best to stay close enough to see what was happening without being in his sights much, but for the most part it was a lot of hurry-upand-wait.
The barge crew had trickled into the store at Fairholm, but they weren’t all there until after ten o’clock and each refused to get started without the others for various safety or legal reasons. Then the big diesel engine on the barge had been reluctant to start, coughing and dying several times before the three-man crew got it warm enough to keep on running. Finally, the barge cast off from the dock at Fairholm about noon and began its slow trip up the length of the lake. Ridenour had pointed out that the barge, while powerful and heavy enough to carry a crane and dredger, wasn’t fast; it would take about an hour for the barge to reach the car on the northernmost shore. With yet more time to kill, Ridenour and I returned to the ranger station at Storm King to meet the deputy sheriff the county had sent.
Deputy Strother turned out to be the lowest man on the totem pole—barely out of training and still unsure of his authority. The county administration wasn’t convinced that a truck was actually needed, and they wanted Strother to give his opinion first. I thought I smelled politics in the county’s action and I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been a few toes stepped on and noses bent out of shape in the past. Ridenour tried to cow Strother from the first minute, taking a much harsher tone with him than he’d used with me. “When can you get that truck up here?” he demanded.
Strother glanced at his watch and looked up again without meeting the ranger’s eyes. “Pretty quick. There’s a flatbed already out at Piedmont, and the driver’s on his way there. I’ll give him a call when the car’s up on the barge so I can see if there’s really a need for the truck at all. Shouldn’t take him but ten minutes to drive over. No sense in his just sitting here and freezing till then, not with the way things have gone so far.”
Ridenour scowled. “It’ll move along fine now, but you should light a fire under your man soon. That road’s pretty narrow and slick from here to Piedmont. Tell him to drive around to the highway instead. It’ll be longer, but safer, so he’d better get to it soon or we’ll all be standing around in the cold waiting for him next.”
Strother shifted his gaze to the side, hunching his shoulders a bit. “I suppose. . . .”
“Don’t ‘suppose,’ Strother; get it done.”
Strother shrugged and sighed. “Can I use your phone?”
“Can’t you radio him?”
“Driver’s coming in on his own time. He won’t have the radio on until he’s in the truck. Better to call his cell phone before he gets into the mountains.”
Ridenour seemed to resent letting the younger man into the ranger station, but he unlocked the picturesque little cabin that stood across the open ground south of the boat ramp and ushered us inside. “Keep an eye on that pocket-edition otter of yours,” he warned me. “This building’s full of crannies and holes she could get into.”
The interior of the small ranger station wasn’t a lot warmer than the exterior, but it had a fireplace at one end and electricity, as well as the phone Strother wanted. Ridenour pointed him to it with a grunt that gave me the idea he might have been enjoying this job more than the rest of us, but it still wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good time.
Chaos chose that moment to decide she needed to get out of my pocket and explore. The way she scrambled around made me think she—and the cabin—would be better off if we went back outside. Though I loathed missing the phone call and whatever exchange the two men might have, I excused myself and took the ferret out to the frozen grass and skinny alder trees before she pooped on the floor.
I looked around while the ferret did her business and began exploring the place. She didn’t like the cold on her feet, but she was intrigued by the area. I glanced back to be sure the cabin door was closed before letting myself slide a little closer to the Grey to see what she was so excited about.
The area around the lake was bright in the Grey, and the same sort of whizzing energy balls I’d seen around Lake Sutherland were much more active and numerous here. The air seemed to be thick with spirits that weren’t quite differentiated from one another, as if a crowd of specters had been blendered into a ghost milk shake and poured into the valley around Lake Crescent. But in spite of the sense of their cold presence all around, pervasive as oxygen, the lake’s shore seemed weirdly empty. I shuddered, disturbed by the expectant loneliness of the Grey around me, feeling as if something was waiting just beyond the edge of what even I could see. Was that connected to the sudden growth of energy lines near Fairholm? I walked around the verges of the clearing, looking for anything that might give me a clue about why the area was this way, but after half an hour I still didn’t have so much as an inkling.
Chaos had found a hole in the ground and was frantically digging in it to get at whatever tiny creature cowered inside; I decided she’d had enough exploring at the lakeside for now. I picked her up and wiped the dirt off her paws, glancing back toward the northeastern shore for a moment. I could see the barge just coming into view on my left past what a map on the ranger station wall labeled Barnes Point. The barge wasn’t fast, but it was making steady progress. In twenty minutes or so it should be in position to start hauling the car up onto its platform. I wanted to be as close as possible to it before the disputed truck took it away.
I returned to the ranger station and interrupted an intense staring contest. Neither man spoke, but their expressions indicated an unpleasant topic had been cut off in midsnipe. They weren’t going to pick it back up in front of me, so I went ahead and announced that the barge was passing the point.
Ridenour jumped up from the desk, cutting his gaze away from Strother’s with a sharp twist of his head. “Well, then, we should go up to the north shore and keep an eye on them.”
Strother lowered his inquisitive eyebrows into a scowl. “I should stay here and wait for the truck.”
Ridenour returned the annoyed expression, but he couldn’t argue much since he’d been the one to insist on sending the truck the long way. “All right. You coming or staying, Miss Blaine?”
I was a little conflicted. On the one hand I wanted to be as close to the action as I could; but I’d need to be here when the barge unloaded the car—that would be the best chance I’d have to get an upclose look at it and what might be inside. But I didn’t need to watch the preliminaries and I wanted to talk to Strother without Ridenour’s overbearing presence, so I said, “I need to use the ladies’ room. I’ll follow you up in a minute.”
Ridenour looked slightly appalled, but he shrugged and went out. I held Chaos out to Strother. “Would you hold on to her for a moment? She likes to eat soap, so I don’t want to take her with me.”
Strother looked a little nervous, but he took the ferret in both hands. Chaos sniffed him and flicked her whiskers. “She doesn’t bite,” I said, handing over the leash as well. “She’s very friendly. Just don’t let her get near your pant cuffs.”
I went out to the restroom and returned in a few minutes to see Strother tickling Chaos’s belly and trying to wrestle a pencil away from her at the same time. The ferret was adamant about keeping the pencil, but she wiggled around on her back on the desk, her head going one way and her butt going the other. She didn’t growl or squeak, because ferrets don’t, but she would have if she’d thought of it. She seemed to be having a good time playing with the deputy.
“You guys doing OK?” I asked.
Strother looked over his shoulder and Chaos took the opportunity of his distraction to hop onto all four feet and try to yank the pencil from his grip.
“Hey,” Strother replied. “She sure is feisty.”
“That’s her stock-in-trade. There’s not a lot of back-down in a ferret.” And there didn’t seem to be much in park rangers or deputy sheriffs, either.
He nodded, twitching the pencil out of her mouth as soon as she tried to get a better grip. Chaos launched into a weasel war dance hopping all over the empty desktop, waving her open mouth and showing off her tiny fangs. Strother laughed. “Damn, got some muscle there. She’s a lot tougher than she looks, too.”
I just smiled and picked the ferret up from the desk. She wiggled around in my hand for a moment, then resigned herself to having lost her pencil and scrambled up onto my shoulder to get a better view. “What did I interrupt?” I asked, keeping my eyes off him.
“It’s a personal matter,” Strother said, glancing around before looking at me again. “So, is it true you found this car in the first place? Ridenour said some investigator found it.”
“That’s me. I don’t know that I’m the first person to see the car in the lake, but I’m the first to have reported it. I didn’t mention this to Ridenour, but I suspect the car might belong to a man who disappeared a few years ago. There’s no missing person report, but he’s definitely not where he ought to be and no one seems to know where he is.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell the ranger that? This is his territory.”
