Night Tides (12 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
HE LOCK
was simple. He couldn’t believe his luck. And despite the warning stickers on the windows, there seemed to be no alarm system attached. He wondered how many other small businesses merely put up the stickers without actually buying the protection.

The door opened and the man stepped into the darkened kitchen. It was silent and still. He carefully closed the door and listened for any movement in the apartment above. There was nothing. Rachel’s car was outside, but he knew how seldom she drove it. The lights in the apartment were dark and had stayed dark for the entire time he’d watched. She was definitely not home.

He saw the door that led to the stairs. He imagined Rachel ascending them, weary after a day at the diner, unbuttoning her blouse and stripping it off as soon as she got to the top. He tingled as he fantasized about the look on her face when she saw him waiting inside, the knowledge of what he intended to do to her making her eyes grow wide. And then the satisfaction, utter and complete, of wiping that superior smirk off her sweet, sweet mouth. But that could wait. He had other things to take care of first. He placed his toolbox on the counter and used the tiny flashlight on his key chain to search for the things he needed to make Rachel pay.

R
ACHEL ENTERED
the coffeehouse through the side door. The tiny place was packed. Worse, the air conditioner was losing the battle against the summer evening, so the air was thick with sweat and coffee. The crowd made her immediately self-conscious about her unkempt appearance, and she ran her fingers uselessly through her hair. She backed into the wall beside the door, near the rack of free local magazines, and tried to look inconspicuous. It was as good a place as any to scout the room for the curly-haired young woman.

Lots of girls sat around the tables, or stood over them as they spoke to seated friends, or clung to blank-faced boys while they watched the show. The girl she sought had dark hair, so that ruled out over two-thirds of them, but she couldn’t keep up as they ebbed and flowed from the service counter to the bathrooms to the seats.

The crowd politely applauded the musician onstage as the latest song ended. People rose to get fresh drinks between songs, and the murmur of conversation started up almost at once.

Rachel was making another visual circuit of the room when she suddenly gasped, then mentally kicked herself. How dense could she be? The girl onstage, who strummed a chord and said, “Thank you so much,” in a low, sensitive voice, was the very one she sought. She was even bathed in the right golden light, and from this angle the patch of wall Rachel had glimpsed in the vision was behind her. The lake spirits couldn’t have made it any easier if they’d hung a sign around her neck.

She was younger than Rachel originally thought, maybe not even twenty. She had wide hips and wore a broom skirt that emphasized them. Feet clad in little satin slippers poked out beneath it, ankles crossed in front of the stool. Her blouse, low cut and dark, set off her pale skin. Her short nails were also dark, and she sported several rings.

Rachel frowned as she studied her. She was cute, certainly, and had a fragile quality that encouraged either protectiveness or annoyance. But she did not get the sense of importance from her that she’d had in the vision. She seemed to be, as the harsh girl outside had said, just another emo dyke with a guitar. They were thick on the ground in Madison, and, to her ears, at least, their songs were indistinguishable. Where was the treasure in that?

Still, this was her. And now Rachel had to at least warn the girl to be careful, in some general, indirect way that wouldn’t make her sound like a lunatic. But before she could approach, a voice said, “Rachel, is that you?”

She turned. Larry “Cat” Arnold, a man she’d known for years and once briefly dated, stood looking at her in surprise. He had his arm around a girl young enough to be his daughter, but no father took his child out dressed like that. The front edge of Larry’s long hair was receding up his forehead, while the back grew longer as if to compensate. He went by “Cat” for his weekend jazz show on a local radio station and milked this minor-celebrity status for all it was worth.

“Well, hello, Larry,” she said fake-cheerfully. She could not call him “Cat” with a straight face.

“Surprised to see you here…” He glanced down at her clothes and added, “… this late.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” she said flippantly, “so I thought I’d jog down and get some coffee.”

“To help you sleep?”

“Decaf, silly. Didn’t know I’d find a concert here.”

“It’s been all over the radio this week. Or don’t you listen to my show?”

“Just like I always have,” she assured him. The irony was all hers.

He turned to the girl. “Rachel, this is my friend Anna. Anna, this is Rachel Matre. She runs that diner I told you about.”

“Oh, hi,” the girl said. She barely glanced at Rachel, instead checking out the other, younger men. “Nice to meet you.”

After an awkward moment Larry said, “Well, we’re on our way out.”

“Yeah, it
is
late for a school night,” Rachel said, with an absolutely straight face. Larry and his date quickly departed.

Rachel sighed and rubbed her temples. Larry had tried to make their first and only sexual encounter into something deep and spiritual, lighting incense and putting on Gregorian chants. He even read her some poetry that he’d written. When he brought out the body paints, though, she knew it was a mistake and never went out with him again. The memory of him saying, in his best FM-DJ voice, “Let me be your canvas, my darling,” still made her giggle.

She looked around at the crowd. She saw several people with familiar-looking faces and one man who bore a passing resemblance to her ex-husband.
That
made her jump. But she saw no one else she actually knew.

Then a voice said, “Hello, Ms. Matre.”

She turned. A gaunt middle-aged man, long gray hair falling out from under a Green Bay Packers hat, stood looking at her. His gaze was steady, not exactly a stare but definitely a bit unsettling on a night like this. He looked familiar, but she could not place him. “Hi,” she said.

“I’m surprised to see you here. Out late again?”

“Well, you know how it is.”

He laughed. “I sure do. See you around.”

He moved through the crowd toward the exit. Rachel stared after him, still trying to put him in some context. His pants looked darker from the knees down, as if they were damp, but in a town full of artists that was hardly an extreme fashion choice. Just as the door closed behind him, she pegged it: He was the man who’d left the diner immediately after the altercation between Ethan and Caleb.

Rachel knew she’d have to wait until the end of the set to approach the girl onstage, so she pushed through the people milling at the counter and ordered an espresso. The long-haired barista frowned a little and tried not to sniff blatantly, but Rachel blushed anyway. Even with the room’s accumulated body odor, her lake-tinted scent stood out. When she paid for her drink, Rachel asked, “So who’s the girl playing?”

“Patty Patilia,” the man said, and nodded at a flyer taped to the front of the counter. It showed the girl with her chin tucked down and eyes raised to look mysterious beneath her dark, curly hair. Her considerable cleavage dominated the shot. Her latest CD was called
The Sister and the Saracen
and was available directly from the artist for ten dollars, a percentage of which went to the local women’s shelter. Six discs were also stacked on the counter. The covers had been signed in silver Sharpie ink, the
i’s
dotted with little hearts.

Rachel sipped her drink and worked her way back to her wall spot as Patty Patilia whisper-sang through her latest number. The flyer tried to make her look sexy, but in person she really wasn’t. She was soft, feminine, and pretty but did not radiate that ineffable quality that made men drool and women envious. Without it, Rachel suspected she was witnessing the girl’s career peak. Unless you could be sold as physically “hot,” music nowadays had no use for you, no matter how talented you were. Madison was full of great musicians who proved that.

And yet the lake spirits called her a treasure. Could there be hidden depths in the girl’s music? Was Rachel about to experience a musical epiphany, like the writer Jon Landau on the night he first heard “rock and roll’s future,” Bruce Springsteen?

The song ended to low-key applause. “Again, thank you,” Patty Patilia said. “For my next song, I’d like to do something new. Something I hope will touch you and make you think. As you know, in the last few days three young women have disappeared in Madison, most likely raped and murdered. I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me, but any time a woman is a victim of violence, I feel like it’s happened to a sister.”

A woman in the audience said loudly, “That’s ’cause men
suck.”
A few people laughed.

Patty ignored the comment. “So, for my missing sisters, in sincere hope for their safe return, I offer this.”

She strummed a deliberately Chinese-sounding riff and began to sing.

A girl from faraway Asian shores
Came to Wisconsin to learn some more
She looked up in wonder at the towering trees
And danced in the fall with their tumbling leaves
Now she’s missing, and no one can find any trace
Of the black-haired girl with the shy little face

The night has swallowed you whole
The shadows took you away
You left us without any reason
And no clue how long you will stay…

And she held the note for a long moment before ending with,
“Gone.”

Nearby, a skinny young man with a small ring in his lip leaned close to his girlfriend and said loudly, “I’ve heard cats screw with more melody.”

She nodded, displaying the spiderweb tattoo on the side of her neck. “It’s inane,” she agreed.

“Hey, shut up,” said another young man, with a sparse, curly beard. He spoke softly, but his eyes burned with outrage and obvious unrequited passion for the singer. “She’s not insane.”

“I said
inane,”
the girl snapped. “Like your soul patch.”

Curly Beard blushed, his anger smothered by the pretty girl’s disdainful certainty. Then he found a last reserve of courage. “Yeah, well, if you don’t want to listen, go somewhere else, but some of us are enjoying it.”

“Then you’re, like, beyond help,” Lip Ring said. “Come on, let’s find something we can dance to.” Spiderweb wrinkled her nose as she passed Rachel and followed Lip Ring to the door.

Rachel slid into their vacated spot closer to the stage. She’d listened to a lot of music in her life and understood the source of their disdain. Patty Patilia didn’t sound like anyone else, and most of her songs embodied both her youth and her meager technical skill. But there
was
a spark. It was there in a distinctive chord change, a throaty bit of phrasing, a surprising lyrical choice. Maybe that potential, buried for now like all treasures, was what the spirits meant.

She forced her attention away from the girl and onto the crowd. Something had just occurred to her. Was the man who would shortly terrify Patty Patilia—the kidnapper, or rapist, or killer—in this room right now? Was it the scraggly-bearded defender of Patty Patilia’s honor
(Jesus
, she thought,
why does every man feel he has to protect a girl he likes from even the slightest trouble)
? Was it the guy with spiked hair, watching sullenly from a table near the other door? Or the older man with the bookish faculty air whose eyes never left Patty’s ample boobs? There was no shortage of suspects.

And what if it wasn’t a man at all? She assumed sex was the motivating factor, but what if it was jealousy or revenge? Or, hell, it still
could
be sex. These days girls were all over each other too.

Patty ended the song with a return to the Chinese melody.

Will we find you alive with flowers in your hair?
Will you be on the news clutching a teddy bear?
Are you hiding but safe, of your own accord?
Or do you lie decomposing in a muddy fjord?
We light our candles and say our prayers
Hoping once again to see your black shiny hair
.

She stopped and said solemnly, “For you, Ling Hu.” Then she looked down dramatically.

The crowd again applauded politely.

The longer Rachel listened, the more she liked Patty. There was an appealing gentleness in her pure, sincere voice, and she played with the enthusiasm of someone who believed she had something to offer. And she seemed genuinely grateful for the restrained clapping after each song. Rachel felt an unexpected spark of anger that someone wanted to change this sweet countenance into the terrified, screaming face she’d seen in the second part of her vision.

Then she laughed, softly and to herself, over the irony. Just like the scraggly-bearded boy, just like Marty Walker’s brother, Ethan, she wanted to protect a damsel in distress. Look at her now, running around in the middle of the night, determined to slay the dragon and save the princess.

She sipped the espresso to counteract the physical weariness she felt. She’d been awake for nearly twenty hours straight, and between working a full shift and being energetically used by the lake, she was
beat
. But here was her girl, the one the lake spirits wanted her to protect, or warn, or
something
, and as long as she stayed in Rachel’s sight, she could come to no harm.

Rachel hoped.