by C. E. Murphy
Melinda and I, like Billy, remained standing. I did it because I was going to have to ask some questions and wanted to be on equal footing, as it were. I suspected Mel was mostly too busy being agog at the depth of Sight she was encountering to think of sitting. Either way, Billy didn’t ask us to, only said, “We’re ready for you now, Naomi,” in the same extraordinarily gentle voice I’d heard him use before, when speaking to lost spirits.
Powerful stage lights did ethereal bodies no favors at all, though at least they also disguised any physical damage her ghost might have shown from her untimely death. But my brief impression of Naomi Allison had been of a vibrant woman full of passion and physical strength. Most of that passion was lost with the amber lights pouring through her, stripping away any color or vitality she might have shown. I had the impulse to run offstage and see if I could find a switch to dim or darken them, so she might seem more real. I didn’t, partly because I wasn’t sure what would happen if I broke out of the circle, and mostly because I thought it might be even harder for her friends and family if the woman they’d lost became any more real than she was at the moment. I wasn’t the world’s most sensitive sensitive, but I was getting better.
Naomi was completely focused on Billy. The rest of us might not have existed, and for all I knew, from her perspective, we didn’t. She hadn’t been pretty: she was too thin and too muscled from dancing, without enough softness to her features, for prettiness. Her intensity on stage had drawn the eye, though, and she showed a similar intensity in how she observed Billy. It made her interesting, even attractive, despite a lack of conventional beauty. And despite being dead, which was the much more disturbing thought.
“I have someone here who’d like to ask you some questions,” Billy said to her, “and some others who would like to say goodbye. Is that all right?”
Naomi tilted her head, gaze sweeping the circle, though nothing suggested she took note of any of us. She nodded, though, as she came back to Billy. He gestured me forward, muttering, “Keep it short, Joanie. I’ve never connected with someone this far gone and I don’t know how long she’ll stay.”
Implicit in the statement was and these people have a lot more to say to her than you possibly can. I nodded and stepped right up to his side, hoping proximity to him would help her awareness of me. I even loosened my shields a little, trying to become brighter, in spiritual terms, so I might be easier to see.
It worked: her eyebrows furrowed and she tipped her head again, now watching me, but as if I was as washed-out and difficult to see as she was.
I only had one question, and it caught in my throat. Billy gave me a sharp look. I fell back a step, losing most of Naomi’s attention, and shook my head. “Let them say goodbye first. I’m not sure what my question will do to her.”
Naomi’s sister, Rebecca, whispered, “Thank you,” and joined the hands of the two people on either side of her so she could rise without breaking the circle. She came to stand by Billy, face contorted with tears, but Naomi’s expression lit up and she extended her hands toward Rebecca. I fell back another couple of steps, not really wanting to eavesdrop on the last words two sisters shared, and kept my eyes mostly averted while a handful of others came to say their good byes as well. Breathing the air within the circle hurt; it was that full of loss and sorrow. My refreshed power pounded at my temples and in my heart, searching for some way to ease their pain, but they already had their mechanisms. The ghost dance was meant to do just that. They would be fine, in time, perhaps especially because they had this rare opportunity for closure after Naomi’s sudden, terrible death.
Gradually—actually rather quickly, but it seemed slow because of the ache in the air—the few who’d come to say a specific goodbye rejoined the circle at large. Others obviously wanted to take their place, say goodbye individually, but Naomi was visibly fading, Billy’s grip on her loosening.
They began to sing, a Native American song I imagined was a mourning tune from Naomi’s tribe. That was how the bulk of them would say goodbye, by overriding their own desires so I would have a chance to ask my question. I joined Billy again, knowing what I owed them and still reluctant: Naomi seemed relatively at peace, and I was afraid what I had to ask would shatter that calm.
On the other hand, I didn’t see that I had much choice. The killer’s trail had gone cold, and while going out hunting Morrison was a worthy cause for the remainder of the night, it wasn’t going to render the dance troupe safe from another attack. “Naomi, can you show me where your killer is?”
Naomi Allison withered, shrieking, and spun skyward to rush out of the theater, every goddamned bit as untrackable as the killer’s trail had been.
The circle broke up around us, dismay crowing from every throat as dancers scrambled to their feet in Naomi’s wake. Rebecca was in tears, hiccups of “But she was fine, she was okay, she was fine,” clearer than most of the other babble. Littlefoot pulled her against his chest, scowling over her head at me. Not blaming me, I didn’t think. Just angry and frustrated and probably scared because he didn’t understand what had happened.
Neither did I, exactly, except I’d been relatively sure asking about her killer would upset her. I’d hoped she might do something mundane like point in the right direction, or better yet, give me an address, though I’d thought the former more likely. Zipping off into the ether was really no help at all, though it was a little hard to condemn the ghost of a murdered woman for not wanting to consider the means or perpetrator of her death.
“I’ve got it.” Billy sounded as thick as he’d sounded light before, like a sinus headache had suddenly taken up all the space and comfort in his head. “I can see her trail. Almost. Close enough to follow, anyway.”
Breath whooshed out of me, and the hubbub fell silent as everyone absorbed that. Rebecca sobbed one more time, a short sharp noise, but this time there was relief in it: maybe Naomi’s horrible departure had a purpose. Even I thought that somehow made it better.
I grabbed Billy’s hand, said, “Sorry, I’m stealing him,” to Mel, and started tugging him toward the door. “Where? Which way? I can’t follow a trail very long and I don’t know how long a ghost trail might last. Where do we need to go?”
“Joanne!” Melinda’s voice cracked across the stage and I turned back, electricity jittering down my spine. She softened a little, though her voice remained serious: “Be careful.”
I gave her a weak smile, nodded and hauled Billy out of the theater. He shook off the deepest part of his malaise as we got outside and cleared his throat. “Keys.”
I dug them out of my pocket as I scurried along, and he thrust his hand at me. I frowned at it. “What?”
“Give me your keys. I’m the one seeing ghost trails.”
A little bubble of astonishment popped at the very bottom of my soul. It gave rise to lots more, like soda fizzing in a glass. The closer they got to the top, the more they exploded with tiny bursts of outrage instead of astonishment. “You want to drive Petite?”
“Everybody wants to drive Petite, Joanne. She’s a beautiful car. People who don’t drive want to drive her.”
“And nobody gets to!” One person. One person besides me had driven my baby since I’d rescued her from a North Carolina barn over a decade earlier, and I’d torn into that person with the unholy vengeance of a thousand paper cuts. I had put blood, sweat and soul into my big purple beauty, and nobody got to drive her but me.
Billy, with infinite patience, said, “Don’t be an idiot. Give me the keys.”
I clutched them against my chest, eyes wide with indignation. “Do you even know how to drive a stick?”
“Walker!”
Sullen, I said, “You sound like Morrison,” and tried to hand over the keys. I did. I really tried, but my hand wouldn’t uncurl from my chest, nor would my fingers unclench from around the keychain. “I can’t.”
“You can’t hand over your keys.”
They cut into my fingers, I was holding them so hard. It hu
rt enough that I was starting to want to let go, but my crimped fingers wouldn’t loosen. “I really don’t think I can. Nobody drives Petite, Billy. Nobody but me.”
My partner flung his hands into the air—a remarkably melodramatic and impressive act, in his bright blue zoot suit—and stomped around the car. “Morrison is right. Your relationship with your car is pathological, Walker. If we lose this trail because you miss a turn, I will haunt you for the rest of eternity. Do you understand me?”
I said, “Yes,” in a tiny voice, and even believed him, but it was still me who got in the driver’s seat.
Billy alternated between giving directions and cursing me, all the way downtown. I parked Petite at the all-night garage on Pine Street, grumpily aware that I wouldn’t get to write off the parking fee because I wasn’t officially on a case. Billy stopped swearing once we were safely parked, sat silent a minute or two, then started up again. “I can’t see the trail anymore. We need to go south from here.”
“I don’t know if there’s any overnight parking south of here and I’m not leaving Petite on the street.” I got out of the car, locked my door, and waited for Billy, cursing all the while, to do the same.
“Is this what it’s like when you try to track?”
“Yes.”
“No wonder it pisses you off.”
“You got us a hell of a lot farther than I have.” We headed for street level. “I don’t know. Maybe if I shift into a coyote again I could pick up the trail.”
“You’ve been hit by a truck once already tonight. Why don’t we try something else first? We’re in the right ballpark.
Let’s go talk to your friend Rita Wagner. If I were down town working a major spell, I’d want to be well out of the way. Maybe she’ll have some ideas on where.”
“Why not the Olivian?” I jerked a thumb northeast, toward the high-rise apartment building a block or two away. “I mean, that’d be plenty out of the way, plus a nice penthouse view. There’s no reason to assume a power-stealing madman is hiding in the down-low and dirty parts of town.”
“Except it was a homeless guy who was murdered down town yesterday morning, not a business executive in a high-rise.”
“Yesterday?” I looked at my wrist, where I’d taken to wearing my copper bracelet instead of my watch. The brace let was prettier, but much less good at telling time. But Billy was right: it was probably past midnight, so Lynn Schumacher had died yesterday. “Okay. Yesterday. God. Long day. Okay. You were saying?”
“I was saying, assuming they’re connected—”
“And why would we do that?”
“Because you’re at the center of it all.”
I shut my mouth so hard my ears popped. Billy waited for me to come up with an argument, but all I could manage was a silent, not especially creative litany of bad words.
There was a non-zero probability that he was wrong. It was possible Rita Wagner had come back into my life simply to pass on her gratitude for us saving her life. It was possible someone within her sphere of influence had died horribly out of pure random hideous circumstance, shortly after she re-entered my orbit. And it was possible there was no connection at all between that death’s physical location and the generalized area Melinda had been able to point us at for our magic-stealing-murderer’s location. It was possible.
It was also possible that a wendigo had just happened to take up hunting in my neighborhood, or that the right pieces to shatter an ancient, powerful death cauldron had come into play around me coincidentally. It was possible. It just wasn’t very damned likely.
“I’m like that woman,” I said after a long time. “Angela Lansbury in that TV show. No one in their right mind would be friends with her. No one in their right mind would be in the same town as her. No one should ever, ever go to a cocktail party with me. Or on a road trip. Or—”
“So we’ll go see Rita.” Billy gestured me out of the garage, and I shuffled toward Pioneer Square, wondering how the hell to escape being a danger to my friends and coworkers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The soup kitchen was closed by the time we got there—the Pine Street parking garage was a mile away—but a few stragglers were still making their way out the door. Billy caught the door behind one of them and I ducked under his arm into a long pale-floored room that reminded me of a school cafeteria, right down to the narrow brown tables with built-in colored benches. Rita hauled pans from the food service area, showing more strength in her small form than I’d have expected. The door creaked as it shut behind us, and she, along with another half-dozen volunteers, called out variations on, “Sorry, we’re closed, come back at seven tomorrow morning!”
My conditioned response was, “We’re the police,” except I thought that would get entirely the wrong reaction, so I said, “Actually it’s Joanne Walker,” as if my very name was excuse enough to barge in after hours.
Fortunately I was right. Rita put her pans down with a bang and turned to gape like she’d never expected to see me again. I was equal parts pleased to confound her and guilty that it had taken Billy’s reminder to get me back to Rita and her case. Guilt beat pleasure and I mumbled, “Could you use a hand cleaning up?” which made Billy shoot me a look suggesting I would die slowly and painfully, later, for having volunteered.
Rita, though, exchanged glances with another one of the women, then pulled her apron off and came around the counter. “It’s okay. You came back. Did you find out anything about Lynn? I think the detective this morning just wants to write it off as a dog attack. I heard on the radio tonight people had seen a wolf. Can you imagine? A wolf? In Seattle? It must’ve gotten loose from the zoo.”
My heart did a sick lunge into my stomach and churned it up. “What else did the radio say?”
“Just to call it in if anybody saw it, that Animal Control and the police were tracking it. They didn’t say anything about Lynn. Do you think it was a wolf attack?”
I bit back a bile-filled burp and very carefully didn’t look at my partner. “No. The wolf only…got loose…around nine o’clock tonight. Did they say where they’d seen it last?”
“On the West Seattle Bridge, heading for the viaduct.”
“The we—what the hell’s he—” I broke off, looked at Billy this time and said, “That’s northeast of where it was last sighted,” as carefully as I could. “Why would he head downtown?”
Billy, aggrieved, demanded, “You’re asking me?”
“Well, who else am I supposed to ask?” If I were a sensible shapechanged human, I would slink home and wait for somebody to come rescue me. That would be easier, in theory, for Morrison than it would be for me, as he owned a three-bedroom house with its own small plot of land, whereas I was still renting the fifth-floor apartment I’d moved into my sophomore year of college. At either location, the doors would be a problem, though Morrison might be able to manage the garage door at his house. I really wanted him to be holed up there, gnashing his teeth over the situation I’d gotten him into.
But all of that assumed some level of human intellect and not just a panicked animal running down whatever streets looked least threatening. Not that the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was also Highway 99, was exactly non-threatening, even at midnight on a Saturday.
I put my head in my hands, trying to press my thoughts back into a more useful order. “One crisis at a time, Joanne. Take it one crisis at a time. All right. Rita.” I looked up, and she came to attention like I was a drill sergeant. “My partner here thinks a bunch of unrelated things are actually related. I’m going to go out on a limb and say your missing friends are related, too.”
“Why?”
I flexed my jaw, making cords stand out in my throat. “I don’t suppose you’d just take it on faith.”
Resignation deepened lines around her eyes. She would take it on faith, obviously, but I got the feeling it made her a little bit less of a person, somehow. I said, “Okay,” very softly. “It’s just usually easier for people to not reall
y pay attention to what’s going on around me, but you might be an exception. You know how you said you being alive was a miracle?”
“I said you saving me was a miracle,” she corrected. “Me being alive, that’s a gift I don’t want to screw up.”
I couldn’t help smiling. I’d screwed up so much myself it was nice to come across somebody else trying not to blow it, too. Kindred spirits, we, not that I’d have ever imagined such a thing. “Ever heard of shamans?”
“Like medicine men, right? Indian medicine men?”
“Native American, yeah, although a lot of cultures had, or have, shamans. Anyway, they’re healers. We might call them magic-users.”
“And you are one, and that’s how you saw me get attacked and called it in before I died?”
My jaw flapped open and Rita shrugged. “What else were you gonna say, with that kind of lead-in? What’s the difference between magic and a miracle, Detective?”
Billy came to my rescue while I continued to wave my jaw in the wind: “From the outside, probably not much. From the inside, I don’t know that I want to get into the theology of it.”
Rita smiled. “I don’t think it matters. So there’s something magic going on?”
“How is it that everybody else is much calmer about that idea than I’ve ever been? I mean, doesn’t it seem incredibly unlikely? Like, totally preposterous?” My voice rose, and Billy very sensibly herded us out of the soup kitchen as I said, “I mean, magic. People don’t believe in magic. It’s like believing in fairies and unicorns and, and, and—”
“And other magical things,” Billy finished. I gave him a dark look, but nodded.
Rita folded her arms around herself and peered up at me. “If you’d asked me three months ago I’d have said you were hitting the bottle too hard. But then I got stabbed and should have died, but instead a bunch of cops and ambulance people showed up because somebody who wasn’t even there sent them on ahead to save my life. If something like that happens to someone like me, you start to have a little faith in something bigger. I don’t know if I believe in magic or miracles all the time. But I believe in you, Detective Walker. I believe in you.”