by Chelsea Cain
Susan smiled. Sometimes this stuff just wrote itself.
She finished slogging down the hill and made her way through the pretty white wooden archway to the fairway.
The cops standing around the carousel looked miserable. Hunched over, their black rain ponchos lifting in the wind, they reminded Susan of crows loitering around a carcass.
All but Detective Archie Sheridan.
He was standing away from the others, wearing one of those coats with fur-trimmed hoods that you get at army surplus stores before expeditions to the Arctic.
It was fifty degrees. Practically tropical for January, but he had his hood up. She only knew it was Archie because of how he was holding himself perfectly still, one hand in his pocket, the other around a huge paper cup of coffee, just watching. And because he was alone.
He looked over and saw her and held up the coffee cup in a sort of absentminded wave. His hangdog face was as creased as ever, crooked nose, heavy lids, but he had color to his skin again, and his eyes had more life. A green scarf covered up the horizontal scar on his neck. His brown curls poked in odd angles around his forehead.
“Is it her?” Susan asked him.
“Looks like it,” he said. “Robbins will issue an official ID from the ME’s office.”
Stephanie Towner had been reported missing two days before. The cops had found her car in the parking lot at the Bishop’s Close, an estate garden along thirteen acres of high river bluffs on the west side. Portlanders liked to take peaceful walks there when they weren’t crouching to take pictures of plants with their iPhones. The cops had found Towner’s purse at the top of a slick of mud where it appeared someone had taken a header down the riverbank. You could blame Darwinism. Or you could blame the bottle of wine her husband had reported that she’d had before she left. Maybe a little of both.
“I thought she drowned,” Susan said.
The corners of Archie’s mouth went up slightly. It had taken Susan a year to recognize the expression as a smile. “I think she did,” he said.
She followed his gaze to the carousel. It was housed in an octagonal-roofed pavilion that was open on all sides. Fifteen or twenty seagulls fought for space on the roof. They shifted their weight from one foot to another and squawked nervously. The iron fence that ringed the ride was open and Susan walked inside. One of the poncho-wearing cops put a hand out to stop her. “Not on the platform,” he said, jerking his head toward the muddy footprints on the carousel’s oak flooring.
She nodded and peered forward from the platform’s edge. The corpse was positioned on an ostrich. The ostrich was beautiful, carved out of wood, brown with a red and gold saddle. His yellow legs stretched apart, as if frozen in a joyful skip. Stephanie Towner was posed as if riding the thing. But it wasn’t convincing. She’d slumped down, her chin now pressed against the base of the ostrich’s neck, her arms dangling on either side of its belly. Thankfully, her hair covered her face. Susan couldn’t see well enough to make out many details. But it was clear that she’d been in the water. Or at least in mud.
Archie stepped up behind Susan. She could smell the coffee in his hand and the wet fur on his coat. The rain fell against the carousel roof. The seagulls squawked. “She was moved,” he said. “There’s mud and grass.” He turned to face behind them and motioned across the park to the picnic area at the river’s edge, where a chain-link fence lined the riverbank. “We found hair on the fence. Looks like the current washed her downstream and she got tangled up there. Then someone found her, got her over the fence, and dragged her here. Rain washed away any good footprints, but you can make out the drag marks in the mud.”
Susan got out her damp notebook and wrote all that down.
Archie was throwing her a bone and she knew it. He’d done that a few times over the last six months. It wasn’t his fault that she’d almost gotten herself killed a couple of times in his presence, but he didn’t seem to know that. So he gave her a heads-up on the weird stuff. Scoops. She was sure everyone at the newspaper thought they were sleeping together.
“Who called it in?” she asked.
“Crew working on the rink,” he said. “I think they’re doing something to the floor.”
Susan had grown up roller-skating at the Oaks Park Roller Rink. Everyone celebrated birthdays there. All the kids skated around under the disco ball until someone inevitably broke a bone and had to go to the emergency room. The rink was now the home of the Rose City Rollers roller derby team, a bunch of tattooed, big-thighed, badass girls in short-shorts. “It floats,” she said. “The rink floor. It’s on pontoons. When the park floods they detach it from the foundation.”
Archie shrugged and took a sip of coffee. “That’s clever. I guess.”
Susan craned her head toward the roller rink, which was at the other end of the park, and tried to catch sight of the workers. “You think one of them…?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” Archie said.
She turned back to the carousel. It was ringed by three rows of animals on ascending circular platforms. Jumping horses. Standing horses. A cat. A deer. A dragon. Zebras. Mules. Pigs.
“Why the ostrich?” she said. Whoever had put the body there had gone through a lot of trouble. It couldn’t be easy getting a corpse over a fence. “It’s on the inner circle. Why carry her all the way in there?”
“What do they call that color?” Susan heard Henry Sobol ask. He stepped beside Archie, grinning.
Susan blushed and touched her hair, which she had recently dyed raspberry. “You are stealthy, for a large person,” she told him, tucking her hair back under the hood of her slicker.
Henry was wearing a watch cap over his shaved head, and his salt-and-pepper mustache glistened with rain. “Professional training,” he said with a grin. His black motorcycle boots were caked with mud, probably from the picnic area where the body had originally washed up.
“Let me guess,” Susan said. “You were a Navy SEAL.”
“Doorman,” he said. “I learned how to lurk.”
Susan never knew when he was kidding.
But she didn’t let on.
“I liked it purple,” he said. “What did you call that color?”
“Plum Passion,” she said. “It’s Manic Panic. This one’s called Deadly Nightshade.”
“Whatever happened to Clairol?” Henry mused to Archie, and Susan saw Archie smile.
“Moving a body is a crime, right?” Susan asked.
“Abuse of a corpse,” Archie said. “It’s a Class C felony in Oregon. People who really like abusing corpses go to California. There it’s only a misdemeanor.”
“Figures,” Susan said.
She’d already called the paper to get a photographer, but they were all out on assignment covering the flooding. The Herald would run a wire photo of the carousel, or a photo of Stephanie Towner in better days, if they ran a photo at all. Right now readers were more interested in whether their homeowner’s insurance covered mudslides than in women who fell into the Willamette and drowned. Even when they ended up on ostriches.
“Third person who’s drowned in the Willamette in two days,” Archie said.
“The city’s flooding,” Henry said, noticing the mud on his boots with a frown. “And people are stupid around water.”
“Yeah,” Archie said.
Henry gave Archie a look and tapped his watch.
“You sure you can handle things?” Archie said to him.
“Go,” Henry said. He pulled a handkerchief from somewhere in his coat, bent over, and dabbed it at his boots.
Archie turned to Susan. “I’ve got a thing across the river,” he explained.
He tossed his coffee cup in a park trash can, which was immediately beset by gulls, and then headed off in the direction of the parking lot.
Susan watched him go. Past the Tilt-a-Whirl, past the children’s train, and past Oaks Park’s hottest new attraction: “The Beauty Killer House of Horrors.” She remembered when it used to be your standard haun
ted house: glowing skull, hologram ghosts, scary dark hallways. Now it was all Beauty Killer crime scenes. Susan had heard they even had a mannequin made up to look like Archie, strapped to a gurney, with an animatronic Gretchen Lowell, like a giant Barbie, torturing him with a plastic scalpel. When Gretchen pressed the scalpel into the mannequin’s chest, a stream of blood jetted out three feet.
WEAR GOGGLES, a sign at the entrance warned.
Everyone loved it.
“Saw your column about the skeleton they found at the slough,” Henry said.
“I thought you only read German poetry,” Susan said. But she was secretly pleased. She’d done a long story on the skeleton. In any other news cycle, it might have gotten more attention. She’d been disappointed when it hadn’t.
Henry rubbed the back of his neck. “What do you know about Vanport?” he asked.
She should have known he’d be critical. “What I wrote. The whole town was washed away in 1948. People died. Some bodies were never found. And the dog park where the skeleton was found is right where the town used to be.”
“The skeleton’s been in the ground sixty years, so he must have died in the Vanport flood?”
“I didn’t say he died at Vanport,” Susan said evenly. She’d had the same argument with her editor. “I said he died about sixty years ago, and was found smack-dab in the middle of the area that used to be the city of Vanport, before Vanport was washed away by a flood sixty years ago.”
“Just be careful what you stir up,” Henry said.
“I exude caution,” Susan said.
Henry snorted.
A hundred feet beyond the ride, the river churned chilly and brown, the current whipping debris by at a frenzied pace. A few seagulls circled above the water, but none dared to settle in it. The oaks at the bank were dead-looking, their tops disintegrating into the low wet mist that draped the city like muslin.
Susan had a sudden feeling of dread.
“What?” Henry said, looking up.
She shook it off. “Nothing,” she said. “I just got cold.”
CHAPTER
3
“Any nightmares?” Sarah Rosenberg asked.
A curtain of water fell outside her office window. Archie’s socks were sodden, his pants damp almost to the knees. More coffee would have been good. But Rosenberg only had tea.
“I’m okay,” he said. His gun pressed into his hip.
“Really?” she said. Her dark hair was knotted in back and held in place with a pencil, and she was wearing sweats. No makeup. She’d been thinking he wouldn’t show.
“No nightmares,” he said.
She raised a skeptical eyebrow.
After what he’d been through, he could see why she didn’t believe him. “I know this is hard to fathom,” he said, “but I’ve actually been doing pretty well.”
It had been three months since his last appointment with Rosenberg, six months since Gretchen Lowell had gone to prison the second time. He was back at work. He’d stayed off painkillers. His physical wounds had healed.
“You haven’t been in touch with her?” Rosenberg asked, leveling her gaze at him.
“No,” Archie said. “From what I hear, she hasn’t spoken a word since she was booked.” He glanced away from Rosenberg, out the window, where a gnarled plum tree glistened dark and wet, its last handful of yellow leaves a miracle against the wind. “She just lies there.”
“Is she trying for an insanity defense?” Rosenberg asked.
Archie shrugged, and returned his attention to the room. “She’s not crazy. She just likes killing people. She’ll get the death penalty this time.”
A gust of wind shook the old house, and the windows rattled. Rosenberg’s mouth tightened. She reached out and centered the tissue box on the coffee table. Archie was no psychiatrist, but he’d been a cop long enough to know the heebie-jeebies when he saw them.
“It’s just the wind,” he said.
Rosenberg’s eyes flicked up. “What’s it like out there?” she asked.
“Bad,” Archie said. It was only going to get worse.
“I was surprised you came.”
He hadn’t even considered canceling. He’d made a commitment. “We had an appointment.”
He could see something shift in her shoulders, a glance at the clock on her desk. Their fifty minutes were up. “That’s it,” Archie said. Rosenberg nodded and followed him as he walked from the office to the front hall, where his rain boots sat dripping on the Oriental rug Rosenberg used as a front mat. He pulled them on, the rubber pressing the wet wool to his feet. They were useless anyway.
“How’s Susan?”
Archie glanced up, startled. “Why ask about her?”
Rosenberg frowned innocently. “I read her column.”
Archie knew Rosenberg never asked anything casually. He looked at her for a moment, then answered the question. “Working on her book, scrambling for stories. Same old thing.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
Archie cleared his throat. “I’ll see you in three months, Sarah.”
She held out her hand and he shook it. “You can come sooner, if you like,” she said.
“Stay off the roads.”
Rosenberg opened the heavy front door for him. “Henry said you moved,” she said.
So Henry was still checking in on him. “I did.”
“Where to?”
Archie looked out at the rain and smiled. “Higher ground,” he said.
CHAPTER
4
Susan’s desk at the Herald was on the fifth floor and if she got up and walked thirty feet and really squinted she had a view of The Heathman Hotel across the street. It wasn’t really worth the effort. Mostly Susan stayed in her seat, where she pounded out her quirky crime roundup column, in between searching for a new job on Monster.com and looking on eBay for the red velvet blazer that Tom Ford designed for Gucci in 1995. She’d agreed to write the column in a rare moment of job insecurity, and had been disheartened at how quickly it had taken off. It turned out that Oregonians loved themselves some gore, the weirder the better. Her first column was about a Ukrainian chemistry student who had a habit of dipping his gum in citric acid to make the flavor last longer, and then died after he accidentally dunked his bubble gum in the explosives he was using for his experiments. He blew off half his face. You couldn’t make this stuff up. She still got letters about that one.
It was an easy job. She got the international stories off the wire or the Internet, and turned up the local horror herself. An old skeleton in a slough, for instance.
Today’s headline? THE DEAD GIRL ON THE OSTRICH.
She’d just e-mailed it to her editor when the flowers came.
Technically, the receptionists downstairs were supposed to call before they sent up a visitor. But they never did. Receptionists always hated Susan. She didn’t know why.
Susan heard Derek Rogers cluck his disapproval from a few desks down before she even saw the flower shop guy.
The Herald was that quiet—it was like working in a museum. Especially since all the buyouts and layoffs started. The city was flooding and the newsroom was so quiet that Susan could hear the toilet flush in the men’s room all the way over in editorial. Derek sat a few desks over from her, and she swore she could hear him when he swallowed. There was something about the acoustics of that place, that huge open floor plan, all that carpet. Miles of carpet. There were over a thousand chemicals used in the manufacture of carpet. Between the central nervous system damage from the fumes and the radiation from all the cell phones on that floor, Susan was waiting for the day they’d all start bleeding out their eyes.
She straightened up and spun her task chair around.
Don, the flower shop guy, looked like he’d just gotten off an Alaskan crab fishing boat: black fisherman bibs, rubber boots, and a yellow rain slicker. He had one of those full beards that all the men in Portland decided to grow about a year ago, and he was a giant, so he could sort of sel
l the fisherman thing. But Susan was still pretty sure he’d never been on a boat.
His boots squeaked on the carpet.
“It’s getting bad out there,” he said, wiping rain from a ruddy cheek. “No more deliveries.”
“Your shop is across the street,” Susan said.
He handed her the wet bouquet he was holding. There had been more ceremony the first few times he’d come.
Susan looked down at the bouquet. It was prettily arranged in a square glass vase. Purple calla lilies, red berries, surrounding a few fist-sized balls of leaves. For a guy with fingers like sausages, he had a way with floral design. “Is that cabbage?” she asked.
“Decorative winter kale,” he said with a sigh.
“Oh.”
“Seriously,” he said. “Tell your admirer to take a break until after the rain stops. The governor declared a state of emergency today.” He looked around at their sad, empty office. “Don’t you watch TV?” he said.
“I read the Herald,” Susan said pointedly. Someone had to.
He shook his head and trudged off toward the elevator, leaving a wet spot on the carpet where he’d been standing.
Derek rolled his task chair next to Susan’s. The musk of his aftershave was overpowering. Stetson. He was the only guy in his twenties Susan knew who even used aftershave. “Leo Reynolds is bad news,” he said, pumping a finger toward the flowers.
True, she thought. But I bet he doesn’t use Stetson.
Leo Reynolds had sent Susan a bouquet at work every week for six months. The cards all said the same thing: To Susan, From Leo. A real formalist. The flower shop guy said that Leo placed the order by phone. He probably had an account at every flower shop in town. Leo’s family money had been made importing massive amounts of drugs into the West Coast, but Susan had to admit she liked the attention.
“You never sent me flowers,” she said to Derek.
“He’s rich,” Derek said. He lowered his voice and glanced around at the twenty or so people still in the office, all wearing headphones and staring blankly at their computer screens. “I make thirty-two thousand dollars a year,” he said.