Downpour (8 page)

“Hallie,” the boy called back. “Hallie Latham Illingworth.”

I looked at the young man and started walking toward him. His sister tagged along with the tub of dirty dishes. It was almost too heavy for her to carry, even half full, but she swaggered under its weight and I didn’t dare offer to help her.

“Hi,” I said, and offered my hand. “I’m Harper Blaine. Who was Hallie Illingworth?” I asked. Business was a little slow at the moment, so I didn’t think anyone would mind if I chatted up the kids.

The young man glanced up from his work on the machine, wiped his hands, and shook mine. “I’m Jefferson Winter. That’s my sister, Erika.” He was a good-looking kid, with wavy black hair and an unseasonable tan. He barely looked old enough to have a food handler’s license and I guessed he was about seventeen. He leaned against the counter and gave me a grin. “Hallie’s a legend.” I could tell he liked the attention and would probably drag the story out as long as he could, but that was all right with me—for now.

“But it’s true,” he added, “and it’s a real cool story. See, Hallie worked up at the lodge—it’s the Lake Crescent Lodge on the park property now, but they called it the Singer Tavern back then. She worked up there in 1937. She was like a cocktail waitress or something. Anyway, she was married to this jerk named Monty Illingworth and they had a totally messed-up relationship.”

“Messed up how?” I asked.

“He used to hit her,” Erika cut in, carrying the bus tub around the end of the counter toward the kitchen door. “I mean, with a name like Monty, he had to be a real dork. Totally abusive, right?”

Jefferson nodded. “That’s what the newspapers said. They lived in an apartment down here in town and they used to keep the neighbors up, fighting and throwing stuff. Hallie used to show up at work with, like, black eyes and bruises and that.” He paused to look over his shoulder as his sister took the dirty dishes into the kitchen. “Hey, Erika, could you bring me the other foaming cup when you come out?”

“Sure,” she said, tossing her long dark hair back from her face as she rounded the doorway. “I live to be your minion, y’know.”

“You
are
my minion.”

Erika scoffed. “Whatevs.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Jefferson shrugged and looked back at me. “Anyway, so, like, it’s Christmastime back in 1937, right?”

I nodded. “OK.”

“And Hallie goes home from the tavern after work. It’s really late, like eleven or twelve o’clock. And she leaves the lodge . . . and she never came back.”

The pronouncement didn’t have quite the impact on me that he’d obviously hoped for: I just made a doubtful face at him. “So . . . ?”

Jefferson frowned. “So, like, she doesn’t come back, and Monty says she took off with some other guy and everyone’s all, ‘She musta left that creep and moved away,’ and that’s what they thought until . . .”

I rolled my eyes, but played along. “Until . . . what?”

“One morning in 1940, these two fishermen are rowing up on the lake near the burned-out remains of the Log Cabin Hotel—that’s the far northwest part—and they see this thing floating on the water, so they go get it and it’s . . . a body!”

“Hallie.”

“Yeah. But here’s the good part: She’s all turned into soap.” He was grinning and his eyes sparkled, kind of undermining the spooky effect he’d probably hoped for.

“Soap?” I asked.

Erika came back from the kitchen with the milk-foaming cup and put it down on the counter beside the espresso machine. “Yeah! Isn’t that gross? They must have been all, like, ‘What’s this?’ and then they get her up in the boat and all—”

Jefferson interrupted her. “And they thought it was a hoax, at first, like maybe someone had carved a person out of soap and thrown it in the lake for a joke, except her face and fingers are all eaten off, so they don’t know who it is. So they take it down here. And there’s this medical student who figures out it’s a real dead person and her body fat all turned to soap because the water in the lake is real cold and real pure, and down at the bottom it’s more alkaline than at the top, so she saponified and got lighter and then . . . she floated up.”

“OK, that’s kind of creepy,” I agreed.

“It’s kind of cool,” Jefferson said. “This medical student, he’s like that forensic lady on TV and he figures out that someone strangled his soap lady and bashed her head in before they wrapped her up in some old canvas and ropes and dumped the body in the lake. And then he figures out who she is because she has this dental thing in her mouth—he finds the dentist who made it and that guy says, ‘Oh yeah, I made that for Hallie Latham.’ And everyone says, ‘Who’d kill Hallie? Everyone loved her!’ ”

“Except Monty!” Erika added.

“So Monty strangled his wife and threw her into Lake Crescent,” I said, “and three years later—”

“Two and a half,” Jefferson corrected. “She died at Christmas in 1937, but the fishermen found her in July of 1940.”

I nodded. “All right. Two and a half years later, her saponified body bobbed to the surface of the lake. It’s a really weird story, but I don’t think my client’s car is going to turn into soap and float to the shore of Lake Crescent anytime soon. And
he’s
been missing for about five years, now.”

“Your client is missing?” Erika asked.

“How do you know the car’s in Lake Crescent?” Jefferson asked at the same time.

I ignored Erika’s question, because I really didn’t want to start down that explanation’s road. Instead, I turned my gaze on Jefferson and gave him a slightly crooked smile. “A ghost told me.”

They both stared at me for a moment, and I took the opportunity to lay an extra tip on the counter and get out before they could ask any more questions I didn’t want to answer.

While it was nice to know that some things do come back from the depths of Lake Crescent, I didn’t think it was going to help me prove something bad had happened to Steven Leung. If Leung had been burned as badly as his ghost looked, there wouldn’t be enough of him left to turn into soap. I’d have to find another way to draw the right kind of attention to his disappearance.

I got into the Rover and headed back up the mountain. This time I kept a lookout for the white things by the side of the road, but they didn’t show up on this trip. With the complexity of the legal jurisdictions that overlapped around the lakes, it wouldn’t have been surprising if the case had been mired in buck-passing and paperwork. But there simply had never been a case opened. For some reason no one had said anything to anyone in authority about Leung’s disappearance. His daughters were both alive and in the area, according to Darin Shea, but neither of them seemed to have done anything about their missing father—and it seemed strange that they hadn’t noticed. Nor had anyone else said anything to the authorities. The small size of the year-round community and the Grey weirdness around the lakes made me think there may have been a more sinister reason for silence than jurisdictional uncertainty. I was going to have to step carefully until I knew what the situation around “Sunset Lakes” really was.

I decided first to take another look at the spell circle near Leung’s house and left the Rover in a different location from the last time before walking down. I didn’t see any sign of Shea, but I did notice that even in the daylight, the area on the west side of Lake Sutherland had a strong gleam of magic to it—not as colorful as Lake Crescent, but well beyond normal. But this was not the orderly grid configuration I was used to; it was more as if an unseen current running deep between the two lakes created a wellspring in the area that seeped upward until it was detectable as a thinly spread general presence, rather than a single source. The strange glow I’d noticed the previous night was easier to see today, even without sliding into the Grey. I had a harder time seeing the bright bolts of colored energy that had darted around me before; they were there, but not as numerous or energetic, and I couldn’t see the spidery white lines in the lake at all from this angle. I was used to an orderly grid of magical feeder lines; what arises from the Grey is shaped by the human minds that manipulate it, so the density of humans in a city might cause the grid to reflect the shape of the city. Here, however, there weren’t enough people to push the lines of magic around so easily—or at least that was what made sense to me at the moment.

When I reached the edge of the clearing where the circle was, I was disappointed: Someone had been there and done some cleaning up. The rest of the shadowy memories of spells cast had disappeared, and the circle itself was fading back into the wild stream of magic below the ground. Even the traces of herbs and dust had sunk into the ground or been swept away, so I didn’t stand a chance of identifying them.

I swore quietly and at length.

Something crunched and shuffled in the frost-blackened bracken beneath the trees. Then a light voice with an odd undertone of distant rocks grinding together spoke just ahead of its owner appearing at the edge of the clearing. “I have not met him, so I could not say, but I’m quite sure that if Shiva had dog breath, it wouldn’t be able to do
that
. But it is a blasphemy I’ve never heard before. May I keep it?”

I spun around to stare at him, the red tails of my scarf flying. When you’re standing beside a magic circle in the woods between one lake that vomits up saponified murder victims and another that’s floored with lines of magic, you should expect to see a few strange things. To most people, the strangest thing about this man would have been that he was wearing a European designer suit to go walking in the forest. To me, it was that he wasn’t actually a person—though he was definitely male. Whatever he was, I guessed he was some relative of the things I’d seen beside the road yesterday; in the Grey, his skin was the same shade of otherworldly white and he had a smaller version of the burned-black-twig horns poking out of his forehead. I preferred seeing him in the normal, where he looked like a tall Asian man with unusually red hair and broad shoulders. His eyes had a disquieting glitter to them in both views, as if reflecting a fire the same unnatural color as his hair.

“You’re welcome to it, if you’ll tell me who you are,” I said. I didn’t think the magic circle belonged to this creature; he didn’t look as if he needed anything as crude as herbs and candles to push magic around, much less magical protection. Judging from the way strands of blue and yellow energy reached up from the ground to cling to him, it was more likely people needed protection from him than the other way round.

He made a closed-mouth smile that let the impression of small, curved, interlocking fangs crease his lips from within. “It’s an interesting bargain, since you know I won’t tell you my real name. People here call me Jin, so that will do, if you like. You are . . . Hm . . . What are you . . . ?”

If I concentrated on the normal, the grinding noise in his voice faded. I wasn’t sure if that meant he had two forms or was just very good at projecting his normal-world one. But I did know “normal” wasn’t his home.

I gave him a thin smile back. “My name’s Harper.” I made a sweeping-up gesture at the fading circle. “Did you do this?”

“Some people don’t take proper care of their things.” He shrugged and his massive shoulders made the stitching at his armholes strain, and the sound of it made him wince just a little. He wasn’t entirely a projection, then, which was good and bad for me if we got into a tussle.

“So you know the owner,” I said.

“Of course.”

“Of the house?”

“Leung? Yes. But he’s dead, you know.”

“Do I? That doesn’t seem to be common knowledge.”

“I prefer
un
common knowledge—it’s much more interesting than the sort that’s lying around everywhere. And more valuable.” His eyes gleamed with a light I recognized at once—avarice. I’d have to see what I could do with that....

“How do you know Leung is dead?” He didn’t seem to think the fact was worth a lot, since he’d already tossed it at me; I wanted to know what else he considered cheap enough to give away.

“Oh, ghosts,” he said with a dismissive roll of his eyes. “They always have something to complain about.” It wasn’t as much of an answer as I could have liked, but it was interesting, nonetheless. As he said it, something cold brushed through me. Startled, I shivered, shifting my focus to the Grey to see a ghost drifting toward Lake Crescent. It was an old specter, ragged and thin, but it moved toward the western lake as if drawn into the currents of magic, paying us no heed at all and giving me pause. The unconscious way it moved in a straight line through every obstacle intrigued me, but I had something more immediate to deal with and shook my curiosity off for the time being. “Do you have any real proof of Leung’s death? Something I can show to someone?”

“Proof? Not the kind you mean. I could tell you who killed him, but you’d have to make it worth my while.”

“Then he was killed by another person, not in an accident.”

Jin frowned, both versions of his face creasing their brows for a moment and puckering their mouths as if the taste of slipping up was sour. He growled to himself.

“Jin,” I continued, “I know the car is in Lake Crescent. I just have to get it out or get someone else to dredge it up.”

“I could help you.”

I wasn’t averse to help, but I was pretty sure any assistance from that quarter came with a price—assuming he could do what he said. On the other hand, that he was wearing a very expensive real suit—not just the image of a suit—made me think he might be a little vain as well as greedy. “Sure you can,” I replied with a deprecating smile. “After all, you’ve been so very helpful so far.”

“I told you Leung was dead.”

“Which I already knew, but you won’t tell me who killed him, because you don’t actually know.” I started to turn and walk away. “You seem to be good enough to clean up after other people’s messes, but you’ve done nothing to impress me. So far as I know, you’re just the garbageman.”

Jin bounded to catch up to me in one huge stride reminiscent of the way the white creatures beside the road had moved. “Wait!” He snatched at my nearer wrist and tried to pull me back around to face him.