Dark Divide: A Cormac and Amelia Story

by Carrie Vaughn

  One of the actresses hefted a bundle of cloth, bouncing it against her shoulder like she would a baby, but exaggerated. The whole thing was exaggerated. “Darling! I’m afraid!” she declared, clinging to the man arguing for the shortcut.

  “Don’t be, my dear! I know what I’m doing!” The man turned forward, gazing into some invisible distant horizon. They looked very much like the giant pioneer statue over at the state park. This might have been intentional. “Soon, we’ll be in California and all will be well!”

  “Great, great!” the director said. “Now, let’s do it again. Take two!”

  Ignoring the film shoot, which had nothing to do with him, Cormac headed over to the Historical Society building. Turned out, the place was closed—a sign on the door helpfully indicated the society was only open three days a week, and not today.

  “Sir! Sir, you can’t be there, you’re in the shot!” The woman with the clipboard hurried toward Cormac. As far as Cormac could tell, the camera pointed well away from him. He crossed his arms, and she hesitated, not coming any closer. “Uh, hi. Can I ask you to please move along? Just for a little while.”

  “You guys making some kind of movie?” he asked.

  “A TV show, yes.”

  “About the Donner Party?”

  “Y-yes?”

  He nodded like she had revealed some deep dark secret. “Just give me one more minute.” He went to the sashed window to the left of the door, cupped his face to the glass, and looked in.

  “Sir!”

  The windows weren’t particularly clean; he didn’t see much. Mostly framed black and white photos of stern men on horseback and parades.

  Satisfied, he crossed to the other end of the lot and his Jeep. The director glanced his way, and Cormac caught his gaze. The director didn’t look away right off; instead, he gave the impression of making some calculation.

  Well, this should make our investigation more interesting.

  Cormac sincerely hoped not.

  Back at the Donner Trail Inn, Cormac dropped by the office. Trina again tore out of the back room as soon as she heard the door, and her face lit up when she saw him. Unfortunately. He resisted an urge to walk out and instead asked what he came to ask. She claimed to know everything about the area. Time to test that.

  “You hear anything about filming down at the park?” he asked.

  Trina’s reaction was dramatic, as she slapped the counter and rolled her eyes. “Oh my God yes, I heard all about it, they’re doing some kind of documentary for one of those history TV shows about the Donner Party, including recreations. Like, with kids sitting around campfires licking bones and that kind of thing, can you believe it? I mean there’s always somebody or other coming through and making documentaries, but these are apparently way out there. The historical society isn’t happy but the producer is paying the town off so what’re you gonna do? Some of my friends are furious, they thought there’d be some kind of local casting call for extras or whatever, just people standing around in the background, you know? I have this friend who lives in L.A. and being an extra in crowds is, like, her job. She just stands around all day and makes pretty good money. Isn’t that cool?”

  “But these guys aren’t hiring locals,” Cormac prompted, hoping to move the conversation along.

  “No, from what I hear this company does a lot of these reenactments for cable shows and crime shows and stuff and they have their own actors they bring in. Just think how much goodwill they’d get if they hired like at least a few locals—”

  “You know how long they’re supposed to be filming?”

  She shrugged. “A week? Something like that?”

  “Thanks. Another question—you know anything about Art Weber?”

  “Oh my God, the ranger who died last week? That was so weird.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No, I didn’t know him. But my friend Katie used to go out with him—just a few dates, you know? She ended up breaking it off because he was kind of a loner. And then he died. . .all alone. . . .” Her gaze went a little vacant.

  “But you don’t know of any rumors about him that might give an idea what happened?”

  She shook her head. “People liked him. He was always around, helping out and stuff.”

  “What about Elton Peterson?”

  At this, she gave a frustrated huff. “He’s just your basic know-it-all. Oh my God, don’t tell me you’ve run into him already.”

  “He was out at the state park.”

  “He’s obsessed with the park. Keeps trying to get people to sign petitions to change the signs—not even the information on the signs, it’s just that he wants to be the one to write them. He’s not even local. He’s originally from Fresno!”

  “Right. Thanks.” He turned to go, but she stopped him.

  “Are you really a detective? Like a private detective, like on TV?”

  “I’m not sure I’d go that far,” he said. He was still trying to figure out what kind of detective he really was.

  “So is there really something weird going on with Arty? Like some secret evidence that tells what really happened?”

  Cop and detective TV shows tended to portray murder as some kind of baroque puzzle, with obscure pieces that only an intrepid hero could discover, that when assembled pointed to the most unlikely suspect imaginable, who had equally baroque reasons for wanting the victim dead. Murder in the real world hardly ever worked like that. Not even when the supernatural was involved. Sure, sometimes a murderer worked out an elaborate plot to kill someone in secret, without getting caught, usually for the most prosaic reasons—sex or money. But most murders were violent, sudden, messy, unpremeditated. People killed people they knew when they got angry. Nothing mysterious about it, and it was often just a case of tracing back the blood spatters, metaphorical or otherwise, to the person standing at the source of them. Trick to not getting caught was not to be the person standing in the spot the spatters all pointed to. Being a professional mostly meant knowing to not be standing where the evidence led back to. Cormac had only failed at that once; that was all it took.

  Here, a magical bomb had gone off. Where did the blast point back to?

  “Nothing as fancy as that,” Cormac said. “I’m mostly just helping Ms. Domingo clean up the cabin.”

  Trina was clearly disappointed—this probably wouldn’t make nearly as interesting gossip as some other tale about a horrifying secret behind Weber’s death.

  “Ah. And everything else? You getting around okay? You find the grocery store? Gas station?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Okay, just let me know if—”

  She might have still been calling after him, but he shut the door as he walked out.

  I have an idea.

  “Oh?” They were back in their sage-scented room, their maps and books spread around them. Night had fallen. He’d grabbed fast food for dinner, and his stomach wasn’t thanking him for it. They had only arrived in Truckee that morning, after driving through the night. Really, they ought to sleep. He wasn’t quite vibrating with exhaustion, but he was getting close.

  Only speculation, really. Someone—or a group of someones—casting powerful spells and not cleaning up after themselves. Not using circles to ground the magic, but rather letting it simply. . .explode.

  He could imagine the gesture, Amelia raising her arms and flicking her fingers out to demonstrate.

  I want to set up a kind of. . .alarm. In case it happens again, we’ll know and can perhaps track down the culprit.

  “Can it wait till morning?”

  I think so. But right now I want to look for ghosts.

  “I thought you said—”

  Indulge me.

  The Donner Party camped over the winter of 1846 and ‘47 in two different locations. The first, the main camp, was near the lake, where the visitor center, monument, campground, and park were located. The bulk of the party stopped here, holing up in three cabins. The other camp was
some six miles away, near Alder Creek, off a state highway, commemorated by a national forest turnout and trailhead. The Donner family itself, stymied by broken wagons and injuries, had stopped here and tried to tough out the winter under little more than a tent and tree branches. Most of them hadn’t made it.

  For decades, ghost hunters assumed the whole valley must be haunted. Over forty people had died in one long, drawn-out, horrifying event. Surely the place was saturated with supernatural energy.

  Not necessarily, Amelia murmured.

  Recently, ghost hunters had done all the usual, taken EMF readings, searched for EVP—but noise from the freeway complicated both those efforts. They always found the usual: vague feelings, unsubstantiated clues. Psychics had their opinions.

  But the ghost of Tamsen Donner was said to walk between the two camps, a trek she’d made in life right before she’d died, and—possibly—been consumed by the main camp’s last survivor, Louis Keseberg.

  After dark, Cormac pulled into the parking lot, turned off the headlights, and shut off the engine. Once again, he had a feeling of disconnect. This landscape was so tame, so populous, how could he reconcile it with the stories of the Donner Party, the twenty feet of snow and pervasive death? Like the other locations significant to the story, nothing here gave any sign about what had happened. He didn’t feel a lurking menace, no sense of dread. No hint of the spirits of those who’d died. No, this was another beautiful mountain meadow with a trickling creek running through, ringed by towering pines, all of it silvered by the light of a half-moon. Only the ubiquitous bronze commemorative slabs told the story of what had gone wrong here.

  Time erases, Amelia said.

  It did and didn’t, Cormac thought. Of course a hundred and fifty years would change the landscape. But echoes remained. They changed the names of the pass and the lake to match the party. Everything around here was Donner. You could not know anything about the story and still have some inkling that something had happened here. Like an old battlefield with a single bronze plaque marking an event that no one but historians knew about.

  Penlight in hand, he got out to walk around. This spot, some ways down an easy, well-groomed trail, had two markers: one where common belief said the Donner camp was located, and another some twenty feet away where archeological digs determined the camp probably was. Without a time machine, no one would ever know for sure. Unless Amelia decided to run some kind of séance and try to talk to one of the party.

  Even then, any spirit raised might not know. The trees are different. The path of the creek will have changed. Memory is a tricky thing.

  He kept the penlight pointed down, studied the grassy meadow as well as he could in the moonlight.

  Walk that way a bit, I want to see something.

  He got the feeling she wasn’t looking for anything in particular—she just wanted to look. He scuffed his boots through the grass, drying out in high summer, panned the light back and forth for anything that might jump out.

  Meanwhile, he also listened. Kept his awareness turned out to the stands of pines surrounding the meadow, to the shadows around the parking lot a couple hundred yards away. They’d escaped the truck roar on the freeway, but the night wasn’t completely quiet, when he really listened. Trees creaked, a bit of underbrush rustled—one nocturnal creature hunting another.

  There, Amelia murmured, and he sensed her frustration at not being able to simply reach out. If she wanted to badly enough, she could try to take control of his body—briefly, at least, before he fought back. At the beginning, he’d fought. The headaches had been mind ripping, and she hadn’t succeeded. They cooperated now.

  He looked for where she indicated, and finally saw it: the glint of something unnatural mostly buried in the dirt, hidden by grass. Crouching, he picked at it, brought it into the light. It was a small brown button, made of bone or horn, polished.

  “This what you wanted?”

  Yes. I wonder. . . .

  The button was old—but probably not that old. This ground had been scoured over so many times, nothing from that time would have been left. Unless some tiny artifact—like a button—happened to bubble up from the ground and appear just for them.

  I want to try something, she said, and pressed forward. She wanted his hands, his muscles, his voice, to work a spell that was too complicated to explain. Frustrated, he nonetheless relented. One of these days, he was going to know her entire catalog of spells, every possible thing she could pull out in a situation like this. He hadn’t reached the end of her knowledge yet.

  “And you never will,” she murmured with his own voice, as he slipped to the back of his own mind.

  She struck a match from his pocket, started a tiny fire with a bit of grass—and was careful to clear a space around it and keep it barricaded, in response to his spike of anxiety about accidentally setting the entire forest on fire. Sprinkled some herbal mix into it, releasing a scent of earth and spice. Whispered words like she always did, that he couldn’t quite catch and could never quite remember. He was about to ask what this was supposed to do.

  Something caught his—her—eye. She didn’t notice, she was so intent on reciting the spell and pressing the old lost button between her hands, calling forth whatever thread of power she was searching for. He tried to get her to turn her head, or at least shift her gaze to a sliver of movement, light where there shouldn’t be any. He didn’t have as much practice catching her attention as she had catching his.

  At last she flinched, startled into paying attention to him.

  The faintest blur of fog had risen. The night was dry, the sky clear. This might have been the start of morning dew—except it wasn’t morning and the gray mist only rose here, on this spot, some ten feet away. It had the shape of a woman. Details emerged: she wore a long skirt and a threadbare blanket over her shoulders, and stood with her hands folded before her. She gazed west as if waiting for someone to arrive from over the next hill.

  “Tamsen Donner,” Amelia breathed.

  And the fog slipped away, melting back into the air.

  So did Amelia, in that moment. She was so astonished that she slipped out of Cormac’s body, back to her usual place lurking around his subconscious. He stretched his fingers and winced, adjusting to the feel of blood and breath again.

  They stared at the space where the mist had formed—Cormac resisted calling it a ghost, that explanation seemed too easy—for a long time, waiting for something else to appear, for that unsettled prickling feeling to fade. Finally, Cormac stomped out the wisp of fire.

  “Was that your spell?” he asked. “Did you do that?”

  I fear it might have been coincidence. Suggestion. I’m not certain she was really a ghost. Merely an echo. Her pain, recorded on the ether. Just one bit of magic calling to another.

  “What was your spell supposed to do?”

  Recall history, she admitted. Show a glimpse of what had happened. But when I’ve used it in the past it’s mostly evoked noises and emotions, something linked to the artifact used to recall the image. I really doubt that button was a hundred fifty years old, however much I may wish it.

  “If you want to try again we could always swipe something from the museum at the visitor center.”

  That won’t be necessary. She sounded a little testy. Maybe because she knew he could really do it, and get the artifact back in place when they were done before Annie Domingo found out.

  This seemed a somber end to their first day on the job.

  The next morning Cormac called the hospital and a couple of local clinics to find out if there’d been any illnesses related to starvation or malnourishment. Since he wasn’t asking about specific patients—he didn’t bring up Weber’s death—he hoped officials could tell him about broad trends. But no, the couple of administrators he managed to get on the line didn’t think such a thing was possible. Eating disorders didn’t generally come in waves, like he was suggesting. He couldn’t get them to understand that he wasn’t talking abou
t eating disorders—this was something else. But didn’t that generally happen, trying to talk about the supernatural? It didn’t fit in the regular categories, so people didn’t know what to think. They didn’t have a paradigm to follow, and so what he described didn’t—couldn’t—exist.

  I have heard of starvation magic being used in battle, Amelia offered. A siege tactic, to hasten the suffering within a holding under attack. But spells of that type are usually directed at the food and water supplies—foul the wells, rot the food, the people will starve as a result. That isn’t what happened here.

  So much magic worked slantwise—not directly at a thing, but near it. Sympathetic relations. That Weber just starved, within reach of food, for no medically obvious reason, was throwing them off.

  Their next stop was back to Weber’s cabin, to place Amelia’s warning system. In the parking lot on the way to the Jeep, Cormac slowed, listened. Trina was standing outside the office, talking loudly on her phone. Her back was to him; he stayed hidden by the wall of the office.

  “. . .yeah, right. I don’t know why he’s here, he’s asking a lot of questions. . . . Of course I’m keeping an eye on him! Well I don’t know. I asked Mag at the diner and she said she talked to Mary over at the park, and Mary says Annie Domingo hired him for something. You think it has something to do with Arty? Between this guy asking questions and the Hollywood people it’s like someone rigged this whole thing up as a publicity stunt. . .right? And it wouldn’t even bother me that much except, you know, what actually happened? It’s some sick joke, I’m telling you. Do I think this guy has something to do with it? Well, I don’t know. . . . Yeah, he’s cute—”

  Cormac sidled away without a word, however fun it might be to tap her on the shoulder and watch her squirm. The Jeep was waiting at the other end of the parking lot.

  Well, you are.

  “What?”

  Never mind.

  The gate at the end of the dirt road to Weber’s cabin was already open, so Cormac wasn’t entirely surprised when he drove up and found a couple of SUVs and a utility van blocking the drive. At least a dozen people milled in the clearing in front of the cabin. Cormac pulled over and got out for a look around. Then he saw the cameras, the historical costumes, and a woman consulting a clipboard and marshalling forces—the one who’d yelled at him yesterday. The same film crew.