Possession

by Kat Richardson

  “Of what?”

  “Of losing Dad’s L&I case. If they decide he’s not really . . . vegetative”—she clearly hated the word—“they’ll take back the benefits and we’ll lose the house and stuff.”

  I was familiar with the state Labor and Industries Board and their often hard-nosed and by-the-book attitude toward long-term injury cases. I’d investigated plenty of suspected frauds for them when I was a lot hungrier. They weren’t as bad as some insurance companies, but they weren’t easygoing, either, and a case like this had to seem hinky to them.

  I patted at the stinging fingernail-scrapes on my face. No blood now, though they itched and irritated my skin.

  “I’m sorry—about your face,” Olivia said.

  “It’s nothing. Aren’t you worried about the L&I case, too?”

  Olivia bit her lip. “I am, but I want to help my dad. You saw—”

  “I did. He writes a lot, doesn’t he?”

  She nodded. “Mom used to let him, but now she tries to stop him. She can’t. He keeps on doing it. If he can’t use a pen, he’ll just use his fingers like he’s drawing in the sand. I don’t understand most of what he writes, but it’s not nonsense. You said you could help him—can you?”

  “Not right away. I need to know more.”

  “Is this like the other lady? Like your client?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “What is it? Don’t tell me it’s just muscle spasms. I know what a muscle spasm is and that’s not it.”

  I peered at her. “Do you believe in God?”

  She gave me that look of incredulity and disgust that teenage girls are so good at. “What? Are you some kind of religious nut?”

  “No, I just wanted to know how to express this. I take it you don’t go to church much.”

  “No. So what?” she added, crossing her arms over her too-thin chest.

  I returned my best professional briefing expression. “My client believes her sister is possessed. She’s a religious woman and that’s the word she understands for what seems to be happening. But when I say ‘possessed’ I don’t mean that a demon has taken over the body, but that some other entity is momentarily in control. That’s what I think is happening to her and to your dad. Some other spirit is pushing through, trying to say something but not making itself clear to us.”

  “But what about my dad? Isn’t this my dad trying to talk to us?”

  “I think he’s unable to shove the others aside—they’re stronger than he is and there are a lot of them. They’re very upset and if I can find out why, or who they are, I may be able to solve their problem so they’ll go away and let your dad come back on his own.”

  She pursed her lips and scowled, thinking. “How do you know this shit? How do you know what’s happening to my dad?”

  I sighed. “I can see them—the ghosts.”

  “You’re some kind of psychic, like that chick on TV?”

  I almost laughed. “No. I’m not like that at all.”

  “You can’t make my dad come back? Like, call him to his body or something?”

  “No. That’s not how it works. At least not for me. The human spirit is stubborn. We’re a troublesome bunch. We don’t like to shut up and go away, even when we’re dead. We reshape the whole world to suit us, even the world we can’t see. And something has made these lingering spirits so frantic to speak up that they are bullying people like your dad—the ones who are kind of in between here and there.”

  “You said there’s more people like my dad. How many?”

  “Just two that I know of, but that’s a lot, if you think about it.”

  She gazed at me, her lower lip pugnacious and downturned, thinking hard. Finally she said, “Are you going to help us or not?”

  “I’m going to help all of you. But I need help from you, too.”

  “What kind?”

  “I would like to see some of the papers your dad has written and, if you can remember any of it, a transcript of what he’s been saying. I need to know where he was injured and how long he’s been like this.”

  “I’ll get the papers. Mom won’t care if I take them. I don’t know if I can remember the things he’s said but I’ll try. And he was working on a site down near King Street and Alaskan Way when he was hurt. What else?”

  Something had been bugging me and I had to ask, “How long has your mom been sick?”

  “She’s not sick. She just can’t gain weight.”

  “And that doesn’t seem strange to you? Wasn’t she . . . fatter when your dad was hurt?” I chose the word because I knew how dancers felt about the subject of weight and body form. To someone who starves herself, overexercises, and may even do drugs to keep her weight down, any normal degree of plumpness represents the hated “fat.” There’s nothing so cruel as telling another dancer she’s overweight and I couldn’t imagine Olivia had never been angry enough at her mother to shout that mean little word.

  Olivia started, tears sparking a moment before she looked horrified at the direction of her thoughts. “Mom was never . . . fat. But she has lost some weight. I’d swear she eats like a pig, but she never gains an ounce—always been jealous of that. We’re all thin in this family.”

  “That’s not thin, what your mom is. She’s skinny like someone starving herself.”

  “But I told you: She eats all the time!” She threw her hands up in exasperation.

  “All the time?”

  “Like, five meals a day. I think it’s ’cause she’s stressed over Dad.” Olivia scowled for a moment. Then her face softened as she gave it some thought. “Oh, man . . . that’s so weird. I hadn’t thought about it. . . . Maybe she’s got, like, a parasite or something.”

  “Maybe. You need to look after her—and yourself. Do you have brothers or sisters?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, two brothers. They’re older than me. They help; they’re just not home right now.”

  “Good. Get one of them to help your mom while you come out to bring those papers to me.” I handed her my card. “I promise to do everything I can for your dad.”

  “A real promise, or an adult-to-kid promise?”

  I wondered what the story was behind that question, but I answered, “I only make the real kind.”

  Olivia put out her hand. “Deal. I’ll call when I want to come over. I might have to sneak out. Mom’s freaky about me leaving the house ever since . . . you know.”

  “I understand,” I said, shaking her hand. “Don’t do anything risky. If you need my help, or if you can’t come, just let me know. We’ll find another way.”

  She smiled at “we.” “Yeah, we will.” She cast a glance over her shoulder, then gave me a conspiratorial grin and a thumbs-up. “Merde!” she whispered, before she turned and closed the door.

  I chuckled. It had been a very long time since anyone had offered me one of the dancer’s versions of “good luck.” I suspected I’d need it.

  As I walked toward my truck, I got the feeling someone was watching me. I turned back and eyed the Sterling house, but I saw no sign that anyone observed me from there. Still . . . I felt like prey—something I don’t care to be. I considered dropping into the Grey and looking for the observer in the bright mist, but there was no guarantee that would put me at an advantage. If my stalker was paranormal, I might be giving them an opening I’d regret. I kept walking, stretching my senses as far as I could while remaining in the normal world and without making it too obvious that I was aware of my tail. I doubted they thought I was clueless, but I didn’t see a point in putting them on alert.

  I was pretty sure they’d have to break for their own vehicle once I got into the truck—or make it obvious there was a second team on me—though I found the idea of a major surveillance team following me around Seattle ridiculous. Who’d be interested in a small-time PI who sees ghosts? I wasn’t working on anything sensitive or significant that I knew of. In spite of Mrs. Sterling’s worries about L&I, there wasn’t any real intrigue about the case in h
and. If someone was observing the Sterling house on a fraud investigation, they would just make note of my presence and drop in for a chat if they were really interested. But as I moved away, the sense of being observed persisted. I stopped and dug around in my pockets for my keys, taking a moment to scan the area and peep back over my arm as I gave up on my pockets and began rooting in my bag instead.

  Something moved in opposition to the delicate breeze rippling the leaves overhead and left a thin trail of red-gold in the corner of my damaged vision. Yeah, someone was following me. I sighed, annoyed. I don’t have a great tolerance for being tailed, watched, bugged, investigated, or eavesdropped upon. It makes me cranky. The only quandary was whether I wanted to shake them off on general principle more than I wanted to know why they found me so fascinating.

  Screw it, I thought. Let them be bored a while; I had more important things to do than wound their feelings by blowing them off now. I’d lose them later and then see where they popped back up—as they would do if they were seriously interested. If it was a casual tail, what did it matter if they dragged along? I was only heading back to my office to see if anything had turned up about Jordan Delamar and to manage some paperwork for other cases. Hardly an exciting afternoon.

  SIX

  I didn’t get a good look at my tail, but I got enough of a glance as I stepped up into my truck to know it was human—or humanoid at least. The tangled energy around the dark-haired figure in shapeless clothes was a mess of colors restrained in tight white bands that made me think of prisoners bound with rope. The colors weren’t any combination I associated with a specific paranormal creature or magic-user—it certainly wasn’t a vampire of any stripe—but I haven’t seen everything and some ghosts and monsters are complex enough to look convincingly human in such a short sighting. It was more likely to be a normal person than a denizen of the Grey, but if so, whoever it was had an unusual degree of control over their feelings—judging by the strange constraint of the aura.

  I got back to the office, half wishing I could stay out in the sun, and keeping an eye out for my shadow as I went. Once I was upstairs, I took a look out of my tiny window, but I couldn’t see anyone on the street who seemed to be watching my building. I gave it up as a waste of time and got on with trying to find further information on Delamar, sorting through e-mails, typing up notes, and generally catching up on the boring necessities of my job.

  Still nothing on Delamar. I’d probably have to go stake out the guy’s mailbox at this rate—which is about the least interesting job on the planet. I wondered if the three patients were connected in some way besides their extraordinary medical condition. So far, I had nothing to link them except that they were all vegetative. That in itself was disturbing, since Skelly had said PVS was so rare that the occurrence of three cases simultaneously stretched probability. I thought it was more likely that the ghosts were causing or prolonging the patients’ condition than that they were just lucky enough to have three outlets instead of one. Clearly, the ghosts wanted to be heard—were possibly desperate enough to exert considerable energy to keep the rightful owners out of their own bodies. But there were a lot of ghosts, which gave them a significant energy reserve, and I was afraid that the longer the living were unable to fully occupy their bodies, the less likely it was that they would survive or awaken from their strange state. The thought gave me a momentary surge of panic: Where were the ghosts getting this energy and how could I break this condition before the patients under their sway died?

  Possession wasn’t one of my areas of expertise, but from what I’d observed, it obviously took a substantial force to keep a soul—for lack of a better term—out of the body it was meant to occupy. Many things in the paranormal realm cleave to their rightful place with the tenacity of limpets. Grey energy tends to return to its assigned path, be that a ley line, a spell, or a ghost. Once you release whatever is holding them out of place, they move back where they belong pretty quickly. As I understand it, fighting that inertia is one of the things that makes working magic of any kind a ton of effort. It was what made walking through the Grey so tiring for me, even though I’m a naturalized citizen. But the ghosts I’d seen at the Goss house and at the Sterling house hadn’t shown any inclination to slide away. They acted like they were waiting for an opportunity to act; they fell back when they had no chance, but didn’t leave the area, in case it became available again. Such behavior implied a collective consciousness, compulsion, or need strong enough to overrule the usual routines of the Grey. That kind of urge had to have some basis other than simple opportunity, or every ghost in Seattle would have been hanging about, but that wasn’t happening. Seattle’s phantasms were mostly right where I’d last seen them—those I took note of, at least. I hadn’t seen any drop in the number of spirits just hanging around Pioneer Square or anywhere else. So it wasn’t a general draw, but something specific. If I could figure out what linked the patients, perhaps I could find a common cause I could attack to change the situation. . . .

  I didn’t yet know what had happened to Delamar, the third patient, but I could try to find similarities between Sterling and Goss and check them against Delamar later. With that thought I picked up my office phone and called Lillian Goss.

  Eva Wrothen answered the phone in a clipped tone of annoyance over background noise. I identified myself and asked to talk to Lily.

  “She can’t come to the phone. She’s with her sister.”

  “So I hear. Is everything . . .” I paused to pick my term. “Is everything normal over there?”

  She snorted. “As normal as ever.”

  “Ms. Wrothen, I know it’s inconvenient, but I really do need to speak to Ms. Goss about her sister’s illness. I know you can’t discuss it with me and you aren’t a secretary, but can you let her know I’m on the phone?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I heard her put the phone down on a hard surface while the din continued in the telephonic distance. I waited through it for several minutes, typing desultory notes on my computer. Then silence fell, cracked in a moment by the sound of hurried footsteps and the scrape of the receiver being moved.

  “Hello?” Lily Goss said. “Ms. Blaine? I’m so sorry—”

  “There’s no need to apologize. Ms. Goss, I wanted to know how and where your sister was injured.”

  “Injured? Oh, the cause of the coma, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t really know where, exactly, but I’d assume it happened near the market, since I can’t imagine where else she’d have come in contact with a mosquito.”

  I blinked. “A mosquito? I’m afraid I’m missing the gist here. What happened to your sister?”

  “She contracted meningitis from a mosquito bite.”

  Mosquitoes are fairly rare in Seattle. In spite of the continual rain, there’s not a lot of standing fresh water for them to breed in—Seattle has pretty good drainage, existing as it does on a series of hills and streets raised above the tide line specifically to encourage sewage to head one way only: down. That’s not to say they don’t turn up—especially in the suburbs and small towns of Washington’s agricultural areas—but they aren’t something the city is noted for.

  “She got bitten at work?”

  “Yes—well, after work. She works—worked—at an architectural firm on the Pike Hill Climb. You know—below Pike Place Market.”

  The Hill Climb scrambled from the waterfront near the Seattle Aquarium up what had once been a steep bluff covered in fir and cedar trees to the city’s famous farmers’ market. The wide stairs of the Hill Climb are broken by terraces that connect to buildings full of tourist shops, hidden apartments, and offices. Restaurants dominate the open ends of the buildings, spreading tables out on the terraces when the weather allows. It’s a nice place to linger over a drink on a summer evening—just when the mosquitoes come out.

  “What did your sister do at the firm?”

  “She is—was—a computer modeler. She
ran the system that created the wire-frame and simulation models of the buildings they design. She was always the math whiz in the family, which is another reason why this painting thing is so weird—Julie never liked drawing as much as drafting and she never learned to paint.”

  I thanked Goss for the information and sat frowning over it for a few minutes. No common cause except trauma and buildings, and I wasn’t sure how a computer modeler at one firm would connect to a tunnel engineer at a different one. Both Goss and Sterling had been near the waterfront when the events that put them into comas occurred, but two points of similarity didn’t constitute a particularly strong argument, especially since one was on the job but the other wasn’t and the types of injury were completely dissimilar. I needed to find Jordan Delamar and discover what had happened to him and where. First, however, I was going to take a look at the tunnel-construction site where Sterling had been injured. It wasn’t far from my office—an easy walk even in unlovely weather. I wrapped up my notes and left the office.

  The sun was still shining, though some clouds had rolled in from the north looking threatening. Typical first of July. It would probably start raining once the sun went down and remain overcast all day tomorrow, just to remind the tourists that this was, indeed, Seattle—the land of seasonal depression and rental umbrellas.

  I had gone about two blocks toward the waterfront when I noticed my tail again. The foot traffic was a little thicker through Pioneer Square, but it thinned around the construction under the viaduct and to the south. There are a few parking lots in the area, so it wasn’t unusual to see pedestrians looking intense or confused, but only one of them had the same tightly bound aura I’d spotted near the Sterlings’ house. I might not have seen him so soon without that edge, but I did. My observer was definitely male, but just to be certain that he was following me, I crossed through a parking lot in the middle of the block and turned onto Post Avenue instead of going all the way down to Alaskan. There’s no cover on that block unless you have the key to one of two alley gates and few people have any reason to walk any farther than the first parking lot. My shadow hung back, but followed me nonetheless. I wished I could turn and get a better look at him, but I needed to get into an area where I had the chance of cornering the mysterious follower. If I was going to blow somebody’s cover, I wanted to get more information out of the encounter than just a glimpse at a face. I walked south toward King Street and the tunnel section that had collapsed over Kevin Sterling, hoping the construction would give me the opportunity I wanted.