“No, I’m staying at a hotel in Port Angeles tonight. I have her cage in my truck and it’s warm enough. She’ll go to sleep no matter where she is—kind of like a kid.”
Ridenour’s stride faltered and for a second his face paled; then he caught back up to me. “I’ll bring my truck around and join you by yours. Then we can both drive out to the site.”
“All right.” I’d half expected him to ask me to come with him, but something had distracted him enough that he didn’t question whether I was leading him on a snipe hunt.
I walked back across the clearing and past the ranger station to the visitors’ parking lot. Chaos was more than happy to snuggle into her dry nest and give me the cold shoulder as if her aborted attempt to be a Popsicle were my fault. I rolled my eyes at her and shut the back hatch. By the time I was in my seat, I could hear the ferret crunching away on her kibble as if swimming in icy, haunted lakes was nothing unusual for her.
Ridenour pulled up and waited for me to get my engine started and pull out ahead of him. He followed me all the way to where the dirt track down to the lake lay exposed and churned up by my abrupt departure earlier. I rolled down my window and pointed to the road. Then I drove a bit past it, to the place I’d first seen Leung, and parked the Rover so I could walk back and join Ridenour, who’d parked his own truck beside a stand of frost- burned bracken ferns on the other side. The area now seemed almost unnaturally dull and quiet, the bright Grey overlay faded to thin mist for the moment.
“This it?” he asked as I joined him.
I nodded. “Just down there. You can see I made a bit of a mess.”
“Well, I won’t cite you, this time,” he said in a forced jocular tone. “This path is supposed to be cleared up in the summer, anyway, so we have access to as much of the shoreline as possible without having to bring out the boats.” We both glanced down the track and I was relieved to see no sign of Jin. “Stick close,” said Ridenour, starting down the trail. “I heard a cougar across the lake earlier and it might still be around.”
“You mean that awful screeching sound?” I asked.
“Yeah. Some people say it sounds like a woman screaming. Me, I just think it sounds like cougars.”
I wasn’t sure if he’d made a really horrible joke or no joke at all, so I said nothing and followed him down to the water’s edge, back to the place I’d last seen Leung’s car. It was still there, just visible as the daylight began to slant onto the lake from the west, illuminating the intrusive rust color of the wrecked car in the glowing greens and blues of the lake.
Ridenour glanced toward the water, apparently not quite convinced I’d really seen a car, and did a visible flinch when he spotted it. “Jesus! ” He started forward as if he was going to jump in and swim to it, but the knowledge of how cold the water was must have stopped him at the brink. He hovered at the edge, rocking from foot to foot as if he could barely restrain himself from action but wasn’t sure which one to take.
“I’m pretty sure there’s no one in there,” I said, not sure at all, but the last thing I wanted to deal with was a ranger with hypothermia. “The car looks like it’s been in the water a while.”
He stopped his indecisive swaying and turned back to look at me, his expression mournful. “If there was someone in it, they’d be dead by now,” he said with a sad nod. “I guess all we can do is have it hauled out.”
“How are you going to do that?”
He bit his lip and frowned at the ground. When he spoke he seemed to be talking to himself more than to me. “This road’s too narrow and soft to support any truck that could pull a waterlogged car out of the drink. We’ll have to get the barge. It’s docked down at Fairholm, but it’ll take an hour or more to get it up here and then another hour and a half to haul the car on board and take it to the boat ramp where we can get it on a flatbed and out to the county yard. We’ve got about three hours of light left. Then the sun goes behind the hills and it gets darker than the inside of a grizzly out here.” He rubbed one hand through his hair. “They’re not going to like working on Sunday . . . but I can’t give ’em a choice. They’re just going to have to do it. Can’t let that sit there any longer than we can avoid—it might slide down and sink.”
“
He stopped staring at the drowned car and turned his head to talk to me. “The boat crews don’t work weekends in the winter—usually they don’t work up here much at all this time of year. Most of ’em have other jobs in the off-season. Damn it, I wish I had a diver with a dry suit up here! I want to know if I’ve got a body in that car.” He glanced up at the sky and muttered, “Don’t let this be a goddamned crime scene. I do not need a murder in my park!” He turned his gaze back toward the lake, rubbing his hands over his face and muttering something I couldn’t quite hear, but I thought he said, “Kill you my damned self.”
I stepped closer and put my hand on Ridenour’s shoulder. “Hey, you all right?”
Ridenour jumped as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Yeah, yeah. I’m just . . . I gotta wonder what the hell a car’s doing in my lake. It doesn’t look like it drove in here recently, so . . . I have to think the worst, and I’ve already got the culprit in mind. . . .”
“Don’t start fitting someone for handcuffs. Wait until you have some real information before declaring this a major crime.” As if I could talk. So far, everything was pointing to the ghost having told the truth, and the car
He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. “OK. All right. We’ll assume it’s just an abandoned car for now, but it’s got to get moved tomorrow. I’ll head back to the center and put in calls for the crew and equipment. I’ll get the county in on it so they can take the car once it’s out of the lake and then we’ll see.... Which hotel are you staying at, Miss Blaine? If I need you, can I call on you?”
“Sure,” I said, and I gave him the name of my hotel. “I’ll come back tomorrow, if you don’t mind. I’d like to see what’s in that car myself, if that’s OK.”
Ridenour nodded absently. “Yeah, sure. First thing, about eight in the morning, then.”
“OK. Eight tomorrow.”
I followed him back up to East Beach Road, watching him shake his head and mutter the whole way. He plainly took the situation personally and was angry as hell at someone.
EIGHT
I gave up on the day earlier than I’d intended, returning to the hotel to check the ferret out more thoroughly—she was fine, naturally—and put her down to romp somewhere safe. Then I sat down on the bed for a few minutes, which turned into falling asleep for a couple of hours. I woke up with every muscle in my chest and abdomen protesting as if I’d been the one to haul the car out of the lake myself and my stomach rumbling hunger even louder.
Clouds had rolled in once again while I slept, and getting food meant a trip in the downpour. It was cold rain that sliced in on the wind through the Strait of Juan de Fuca like a million tiny daggers. By the time I was back in my room after dinner and some quick shopping, I was feeling as miserable as Chaos had looked coming out of the lake. The already-wet velvet scarf had been useless, and even the baseball cap I’d snatched out of the Rover had only slowed the penetration of water to my head. I took a hot shower and lurked under the duvet to save my toes from predation by ferret while I made another phone call to the Danzigers.
Ben answered the phone. “Danzigers’ House of Paranormal Pancakes.” I could hear Brian chanting in the background, “Ghost, ghost, ghost! ”
“What?”
“Oh, hi, Harper. We’re having potato pancakes with dinner and the boy wants them ghost shaped. We’re having some trouble disambiguating latkes from flapjacks.”
It took me a second to puzzle out “disambiguate” before I could reply. “At least you aren’t trying to explain the difference between blintzes and the Blitz.”
“Oh God, I fear the cream-cheese-filled barrage balloons. . . .”
I laughed. “So, did Mara ask you about monsters?”
“Oh, your elemental white apes? Yeah, but I haven’t had a lot of luck narrowing that down. Technically a lot of things fall into the ‘elemental’ category, from brownies to the yan-gant-y-tan.”
“A what?”
“It’s a Breton creature of evil omen—it has candles instead of fingers. Your monsters didn’t have waxy
