Downpour

by Kat Richardson

  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 call Shea—he hasn’t got a phone and mobiles don’t work up here, anyway—but he usually comes around the lake a few times a day, working and checking on things. If he’s around, he’ll always lend a hand with a lockout or a jump start. He carries most of his tools around with him in his truck.”

  Quinton came back with my boots and his own. We both sat down and started putting them on.

  “What sort of truck?” I asked Ridenour while I was lacing up. Shea had been using a pickup truck at the Log Cabin Resort when we’d met, but it hadn’t been registered to him, and I couldn’t quite remember what color the battered old beast had been. Something pale, but it had been hard to be sure under the coating of road dust and mud.

  “Just an old truck, light blue with a shell. Why?”

  “Do you know where he is? Was Shea working here today?”

  “No, but he’s done work here in the past. I think I saw the truck at Rosemary earlier. . . .”

  “What’s Rosemary?”

  “The Rosemary Inn, back along the road here. It used to be a camp and hotel, but it’s the Olympic Park Institute now. Not much going on there this time of year and the sign’s a little hard to spot sometimes.”

  I stood up. “Can you get to Rosemary from here on foot?”

  Puzzled, Ridenour got up, too. “Of course. There’s a trail from the meadow down here all the way up the shore. It’s not very far from here to Rosemary—half a mile at most. They bring school kids and Sierra Club groups out here on nature hikes and education retreats all the time. We even show them the hatchery sometimes.”

  I glanced at Quinton and back to Ridenour. “We have to go.”

  “No! You know something about May; you have to tell m
e.” He reached for my arm and I deliberately turned aside. I couldn’t risk being detained any longer by Ridenour.

  “Not now. Come to the Newmans’ house tonight and I’ll tell you everything.”

  He tried to object, but I’m fast, and Quinton and I dashed for the kitchen and out, slamming the door behind us to slow him down. We yanked on our coats as we bolted for the Rover. Ridenour wasn’t very far behind us, but he didn’t give chase for long, returning to the lodge to lock up, I supposed, caught by his duty.

  The Olympic Park Institute wasn’t very far away at all. It was closer to the Storm King ranger station parking lot than to the lodge, and the sign was heavily overgrown with dead foliage that hadn’t yet been cleared off, but I spotted the road easily enough. I turned in and went a quarter mile or so up the muddy road—it was in need of a lot more gravel and upkeep than the rest of the roads in the park—and discovered a round driveway that circled a covered bench and passed a rustic entry gate made of whitewashed logs. The word “Rosemary” was spelled out in bits of tree branch under the peaked roof of the gateway that stood at the front of an open area bounded by quaint little cottages and a tiny schoolhouse with a bell on a spire. But there was no sign of Shea’s blue truck anywhere. I figured he’d taken off as soon as he reached it and was now on one of his other errands, feeling smug and thinking we had no way to know who or where he was.

  I turned the Rover around and headed back out onto the highway.

  “Where are we going to find him?” Quinton asked. “And how do you know it’s anything to do with this Shea guy?”

  “He’s the invisible man,” I replied.

  “Sorry—I’m not sure I’m following you on that one.”

  “G. K. Chesterton wrote a short murder mystery where the victim is apparently killed by an invisible man, because no one noticed anyone coming or going. But it’s not an actual invisible man who did the murder, but a ‘mentally invisible man.’ A man so ubiquitous that no one notices his presence. Just like Darin Shea. He’s been here off and on for twenty years, but he’s not a real resident, he doesn’t own any property or rent any, and no one takes much notice of his comings and goings, but they all let him in and out of their property. They even give him their house keys!”

  “You think he killed Leung and Strother?”

  “I’m sure of it. If we can find his truck, I think I can prove it, and we can get the anchor stone back from Faith to fix the lake. But we have to do it before the gathering at the Newmans’. . . .”

  “How did you come to the conclusion that Shea is the one?”

  I scowled, trying to put my ideas in order. I thought it would be better if I didn’t try to drive at the same time, so I turned onto Lake Sutherland Road and took us to the Leung house where I parked the truck under some trees, looking into the clearing on the west side of the house.

  I started speaking my thoughts aloud, trying to make them orderly. “The pattern Strother noticed was the thing that clinched it. I realized that the places he’d driven to for no apparent reason were the same places where I went looking for Shea originally, plus Costigan’s house and here, around Lake Sutherland, which Shea himself told me is where he’s been house-sitting this winter. I told Faith we were looking for an invisible man, which Shea is. We know that invisible man has to be the killer and he has to be an ambitious but ignorant mage. All the magic users are accounted for: the puppet master, the nexus keeper, the east, the rogue, and the ley weaver, but not the child. So Shea has to be Costigan’s so-called child. I know Shea’s been to Seattle several times—he’s a potential witness on the corporate case I’m working on for Nanette Grover that’s based in Seattle—and Costigan said he sent his child to the city on his business. It would have been no trouble at all for Shea to find someone either foolish or unscrupulous to create the banishing scrolls for him. Someone like Ben’s colleague who made the one you brought to me. Shea used it to encourage Ridenour’s animosity toward Willow by banishing May and then telling the ranger it was Willow who did it. He’s probably been Ridenour’s little snitch ever since.

  “Once Shea had Willow on the run and could manipulate Ridenour out of his way, he had a free hand to try to control the lake. He wasn’t in any hurry about it since he had to learn how to grab the power and use it. Until Steven Leung got the idea to ‘fix’ the lake. I don’t know why Leung waited or what he meant to do that didn’t work, or how Shea knew what he was planning—”

  Something rapped on the rear window. Quinton and I both twisted around to look. A tree branch swung down to tap the truck again; there was no wind to move it.

  I got out so I could see into the Grey more easily. The green streaks and pools were brighter and thicker than I’d seen them in a while, and I was surprised after so much energy had been spent the night before. Quinton tried to get out of the truck and join me, but the trees shifted and moved their branches in the windless air, barricading the doors closed.

  Willow stepped out from behind one of the trees. Wearing her black dress, she was barefoot as usual, even in the icy slush. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Boyfriend, to tell the truth.” I could sense Quinton’s anxiety, but I wasn’t going to tangle with Willow until I knew what she wanted.

  “And you let Elias doctor him? You can’t be too fond of him. . . .”

  “Since it was Elias who hurt him, I figured he owed me a few repairs. Besides, he didn’t do much—his shadows did the real work.”

  “The loa. I hope it was Loko, not Ghede, who cured him.”

  “They didn’t give their names.”

  “Was the shadow you saw black or green?”

  “Green.”

  “Loko. It will be all right, then.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been watching and . . . borrowing from Cheval Elias for a long time. He’s not so much a houngan or even a bokor as he is a mount for the loa. He has the delusion of power, but he doesn’t control his actions so much as he thinks he does. He’s very dangerous to know.”

  “His child is worse.”

  “Shea? He’s a fool.”

  “Apparently that’s your part.” Her face grew stormy and she started to raise one hand, but I put up both of mine and said, “Hear me out before you smite me—or whatever you’re thinking of doing. How well did he know your father? Would your father have, say, given him a gift?”

  She watched me with a narrowed, angry expression, but she let the gathering power in her hands slide back to the ground as she answered. “They were friendly, but not like that. Daddy was lonely and Shea liked to sit and talk to him instead of working. It seemed harmless.”

  “He’s a better actor than anyone would have credited. And good at masking his abilities—he fooled me, too. What did they talk about?”

  “I don’t really know. I wasn’t around much—too busy staying out of Ridenour’s hands and trying to teach myself the Way.”

  “I think your father must have told Shea how he meant to fix the lake. I don’t know how he got it, but he figured out that the anchor stone was the key to the problem. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to use it properly. I think he was going to take the stone away from the lake. He didn’t know that would have just made things worse. Shea didn’t know, either, and he thought he had to stop it. So he killed your father and hid his body and his car in the lake. The anchor was in the car the whole time, ironically, but it never redirected the leyline as it should have done, because it wasn’t in the right place.”

  Willow blinked at me and a tear rolled down her blank face, leaving a streak. “Shea can’t have done it. He’s not strong enough.”

  “He was strong enough to steal your mother’s circle.”

  “Why do you think it was him? It could have been—”

  “Nobody else. No one else needed it except you and no one else who could use it is still here except Shea. It has to be Costigan’s child—who turned up as soon as I found the circle—Shea. He steals magic; that’s why he’s
here. I can tell from the color of the energy he leaves behind. He uses Costigan’s hoodoo and he ‘borrows’ your family’s energy, too. I think he gave the ley weaver the hand-spiders and said they were from Costigan. Then he could get help from that creature, too. I think he’s used his access to people’s houses to set traps and drive other, weaker mages away now that he’s getting closer to his goals. He comes and goes wherever he pleases and no one pays him any mind—they even ask him in! He must be clever enough to get his master’s loa to help him hide the Subaru after he rigged the brakes and set it on fire when it crashed. I saw the memory of it in your mother’s circle.”

  “He used my mother’s circle to kill my father?” Willow looked appalled and started shaking her head desperately. “That can’t be. The divine horsemen would never obey Shea. He’s only a hoodoo-man, not a real votary of the loa.”

  “He’s not ‘only’ anything. That’s how he’s tricked all of you for so long. But if not the loa, then it must have been Jin who helped him. Which might be why Shea banished him.”

  Willow stared at me. “Banished Jin? He couldn’t. . . . He wouldn’t know how. . . .” She put her hand on her chest and closed her eyes, whispering words that circled into the air and died. Her eyes flashed open in shock. “Jin’s gone!”

  I nodded. I wished we were having this conversation somewhere warmer, but I suspected she’d never agree to sit in the Rover where the steel and glass would cut her off from the streams of magic that flowed underfoot.

  “Willow, how would you banish a demon like Jin? Or May?”

  “I’d cast it out by force. I can. Now. But I didn’t banish May. I liked her, and I wasn’t strong enough then to force a demon. I barely managed to bind Jin so he wouldn’t kill anyone after Jonah.”

  “Couldn’t you have used a spell on yellow paper?”

  “If I could have bought one. I never learned the characters for a major banishment. The best I could do with the Chinese I can write is scatter the stupid guai. It’s much easier to just shove them out.”