you, Kate thought. She grabbed her bag and sighed, as she looked out the window. “I thought you didn’t like Brooke.”

Thea zipped up her coat. “I’d curse the little bitch if I could get away with it, but I don’t wish her dead.”

“How thoughtful of you.”

“C’mon,” Thea said, opening the driver's side door. “It’s just rain.”

Kate burrowed herself inside her parka. “It’s just my luck.”

She opened the passenger door and stepped out into a torrential downpour. A March rain, cold as the sea, pelted sharp against the exposed skin at her cheeks. Spring in Oregon came with its share of showers, but the storms this year had unusual volume, velocity, and duration.

Working as a seismic specialist for the Pacific Northwest Geological Survey (PNGS), Kate had access to weather and meteorology channels, and they too were reporting an increase in both frequency and intensity of storm systems and patterns. Damage to roads and homes had dominated breaking news reports on the nightly news, and sirens were a common background noise throughout the city.

Kate and Thea jogged down the sidewalk, dodging rivulets that surged across the concrete and into a ditch already full of rushing coffee-colored water. Within the first two blocks, rainwater had soaked the hem of Kate’s pants. The cuff slapped against her ankles as she ran, and water seeped inside her shoes with the coolness of a mountain river.

The wind gusted and threw another hard, cold spray at them. Both Thea and Kate spun around and walked backwards against it. They followed a chain-link fence lined with old, knotted maple trunks. Daffodil buds rocked back and forth near the front porch of a white and green bungalow. A black lab paced in the yard. It yapped and howled, almost as if in pain, but the dog wasn’t limping or hunched over in any way. Kate had the strange notion the dog was nervous or distressed. Thea noticed it also. As they passed, the dog continued to shift side to side on its front paws and then twirled around in a circle. It didn’t notice them, was too absorbed in whatever upset it.

They both pushed on through the wet cold, rounding the corner of Brooke’s street. According to Thea’s directions, her house was just two blocks down. Kate noticed other animals sitting out in the rain too, all exhibiting the same unusual behavior.

A cat clung to the trunk of a tree, not as though intending to climb up, but merely hanging on for what appeared like no apparent reason. Birds hopped along the sidewalks, moving left and right, not caring that they were belly deep in water. Kate imagined with an inward smirk that cable TV must have cancelled
Animal Planet
, but behind the humor, she couldn’t ignore the feeling that something cold lurked, almost as if behind her.

She quickened her step and glanced back, her breath momentarily hitched in her lungs. Nothing was there, only the wind shaking the trees and the rain blurring everything in between.

Thea stopped and reached for Kate’s arm. “What?”

“Nothing, just thought I saw something.”

Thea studied her, seemingly trying to read her thoughts, which strangely, she often succeeded in doing.

“C’mon, let’s go,” Kate said, pulling her farther down the sidewalk.

When they made it to the last block, another dog sat outside in the rain on the steps of the house next to Brooke’s. The animal appeared vacant, troubled, like all the others. The cold lurking feeling returned and chilled Kate from the inside out. Thea fixed her gaze on the dog. It didn’t watch them, didn’t care to defend it’s territory or bother to sniff out passing strangers.  

Kate pulled Thea away from the dog and up the steps to Brooke’s house. She couldn’t reach the porch fast enough. “What was up with the animals?” She brushed excess rain off her coat.

Thea took off her hood and blew into her hands. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

Attempting to warm herself up, Kate rubbed her palms up and down her arms, but not because of the weather. She’d had a bad feeling about going to Brooke’s in the first place, and then to top off her unease with another fierce storm and creepy animal behavior was more than her nerves could handle. Had there been lightning and thunder, the animals’ behavior would have made sense, but even then, they wouldn’t have endured the cold rain seemingly for no reason at all. What should have chased them inside strangely seemed to have drawn them out.

Kate faced Brooke’s front door. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Thea scrutinized the doorframe. Her eyes widened. “The door is open.”

Kate leaned to the right to see in better. Soft light from a lamp filtered through the gap. She tapped on the door. “Hello? Brooke?”

They peeked inside like teenagers past curfew.

“See, I told you something was up,” Thea said.

“She’s not home.” Kate knocked a little louder causing the door to creak open farther.

“Brooke?” Thea called out. She stepped inside.

“You are breaking and entering,” Kate said. “I don’t think that’ll improve the delivery of your message.”

“I’m not breaking in, just entering,” Thea replied in a hushed voice. “Besides, I have good intentions. Don’t you think?”

“You wanted to curse her ten minutes ago,” Kate reminded her as she stepped in behind her.

“But I didn’t do it in a circle.”

Kate didn’t grasp what difference that made, but avoided further discussion of it. Of more concern to her was the soured, burnt scent in the house. “What is that smell?”

Thea walked toward the kitchen. “If it’s dinner, I am not staying.”

The stench contrasted with Brooke’s elaborate decorations—black and white pictures of cityscapes hung on golden walls trimmed with glossy, white paint and nickel-toned fixtures. Red and turquoise accents brightened the sofa and coffee table, and expensive cream-colored, leather loveseats faced a built-in gas fireplace.

Kate glanced back at Brooke’s front door hoping Brooke wouldn’t return home to find them snooping through her house. “She’s not here. I think we should go.”

Thea stepped into the kitchen and stopped abruptly. Her hands dropped to her sides.

“What is it?” Kate crossed the living room, ignoring the voice in the back of her mind that warned her not to go any farther.

“We’re too late.”

On the floor, two feet stuck out from behind the kitchen island, twisted in a way that meant only one thing. Thea inched around the counter to get a full view of who it was, though by her expression, she seemed to know already. The horror of what she stared at darkened her green eyes.

As much as Kate wanted to sprint for the door and back to her car, she found it difficult to lift her feet from the floor, as if they had taken root. Willing herself to do so, she inched forward until she saw a young woman lying on the floor, unmistakably dead. Her lifeless eyes had frozen open to the ceiling, unblinking to the flies crawling over them. One flew by Kate, and she swatted at it in disgust.

“Jesus…tell me that’s not Brooke?”

Thea backed up and gazed around the kitchen, nervously, a characteristic uncommon in her. “Wish I could.”

A dreadful weight sank into Kate as she wrestled with flashbacks of her own sister, Jev, lying on the slab in the morgue only six months ago. A vision that haunted her in the middle of sleepless nights, grocery lines, generally any moment her mind was not fully engaged in life’s daily pressures. She turned back to the front door, feeling as though she still shouldn’t be there.

“See, I told you,” Thea said, halting her.

Kate recollected what Thea had said over the phone two hours earlier:
I think Brooke is going to die.
She had said that on the way over too. An intensifying suspicion washed a cool tremor through Kate, a cold looming sensation. She had only known Thea a short time, and their first encounter was not a positive one—she had caught her snooping through Jev’s bedroom during the wake. Thea and her sister had practiced witchcraft together, not a discovery that had pleased Kate and one that had led to the questionable circumstances surrounding her sister’s death. Kate wondered how well she really knew Thea, then and now. How could she have known Brooke’s life was in danger if she weren’t somehow involved?

Kate stepped farther away from Thea, toward the front door creaking open in the wind. “You knew. How did you know Brooke was going to die?”

Thea shook her head. “I told you, I’ve been having bad dreams. A big storm is approaching.”

“A storm is already here,” Kate said, gesturing to the rain still pouring beyond the front porch, “and I don’t think it has anything to do with why Brooke is dead.”

“The storm is part of the Goddess’s curse.” Thea gazed across the living room as if searching for something. “I witnessed her vengeance in my dream. Her wrath will plague us.”

Kate pointed to Brooke. “Some of us are dead.”

Thea turned cold eyes on her. “And there will be more if we don’t find the statue.”

“What statue?”

Thea ignored her question. “Do you still have that detective’s number?”

Kate had memorized Detective Wells’ phone number from her sister’s case. “Yes, but—”

“Give him a call. I have nothing to hide.”

Thea disappeared into the hallway, leaving Kate alone with Brooke. The images of Jev lying in the morgue on a metal slab, cold, purple-blue and impossibly still, reeled back to her. Feelings of helplessness and fear burgeoned in her mind and constricted around her throat until she had trouble breathing. Her heartbeat clubbed inside her chest and ears, and dizziness threatened her footing. She stumbled back a step. Then, she turned, headed for the door, and ran outside gasping for air and struggling to submerge visions she had hoped to never see again.

***

A bright, misshapen moon drifted across the star-dotted sky and cast gray-bright light on the shoulders of Keith and Barry. Nick thought the dim light made their expressions longer, meaner. The three of them sat in the back of the Dawn Maiden, a research vessel he used for explorative study as an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Barry worked for a division of the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) in Seattle. Keith had introduced them to each other.

The Dawn Maiden rocked softly in the Pacific a quarter-mile offshore from Newport, Oregon. Despite the lulling of the waves, Nick’s unease only grew. Their partner, Jim Kelley, had washed ashore yesterday morning on the beach near a small, Oregon coastal town. A diving run that had gone terribly wrong. Nick grabbed the wheel as the boat dipped into another steel-black wave. He propped himself against the railing and took a swig of his beer, hoping to drown his growing restlessness.

“Your edginess is killing me,” Keith said to him. “Would you just relax? Everything is cool.”

Barry, Keith’s friend, regarded Nick with beady eyes vacant of emotion. He nodded his head at him.

“Cool?” Nick repeated. “Tell that to Jim. He’s cool all right—cool as a fuckin’ ice cube.”

“Christ, don’t go 'girl' on me,” Keith replied. “We all knew the expedition carried a certain risk.” He pointed his finger at Barry, Nick, and himself. “We were all taking a chance.”

“We should have searched for him longer,” Nick said.

Keith dunked his hand into the ice chest and pulled out another beer. “We did the best we could.”

“That’s right,” Barry said, putting the tip of a cigar in his mouth. “You saw the size of those waves. It was either him or all of us.” He lit the end of his cigar.

Nick understood the risks—the risk of getting caught pilfering artifacts from the newly discovered Spanish ship,
Nuestra Señora
, without the proper diving permits, but he had never imagined one of those risks would include death. Diving had its own hazards, but they were all experienced, each with 500 hours plus of dive time. He kept asking himself what had happened. Was his death really the curse, the Goddess Rán that Jim had warned them about or just an unfortunate coincidence?