Downpour g-6

by Kat Richardson

  I might as well have stayed in bed on that point, though. Nothing seemed to move as quickly as Ridenour expected and he’d become a bossy, irritating martinet. He dismissed my questions about Shea’s background and was on his phone or radio continually throughout the morning, issuing orders, corrections, or demands. I did my best to stay close enough to see what was happening without being in his sights much, but for the most part it was a lot of hurry-upand-wait.

  The barge crew had trickled into the store at Fairholm, but they weren’t all there until after ten o’clock and each refused to get started without the others for various safety or legal reasons. Then the big diesel engine on the barge had been reluctant to start, coughing and dying several times before the three-man crew got it warm enough to keep on running. Finally, the barge cast off from the dock at Fairholm about noon and began its slow trip up the length of the lake. Ridenour had pointed out that the barge, while powerful and heavy enough to carry a crane and dredger, wasn’t fast; it would take about an hour for the barge to reach the car on the northernmost shore. With yet more time to kill, Ridenour and I returned to the ranger station at Storm King to meet the deputy sheriff the county had sent.

  Deputy Strother turned out to be the lowest man on the totem pole—barely out of training and still unsure of his authority. The county administration wasn’t convinced that a truck was actually needed, and they wanted Strother to give his opinion first. I thought I smelled politics in the county’s action and I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been a few toes stepped on and noses bent out of shape in the past. Ridenour tried to cow Strother from the first minute, taking a much harsher tone with him than he’d used with me. “When can you get that truck up here?” he demanded.

  Strother glanced at his watch and looked up again without meeting the ranger’s eyes. “Pretty quick. There’s a flatbed already out at Piedmont, and the driver’s on his way there. I’ll give him a call when the car’s up on the barge so I can see if there’s really a need for the truck at all. Shouldn’t take him but ten minutes to drive over. No sense in his just sitting here and freezing till then, not with the way things have gone so far.”

  Ridenour scowled. “It’ll move along fine now, but you should light a fire under your man soon. That road’s pretty narrow and slick from here to Piedmont. Tell him to drive around to the highway instead. It’ll be longer, but safer, so he’d better get to it soon or we’ll all be standing around in the cold waiting for him next.”

  Strother shifted his gaze to the side, hunching his shoulders a bit. “I suppose. . . .”

  “Don’t ‘suppose,’ Strother; get it done.”

  Strother shrugged and sighed. “Can I use your phone?”

  “Can’t you radio him?”

  “Driver’s coming in on his own time. He won’t have the radio on until he’s in the truck. Better to call his cell phone before he gets into the mountains.”

  Ridenour seemed to resent letting the younger man into the ranger station, but he unlocked the picturesque little cabin that stood across the open ground south of the boat ramp and ushered us inside. “Keep an eye on that pocket-edition otter of yours,” he warned me. “This building’s full of crannies and holes she could get into.”

  The interior of the small ranger station wasn’t a lot warmer than the exterior, but it had a fireplace at one end and electricity, as well as the phone Strother wanted. Ridenour pointed him to it with a grunt that gave me the idea he might have been enjoying this job more than the rest of us, but it still wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good time.

  Chaos chose that moment to decide she needed to get out of my pocket and explore. The way she scrambled around made me think she—and the cabin—would be better off if we went back outside. Though I loathed missing the phone call and whatever exchange the two men might have, I excused myself and took the ferret out to the frozen grass and skinny alder trees before she pooped on the floor.

  I looked around while the ferret did her business and began exploring the place. She didn’t like the cold on her feet, but she was intrigued by the area. I glanced back to be sure the cabin door was closed before letting myself slide a little closer to the Grey to see what she was so excited about.

  The area around the lake was bright in the Grey, and the same sort of whizzing energy balls I’d seen around Lake Sutherland were much more active and numerous here. The air seemed to be thick with spirits that weren’t quite differentiated from one another, as if a crowd of specters had been blendered into a ghost milk shake and poured into the valley around Lake Crescent. But in spite of the sense of their cold presence all around, pervasive as oxygen, the lake’s shore seemed weirdly empty. I shuddered, disturbed by the expectant loneliness of the Grey around me, feeling as if something was waiting just beyond the edge of what even I could see. Was that connected to the sudden growth of energy lines near Fairholm? I walked around the verges of the clearing, looking for anything that might give me a clue about why the area was this way, but after half an hour I still didn’t have so much as an inkling.

  Chaos had found a hole in the ground and was frantically digging in it to get at whatever tiny creature cowered inside; I decided she’d had enough exploring at the lakeside for now. I picked her up and wiped the dirt off her paws, glancing back toward the northeastern shore for a moment. I could see the barge just coming into view on my left past what a map on the ranger station wall labeled Barnes Point. The barge wasn’t fast, but it was making steady progress. In twenty minutes or so it should be in position to start hauling the car up onto its platform. I wanted to be as close as possible to it before the disputed truck took it away.

  I returned to the ranger station and interrupted an intense staring contest. Neither man spoke, but their expressions indicated an unpleasant topic had been cut off in midsnipe. They weren’t going to pick it back up in front of me, so I went ahead and announced that the barge was passing the point.

  Ridenour jumped up from the desk, cutting his gaze away from Strother’s with a sharp twist of his head. “Well, then, we should go up to the north shore and keep an eye on them.”

  Strother lowered his inquisitive eyebrows into a scowl. “I should stay here and wait for the truck.”

  Ridenour returned the annoyed expression, but he couldn’t argue much since he’d been the one to insist on sending the truck the long way. “All right. You coming or staying, Miss Blaine?”

  I was a little conflicted. On the one hand I wanted to be as close to the action as I could; but I’d need to be here when the barge unloaded the car—that would be the best chance I’d have to get an upclose look at it and what might be inside. But I didn’t need to watch the preliminaries and I wanted to talk to Strother without Ridenour’s overbearing presence, so I said, “I need to use the ladies’ room. I’ll follow you up in a minute.”

  Ridenour looked slightly appalled, but he shrugged and went out. I held Chaos out to Strother. “Would you hold on to her for a moment? She likes to eat soap, so I don’t want to take her with me.”

  Strother looked a little nervous, but he took the ferret in both hands. Chaos sniffed him and flicked her whiskers. “She doesn’t bite,” I said, handing over the leash as well. “She’s very friendly. Just don’t let her get near your pant cuffs.”

  I went out to the restroom and returned in a few minutes to see Strother tickling Chaos’s belly and trying to wrestle a pencil away from her at the same time. The ferret was adamant about keeping the pencil, but she wiggled around on her back on the desk, her head going one way and her butt going the other. She didn’t growl or squeak, because ferrets don’t, but she would have if she’d thought of it. She seemed to be having a good time playing with the deputy.

  “You guys doing OK?” I asked.

  Strother looked over his shoulder and Chaos took the opportunity of his distraction to hop onto all four feet and try to yank the pencil from his grip.

  “Hey,” Strother replied. “She sure is feisty.”

  �
��That’s her stock-in-trade. There’s not a lot of back-down in a ferret.” And there didn’t seem to be much in park rangers or deputy sheriffs, either.

  He nodded, twitching the pencil out of her mouth as soon as she tried to get a better grip. Chaos launched into a weasel war dance hopping all over the empty desktop, waving her open mouth and showing off her tiny fangs. Strother laughed. “Damn, got some muscle there. She’s a lot tougher than she looks, too.”

  I just smiled and picked the ferret up from the desk. She wiggled around in my hand for a moment, then resigned herself to having lost her pencil and scrambled up onto my shoulder to get a better view. “What did I interrupt?” I asked, keeping my eyes off him.

  “It’s a personal matter,” Strother said, glancing around before looking at me again. “So, is it true you found this car in the first place? Ridenour said some investigator found it.”

  “That’s me. I don’t know that I’m the first person to see the car in the lake, but I’m the first to have reported it. I didn’t mention this to Ridenour, but I suspect the car might belong to a man who disappeared a few years ago. There’s no missing person report, but he’s definitely not where he ought to be and no one seems to know where he is.”

  “Why wouldn’t you tell the ranger that? This is his territory.”

  “He seems a little biased. And proprietary. I’m afraid he might not be entirely honest with me about the people and situation up here if I asked.”

  “I can understand that impression. He’s got the park’s welfare to think of and sometimes he does . . . uh . . . take things a bit personally.”

  I nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. So I’d like to get a look at the car when it comes up, before it gets into the yard where things might be tampered with. Ridenour might not like that. Will you help me get a look at it when they bring it back to unload?”

  Strother gave it some thought. “I don’t see any harm in it, so long as you don’t touch anything. But you see anything odd, you sing out. Hard enough trying to juggle the paperwork on this multijurisdiction crap without any cross-agency accusations of incompetence down the road.”

  I smiled at him. Strother was young, but he wasn’t a fool, even if he didn’t do much to dispel that initial impression. “I’ll do that.”

  We shook hands on it and I went out to my truck to drive up and join Ridenour while Strother stayed behind, waiting for the truck. I envied him the quaint little ranger station—it wasn’t warm, but being there was more comfortable than standing on the frost-hardened shore was going to be.

  Ridenour had gone back to the spot I’d taken him to before and I joined him, walking down once again from parking my truck next to the road. The pools of yellow and blue light were back, glowing like something radioactive in an old science fiction film. But though the energy was back, no ghosts had returned to the spot where Jin had squatted to raise the truck.

  When I reached the edge of the water, the barge crew was already firing up the dredging crane and trying to maneuver into position to grab the car. They seemed efficient, and I imagined the cold was spurring them to get the job over with as quickly as possible, but it still took quite a while to get the barge and crane aligned to someone’s liking. Ridenour, standing back from the water’s edge, kept his words to himself, but I could see his jaw clenching and unclenching as he watched.

  The clawlike extension on the crane arm descended, but the car was a weird shape for the tool and they only ended up pushing the wreck deeper into the water. We could hear the cursing from the barge as the crew repositioned to try again. Eventually, a small boat with an outboard engine cast off from the barge with a man in heavy-duty dry gear towing a hook and cable out from the crane. He got up close to the car and reached out to catch the hook on the nearest bit of doorframe. He had to stick his legs through some straps on the opposite edge of the boat and let the outboard engine act as a counterweight while he leaned out to get the hook seated a little more securely.

  The small boat tipped up as if it were going to spill the man into the lake, but he didn’t quite go far enough, and he righted himself before turning back to wave at the crew on the barge. Then he steered the workboat to the side about twenty feet.

  Once the smaller boat was out of the way, the crew reeled up the hook until the slack was gone and the car had begun to rise off the slippery bottom. The car turned and rolled a little as it came free, dragging along the gravelly slope for a few feet, and then stopped. The man in the small boat came in close again and motioned the crane operator to let the car down a little. As the cable slowly lowered and slackened, the car settled and stood still. It took several tries to get the hook on and the car moved into a position that pleased everyone. Ridenour plainly found it tedious.

  I mostly noticed the cold, some of which had nothing to do with the ice on the ground. The edge of the lake had the same weird silver covering in the Grey up here, and the colorful balls of errant energy stung me when they hit, like small electrical shocks to my already-sore belly. I spent a lot of that time on the shore biting my lip and holding back from wincing.

  Finally the barge crew members were satisfied with the disposition of hook and car and began to reel in the cable. This time the car came straight out of the water as the cable was taken up. Once the barge crew raised the car a little and saw it was stable, the man in the dry suit returned the workboat to the barge. When he was safely aboard and the smaller boat secured to the back of the barge, the crew lowered the claw again. This time it grabbed onto the misshapen car, the lower jaw sliding under while the upper bore down. The metal of the waterlogged Subaru groaned as the claw closed up and the crane began retracting. As the car rose, water poured out of it. Even with the gush of water, anyone could see the crushed front end and burnscarred metal, but to me the lake seemed to be reaching up, trying to keep hold of the vehicle with a web of ice blue and moss green energy that clung to the car as it rose.

  The crane slowed its ascent and the crew watched it with anxious expressions. “Must be something awful heavy in there,” Ridenour muttered beside me. I didn’t give him a glance; I just stepped closer to the water’s edge, feeling an urge to reach for the car as if I could help pull it free from the lake.

  “Come on, come on,” I murmured. “Let it go.”

  Leung’s flames leapt in the corner of my eye as I started to raise my hand. I could feel the water lap at the toes of my boots and I turned my head toward the ghost. Encased in the red and orange of remembered fire, he also stared up. We both turned our sights on the car, willing it to keep moving, to clear the lake....

  The crane gave a squealing sound and lurched back into motion, the web of the lake’s hold on the car falling away as the car suddenly lifted free of the surface. Water rushed back to its source from the broken windows and crooked doorframes, and the noise sounded like the heavy sigh of a giant. Leung’s ghost turned toward me. Then he flamed up in a sudden bolt of red energy visible even in the wan sunlight of the afternoon and vanished with the stink of burned hair. I felt the same sense of emptiness that had accompanied the disappearance of the Russian girl’s ghost. Was the last remnant of Steven Leung now gone forever . . . ?

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned a little farther to find Ridenour reaching to pull me away from the water’s edge. “Come on back. We don’t need you in the drink, too. It’s getting damned late and we’d never get out of here before dark if we had to fish you out as well.”

  I nodded and retreated with him a few feet to watch the barge crew swing the car over the side and into the well of the craft.

  When we returned to the Storm King ranger station, Strother was standing in the parking lot, keeping watch for the flatbed, which drove in about thirty minutes behind us. The barge was also nearing the dock by that time and the pointing and parking, shouting and maneuvering of both the barge and the flatbed took longer than I’d have expected. The two men and the truck driver did eventually get the flatbed backed a few feet down the boat r
amp and the barge tied up just right so the barge would have a shorter distance to move the crane arm when unloading the car. The truck driver didn’t seem happy about the water; he hadn’t brought hip waders and he took pains to let us all know he didn’t see how he was going to secure the load without getting wet. With the wind finally coming up along the lake as the sun tilted toward the western rim of the valley, the barge crew and the truck driver were especially eager to get finished and headed back toward home soon.

  More shouting and pointing went on until the problem was solved by the man in the dry suit who’d worked the smaller boat around the sunken car. He jumped to the dock and did the wading end of the business himself, though not without a show of annoyance. Strong words were exchanged in all directions, and the driver looked relieved when he could move the truck up onto the gravel above the water and tie the car down to his own satisfaction. The man from the barge rolled his eyes and returned to the craft after trudging back up the short dock to untie the vessel and jump aboard across the widening stretch of water. The jump wasn’t so good this time and he had to scramble to get in, but he made it, and the barge began chugging away from the dock and out into the deeper water to head west and south to Fairholm.

  While the trucker was checking on the straps he’d used to secure the car to the flatbed, and Strother and Ridenour were arguing between them, I took the opportunity to climb up on the bed of the truck and look into the remains of the car.

  A skull, some dying fish, and a litter of bones floated in a puddle trapped on the floorboards. Ridenour shouted as he noticed me leaning in through the broken driver’s window.

  “Hey! Get out of there, Miss Blaine! It’s not safe.”

  I turned back to shout over my shoulder at him, but I didn’t leave the car. “There’s a skeleton in here.” I looked back into the car and saw something gleaming green and gold through layers of Grey in the back footwell. “And some other things on the floor.” Besides water, the car seemed to leak a Grey mist. I wanted to take a closer look, but now was probably not the best time to try it, with tempers running a bit high and the hour growing late.