by K. Panikian
My brain seethed and my heart pounded, both with anger and with despair. That’s what went wrong in Russia when I told him I wanted to be with him? He didn’t think I understood what I was feeling?
It was so patronizing it made me sick, like I had completely misjudged him as a person.
I tossed and turned for a long time in my bed, thinking about what he’d revealed and what I wanted to say to him when he came to the cabin. In the end, I fell asleep, my feelings still heaving in my chest.
IN the early morning light, the rusalka’s pond looked even more foreboding. The mossy, dead trees lining the edges of the mud drooped their trailing branches into the water like white, bony fingers. The sulfur smell from the decomposing biomatter in the pond’s depths and presumably, the rotting corpses, was eye-watering.
We’d picked up Josephine in town early and motored to the pond. I still wasn’t speaking to Julian, though I knew we had a job to do.
Standing in between Julian and Josephine, I called out softly, “Grace!”
Nothing moved. I heard a fish splash in Iliamna Lake, which was barely visible through the trees at the southern end of the pond.
Josephine knelt by the footprints we saw yesterday and took a picture with her phone. She laid a measuring stick beside the print for scale in the photos. She stood again and then whispered, “What if the other monster comes instead? The old one?”
Julian patted the handle of his sword. He’d disguised it in his fishing rod kit and, once we landed the skiff, strapped it on. I’d borrowed his dagger pair and had one on each hip.
He said calmly, “We can handle a lake monster, don’t worry.”
“Can you?” the rusalka asked, appearing beside me. Her hair gleamed bright green this morning.
I turned to the apparition and said quickly, “He wasn’t talking about you. We know who you are. You’re Grace.”
The rusalka looked at me, licking her lips. “Yes. Grace.” She bared her sharp teeth.
Julian took a few steps back. We’d discussed it earlier and decided the less she saw of him, the better.
“Grace,” Josephine said, her voice breaking. “Oh, child.”
The rusalka turned to the older woman. Her pale brow furrowed for a moment before recognition dawned. “Josephine!” she wailed. She dropped to her knees beside the pond and screamed into her nightgown.
“Oh, Josephine,” she sobbed through her moans, her fingers scrabbling in the mud. “I was so scared.” Her hair started to glow.
Hurriedly crouching beside her, I gave Josephine a warning look. “We’re not here to make you sad or upset. We need your help, and we want to help you.”
The rusalka spoke into her lap bitterly. “How could you possibly help me?”
“If we find out what happened to you,” I told her, “we can free your soul. You can move on.”
The rusalka glanced at me again, her ink-black eyes widening.
“Can you remember anything about how you came to be here?” I asked.
The rusalka tapped her sharp fingernails together. She was quiet for a long time.
“Charlie,” she finally said. “Charlie sent a note.” She looked up at the sky. “I was excited and nervous. I told Amy.” Scrambling to her feet, she became agitated again, shaking her hands. A swirling magical wind started to surround her. “Amy!” she cried out to the sky.
I stretched my elemental control and calmed the rusalka wind. “We will figure this out for you,” I promised.
My heart ached for the young woman she used to be. To be turned into a demon like this, a vengeful spirit, because someone betrayed her, murdered her, and callously tossed her body away—it outraged me.
“We’re looking for something too,” I told her. “There is a door in your pond, yes?”
“Yes,” she answered dully. “There is a door.”
“I need the key to the door.”
“No,” she said, “you don’t want the key. There is a monster on the other side of the door.”
“Yes, we know about the lake monster. I promise you, we will kill it.”
“No, not the lake monster,” she sneered. “That one is stupid and arrogant and he leaves me alone. I mean the one who calls us to the mountain.” The rusalka dropped her voice to a whisper and hunched her shoulders.
I held my breath. Abaddon?
“The dragon mountain?” I asked carefully.
The rusalka pointed her finger at me and leaned forward. I smelled sulfur again. “I will give you the key if you release me.”
I nodded. “Yes. We can do that for you. If there’s anything you can remember that will help us, please share it.”
The rusalka wind gusted, picking the two of us up into the air and spinning us. I ignored the magic and focused on Grace twirling with me, her face inches from my own.
“I feel your anger,” she whispered and licked her lips. “Do you want to make him pay?”
Calming my wildly beating heart, I said gently, “No. He is foolish, but he is not evil. I don’t want you to hurt him.”
The rusalka dropped us into the mud at the edge of the pond again and I staggered as she shrugged. “You’ll see soon enough if you’re right.”
Then she pointed at me again, her sharp fingernail inches from my face. “Find the note.”
She vanished. She didn’t dive into the pond like last time; she simply wasn’t there anymore.
“The note,” I murmured. The note from Charlie?
I turned to Josephine. “We need to know about Charlie.”
She nodded, her eyes sad, and gestured us toward the lake. “Let’s not talk here.”
We walked back to the beach and pushed the skiff off into the lake. After steering us a few hundred yards offshore, Julian dropped anchor.
I looked expectantly at Josephine and she sighed. “Charlie was the first victim—the local man that vanished when he was supposed to meet his buddies for ice fishing.
“The Troopers interviewed him earlier in the summer, right when Grace disappeared. They’d been seeing each other; everyone knew about them. They were really sweet together. When Grace vanished Charlie took it really hard. He quit his guide job and started drinking pretty heavily.
“When he disappeared, too, that winter, everyone thought he’d committed suicide from missing her so much, or he drank too much and wandered off into the snow.”
“She killed him,” I murmured. Why kill the man she loved? Even as the rusalka, she should have recognized him. Maybe she didn’t kill him? Maybe he really did have an accident in the snow?
“Who’s Amy?” Julian asked next.
“Grace’s sister. She’s a guide here also. She comes back every summer, despite what happened,” Josephine answered.
“She probably knows everything about Grace and Charlie,” I said. “Can we talk to her?”
“She’s guiding this summer at the same lodge again. I’ll take you there.”
Julian pulled up the anchor and we sped off through the beautiful summer morning.
Chapter 11
An hour after leaving Grace’s pond, we sat at a picnic table on a stretch of grass in front of a large, rambling fishing lodge. Multiple cabins lined the shore and skiffs bobbed in the water at the dock. I could smell salmon smoking on the breeze and saw a tall, wooden smoker by the path to the main lodge. The sweet aroma made my mouth water.
A woman walked down the path toward us. She had long, dark hair tied back in a ponytail and her eyes looked wary. I could see the resemblance to the rusalka in her delicate features and slim arms. She wore jean shorts and a tank top.
Waving her over to our table, Josephine called out, “Amy.” The woman lifted her chin and headed our way.
“Hey, Josephine,” she said when she reached our table. “Seth said you wanted to talk to me? I have about an hour before my next guide trip.”
Josephine patted the seat next to her and Amy sat, looking expectantly at me and Julian. Josephine introduced us as investigators hired by
the current missing person’s family.
“Yeah, Landon. I heard.” She nodded at us gravely. “I’ll help you any way I can.”
Leaning forward, an open notebook in front of me as my prop, I said, “We’ve been looking into the disappearances on the lake, specifically over the past two years, and we’d like to ask you some questions about your sister, if it’s not too hard for you to talk about.”
Amy blinked at me. “Of course. I can talk about Grace. She would want me to help however I could.”
“It’s very interesting to me that the first two people that disappeared were romantically involved. Can you talk at all about Grace and Charlie’s relationship?”
Amy tilted her head to the side as the corners of her mouth turned down into a frown. “Grace loved Charlie, I have no doubt. She chased after him for the whole first part of the summer before he finally started noticing her. Then after that, I would say, yes, they were heavily involved.
“She was talking about dropping out of school and moving here, so they could be together year-round.”
“Did you like Charlie?” I probed. “Did you think he was a good guy for your sister?”
Amy blushed and then paled; tears appeared in her eyes before she blinked them away. “Yeah, I liked Charlie a lot. He was a great guy. He had a way of looking straight at you. Like, he saw the real…” she trailed off.
“The night Grace disappeared,” Josephine said, “did she receive a note from anyone? Was she going to meet Charlie?”
Amy exhaled a short puff of air and then stuttered, “No. There wasn’t a note. Who said there was a note?”
“Oh,” Josephine answered, “maybe I was mistaken.”
There was a shout from the lodge and a man waved to Amy. She rose. “That’s my group. Come find me after, if you have more questions.” She started to turn away.
I called, “What do you think happened to your sister?”
Amy spun back to me, her lips trembling and her eyes hard. “I think she made some bad decisions that summer and maybe she trusted someone she shouldn’t have.” Whirling, she hurried up the path.
I exchanged significant glances with Josephine and she grimaced at me.
“Yeah, I agree,” she said.
“What?” Julian asked.
“I admit,” Josephine said slowly, “that now knowing Grace was murdered and is currently a spirit of vengeance, and her first victim was her former lover, that I’m interpreting Amy’s performance just now in a different light.”
I nodded. “Amy was involved with Charlie, or at least wanted to be. Who else can we talk to here?”
Josephine arranged interviews with three more guides who were at the lodge that pivotal summer. The first, an older man, wasn’t much help. He told us he didn’t pay attention to the young people’s romantic “tangles.” When I pressed him on his opinion of Charlie, he said only that he was a good guide. He was heavily requested by the tourists, especially groups that had women with them.
“Was he flirtatious?” I asked Josephine when the man left.
“Oh yeah. Charlie was a big flirt. He could be charming and you’d find yourself ignoring a speeding ticket, only because it was Charlie asking.”
“Did that change when he was involved with Grace?”
“Not really,” Josephine answered. “That kind of man, he’ll always flirt.”
“Was Grace okay with it? Or was she jealous?”
Josephine shrugged. “I can’t remember for sure. She never said anything to me and I saw her often that summer.”
I couldn’t imagine feeling okay with the man I loved flirting with other women, even if he was just trying to get big tips. It felt disrespectful and mean.
Our next interview was another guide who was close to Grace and Amy both. She told us that, yes, Grace was having lots of problems with feelings of jealousy. She was convinced that Charlie was seeing someone else at the beginning of the summer. And after they got together, she worried often that he was sneaking around.
When I asked her if she thought Grace was right about there being another woman, she nodded sadly and said yes, probably. Everyone knew Charlie would follow any girl that winked at him.
After I probed into Grace and Amy’s relationship though, she stopped talking to us, saying she didn’t feel right gossiping about a dead person.
Josephine wanted to know if Grace had gotten a note from anyone the night she disappeared and the woman shrugged helplessly. “If she did, it would have been with her things and all of that was divided up after she disappeared. Her family got some stuff and Charlie took a few things. Mementos, I guess.”
Finally, we talked to a young man. The summer Grace disappeared was his first summer guiding on the lake and he admitted that he didn’t remember much about specific relationships. He’d been smoking a lot of pot, he told us. Josephine rolled her eyes.
He did say the night Grace didn’t come home to her bunk, he saw a skiff on the lake heading in the direction of Newhalen.
When he left our table, Josephine confirmed that the Troopers had that information. They’d never discovered who’d been on the boat, but assumed it was Grace, possibly heading to meet her killer. When the Troopers asked Charlie if she’d been going to meet him, he’d denied it; and, he had a solid alibi—he’d been on an overnight guide trip and the clients confirmed he’d been with them the whole night.
“Who could she have been going to meet?” I mused. “If Charlie wasn’t even there that night?”
“She didn’t know he wasn’t there,” Julian reminded me. “The rusalka said the note was from Charlie.”
Oh yeah. I nodded, thinking.
“I think there are two possibilities,” I said. “One, she got a note that she thought was from Charlie, though it wasn’t, and she was going to meet him. Once there, the fake-note-writer killed her.
“Two, she actually did get a note from Charlie, and he was in on her death. He arranged for her to be killed while he had an alibi.”
I ticked off my fingers. “Both alternatives involve a betrayal and either would be sufficient to trigger the rusalka magic. The fact that she killed Charlie first though, I think, indicates that she felt betrayed by Charlie. So, I think the second possibility is more likely.”
Both Julian and Josephine nodded.
“And,” I finished, “based solely on the circumstantial evidence of these interviews today, I think it was Amy. But I don’t know how to prove it.”
“Let’s go check Charlie’s house,” Julian said.
Chapter 12
Charlie’s trailer was abandoned, Josephine told us. No one wanted to move in there after Charlie disappeared, in case he returned one day. The Troopers went all through it when Charlie first vanished, but didn’t find any signs of what happened to him.
Josephine got the key from the general store where she’d been safekeeping it and we drove to a poorly maintained side road, heading up a gentle slope. We stopped in front of an old trailer with a sagging roof and streaks of rust on its grimy, formerly-white siding. On the porch the screens hung ripped and loose. Josephine unlocked the front door.
Inside, a shapeless brown couch sat on the bare and scratched floor. It smelled musty, like no one had opened that door for a long time.
Josephine stood for a long moment, her shoulders drooping, and then led us around. The bedroom had only a mattress on the floor and some clothes in the closet on wire hangers. A photo on the wall showed a young man standing with his arms around two older people; everyone was smiling.
Josephine pointed to the photo. “Charlie’s parents. They had a summer cabin here when Charlie was young and he ran wild through these woods. They eventually sold it, but Charlie came back when he was older to live and work here. He was different though.”
She shrugged. “I guess we’re all different when we’re kids.”
The bathroom had a yellow counter and a mirror specked with rust, a sheen of dust on all the surfaces.
“Where wo
uld he have put whatever mementos he kept from Grace’s bunk?” I asked.
Josephine looked around. “Let’s split up,” she suggested.
I went to the kitchen and started opening the cabinets, finding chipped dishes and a few pots and pans. The sink had hard water stains around the drain. The old-looking, beige fridge sat open and empty.
I heard Julian in the living room, moving couch cushions and then lifting the couch into the air to search underneath. He opened the coat closet and started rummaging around, moving boots on the floor and jackets on the rod.
I came in, watching as he pulled a shoebox from the top shelf. Walking over as he opened it, I saw photos and ticket stubs inside.
He held up one picture for me to see—a young man with a big grin and straight, spiky black hair stood with his arms around two girls. Amy and, presumably, Grace. Amy looked at Charlie with an adoring expression on her face. Grace though, looked straight at the photo-taker, her eyes miserable.
Josephine came out of the bedroom carrying another old shoebox. Inside I saw folded up pieces of lined notebook paper. Josephine opened one and read it, then showed it to us. It was a love note, written from Grace to Charlie, where she told him she’d had an amazing time with him and couldn’t wait to see him again.
Josephine opened another letter and this one was from Amy to Charlie, asking him to meet her by the docks later.
“Charlie was seeing both of them,” I said. “Did the Troopers read these?”
“I don’t think so,” Josephine said. “The box was in his gun safe. I guessed the combination was his birthday, but the Troopers didn’t have a warrant when they came through here. They could only look through open and obvious things.”
We split up the pile of notes, each taking a handful, and read quietly for a few minutes.
The few that I read painted a picture of a dishonest, superficial man who had two women desperately in love with him. Amy knew that he was seeing both her and Grace, but Grace was clueless. She asked for reassurances on the evenings he wasn’t with her and wanted his promises for the future.