The Rivers Run Dry (3 page)

But Jack Stephanson wanted some torture beyond hazing. An alpha among alphas, Jack was assigned by my squad supervisor to be my training agent, the person who guides the newbie through her transfer, eases the transition, shows her the ropes. Instead, Jack was fashioning my noose.

Per his order, I found the King County Courthouse, a Beaux Arts-style building that swallowed a block between Jefferson and James streets. In the clerk's office, a homeless man stood at the public computer, pile-driving a soiled middle finger into the Return key. When the computer froze, he cursed the pretty woman standing behind the counter, spittle gathering at the corners of his chapped mouth. He picked up a rumpled paper bag from the floor, promised to return, and shambled down the hallway, leaving behind a scent of salt and paranoia.

I walked to the counter and asked the clerk for help.

“Can I see some ID?” she said.

Her blonde hair fell like liquid citrine, her bare tan shoulders dark against her yellow sundress. She wore high heels, and to read my credentials, she balanced herself by placing both manicured hands on the laminate counter. Then she tipped back on her heels.

“Jack just called me,” she said. “You're an agent?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You work with Jack.”

“That's right.”

She paused. “Like, side by side?”

“He's a colleague.”

She repeated the word, a sharp pebble on her tongue. “Colleague. That means you go on stakeouts together. Stuff like that?”

“I'm not sure what you're asking.”

“It's fifty cents a page for straight copies,” she said. “We charge a fee for certifying every page.”

“That's fine.”

“Type the guy's name into that computer.” She pointed a red fingernail at the computer terminal where the homeless man had been.

“But that computer's not working,” I said.

“Guess you've got a problem.”

Behind her, a computer rested on a long wooden desk. And behind that, a Xerox machine hummed idly against the far wall.

“Could you print out the copies for me?” I asked. “We would pay all the fees.”

“You got cash?”

“Pardon?”

“Cash. We only take cash. No credit cards. With fees for certifying and all, you're looking at fifty bucks easy. Jack says the guy has priors up the yin-yang.”

“Okay. Do you know where I might find a cash machine?”

“Beats me.” She smiled, her teeth white as petrified bone. “Be sure to tell Jack that Tiffany says hello.”

She turned and walked back toward the metal cabinets, past the available computer and the Xerox machine, her high heels clicking across the marble floor, a sound like an empty chamber tumbling in a revolver.

Later that evening, as dusk settled over Seattle in a series of stratus clouds that glowed like backlit amethyst, I opened the front door to my aunt's house on Capital Hill. A small black dog raced down the hallway to greet me. I dropped my briefcase and lap-top, kneeling to stroke Madame's soft fur, whispering praise in her ears. Down the wainscoted hallway, I could hear my aunt's voice, the sound of the old South gone west, and the voice of my mother, a woman Virginia-born and bred and believing.

“Nadine,” my aunt said, “here's another good one. See what you think.”

“Oh, Charlotte, really, you believe I need it?”

With Madame by my side, I walked down the hall and found my mother and aunt in the kitchen with three long-haired cats hunched across the painted table. As Madame entered the room, the cats arched their backs, hissing, and my mother's dog crawled under the table, curling beside her feet.

“All you have to do is wear it,” my aunt was saying. “Rub the crystals if the situation is particularly bad.”

She draped the necklace of polished stones around my mother's neck.

“That's fuschite,” I said.

She waved a plump hand, dismissing me. “Raleigh, forget all the geo-technobabble. Who cares? What matters is these stones can protect your mother.”

“Protect her—from what?” I bit back the obvious point: fuschite wasn't protecting her from any nutty New Age ideas.

My mother leaned forward, allowing the light to catch the stones' green and silver veins. “My, Charlotte, this is beautiful,” she said. “But I've never heard of such a thing. Have you, Raleigh?”

I shook my head. Charlotte Harmon had lived in Seattle twenty-one years, having fled Richmond in the wake of an acrimonious divorce. Back then, Seattle was a somewhat obscure city, particularly to Southerners, and I remember my mother wondering aloud why anyone would cross the Mason-Dixon Line if a gun wasn't at their back. But my aunt had found her true home.

And now we were living with her in an old Craftsman bungalow on the northeast edge of downtown. In the two weeks since we'd arrived, the tone of my mother's soft voice had changed from familiarity to uncertainty, as her sister-in-law revealed how far she'd fled from the South.

“Nadine, you will not regret wearing protection in this city,” she said. “It's the best place in the world, but even the ghosts want to live here. You need to arm yourself, spiritually speaking.”

“I just don't see how that's necessary, Charlotte.” My mother turned to me, looking for help. “Raleigh?”

I opened my mouth but my aunt barreled forward.

“If you're worried about the necklace matching your outfit, just put it in your purse. You can touch the stones every now and then if you feel threatened. You won't believe the change that comes over you.”

“This is nuts,” I said.

“Raleigh Ann!” my mother said. “Don't be rude.”

My aunt placed her hands on ample hips, her batiked silk tunic seeming to quiver.

“I'm telling you, Nadine, this city is the Grand Central Station of the spirit world. Every spirit comes through Seattle before going on to other dimensions. And some of them never leave.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

My mother threw me a harsh look, then smiled at Charlotte as though she were offering a free vacuum. “Go on, Charlotte.”

“You remember when I moved to Seattle, I was as thin as Raleigh. Now look at me. I'm as wide as the Chesapeake and it's all because this city has a spirit of hunger. Food, food, it's all about food here. If you don't protect yourself, Nadine, you'll find twenty pounds landing on your hips by Christmas.”

“Aunt Charlotte, this is—”

“Raleigh,” my mother warned.

Holding up the plump hand, she severed my mother's scold. “You just watch, Raleigh. You won't be able to stop eating.”

“I don't want to stop eating.”

“That's what you think.”

The last time I saw my aunt was at my father's funeral, four years earlier. She was an exotic character, the aunt who sent me rocks for birthdays and Christmas, and she had flown into Richmond with the smell of patchouli and rain and grief. She had been sensitive enough, or sufficiently devastated, that she did not raise any New Age ideas then, but now I recalled how she gripped a specimen of pink tourmaline during my father's funeral. At the time, my mind numbed with pain, I only saw a mineral the color of antique roses and a bosomy woman with tear-streaked cheeks whose pudgy fingers rubbed a rock with an agitation I mistook for misery. Her brother, my father, was dead, murdered in an alley near our house.

I saw pink tourmaline, not spiritual kryptonite.

“Speaking of hunger, what's for dinner?” I said, attempting to change the subject.

“How does tofu tetrazzini sound?” my mother said.

“You're asking me?”

“It sounds great!” my aunt said.

My mother shooed the cats off the table, and I walked upstairs to change clothes and search my closet for the stash of candy bars. My bedroom, barely used, was a shrine to my late father. Every morning before work, I locked the door with a brass skeleton key, hoping to shield my mother from the walls that held copies of his law degree from the University of Virginia, the official appointment to the state's Superior Court, the handwritten note from the governor, vowing every resource to solve a crime that to this day remained unsolved. Even the bookcases held his boyhood favorites—
Treasure Island
,
Pilgrim's Progress
—with prep school tennis trophies and blue ribbons for shag dancing contests.

I did not believe in ghosts, except one who was holy, but there was no mistaking that in this bedroom my father felt close, palpable. The feeling comforted and haunted me at the same time.

When my cell phone rang, I pulled the closet door behind me, leaving an inch open for air, and lifted the phone off my belt clip.

“Harmon?” My supervisor, Allen McLeod.

“Yes, sir.”

He paused. “Jack sent you to Issaquah today. That right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Girl missing?”

“Correct.”

“Go talk to the parents. Start making nice. We're in a bad game of hot tomato. The parents called a senator in Washington. He called our ASAC who called me. He wants to know what we were doing about her disappearance.”

“I was told they wanted it kept quiet.”

“You did that. I didn't know what the ASAC was talking about because you didn't explain it to me.”

“Jack told me to file it, sir. He said it was a nothing case.”

I heard the bedroom door open. My mother said, “Raleigh, do you know where my—” She stopped at the closet door, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Oh, you're on the phone. I'll wait.”

“Jack meant file it
after
you checked with me,” McLeod said. “I'm sure that's what he told you.”

“Yes, sir.” I watched my mother turn and take in the documents on the walls. The bedside table lamp cast gold into her dark curls. I heard her gasp.

“Get over to the parents right away. Tonight. And check in with me first thing tomorrow morning. We need to be on this like wet on rice.”

My mother stood beside the bed, leaning into the black-and-white photograph of my father holding a tennis racket. He was smiling.

“Harmon?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Full briefing tomorrow morning.”

I closed the phone.

My mother was moving like somebody about to lift a dark veil. She went from photograph to document to the bookcase, her fingertips brushing the fringed blue ribbons. When she turned back to me, her face was porcelain.

“Have you seen my raincoat?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Strange. I can't find it anywhere. I know I brought one. Do you think it's possible somebody stole it?”

“No. Of course not. You misplaced it. That's all.”

“I hear things in this house. At night. Do you hear them?”

“The cats. They creep around.”

She examined my face, her brown eyes changing to hazel. “It's going to rain. That's what they say.”

“Yes, I heard that too.”

“They say it rains all the time here. They say it never stops raining.”

“Then plenty of raincoats for sale.” I smiled.

She nodded.

“Don't be late for dinner.” She closed the door behind her.

A six-mile moraine of land ten minutes from downtown Seattle, Mercer Island boasted more millionaires per capita than any other city in Washington State. Later that night, after choking down tofu, I crossed the bridge that connected Mercer Island to the city. Lights from the waterfront mansions danced on the lake, glimmering like castle fires in a kingdom moat.

The VanAlstyne estate sat on the west side of the island at the end of a long winding descent, an iron gate guarding the property. I leaned out my car window, speaking into the rectangular metal box bolted to the ironwork. Moments later, the gate slid back and I drove toward what looked like a small hotel. In the circular driveway, my headlights brushed a black Porsche. I could hear water lapping against the rocky shore beyond the house, a wet percussive sound without detectible rhythm.