flickered, almost recognizable, then fell away. I could still hear the crackle of fire’s memory and the discordant strains of the organ and Beauty weaving together; I could still smell the ash on the breeze and the crawling things in the loam, but they lay at a distance. A safe one, I hoped. I nodded at the trees. “I’ll do what I can.”
A deer walked across the road, paused to glance at me, then bounded away, its hooves breaking through old wood and frost-burned bracken, cracking words into the air. “Do. More.”
I shivered as the forest went still and I looked around, expecting something more. But except for the feeling that I was watched on every side, that was all.
Then the rain came harder on the road, beating drums on leaf and limb. I turned up my coat collar, kept my mouth shut, and started up the road to the truck.
They say nature is a mother, and they’re right about that. Now I was being bullied by trees. I would have grumbled, but it seemed a bad idea.
I spotted Jin lurking under the roof of the guard shack, huddling from the rain to keep his suit dry. I motioned for him to come with me to the Rover, but he frowned at the rain and shook his head. Goody—now the demon was feeling prissy. I went to the back of the truck and rummaged for a minute. I find umbrellas impractical most of the time in Seattle, but I had one. I found mine and a hat with a brim, which I crammed onto my head before taking the umbrella back to Jin.
I held it out. “Come on. I want to talk to Costigan before his zombies wake up.”
Jin popped the umbrella open and grinned at it. “You should talk to Willow first.”
“Why?”
He kept grinning but didn’t say anything.
I sighed, annoyed but resigned. It was getting late, and I’d have preferred to get to Costigan today, but if I had to wait for another day, so be it. “Where is she?”
“Tragedy Graveyard.”
The tiny cemetery was in Beaver, behind the old schoolhouse that no one had used in ages. The drive took us most of the way to Forks. I knew I wasn’t likely to get back to Lake Crescent before the sun went down; I only hoped whatever Willow could tell me would be worth it.
The rain was lighter in Beaver, but Jin clung to the umbrella as if we were stepping out into a monsoon. I made do with the hat, hoping to avoid getting any wetter where it really mattered. I had parked the truck in a patch of weedy gravel off the road that served as a parking lot beside the old school, and the demon and I walked around to the back of the rickety nineteenth-century building. A haunting melody whispered on the wind, twining strange rills and falls through the Grey as we entered the cemetery.
It wasn’t much to look at—a sad collection of wooden crosses and slabs inside a hastily erected fence. There were thirteen graves and the markers were of a more recent vintage than the bodies under them—probably put up by a local group to ensure the dead weren’t forgotten completely. Most of the markers were too weathered to read, but I didn’t need to; the ghosts that lingered in the cemetery hovered around their graves like frightened tourists guarding their luggage. At one site, I saw a woman huddling over a child in her lap, crying eternally. Beyond the mother and her dead baby, we passed a group of four ghosts squabbling in thin voices. The shades of three men had gathered around the ghost of a pretty young woman. They were dressed like early settlers and each of the men tried to grab onto the woman and pull her to him. She smiled at each one, a horrible wound in her throat opening to gush blood every time she turned. They didn’t seem to care. Each one yanked at the woman’s arm in turn, shouting at the others, “Rose is mine!”
“She’s mine!”
“Mine!”
“You’re all stupid,” Jin jeered at them. “She killed you all,” he added, and laughed.
I grabbed his sleeve. “She killed them? She’s the one with the neck smile.”
“It’s her fault they’re all dead, the selfish little trollop. See, that one,” he explained, pointing at the shortest of the male ghosts, a rough, bearded man with a shotgun in one hand, “killed her husband, that one”—he pointed at the tallest ghost—“because he wanted to marry her himself and she told him she was so horribly unhappy with her husband and her little cabin by the lake. Boo hoo. So sad.”
“What about the other guy?”
“That’s the lover she took while the ugly one was working to make enough money to convince Rose to marry him. When he found out what she was doing, the ugly one borrowed a boat and some guns and rowed across the lake—”
“Lake Crescent?”
“No. Lake Pleasant,” he said, waving vaguely west. “He rowed over to her house, caught her lover in the outhouse, and shot him. Then he broke into the cabin and cut her throat. And then when he was rowing back home, he felt such remorse that he decided to shoot himself with that shotgun. But first he sat there on the lake and wrote it all down and apologized to the friend he’d stolen the boat and guns from. Idiots,” he added, grinning. “If they were Chinese, they’d all be in Diyu for being lustful, greedy morons.”
“Like you?”
He sniffed and turned his head. “There’s Willow,” he said, leading me away, toward the whisper of sound that haunted the graveyard as much as any ghost.
Under one of the few trees, Willow, wearing her dark loose-fitting dress, crouched next to a grave, singing under her breath. I could see her bare toes peeping out from under her hem as she used a small knife to scrape something from the edges of the one stone marker in the whole graveyard into her cupped hand.
She stopped singing, but she didn’t look up as we drew near and paused beside her. The sound of rain seemed too loud now. “So,” she said, “you’ve seen the ley weaver. Now what do you think?”
“That the lake has a problem.”
“Didn’t I say so?”
“Not exactly.” I looked at the green-gray grit collecting in the palm of her hand as she scraped away the lichen that had grown on the small headstone.
She turned her head to glance at me and I saw her eyelids were red and swollen. She moved her hand a little toward me. “Grave mold.” She put down the knife and picked up a small cotton drawstring bag that lay on the hem of her dress. Then she dumped the scraped lichen into it and pulled the bag closed before picking up another. She returned to the knife with her free hand and used the point to pick at the ground along the edge of the marker, scooping up the driest bits of dirt and dumping them into the new bag before tying that off, too.
“Graveyard dust?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Who’s it for?” I had no idea what she was making, but I could guess it was some of the kitchen magic Mara had talked about; some kind of hoodoo or trick, in this case to do someone harm with the threat of the grave.
She stabbed the blade at my nearest hand and I barely jumped out of the way. Willow snickered at me. “I’m going to get whoever killed Alan.”
“Do you know who it was, then?”
“No. But I can find out.”
“How?”
She didn’t reply, just kept at her task.
“How did you know Strother? Not just as a cop. You know him better than that,” I said.
She made a noncommittal head wag. “Around.”
I pushed on her and wasn’t quite surprised when I felt her energy wriggle away from mine. She was stronger than she looked and I was tired. I sighed. “You were friends. Weren’t you? He had to do his duty, but you were still . . . friendly at least. So you must have met him before you got into trouble.”
She made a soft snorting noise that might have been sadness as much as dismissal. “We got into trouble together, to begin with. White boy from the rez, bad girl from the lake, hanging out in the hills, smoking weed.” She cut me a sideways glance, wanting to see my reaction. “Ridenour caught us. We were fifteen, so off to juvie. No record. Alan went straight. I just stayed bent.”
I imagined them as teenagers, outcasts together, lying in the sun on the mountainside and laughing at everything while they had the chance. I could see how Ridenour’s animosity toward them had grown from that little seed of rebellion. Strother had toed the line afterward, but Ridenour probably had never trusted him— handing him the investigation of Leung’s death had been a kind of dare to see where Strother’s loyalty really lay.
