company might not have done so. They might have just dumped it somewhere off the park property so they wouldn’t have to deal with it.”
Lake Sutherland was just outside the park boundary. . . .
“Why are you asking?”
“Because I think something they pulled up allowed your wife, May, into this world.”
Ridenour’s jaw went slack and he stared at me for a second, the normal energy around his body sinking down as if someone had pulled his plug. Then it flashed back in a red glare. “What do you know about it?” He lunged forward. “Who are you to talk about her? Who the hell are you, anyway?”
I had to put my arms up and fend him off as he grabbed at me. Quinton clutched Ridenour’s shoulders and tried to haul him back, but the ranger was heavier and had the advantage of traction with his boots on, so Quinton only ended up trapping Ridenour’s arms and being pulled across the floor as his socks slipped over the varnished wood planks. I broke Ridenour’s grip with an outward sweep of my arms while his leverage was undermined, but we’d come to the edge of the seating area around the hearth and I stumbled backward, falling into a chair as he continued his forward momentum.
The seat was an original Morris recliner and my weight tumbling into it sloped the back down and the seat forward. I brought my left foot up and planted it in Ridenour’s chest. “Stop!” I barked.
Quinton hauled backward on Ridenour, pulling him upright and yanking his coat down off his shoulders to trap his arms at the elbow. It wouldn’t hold him long, but it brought the older man to a frustrated halt. I put my feet back on the floor with care and got up out of the chair. Ridenour struggled in the confining coat and Quinton let him go. I took advantage of his distraction to turn the ranger and shove him into the recliner I’d just vacated. He flopped into it with a woof of surprise, through the ghost of a sporty-looking fellow in an old-fashioned shooting jacket who paid him no mind and went on reading his memory of a newspaper.
I turned my palms out and raised my hands to chest height. “Calm down, Ridenour. I’m just trying to figure out what went wrong here and caused the deaths of two people. I’m not trying to upset you or degrade May’s memory.”
“Four people,” Ridenour snapped back, wriggling his coat up onto his shoulders so he could free his arms and move the chair back upright.
“Four? How do you count that?”
“Leung, Strother, Scott, and my—and May. It’s goddamned Willow’s fault.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s not,” I said, letting my hands fall to my sides. I could feel the pressure of Quinton’s presence moving back a little, keeping out of Ridenour’s focus. “And I notice you didn’t say she’s responsible for Jonah Leung’s death. So don’t you believe that anymore, or did you ever?”
Ridenour glared at me for a few seconds; then his shoulders slumped and he hung his head. “I don’t know. Ever since you showed up, I just don’t seem to think quite right. Or maybe I’m thinking too much. There are moments when I feel . . . connected to something and I think I know things I couldn’t know—as if someone whispered them in my ear—and then . . . it’s just gone. The same way May was just . . .” He raised his head and looked at me, the watery light through the windows streaking his face with age he hadn’t lived. “How did you know about May, anyhow?”
I almost turned my head toward the place Jin’s suit had lain, but I gave a rueful smile and kept my eyes on Ridenour. “Weird stuff is my territory, just as the park is yours. Someone told me.”
“No one knows. Except Willow. That’s why I always thought—well, you know what I think. Who told you?”
“Someone like May.”
He squeezed his eyes closed and his face crumpled. He had to swallow hard a few times before he could speak. “At first I didn’t know. That she wasn’t . . .”
I just nodded. To say she hadn’t been human or real would have been too much, and Ridenour was hurting enough by talking at all.
“Why did you believe Willow sent May away? Was it only because she knew about her?”
“No. There was paper . . . yellow paper with Chinese written on it. Folded like a flower.”
I crouched down beside the chair, turning a little to keep from blocking the light as I pulled one of the scraps from my pocket. “Were there other pieces around, like this?” I asked, holding out one of the bits of fabric I’d plucked from the floor earlier. In the thin, sleetbattered light it was the color of dry grass.
Ridenour glanced at it and then looked again, longer. “I—think so. That sort of color, scattered around near her clothes.”
Now I almost wished we hadn’t cleared the suit and the dust away. “How were her clothes arranged?”
“They were . . . in a pile. As if she’d stepped out of them. With the yellow paper flower on top.”
“Ridenour, there’s no reason to believe it was Willow. The flower was a spell, just like the one that—that sent May back where she came from. Someone wanted you to see it and think it was Willow’s work because she’s Chinese, but you can’t be sure. Whoever did it had two of the papers—one to use on May and one to leave for you to find. What did you do with it?”
“I burned it.”
“Who else might have made it? Who else wrote Chinese?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Jewel, maybe . . .”
I doubted Jewel would have gone to the trouble of implicating her half sister. She didn’t like Willow, but she didn’t seem to have any grand plan against her. Once again, I sensed the hand of the mysterious child—whoever he was, I’d come to hate him—and I wondered if, on his trips to Seattle for Costigan, the child had stopped in Chinatown. . . .
“Ridenour, who was working on this building today?”
The ranger still seemed dazed. “Some contractors, I suppose.”
“Building contractors, renovators . . . ?”
“No, no. The resort is run by a management group that the park service contracts with. The group hires the people they need to do the seasonal cleaning and run the place on short-term contracts.”
“What about the building maintenance? Who does that?”
“We do, but, again, we contract for it. It’s mostly done as needed, since it’s usually odd jobs and immediate repairs, not planned things like the big renovation.”
The certainty welled up in my mind so fast I gasped. Ridenour and Quinton both stared at me.
THIRTY-ONE
I looked at Quinton. “I need my boots. We have to get going.”
He looked surprised but headed into the kitchen to fetch them. I turned my attention back to the ranger. “Ridenour, how can I find Darin Shea?” I asked.
He blinked at me and shook his head as if trying to clear it. “He’s usually around. People leave notes for him on the bulletin board at the Fairholm store and he turns up once he gets them.”
“What if no one’s home?”
“Most folks have a spare key around if you know where to search, and Shea’s got a few keys of his own for the places he looks after regularly.”
“I’ll bet he does . . .” I muttered.
Ridenour didn’t seem to have heard me very well and asked, “What?”
“Mr. Shea’s handy with locks, isn’t he?”
“He’s certainly installed a lot of them round here.”
“And I’ll bet he’s the guy you call when you’ve locked your keys in your car, too.”
“Well, you don’t
Quinton came back with my boots and his own. We both sat down and started putting them on.
