Downpour

by Kat Richardson

  “Moron tube rat,” I muttered, turning back and heading for land, just in case she tried another fool’s leap. I yanked off my scarf and started wrapping her up in it. “What are you trying to do—turn into an otter and swim out to sea?” I glanced up, gauging the distance back to the Rover, and saw a man in a dark green park service uniform and heavy jacket walking toward the white pickup. “Hey,” I called out. I wished I could wave to get his attention, but I had my hands full of wet ferret-in-velvet. I started running toward him, cradling Chaos against my chest and calling out again.

  The ranger shot a glance over his shoulder, then stopped and turned to face me, waiting patiently for me to catch up. He was a middle-aged man, wings of gray spreading from his temples into his brown hair, though judging from the way his uniform hung, the park service kept him pretty fit. His nose was a little crooked, and constant cold had made the veins spiderweb across it, but there wasn’t much else about him that stood out. His aura was small and neutral yellow; he seemed totally normal—dull, even.

  “Hey,” he said as I drew near. “What happened? Your dog fall in the lake?”

  “My crazy ferret wants to join the Polar Bear Club, I guess,” I said, unwrapping the miscreant’s face so she could wave her whiskers at the man. She didn’t react to him at all except to sniffle piteously, so I wasn’t missing anything Grey about him, and that was reassuring: I’d begun to wonder if I’d lost more ability than I’d realized. “She jumped right into the water.”

  He chuckled. “That water’s so clear, it’s like glass. Maybe she didn’t think it was there.”

  “I have no idea. I’d think she could smell it, but maybe it’s too cold for her nose to work well.”

  “It’s been colder. It’s above freezing today.” He glanced at a long, low building beside the water, nearly hidden by shore grass and winterdead water iris. “Why don’t you come in here and I’ll find you a towel for her.”

  I thanked him and followed him into the building. It was only a little warmer inside than out and the long open room held two long water-filled troughs. “What is this place?” I asked.

  “Fish hatchery. We keep the lakes stocked with trout and a couple of other sport species so they don’t get overfished. We almost killed off the native trout with introduced species and overfishing in the past. We try to learn from our mistakes.” He took a small towel out of a cabinet near the door and handed it to me. “I was just up checking on the tanks, making sure they hadn’t frozen over. Lucky for you we had a spate of subzero temps last week or I might not have come out here today.”

  “I do seem to have really good luck,” I agreed, taking the towel and unwinding the ferret from my now-wet scarf. Actually, I don’t have luck, according to another Greywalker I’d met in London; I have a gift of persuasion, and that includes persuading circumstances to favor me. I think that’s probably bull, but I’ve learned not to let my natural cynicism ruin perfectly good magic: I’ll take all the luck I can get.

  I wrapped Chaos in the dry towel and rubbed the water out of her fur while the ranger held on to my wet scarf. “So, do you just do fish or do you take care of the whole lake?” I asked.

  “No, I do pretty much the whole lake. Name’s Ridenour,” he added, starting to offer me a hand to shake, then realizing I didn’t have one of my own free and stuffing it back into his jacket pocket. “Brett Ridenour. I’m the senior ranger for this district of the park.”

  “Well, then you’re probably the man I need to see.”

  “About what, Miss . . . ?”

  Chaos was shivering in my hands and I paused to stuff the mostly dry ferret inside my coat to warm up. “Harper Blaine.” Now I shook his hand and went on. “I’m a private investigator and I was up here doing some pretrial work for a lawyer in Seattle when I noticed a car in the lake.”

  “A car?” Ridenour questioned, half frowning and half smiling. “There aren’t too many places in the lake where a car would be visible if someone were fool enough to drive one in. It’s pretty deep out there.”

  “So I hear, but there certainly is a car up near the northeast shore, about a hundred feet off East Beach Road.”

  “Seriously?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Bit of a lonely stretch just west of where the lake comes to a point behind that big house . . .”

  “East Beach. Well . . . yeah, I suppose that’s about the one place a car wouldn’t just sink all the way to Hades out there. That’s an old landslide area; filled in part of the valley about eight thousand years ago and formed the two lakes here. The rest of it’s all glacial and deep as hell. I wonder what cabin-crazy son of a bitch drove his damned car into my lake.”

  I made a clueless face and shrugged. “No idea.”

  “You didn’t scare someone into the lake, now, did you, Miss Blaine?”

  “Hell no. I was just looking for my witness and someone said he might be farther out along the shoreline. I got a little lost and ended up going down the wrong tiny dirt road.” I’m not too proud to make myself out to be a fool if it serves my purpose. “I got down to the end, realized I was in the wrong place, and got out of my truck to see if I could turn around or if I’d have to back out. And there’s a car in the water—just under the water, really, but, as you said, the water’s so clear that you can see down a long way. This isn’t even down more than two feet on the highest bit.”

  Ridenour’s frown deepened. “Huh,” he grunted, staring into the distance. “I guess you’d better come show me, if you think your ferret’s all right now.”

  “She’s dry enough to warm up on her own now.” I handed him the damp towel and he returned my wet scarf. “Thanks.”

  He opened the door and we left the hatchery, heading for our respective trucks. “Do you need to take that critter home first?”

  “No, I’m staying at a hotel in Port Angeles tonight. I have her cage in my truck and it’s warm enough. She’ll go to sleep no matter where she is—kind of like a kid.”

  Ridenour’s stride faltered and for a second his face paled; then he caught back up to me. “I’ll bring my truck around and join you by yours. Then we can both drive out to the site.”

  “All right.” I’d half expected him to ask me to come with him, but something had distracted him enough that he didn’t question whether I was leading him on a snipe hunt.

  I walked back across the clearing and past the ranger station to the visitors’ parking lot. Chaos was more than happy to snuggle into her dry nest and give me the cold shoulder as if her aborted attempt to be a Popsicle were my fault. I rolled my eyes at her and shut the back hatch. By the time I was in my seat, I could hear the ferret crunching away on her kibble as if swimming in icy, haunted lakes was nothing unusual for her.

  Ridenour pulled up and waited for me to get my engine started and pull out ahead of him. He followed me all the way to where the dirt track down to the lake lay exposed and churned up by my abrupt departure earlier. I rolled down my window and pointed to the road. Then I drove a bit past it, to the place I’d first seen Leung, and parked the Rover so I could walk back and join Ridenour, who’d parked his own truck beside a stand of frost-burned bracken ferns on the other side. The area now seemed almost unnaturally dull and quiet, the bright Grey overlay faded to thin mist for the moment.

  “This it?” he asked as I joined him.

  I nodded. “Just down there. You can see I made a bit of a mess.”

  “Well, I won’t cite you, this time,” he said in a forced jocular tone. “This path is supposed to be cleared up in the summer, anyway, so we have access to as much of the shoreline as possible without having to bring out the boats.” We both glanced down the track and I was relieved to see no sign of Jin. “Stick close,” said Ridenour, starting down the trail. “I heard a cougar across the lake earlier and it might still be around.”

  “You mean that awful screeching sound?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Some people say it sounds like a woman screaming. Me, I just think it sounds like cougars
.”

  I wasn’t sure if he’d made a really horrible joke or no joke at all, so I said nothing and followed him down to the water’s edge, back to the place I’d last seen Leung’s car. It was still there, just visible as the daylight began to slant onto the lake from the west, illuminating the intrusive rust color of the wrecked car in the glowing greens and blues of the lake.

  Ridenour glanced toward the water, apparently not quite convinced I’d really seen a car, and did a visible flinch when he spotted it. “Jesus! ” He started forward as if he was going to jump in and swim to it, but the knowledge of how cold the water was must have stopped him at the brink. He hovered at the edge, rocking from foot to foot as if he could barely restrain himself from action but wasn’t sure which one to take.

  “I’m pretty sure there’s no one in there,” I said, not sure at all, but the last thing I wanted to deal with was a ranger with hypothermia. “The car looks like it’s been in the water a while.”

  He stopped his indecisive swaying and turned back to look at me, his expression mournful. “If there was someone in it, they’d be dead by now,” he said with a sad nod. “I guess all we can do is have it hauled out.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  He bit his lip and frowned at the ground. When he spoke he seemed to be talking to himself more than to me. “This road’s too narrow and soft to support any truck that could pull a waterlogged car out of the drink. We’ll have to get the barge. It’s docked down at Fairholm, but it’ll take an hour or more to get it up here and then another hour and a half to haul the car on board and take it to the boat ramp where we can get it on a flatbed and out to the county yard. We’ve got about three hours of light left. Then the sun goes behind the hills and it gets darker than the inside of a grizzly out here.” He rubbed one hand through his hair. “They’re not going to like working on Sunday . . . but I can’t give ’em a choice. They’re just going to have to do it. Can’t let that sit there any longer than we can avoid—it might slide down and sink.”

  “Who aren’t going to like working on Sunday?” I asked.

  He stopped staring at the drowned car and turned his head to talk to me. “The boat crews don’t work weekends in the winter—usually they don’t work up here much at all this time of year. Most of ’em have other jobs in the off-season. Damn it, I wish I had a diver with a dry suit up here! I want to know if I’ve got a body in that car.” He glanced up at the sky and muttered, “Don’t let this be a goddamned crime scene. I do not need a murder in my park!” He turned his gaze back toward the lake, rubbing his hands over his face and muttering something I couldn’t quite hear, but I thought he said, “Kill you my damned self.”

  I stepped closer and put my hand on Ridenour’s shoulder. “Hey, you all right?”

  Ridenour jumped as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Yeah, yeah. I’m just . . . I gotta wonder what the hell a car’s doing in my lake. It doesn’t look like it drove in here recently, so . . . I have to think the worst, and I’ve already got the culprit in mind. . . .”

  “Don’t start fitting someone for handcuffs. Wait until you have some real information before declaring this a major crime.” As if I could talk. So far, everything was pointing to the ghost having told the truth, and the car was evidence of murder. But it wouldn’t be reasonable of me, a stranger, to agree to Ridenour’s visions of the worst.

  He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. “OK. All right. We’ll assume it’s just an abandoned car for now, but it’s got to get moved tomorrow. I’ll head back to the center and put in calls for the crew and equipment. I’ll get the county in on it so they can take the car once it’s out of the lake and then we’ll see.... Which hotel are you staying at, Miss Blaine? If I need you, can I call on you?”

  “Sure,” I said, and I gave him the name of my hotel. “I’ll come back tomorrow, if you don’t mind. I’d like to see what’s in that car myself, if that’s OK.”

  Ridenour nodded absently. “Yeah, sure. First thing, about eight in the morning, then.”

  “OK. Eight tomorrow.”

  I followed him back up to East Beach Road, watching him shake his head and mutter the whole way. He plainly took the situation personally and was angry as hell at someone.

  EIGHT

  I gave up on the day earlier than I’d intended, returning to the hotel to check the ferret out more thoroughly—she was fine, naturally—and put her down to romp somewhere safe. Then I sat down on the bed for a few minutes, which turned into falling asleep for a couple of hours. I woke up with every muscle in my chest and abdomen protesting as if I’d been the one to haul the car out of the lake myself and my stomach rumbling hunger even louder.

  Clouds had rolled in once again while I slept, and getting food meant a trip in the downpour. It was cold rain that sliced in on the wind through the Strait of Juan de Fuca like a million tiny daggers. By the time I was back in my room after dinner and some quick shopping, I was feeling as miserable as Chaos had looked coming out of the lake. The already-wet velvet scarf had been useless, and even the baseball cap I’d snatched out of the Rover had only slowed the penetration of water to my head. I took a hot shower and lurked under the duvet to save my toes from predation by ferret while I made another phone call to the Danzigers.

  Ben answered the phone. “Danzigers’ House of Paranormal Pancakes.” I could hear Brian chanting in the background, “Ghost, ghost, ghost! ”

  “What?”

  “Oh, hi, Harper. We’re having potato pancakes with dinner and the boy wants them ghost shaped. We’re having some trouble disambiguating latkes from flapjacks.”

  It took me a second to puzzle out “disambiguate” before I could reply. “At least you aren’t trying to explain the difference between blintzes and the Blitz.”

  “Oh God, I fear the cream-cheese-filled barrage balloons. . . .”

  I laughed. “So, did Mara ask you about monsters?”

  “Oh, your elemental white apes? Yeah, but I haven’t had a lot of luck narrowing that down. Technically a lot of things fall into the ‘elemental’ category, from brownies to the yan-gant-y-tan.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a Breton creature of evil omen—it has candles instead of fingers. Your monsters didn’t have waxy hands, did they?”

  “No, they had black claws. But I have another clue. I met another . . . thing that seems to be related, same kind of coloring and horns, but no fur. It’s an intelligent monster, essentially human in shape and size, male, but it can project a human form over its own. This one looks Asian when he’s pretending to be human, has red hair on his head, and he called the other ones—the smaller, dumber ones—‘gwhy’ or a word that sounds like that. Any bells?”

  “Gwhy . . .” he repeated. I could imagine him staring at the kitchen ceiling and thinking, going through his mental catalog of monsters until he asked, “Could that word be . . . guai?” His tone had the same odd rise that Jin’s had had.

  “Yes! That’s what he called them.”

  Ben paused. “Ah. That’s Chinese. I’m not so good with Chinese—I don’t read either of the text forms, so what I know comes from translations and broad-stroke references. And the Chinese myths got around along with the rest of Chinese influence and conquest. For instance, a lot of Korean and Japanese demonology is based on the Chinese legends and myths that came with Buddhism—though of course it’s impolitic to say that in some company. They have a bunch of demons and ghosts in common but for the name-change, such as the kitsune, the kumiho, and the huli-jing, which are all the same shape-shifting fox-demon, essentially. The three mythologies get tumbled together a lot, and it’s sometimes kind of hard to pick out which version is which.”

  “Hey, Ben,” I suggested, “could we just go back to ‘guai’ ? What’s that? Because that seems to be what I saw, if Jin was speaking truthfully.”

  “A djinn?”

  “No. The articulate, manipulative one calls himself ‘Jin.’ He’s also vain and kin
d of greedy.”

  “Oh . . . Interesting . . . I think that’s the word for ‘effort’ or maybe for ‘gold’. . . . I should learn some Chinese. . . .”

  “Getting off track here, Ben.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Chinese is tough. It’s contextual and tonal and it’s easy to mistake one word for another—it’s a great language for puns and jokes and embarrassment—but in this case, I’d think he meant it as a bit of an insult. See, the word I think he said can mean ‘ghost’ ”—the word brought on a new spate of chanting from Brian in the background until the noise stopped with an abrupt yelp—“or ‘spirit’ or ‘demon’ or ‘freak’ or ‘monster.’ Probably a few other words as well . . . You get the picture. But I think what you’ve seen is a couple of different types of Chinese demons, since these plainly aren’t ghosts. They’d be ‘yaoguai’ or ‘yaomo,’ depending on which shade of meaning you intend. If your big guy is smarter and more sophisticated, he’d naturally look down on the smaller, dumber ones, so calling them ‘freak’ would be about right.”

  “OK. So, what’s the skinny on these yaoguai?”

  Ben sighed. “Unfortunately, I really don’t know. They are elemental in nature—or at least a lot of them are. The Buddhist legends say the smart ones used to be humans who died in some particular sinful way and became demons when they descended to hell. I’m not sure how they get to be demons, but they do, and then they sort of embody their sin, and their way out of hell is to acquire the power of a very magical or truly enlightened man—to the Taoists and Buddhists, enlightenment and magic are closely related. Anyway, the demons acquire this power by literally consuming it—they eat the power, usually by eating the man who has it. The demons trick people by using illusions and making bargains, because these are both considered degraded uses of the powers that lead to enlightenment. They get more sophisticated and powerful as they consume more, but they always remain tricksters at heart until they can devour a truly enlightened man. You see the general trend?”