got off, including the captain’s wife, Anna Petrovna, so she was the first white woman in Washington.”
A cold stab of memory lanced through my chest. “What happened to them after that?”
“Some were killed and the rest were captured—probably by Makah—and they sold ’em as slaves. Anna and the captain finally died in captivity after about a year or so, but most of the surviving crew were found out around Quileute and the Hoh River and bought back by an American sea captain. Kind of tragic and ironic, huh?”
Anna Petrovna . . . a Russian lady who died near La Push in 1810—I wondered if she was the ghost I’d seen in my hotel room on Thursday night. And if she was, why had she been so far from her resting place?
“Strother,” I asked, “do the Newmans know the regular investigation team?”
“I imagine so, what with Willow’s way of causing trouble and all.”
“Maybe that’s why you were assigned and not one of them. You don’t have any past association with the family or the area, so you’re less likely to be influenced by them.”
Strother seemed to consider it. “Could be. Maybe.” He nodded to himself and repeated, “Maybe.”
I pulled an envelope out of my bag and offered it to him. “These are the background notes I took to find Leung. I don’t think they’ll be a lot of help, but they’re what I’ve got. Since this is an active case now, even though it’s pretty cold, I can’t, technically, investigate it. But I can keep you in the loop if I find information helpful to you while I’m on my job. Would you feel uncomfortable reciprocating?”
“You mean tell you what I find?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose I could, mostly. I mean, not everything, of course, and not if you might tell your client something that could derail the investigation, you understand.”
I nodded, noticing he suddenly sounded a lot less “hick” than he had a few minutes ago. “That’ll be fine. My cell phone number’s on the paperwork. You might want to start with Leung’s bank records and see if all his retirement money’s accounted for, less his taxes, of course. If it’s not, that might be an interesting angle. . . .”
He sat up straighter. “It certainly would be. And you might want to keep an eye out if you go back up the mountain anytime soon for a fella named Costigan—Elias Costigan. Seems to have some noisy parties and he’s what you might call ‘a practitioner of alternate lifestyle.’ Got a place almost directly across from Jewel and Geoff’s on the west shore of Lake Crescent. Near Devil’s Punch Bowl. They say he and Jewel have been heard to scream at each other across the lake—though I imagine that’s not really possible. He’s not exactly what you’d call a friend of the family.”
That was interesting. If I had the location right, Costigan’s place would have been close to where the white thing I’d seen rise from the lake had come slogging into shore while I was interviewing Shea. “Anybody else I should keep an eye peeled for?” I asked.
“Not sure,” he said, picking up a yellow legal pad with neat rows of writing. “Kind of funny—there seems to have been a little housing boom up at the lakes about the time Steven must have disappeared. A half dozen families in a year or two sold up and moved on. Now, could be they foresaw the market collapse, but I’m thinking not all of’em could have been that smart.”
“You have a list?”
He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I could do.” He flipped the first few pages back and wrote himself a note.
“Could you indicate which of the newcomers are year-round residents and which are seasonal visitors only?”
“I think I could, but it’ll take a little while longer.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“I’ll call you when I’ve got the info, all right?”
I nodded and smiled a little. “Thanks. And I’ll let you know if I find anything that might help you.”
“All right, then.”
I noticed he didn’t offer to tell me what he found out from the bank, but I figured he’d trade information with me once I got anything he could use. He wasn’t quite the native guide I might have wanted, but he was at least a useful source of local information. And he seemed disposed to be friendly, which I couldn’t expect from a lot of others if there was, indeed, a nest of tricky mages around the lakes.
I thought it unlikely that everyone on Strother’s list was a magic user of some kind, but I could see where his thinking and mine intersected: Carefully-planned murders don’t happen out of the blue; something in the status quo changes and that triggers the violence. It could be something big, like a crime or an indiscretion, or it could be something small, such as the weather or one too many humiliations. Or it could be that someone comes to town and blows the whole thing up. Steven Leung’s ghost had said something about “them”: “We should never have let them.” His daughter Jewel was also concerned with “them.” I felt pretty confident that one of “them” was—if not the trigger—the one who’d pulled it. I just had to figure out which of “them” it was—once I met them—because, even if it wasn’t my case, I wanted to make sure that someone got special treatment when the flak hit. It takes a dangerous lack of empathy to set a man on fire.
Having picked Strother’s brain for ideas, I thought my next stop should be Ridenour to see what he thought of the names on Strother’s list and whom he might add to it. Between Strother and Ridenour, I stood a good chance of getting many pieces to this puzzle I’d never get on my own, since there weren’t a lot of neighbors in residence of whom to ask questions. Most of the houses were still closed up at this time of year and I’d have to spend some time with the tax records to figure out where the owners actually lived.
I opened my cell phone and called the main ranger station for the park; it seemed most likely Ridenour would be there or that they’d know where he was. I wondered how much damage Willow and her creatures had actually wreaked on the place Sunday evening and how she’d gotten the bears to do her bidding.
The ranger who answered the phone thought Ridenour was at the southwestern end of his territory, near the Sol Duc Hot Springs resort. That was beyond the big lake by a couple of miles, heading toward Forks. The ranger offered to call Ridenour on the radio and have him meet me at the hot springs tollbooth, which sounded like a good idea to me.
It took a while to drive to the far end of the lake and then on down the road toward Sol Duc. A sign at the edge of the road informed me I was entering the Hoh Rain Forest and another sign pointed toward the hot springs. I followed it. When I got to the quaint little booth in the middle of the road with its red and white striped traffic barriers and blinking stoplight, I found Ridenour’s pickup truck parked at the bar, but there was no sign of the ranger. I stopped the Rover and stepped out, thinking he might be in the booth itself, but no dice there, either.
As soon as my feet were on the ground, I felt a flush of sourceless heat and a strange noise took over my ears.
SEVENTEEN
It felt much too warm for February, yet the air had the crystalline sharpness of ice and it rang in my ears like a chorus of glass pipes singing through an electronic filter. I took a step away from the truck, and the heat plunged and cut across me in bands. It was like standing in the ghost of an electric fence. Looking down and around, I saw a rainbow array of lines much like the spectrum of energy lines I’d seen on the Fairholm shore Sunday morning. I wasn’t quite sure of my position, since the road from the lake to the hot springs had twisted and turned all along its length, but I thought there couldn’t be two similar sets of energy lines.... Could there?
They felt strange, and the high, uncanny singing pulled me toward it, away from the little guard shack and deeper into the site. I wondered where they went and started to follow.
The deeper I went into the rain forest around the hot springs, the more the sounds resonated on my chest in uncomfortable disharmonies that tweaked up and down as if someone were adjusting the tuning of a giant harp strung with souls. The colorful lines of magical energy kinked and took on odd angles, curves, and spirals that looked like screws lying along the road. Wherever the lines crossed or knotted together for a space, the chiming cry of the magic formed a chord of Grey voices that rippled colors outward. I could see them even without sliding
