I swore and reversed direction, running around the lake side of the building with Quinton behind me. We dashed around the corner where the path pointed back to the parking lot or toward the low, fieldstone buildings of the Roosevelt cottages on the south end and ran for the maintenance gate, which was now swinging wide, blocking the view of the parking lot and the roads beyond it. We didn’t hear an engine, and the noise of the sleet on the gravel parking lot obscured the sound of running steps.
Beyond the gate, there was no one to be seen. I ran several more feet, scanning the ground for a sign of someone’s passage, but the sleet and rain had churned up the surface too much to tell, and the Grey, so full of ghosts and colored shadows, was unhelpful this time.
“Damn it,” I spat, coming to a halt and glaring into the curtains of icy rain. “How did he get the gate unlocked from the inside?” Probably the same way he’d gotten into my truck to steal my hotel key card, I realized. The same blue, gray, and violet energy I’d seen on the Rover’s doors had wound around the borrowed zombies the night before, and now I’d seen it trailing behind our mysterious escape artist. It was unlike the energy colors I’d seen around Willow and Jewel and Jin and not quite like Costigan’s, either, though it had the same strange, breathing darkness. We’d just missed seeing Costigan’s “child” in the flesh. Whoever he was, he had a way with locks.
There was no way we’d find him in the rain and unfamiliar territory of the forest between the lodge and the road. Our only option was to turn around and figure out what he’d been doing inside the lodge. We went in through the now-open kitchen door, since the gated yard and covered mudroom gave us a place to leave our coats and boots so we didn’t track any mess inside. I didn’t want to clean up or leave evidence behind that we’d trespassed.
We went through the kitchen to the main lobby. It was gloomy inside, even though the storm shutters had been removed from the ground-floor windows. I couldn’t find a source for the light Quinton had seen from outside, but it could have been a flashlight, or a reflection, or even a witch light. What we did find was a gold-colored silk suit, crumpled on the floor in front of the hearth, as if its owner had lain down and vanished, leaving the clothes behind and a thin residue of dust that smelled of camphor and sea salt.
I closed my eyes for a moment and let out an unhappy breath. I’d hoped to get some more help out of Jin, but I didn’t think he’d have voluntarily left his suit behind, and that meant he was probably gone for good. I knelt down beside the dim shape of a head above the empty suit collar and picked a scrap of fabric out of the dust. It was about the size of my thumbnail and felt strangely stiff. It was hard to see in the dimness, but it appeared to be a different color on each side. I picked two more shreds out of the mess and put them in my pocket.
“What is it?” Quinton asked.
“I think it’s what’s left when you destroy a Chinese demon. Or banish it.”
“They leave their clothes behind?”
“Maybe they can’t take anything with them back to hell—or Diyu, really. I mean, it’s not as if you banish the suit no matter how ugly, just the wearer. We’d better sweep this up and take it with us. Willow might be able to tell us more, when and if we catch up to her.”
Quinton and I found a broom, a dustpan, and a couple of plastic grocery bags in the kitchen. I folded the suit and Quinton swept up the dust. We put them in separate bags. Quinton carried the bags and the broom back to the kitchen while I continued to stare at the floor for a few more moments. I noticed there were no shoes, but Jin hadn’t been wearing any the last time I’d seen him after his original pair had been ruined, so that didn’t surprise me, but there were a couple of other things lingering on the floor once we’d gotten the suit out of the way.
Quinton returned and gave me a curious look. “You coming?” he asked.
“In a second . . .” I knelt down to get a look at the shiny things on the floor as the gift shop door squealed again. We both looked up into the business end of a revolver and a very annoyed Brett Ridenour right behind it.
“What in hell are you doing in here?” he demanded.
I kept my hands where he could see them and didn’t try to get up. Quinton remained standing, but he made sure his own hands were in plain sight.
“We were looking for you and saw someone inside. The door was open, so we came in, but whoever was in here ran out the kitchen door. We tried to catch him, but we couldn’t, and we came back inside to see what he’d been doing.”
“You should have stayed outside.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s half a step from snowing out there, Ridenour, and we had no way to secure the building. I knew you’d be back this way since your truck’s outside, so we figured it was better to wait in here for you and keep any other trespassers out than to go wandering around in the sleet and ice looking for you. We even left our shoes in the kitchen so we wouldn’t mess up any evidence.”
Ridenour huffed an exasperated sigh and slipped the revolver away under his coat. I wasn’t quite sure how he managed to conceal it, since it was big enough to bring down an elk, but maybe that was just my skewed view from the fire-breathing end. “So what did you find?”
“I’m not sure. Looks like jewelry.”
I stood up and took a step away, letting Ridenour do the honors, since it was his territory. He crouched and poked one of the small objects with a gloved finger. “Huh.” He reached under his coat again and brought out a flashlight, which he clicked on and used to illuminate the nearest of the two shiny things. “Cuff links . . .”
“Not something the cleaning crew is likely to have dropped,” I observed.
“Nope,” he agreed, picking up the closest one and looking at it. He held the cuff link out toward me. The crest was a silver oval with a blue enameled outline of the U.S. overlaid by a raised silver compass cross. “National Society of Professional Surveyors. You can bet this hasn’t been lying around since they closed up in October.” He picked up the other one and rose to his feet, leaving the floor bare as he put the flashlight away.
“Has there been a surveyor up here?” I asked.
“Not in a while. They did a survey of the buildings and property a few years ago as part of an assessment for renovation and preservation requirements, but that was more than ten years ago.”
“Steven Leung used to be a surveyor . . .” I said.
“Yes, he was. I can’t be sure these are his, but it might be a safe bet.”
“The trespasser we chased off must have dropped them,” Quinton suggested.
“Male or female?” Ridenour asked. Then he looked up and glared at Quinton. “And who are you? I know her, but I’ve never seen you before.”
“Lassiter’s an associate of mine,” I said, breaking in before Quinton could answer for himself. Not that he wouldn’t have said the same, but I wanted Ridenour focused on me, not on Quinton and his redsmeared face.
“Really.” Ridenour sounded skeptical.
I gave him a narrow, disgusted glance.
He shrugged it off. “You two find anything else disturbed when you came in?”
“Not that we could see,” I replied.
“Uh-huh. What were you after up here?”
“You. I wanted to ask you a couple more questions.”
“What about?”
“What happened up here in 1989?”
“ ’ Eighty-nine? Not much I recall. I was the new guy back then.”
“No unusual activities? No . . . construction or accidents or fires?”
He frowned, giving it some thought. “Well . . . I’m not sure of the year, but that might have been when they laid the power cable across the lake.”
“Was that when they discovered the lake was deeper than they had thought?”
“Yeah, I think it was.” He nodded. “It must have been. They had a couple of false starts because they thought the lake was about six hundred feet deep or so and they were laying the cable nearby, where the lake’s narrowest. But they ran out of cable on the first try and they couldn’t guess how much they needed since they could only measure a maximum of a thousand feet on the reel. They had to pull it back up and start over, and it was a real mess. The cable got caught on some kind of submerged snag or overhang, and they ended up hauling up a bunch of rock and weed that had tangled on it before they could get the cable up and try again.”
“What happened to the junk they pulled up?”
“Not sure, now you mention it. Usually that kind of thing is put back where you find it, but the power
