He chuckled, the burn scars on his face fading as I watched. “I am. He was not so very hard to break—his mind already teetered on the edge. I only made sure he would fall into chaos, not into power. It’s best.”
“When I believe you, I’ll let you know,” I whispered, swaying. My back blazed pain, my tongue was clumsy in my mouth and I tasted blood from biting it. The world swam in blazing colors and restless silver ghosts.
“Even in victory, you spit like a cat.” I felt the rolling disturbance of his amusement. “Formidable creature. Assure yourself this was necessary. It was what had to be for everyone’s sake.”
There was some noise from outside. Carlos glanced over his shoulder. “Do you wish to leave here?”
“No,” I gasped, falling against the wall and sliding down. “The cops—”
“Are coming.” He stood and melted into the darkness.
I was alone with the ghosts. The twenty-year-old memory of robbery and murder played again before my eyes. I waited for the police as I watched the shade of the lone survivor of that bloody night crawl from the room.
Solis found only me and Ian.
EPILOGUE
No one would have been believed and judged competent to stand trial when they raved about ghosts and vampires, sex and death, and women who danced in curtains of blood and fire. During his hearing, Ian’s sudden fits of screaming, swearing, and sobbing did nothing to advance a finding for sanity, even though the things he said were true. I would not have called what I had done in the dread light of the entity dancing, however.
Ian had been quiet at first, sitting still and calm beside his lawyer. His demeanor and responses had been almost childlike in simplicity and lack of focus. Then he had burst into profanity and screaming. Guards removed him from the room after the second rage of hysteria, when he had raised his hands to his face, shrieking and gouging at his own eyes. He was committed to Western State Hospital, confessing to Mark’s murder over and over in gruesome detail. I knew he’d never be coming out; Carlos had deranged his mind too far for hope of recovery.
While he wasn’t sane enough to stand trial after the fact, the summary hearing found Ian sane at the time of Mark’s murder. Ian had been a diarist. In the office of the Wah Mee, Solis discovered a notebook in which Ian had written everything he’d thought, felt, and planned. His intended actions through Celia, coldly detailed, were perverse and violent, written in a neat draftsmanly hand, between precise margins.
My name was included in his list of those he’d meant to have Celia “remove,” just below Ana’s, Ken’s, and Cara’s. The testifying psychologist believed that Celia was Ian’s own disassociated personality and that everything he attributed to Celia was something he had done—or wished to do—himself, deluded that he had some kind of magical powers. I wouldn’t have argued with that concept. With his increasing skill, Ian might have been able to do what he’d written. I was glad not to have tested the hypothesis, though.
Solis was never happy with my story of being spotted by Ian and of a phone call that had brought me to the Wah Mee, but I refused to change it and there was nothing he could do. My office was six blocks from Uwajimaya and my claim to have been shopping in the neighborhood was attested by his own observers.
The Lupoldi family accepted the official finding and Amanda Leaman confirmed that it was Ian who’d argued with Mark the Monday before the murder. No mechanism for Mark’s death was ever found, since no one but Ian and I accepted the notion of killer ghosts.
The lack of a weapon made the case quite unsatisfactory to Solis, but the rest of the evidence was strong enough to close the file. His colleagues consoled him that his clearance record remained unblotted by the mystery, but he turned a chilling silence on them and further discussion died.
Frankie called to tell me Gartner Tuckman hadn’t dodged the grant review or the specter of having unleashed a psychopathic killer, and his credibility fell apart. He was dismissed and a fraud investigation was initiated. Terry was left scrambling to find a new thesis reviewer. I figured he’d do better without Tuck.
Frankie also informed me that Ken and Ana had both changed their address cards and were cohabiting. “I wouldn’t call it an engagement,” she said, “but they look like they’re headed that way.” I guessed family objections meant less when life seemed shorter.
Of the Stahlqvists, only the business news had word and that mostly bland. Patricia Railsback and Wayne Hopke dropped from my radar like stones in water. I tried to settle back into normal cases—or as normal as they get when some of the clients start out dead—but grasping the burning lines of energy in dismantling Celia had seared the Grey deeper into me and it was harder than ever to shake it off. Most of the time, I no longer bothered.
The knee and shoulder I’d landed on were injured worse than I’d imagined, and I replaced my morning jog with time at the gym, working them back into shape.
On the Monday before Thanksgiving, with no phone call to warn me, Will Novak came through my office doorway. Tall—almost gangly—with prematurely silver hair glinting from the hall light, he leaned on the doorpost and smiled at me, glimmering pink sparks like I’d seen around Ken and Ana.
“Hi, Harper.”
“Hi, yourself, stranger.”
“Got any plans for the national holiday?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh?”
I nodded. “I thought I’d rent a pile of DVDs and gorge on old black-and-white movies and turkey potpie. Want to join me?”
“Are you coming apart?”
“Yup. Wanna try to stick me back together?” Well, I hoped he could, but I wasn’t sure we’d still get pink sparks.
He came in and kissed me and grinned and said, “Think we can find Suspicion?”
Cary Grant as a man who might be a psychopathic killer . . . My stomach pitched and I felt cold. “I’d rather not,” I said. “Maybe we could find something a little lighter.”
In quiet moments, guilt, anger, and regret found me and I didn’t want to see a film that would remind me of Ian and of what I hadn’t stopped Carlos from doing to him. Ian wouldn’t kill anyone else, but he lived in endless nightmares. I didn’t know that I could have changed that; I only knew that I hadn’t.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Wah Mee massacre really did happen. I discovered it through the HistoryLink.org project online (www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=382) and did some additional research before incorporating the site of the then-forgotten crime into my story. By an unsettling coincidence, I was a week away from submitting the first draft when the story returned to the front page of the local papers due to the parole hearing of one of the men involved. It felt pretty weird to walk down the streets of Chinatown and hear people discuss it, when they had said nothing of it for years.
In doing the research, I found that Seattle’s International District is a font of intriguing tales, many of them tragic, bizarre, or touching. The fertile soil of history offers great material for a series like this, and I hope to continue bringing forgotten bits into the light.
I also dug into the history of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps and the women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, from which eventually came the WASPs (WASP, to be more correct) to generate Celia’s backstory. Celia’s story is intentionally flawed, but the actual evolution of the WASP and the tales of the women who flew military planes are fascinating and worth a look, and I regret having had to warp them. If you care to look into them, I suggest starting with the US Centennial of Flight Commission’s website about women in the military in World War II (www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Air_Power/Women/AP31.htm) and the Texas Woman’s University WASP History website (www.twu.edu/wasp/history.htm).
In concocting this story, I did, of course, spend quite a bit of time looking into the real Philip project, and had a lot of difficulty finding a copy of Owen and Sparrow’s book Conjuring Up Philip—it’s been out of print for quite a while and even used copies can be hard to find. Ben’s
statements about the experiments are true—amateurs continue to attempt to re-create the experiments, and there is evidence of broadcast and film documentaries being aired in Canada in the 1970s, but the actual recordings seem to have vanished. After reading the book and being in fact rather skeptical myself, I’m not convinced that the experiments were more than hopeful self-delusion, but it makes a wonderful premise and I’m not the only one to think so. Since the book was first published, many other authors and scriptwriters have mined the Philip experiments and their copycats for supernatural thrills.
Being skeptical, I felt it was only reasonable to look at the other side of the issue and include some of the faking techniques. I got some excellent help on this score from Richard Kaufman, professional magician and owner of the Genii forums for magicians, and from James Randi’s Web site at randi.org. I also read Randi’s book Flim-Flam and parts of Harry Houdini’s book A Magician Among the Spirits, as well as the biographical work The Secrets of Houdini by J. C. Cannell.
Further interesting ideas on death came from Spook by Mary Roach. I also picked up a ton of interesting info that I wasn’t able to include here from Sandra Haarsager’s excellent biography of Seattle’s lady mayor, Bertha Knight-Landes of Seattle.
Not long ago, a reader sent me a note asking why Harper didn’t have a cell phone in Greywalker—it seemed anachronistic to him, and it is. This got me thinking that there are some odd things about the first book and this current one that I should probably explain.
Greywalker was written (and therefore happens) in 2000, and when it was ready for publication, I chose to leave it as it was rather than update the locations, since so many were important to the way the plot unfolded. Many of the businesses I mentioned went out of business in the years between writing and publication—the original Fenix Underground building that housed the fictional Dominic’s fell down in the Mardi Gras earthquake of 2001; the Wizards of the Coast Game Center closed and the building now houses a Tower Records, also on the verge of closure as I write this. Several of the restaurants are no more, and several others had to be fictionalized a little or moved to avoid upsetting owners—most notably the former rumrunner’s house on Magnolia bluff. There is no restaurant in the location given in the book, but a similar restaurant does exist on the other side of the canal.
Carlos’s shop also exists under a different name, but I figured the owners wouldn’t be too pleased to know I’d turned their manager into a vampire necromancer and made their staff totally weird, so small changes had to be made. There is, however, no Radio Freeform, although there are radio towers on top of Queen Anne Hill.
In this book I was able to use existing places most of the time. The parks, monuments, restaurants, and businesses do exist where I said they do, except for the restaurant owned by Phoebe Mason’s family—that’s based on an actual place called Ida’s Jamaican Kitchen that went under in 2002—and Phoebe’s bookstore, which is an amalgam of three great used-book stores in the Seattle area. Yes, there really is a troll under the bridge, and Lenin does, indeed, stride into the future of fast food. Pacific Northwest University is entirely fictional.
And because of a question about cell phones, I ended up with the scenes in the downtown Barnes & Noble bookstore—which truly is the cell phone death zone.
So, having warped and twisted and willfully ignored bits of intervening time, I’ve brought Harper’s world back in sync with our own timeline, but the past will continue to play a big part in these books—not just because it’s part of the structure, but because I always seem to find something interesting there.
—KR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kat Richardson is a former magazine editor who escaped Los Angeles in the nineties. She currently lives on a sailboat in Seattle with her husband, and a crotchety old cat and two ferrets. She rides a motorcycle, shoots target pistol, and does not own a TV. Visit her on the Web at www.katrichardson.com.
Poltergeist (Greywalker, Book 2) Page 33
