The Alchemical Detective (Riga Hayworth)

by Kirsten Weiss

  “I just can’t believe it,” Lily said. “They have a limited vision, and they’re scared and ignorant, but I can’t believe they’re killers.”

  “Someone killed Sarah,” Tara said. “Decapitated. My Goddess. There’s always a reason, but sometimes it’s hard to see it.”

  “And sometimes, shit just happens,” Audrey said, her eyes flashing angrily.

  “But she must have done something, don’t you think?” Lily appealed to Riga. “Made someone angry or… something.”

  “Something like what?” Riga asked. “Did Sarah have any enemies?”

  “That’s blame the victim talk,” Audrey growled.

  Tara spread her hands wide. “So what do we do now?”

  “I’d like to honor our sister,” Lily said tentatively. “What about a Wiccan funeral ritual? At least we can do that much for her.”

  “Her family may have other ideas,” Tara said.

  Audrey snorted with derision.

  “Then a memorial service.” Lily pulled her hair into a ponytail and loosely knotted it. “Would you like to join us, Riga? I realize you didn’t know her well, but I think she would have liked you.”

  “Of course,” Riga said, rising to her feet. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with the preparation.” Riga wasn’t sure when she’d have time for it, but she wanted to stay in touch with these three. They’d known Sarah well. Riga wondered whether they knew too much.

  Chapter 9: Dissolution

  The sun warmed Riga’s back. She lay face down upon the floating pier, gazing dreamily over the side. Moss-covered stones lay below, visible through the blue-green water, and minnows darted past. A cool breeze sighed through the pines, and her reflection shivered, fracturing then reforming as the water calmed.

  Her reflection changed and a young, Asian woman smiled serenely up at her. Riga shifted on her stomach, bringing her hand to hover above the water and the reflection’s hand rose to meet hers. The stranger’s face moved closer, rising towards Riga, through the water. It distorted, grew sallow, the eyes cloudy. The head broke the surface, rank and rotting. It bobbed in the water, staring, lips curled in a snarl, then rolled, and settled face down. Long black hair fanned out upon the water.

  Riga reared backward, her stomach rolling. Tentacles wrapped around her wrists, dragging her toward the water. She was so close now. There was a word that would free her, if she could only remember it, but the magic was out of her reach. The bones in her wrist snapped and she shuddered from the shock of pain. The rough edge of the dock scraped off a thick strip of her flesh. The word, God, what was it?

  Awake.

  Riga woke to darkness, her heart pounding. For a moment she forgot where she was, then the even breathing beside her anchored her. Donovan. She was in his room. Riga wanted to curl up against him, but instead slid quietly from the bed. She hooked a soft cotton robe from the end of the bed and slipped her arms inside, then slunk out the bedroom door.

  The woman in her dream was unfamiliar but she knew that place, that pier. Donovan kept maps in the study and Riga padded there now, feet bare on the cool wooden floor, thinking hard.

  It had been years ago. A warm summer, a cabin on the beach, the icy sapphire lake. The cabin belonged to friends of her parents. She and her sister’s family had lain upon the beach, north of Cave Rock, a young Pen shoveling rocks and sand into a bucket, the high sierra sun darkening their skin.

  Riga flipped the study light on and strode to the desk. Her leather satchel lay beside it, gaping open, papers protruding from it. She pulled a crude tourist map from her bag then found a Tahoe street map in the desk drawer. She spread them both upon the desk. The tourist map had Tessie sightings marked upon it in red ink. X marks the spot.

  The summer cabin was just north of Cave Rock, also the scene of a recent Tessie sighting.

  Dammit. There was another body.

  “Aunt Riga?”

  Riga started, spun around, a hand over her heart. Pen stood in the doorway, looking young and rumpled in black cotton pajama bottoms and a white tank. Riga squinted to read it: Dear Karma, I have a list of people you’ve missed.

  “Pen. You scared the hell out of me.”

  Her niece yawned. “What are you doing?”

  “Homework.” She folded the map. “One of the Tessie sightings last month was near a cabin we used to vacation in. Do you remember it?”

  Pen wandered into the room and folded herself upon a leather settee. “Sure. There was no TV. It was really boring.”

  Pen was right. Beautiful scenery, but Riga had been bored too. She’d never been one for sunbathing. “So how do you like the film crew?” Riga jammed the maps into her satchel.

  “They’re fantastic!” Pen’s gray eyes glittered with excitement. “Wolfe’s been showing me all sorts of cool lighting techniques. He’s amazing.” Her cheeks flushed. “Did you know he worked on a series in Vancouver? That’s where the action is now. Hollywood is so over.”

  “Wolfe?”

  “You know, the cameraman? The one with the sideburns, not the pasty-faced guy. I’m lucky to be working with him.”

  Riga straightened. “Oh, yeah. The older guy,” she teased.

  “Old? He’s only twenty-six! That’s what’s so amazing. He’s done so much cool stuff and he’s still young.”

  John Wolfe was too old for Pen but telling her that would only make the pursuit more romantic. Riga changed the subject.

  “So what are you doing up so late?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Guilty conscience?” Riga joked.

  A shadow of annoyance crossed Pen’s face.

  “I was kidding.” Riga leaned one hip against the leather sofa. “You know the saying: no rest for the wicked. What’s wrong?”

  She looked away. “Nothing.”

  Bull. Riga’s off the cuff comment had struck home. Pen felt guilty about something, though Riga couldn’t imagine what deadly sins Pen had amassed at the tender age of eighteen.

  “So what are we shooting tomorrow?” Riga asked.

  “We’re going to film at Tessie sites. We managed to get a couple of the witnesses to agree to meet us there. You did review the video interviews that Sam gave you, didn’t you?” Pen asked.

  Riga crossed her fingers behind her back. She hadn’t had time and then had forgotten about them. “Yeah. I ran through them. Since I can’t sleep, I think I’ll watch them again though, take some notes.”

  Pen looked skeptical. “Right.”

  Pen finally tottered off to bed. Donovan, bless him, had a bar in his study and Riga found a newly opened bottle of Cab. She poured herself a glass, then booted up her laptop and inserted the DVD of eyewitness interviews that Sam had given her. It was standard lake monster fare, reports of seeing a long neck, a snakelike shape, ripples in the water where there shouldn’t have been any… She sipped the wine thoughtfully. The most recent sightings had all occurred around twilight. If they were related to the killing – plural, killings, she reminded herself – was a pattern developing?

  If. Riga couldn’t jump ahead of herself. But twilight was a liminal time – neither day nor night – when the veil between the worlds was thin. It was a prime time for certain types of magic. Or it could simply be that the poor lighting made people think they were seeing monsters rather than jumping fish or floating sticks.

  “Can’t sleep?” Donovan asked from behind her.

  “Gagh!” Riga’s hand jerked, knocking her glass of wine. It teetered upon the desk, and she steadied it. “You startled me.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed,” he said, his voice layered with irony. He kissed her neck and she shivered with pleasure. “I woke up and you were gone. It’s getting to be a habit. You should stay.”

  Riga pretended to misunderstand. “I couldn’t sleep, and didn’t want to wake you.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and massaged her.

  She felt her muscles descend into a pleasant lassitude and close
d her eyes, relaxing against him.

  “No rest for the wicked,” he rumbled. “What woke you up?”

  Riga smiled at his echo of her earlier thoughts. Was her attraction to Donovan one long exercise in self-admiration?

  “Just a bad dream,” she said.

  His hands stopped massaging. “A big dream?”

  “You’ve been studying,” she said, surprised. There were ordinary dreams, the subconscious processing the flotsam and jetsam of daily life, and then there were big dreams. These were dreams with meaning, predictive dreams, magical dreams.

  “I’ve been studying you. You told me once that dreams were your way of crossing to the other side, that shamanism never really worked for you.”

  “And I thought you weren’t listening.”

  He stepped around her and leaned against the desk, looking down. Donovan wore a black robe and nothing else. She glanced down. His feet were perfectly shaped, as if he’d never worn western footwear. Donovan picked up her wine glass and drank. He handed it to her; his green eyes darkened. “Was it about the murdered girl?”

  “I’m not sure,” she hedged, fiddling with a pencil. A feeling in her bones wasn’t good enough, not anymore.

  “What else is bothering you? There’s more.”

  “Besides the murdered girl, and being under suspicion for murder, and Pen rejecting her ability to see ghosts?”

  He smiled crookedly. “Come on. That’s all in a day’s work for you.”

  “My magic isn’t getting better. It’s growing more uncontrollable. The irony is when I had it, I tried not to use it too much. I thought relying on magic was weak. I never realized…”

  “How much a part of you it was?” he finished for her. He pulled up a chair and sat down beside her, his legs in a sprawl, his robe gaping enticingly.

  She raked her hands through her hair. “Yeah.” Her magic had been a sixth sense, and now she was down to five and a quarter.

  He glanced around the room. “That’s how I feel about this place. I couldn’t imagine not being a part of it.”

  She gave him a long look and suddenly wondered what he was doing awake at this hour. “How’s the turnaround going?”

  “Ah. That.” He tilted the wine glass, observing the play of lamp light through the garnet-colored wine. “I know what needs to change. Gambling at Tahoe once had glamour, elegance. Sinatra and other movie stars used to come here. I want to bring that back. This place will never be Vegas and it shouldn’t be. Tahoe is different and that’s a strength.

  “I plan to renovate the building in American craftsman style. I want people to come here and feel like they’ve arrived somewhere special.” His expression turned wistful. “This was my parent’s first casino, you know.”

  She didn’t say anything, knew Donovan’s parents had died when he was young. By the time he was old enough to take control of their casino, it was flagging. But he’d turned it around, and added to the family empire with casinos in Las Vegas. The casinos were more than just businesses to him, Riga knew. They were his heritage and mythology wrapped together.

  His jaw tightened. “I won’t lose this place.”

  “Is there really a chance that might happen?”

  “I’ve been complacent and I trusted…” He stopped himself with a quick shake of his head. “I turned this place around once. I’ll do it again.”

  “A full renovation… Sounds like big changes in the works,” she said, thinking of Reuben, who’d been in charge here for so long.

  “If that’s your subtle way of asking if Reuben is on board, the answer is, no. Reuben thinks I should play up the celebrity card, brand myself, to bring people in.” He set the wine upon the desk and took her hand, traced the lines of her palm. They tingled from the contact. “Don’t worry, I won’t do it.”

  Riga felt a surge of relief. She didn’t like the idea of a more public Donovan, didn’t want to share him. Was she being selfish? Was the celebrity angle such a bad idea? Donovan already got his share of press, he was rich, sexy. But celebrity was fleeting, the public fickle. It might provide a boost to the casino for a few years, but what then?

  “Though if your show on Tessie takes off,” he continued, “I might just have to. I can’t have you walking the red carpet with an empty-headed actor on your arm.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that.” She smiled. “It’s just the Supernatural Channel. I didn’t even know there was a Supernatural Channel until this week. How many viewers can it have?”

  He stretched his legs out, and crossed them at the ankles. The robe slipped further, exposing his powerful muscles. “The paranormal is hot right now.”

  Riga placed her hand on his knee, slid it up his thigh. The paranormal might be hot, but Donovan was on fire.

  Chapter 10: Action

  “I don’t believe in Tessie,” the retired Marine said.

  It was the first really interesting thing Riga had heard from an interviewee all day. She’d spent the morning shuttling with the TV crew around west Lake Tahoe, standing on frozen piers and interviewing witnesses who described Tessie sightings from decades past, and itching to return to the south shore, where the more recent sightings had occurred.

  Finally, in the late afternoon, they were where she wanted to be: interviewing one of the recent witnesses, Walt, a no-nonsense ex-Marine. He stood with a tall, erect posture, his arms folded across his broad chest. His steely blue eyes looked out from a leathered, outdoorsy sort of face.

  They filmed in Walt’s three story lakeshore home, perched on a hillside overlooking the lake. A picture window revealed a sky blazing tangerine, the clouds rimmed with gold, the mountains a violet haze. And then the sun dipped lower and the lake flashed crimson fire. Riga’s breath caught from the beauty of it. The trick of light faded and with it, the lake turned dull silver.

  Walt pointed down the wooded slope, towards a small pier on a neighboring property. “I saw something moving in the water over there. It was dusk, the light about like it is now, and the view was clear. Whatever it was, it was too big to be a fish and it moved wrong, coiling about itself. And then it flipped a tail as big as my arm in the air and took off, leaving a wake like a motor boat.”

  “Still, that’s a fair distance from here,” Riga said. She stood with her back to the fire, enjoying the heat upon her legs. “How did you spot it?”

  “It was the light, just a flash out of the corner of my eye, coming from the trees above the shoreline. Sometimes hikers cut through here to get to the lake and we’ve had a couple of break-ins around here. I was suspicious because my neighbors aren’t home. And then the motion in the water caught my eye.”

  It was the first Riga had heard of a light. “What did this light look like?” she asked sharply.

  “Just a flash, bluish-white.”

  Riga looked at him appraisingly and wondered why he’d reported it at all, or had agreed to be interviewed by her, for that matter. “What made you call the police?” she asked. “Why report it?”

  His jaw set and he looked out over the lake. The mountains darkened to deep purple and the waters to the color of cold steel. “Tessie is a children’s fable, something for the tourists. It isn’t real. But I saw something out there. I won’t call it a lake monster but there was something and I thought the Sheriff should know.”

  Riga sympathized. It had been his duty, even if he looked like a fool executing it. “What did you do afterward? Did you find any tracks the next day?”

  “I didn’t wait for the next day. I grabbed my flashlight and headed down to the beach. But the stench was so god awful I turned back, figured whatever it was could wait until daylight, when I’d be less likely to step in it.”

  “What did it smell like?” she asked.

  “Shit and rotting garbage, pardon the language, ma’am.”

  Riga felt a prickle of fear. He’d described the stench of demon. No wonder he’d retreated. There had likely been other things in that scent as well: oppression, terror, and death.
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  “I checked out the beach again the next morning,” he continued. “Didn’t find any unusual tracks. There were some footprints that couldn’t have been more than a week old, but tracking was never my strong suit.”

  “Mind if we look around on the beach?” she asked.

  “Go ahead. Just keep off my neighbor’s property.”

  “That’s the Gonzalez home, isn’t it?” Riga jerked her chin toward the window.

  “Yeah. You know them?”

  She drew her cell phone from the pocket of her pea coat. “I used to spend summers up here. Let me give them a call now.”

  Mr. Gonzales answered on the third ring and it was the work of minutes to get permission to walk his part of the shoreline. She handed the phone off to Walt and left him talking to Mr. Gonzalez, about the film crew, the break-ins.

  Riga and the crew walked out onto the deck then took the wooden stairs, slick with ice, down toward the water.

  It was colder now and the chill air burned Riga’s nostrils. Patches of snow gleamed pale beneath the trees. Riga glanced covetously at Pen, who wore a fitted black parka and a black felt hat with flaps that covered her ears. She gathered her coat more closely around her, pulled her scarf higher around her neck.

  Riga scanned the shore with every magical sense she’d once had, broadening her vision, reaching out with her senses, listening with her inner self.

  Nothing.

  She tightened her lips in frustration. Still, if it had been a demon, it would have left signs that didn’t require magical senses to locate. Riga paced the beach, walking methodically through the soft, damp dirt. Closer to the water, the ground turned sandy. Riga crouched beside the empty pier, near a patch of earth that had been roughly churned. “Get a photo of this, will you?” she asked Griff, who followed closely behind her.

  He sighed, adjusted the camera on his narrow shoulder. “Video. Not camera, video.”

  “What do you think?” Sam asked her.

  She straightened. “I think it’s too soon to jump to conclusions.”

  Walt strode up the beach and joined them. He looked about as if to assure himself the crew was behaving on his neighbor’s property, and handed Riga her phone.