Three dogs. I thought of the crows. I thought of Olivia.
"What?" Mary said, following my gaze. "Those dogs?"
"Yeah. They're watching us."
Mary shuddered. "It is kind of creepy. I don't like dogs. They bite."
"I don't think these ones will."
"I better get back inside."
"You're a ghost. They can't hurt you."
She glared at me as if I'd just insulted her in the worst way, then turned toward the house. I almost let her go, but then I realized I hadn't said anything about Olivia's abilities with animals. Or if I had, I certainly hadn't stressed it.
"Wait," I said, "one last thing."
She turned, sighing. With all of her bulk, and with that wide-winged collar, even turning around was quite the production. "Yes?"
"I'm sorry. It was a careless thing to say."
"Don't worry about it. I should be used to it by now, but, well, it still stings a little to be reminded."
"I know. Look, about the animals…" And I told her all I'd learned about Olivia's special connection, how I'd experienced several strange encounters with animals since I'd started this investigation. My teeth chattered, my ears felt numb, and I could barely think straight, what with the all the alcohol coursing through my veins, but I somehow managed to be coherent. "Any of that mean anything to you?"
She considered it, then shook her head. "Not really. I don't have any kind of talent with animals. Sorry."
"Well, it was worth a—"
"Oh, wait," she said, interrupting me. "Wait a second. Have you heard about SISAH?"
"Uh huh. The Society for the Investigation of Strange Animal Happenings?"
"That's the one!"
"Yeah, well, I know of them. Another ghost group—there's so many, it's hard to keep them straight. I haven't worked with them before, but from what I've heard, I really don't think they'd be much help. Aren't they into trying to prove animals should be treated as if they have ghosts within them that live on? I don't know if they'd be much help finding Olivia."
"Not them, no. You're probably right. But I know someone who used to work for them that might be able to help. She used to come see me to talk to her living sister, one back in Kansas, though I haven't heard from her in a while. I think her sister died. And this woman, she actually got kicked out of their organization."
"Oh yeah?" I'd just been humoring her to that point, but now she actually had me intrigued. "Kicked out for doing what?"
"She told me she has a special connection with animals. Like a form of telepathy. She said they have much simpler minds, and they don't use language the way we do, but she's able to communicate with them. She said she's always been able to do it, even as a child."
"Just like Olivia," I said.
"Right. Just like her. Her name is Felicity … Felicity, hmm, can't remember her last name. Langford! Felicity Langford."
"Where is she?"
"I don't know."
"Well, who would I—"
"But I can tell you where to look to find her."
Mary smiled, pausing for dramatic effect. She stared at me as if it was obvious, which only irritated me.
"Look," I said, "just spit it out. I'm not in the mood for—"
"Animals," Mary said. "Just go wherever there are animals. The zoo would be a good place to start, right?"
Chapter 12
Somehow, despite my woozy brain and my blurry vision and taking the roads hardly any faster than an old lady with a walker, I made it back to the house in Sellwood. I consoled myself that with the roads so empty, I was really only putting myself in danger, but it still wasn't my finest hour.
Jak's Ford Taurus wasn't in the driveway. The porch light was off, the house dark, and fine particles of snow swirled under the streetlamps. I saw Mrs. Halverson, my long-dead neighbor, peer at me from the dormered second-floor window, frown, and vanish from view. She wasn't too keen on having the Ghost Detective living next door to her house, and she'd told me so many times. My pointing out that it wasn't, technically speaking, her house any longer only infuriated her.
I tried Jak's cell again but got no answer. Where was she? I thought about heading out to look for her, but I was in no condition to drive. Getting home was one thing. Prowling the streets looking for my girlfriend was another. I considered calling Alesha, seeing if she'd have some cops search for her, and she would probably do it even if she complained the whole time, but I didn't know how to even describe Jak. Find a homeless-looking woman? What good would that do?
Better to wait at least until my head cleared, and hope she turned up soon. If she didn't, I'd head out in an hour or two.
Once inside, though, my worry about Jak wouldn't let me come close to resting, much less sleeping, even in my beer-infused state of mind. I lay fidgeting on the couch, calling her phone every ten minutes, listening for the telltale rumble of her car's engine or the creak of her footsteps on the front porch. I heard the jingle of a wind chime on the back patio. Jak had given it to me for my birthday, and the sound filled me with sadness.
Finally, after forty-five minutes of this nonsense, I decided it didn't matter what kind of condition I was in—I was going out. No matter where she was, she wouldn't have gone this long without calling me back. Even if speaking with me would risk breaking her cover, she would have at least texted after all the urgent messages I'd left.
After slipping on my jacket, I called her one last time. When it stopped mid-second ring, I felt a flood of relief—until the person spoke, and it definitely wasn't Jak.
"Who dis?"
A male voice, gruff. My heart did one of those jigs where it feels like it stops and leaps into your throat at the same time. It turned out that I didn't need sleep to shake off my drunkenness. The cold blast of adrenaline through my veins did the trick.
"This is Myron Vale," I said. "Who's this?"
No answer.
"Where's Jak? Is she there?"
"You know dis girl?" the man said, his voice slurred. He sounded drunker than I was.
"What do you mean? What's going on?"
"Umm…"
"Put Jak on!"
"She not talking, man. I was sleeping, too, down the way. Her phone ring and ring and I finally come down to see why she don't answer. She just sitting here, man. She just sitting here with her eyes open. You better come get her, man. There some mean people about. Not me, you know. I'm nice. But there are some mean people."
An episode. She'd had an episode, that had to be it. I asked him where they were and he told me under the bridge. I asked him which one and he couldn't tell me, but after some back and forth, he was able to describe where it was and I realized it was the Morrison Bridge. With a sinking sense of despair, I realized she'd only been blocks from where I'd just been talking to Mary Rittles.
Keys. Car. Drive. My pounding heart managed to improve my focus quite a bit, but I still managed to take out a garbage can as I took a corner too tight and bumped up over the curb. Somebody yelled at me from a porch, but I didn't stop.
The snow came down heavier now, in waves, like sheets falling on a bed. My windshield wipers labored to keep the glass clear. Slipping and sliding, narrowly avoiding more than one parked car, I made it down to the Morrison Bridge in ten minutes. I saw cardboard houses, patchwork tents, and shopping carts piled high with the stuff other people threw away. A few fires burned inside metal barrels, dark, thickly bundled shapes huddled around the flames. It was crowded, lots of homeless, over a hundred people on that one block at least. I knew from past experience that most of them were ghosts.
When I parked the Prius on the corner, sheltered by the bridge, I saw a big bearded man deep in the shadows waving at me. I also spotted a shape on the ground next to him and my mouth went dry. A dozen people, bulky in their layers of rags, had gathered around a little farther back, watching warily from a distance.
I sprang out of the car and scrambled over the bare asphalt—only a fine dusting of snow had made it under the bridge. I sm
elled dank earth, rotten cardboard, and a whiff of human waste. The onlookers dispersed like scared geese, some, seeing me up close, yelping or crying out, a few gasping, "Ghost Detective!" The bearded man, reacting to none of this, held out the phone to me as if he thought I was going to punch him.
"I jes … I jes found her," he explained.
He smelled like he'd just gone skinny dipping in a pool full of beer. I snatched the phone from him and shoved it in my pocket. Jak lay on her side, curled into a ball, dressed as she had been the other day—lots of camo and duct tape, layers upon layers that doubled her size. I felt for a breath and found it—thank God for that. A pulse, too, but her skin felt like ice. A garish, dark line marred her cheek, but when I touched it I found it was only a streak of mud.
"Jak," I said, jostling her. "Jak—Jacqueline, it's me. Myron."
She murmured something incomprehensible, but it was a good sign she was trying. I turned to talk to the bearded man, but he was already gone. I gathered Jak up and carried her to the car. By the time I had her buckled in her seat, she was blinking awake, lolling her head side to side and looking at me under hooded eyes. She mumbled my name.
"I'm here," I said.
"Wh—what happened?" she asked.
"I don't know. I think maybe you had an episode."
She coughed, waking up bit, squinting at me as I stood on the curb leaning over her.
"In the coffee shop?" she asked.
"What?"
She looked past me, taking in her surroundings. She examined her raggedy clothes, picked at the soiled sleeve of her flannel shirt. When she spoke again, there was an edge of panic in her voice—and it was that, more than her question, which scared me.
"How did I get here?" she asked.
* * *
Her memory of the last twenty-four hours was gone. I had a good idea why, but I didn't want to believe it. On the way back to the house, fighting to keep her awake, I quizzed her about Mary Rittles, about what we'd learned about Olivia's cryptic statement, but the last thing Jak remembered was walking into Starbucks. She knew about John Ray's death, but nothing after that. She didn't remember how she'd ended up under the Morrison Bridge. She didn't even remember making the decision to get in touch with her contacts among the homeless. It was all a blank.
I didn't want to scare her any more than she was already scared, so I let her fall asleep. With the vents blasting out enough heat to forge iron, I wasn't that afraid of hypothermia anymore.
In the house, she was barely coherent while I got her out of her grimy, freezing clothes and into a hot bath, but she did make a smartass remark about me just looking for a chance to cop a feel, so I knew she wasn't totally out of it. Still, I stayed with her until she was ready to get out, helped her into a robe, and guided her to our bed. I told her to get dressed in some pajamas if she could, and I'd make her some hot tea.
By the time I got back to her, though, she'd fallen asleep, her feet still firmly planted on the floor while the rest of her was sprawled on the bed. I put the mug on the bedside side table, the rising steam smelling of lemon and ginger, and helped her get under the covers in her robe. I covered her with extra blankets, felt her forehead, and was pleased to find the skin warm, then kissed her lightly and retreated from the room, turning off the lights as I shut the door.
When I turned around, there were two men sitting in my living room.
Big guys. Black hair. Brown turtlenecks that stuck to their muscled bodies like paint. My heart jumped into a higher gear, and I felt my pulse all the way up in my throat. On the way in, I'd turned on only one light, a lamp on the desk by the door, so they were mostly cast in shadow, but I could see that their skin was almost the same maple hue as the rattan couch where they sat. It was a big couch, big enough for three of me, but they filled up the space, just the two of them.
First thing I thought: Glock was in the bathroom, in the shoulder holster hanging on the door.
"Sit down," said the one on the right side. He had a slight accent, a bit of a "Z" sound for the "S." Zzit down.
I hesitated.
"We are not going to hurt you," the one on the left said.
For a second I thought it was the one on the right who'd spoken, because he had the exact same voice with the same South American lilt. That's when I realized they were twins.
"What the hell are you doing in here?" I said.
Rather than answer, the one who'd just spoken gestured to the leather recliner across from them. I didn't move, thinking about that Glock. As if reading my mind, he shook his head. In the dark window, the snowflakes were moth-like shapes drifting downward, rhythmic and steady in a repeating pattern like one of those rolled-up paintings. A dog barked outside, a lonely bark in an otherwise silent world.
While I stood there, debating, the one on the left moved the Ruger that had been sitting next to him onto his lap, where I could clearly see it. I also clearly saw the four-inch silencer attached to the barrel.
"Sit," he said. There it was again, that zzz sound.
"Where are you from?" I asked.
He blinked at me with a bit of panic in his eyes, as if I'd gone off script.
"Portland," he said.
"Funny," I said. "No, I mean originally. Argentina?"
"Guatemala," he shot back, as if the very idea of anyone of being from Argentina insulted him. "Now, you sit. Or we will make you sit."
"Guatemala," I said. I assumed that these were the same men who'd abducted Olivia, but there was also a chance that they weren't, that they weren't even men at all, at least not living ones. And if they were ghosts, that wasn't a real gun they were holding, which meant he couldn't shoot me. So I stalled, trying to think of a way to make sure he wasn't bluffing. "They have a lot of twins in Guatemala? You make quite the pair. What do you guys eat down there to get so big? Giant chalupas? I can't even imagine what it must have been like for your mother, giving birth to you two—"
The one with the gun shot the recliner.
The sound of it, like a clap of the hands, echoed off the walls and the low ceiling. White stuffing plumed in the air.
So much for them being ghosts. After my initial shock, I started for the bathroom, but he had the Ruger aimed at me before I'd even lifted my foot. There are a lot of misconceptions about silencers, starting with the name. They don't really silence the gunshot, which is probably why people familiar with firearms don't usually refer to them as silencers but suppressors. They do muffle the sound, but only the way padding wrapped around a baseball bat would muffle the crack of a ball.
In other words, it was still loud, loud enough to leave my ears ringing, but not loud enough to wake the neighbors. Or even Jak, it seemed.
"I liked that recliner," I said. It was a lie. Billie had bought it for me, another piece of furniture purchased not for comfort but because it matched the decor. "I can't believe you shot my recliner."
The one on the left gestured with the gun toward the chair. "It still works. Sit."
Somehow, pointing with a loaded weapon was more persuasive than pointing without one. I sat. I did make a show of waving away the stuffing still hanging in the air. The particles fell upon the black glass coffee table between us, like snowflakes on a dark pond. The matching rattan legs were like the trees growing on the edge of the water. It was a pretty image, and I would have marveled at it a bit more if the circumstances had been different.
"Well?" I said. "What now?"
The twin on the right, the one without the gun, took a cell phone out of his pocket and called someone. It was a tiny phone, all the tinier in his apelike hand. He listened for a moment, said only "Yes," then hit another button and placed the phone face up on the coffee table. Then a woman spoke, on speaker.
"Hello, Myron Vale. My name is Victoria Gath. I would have liked to be there to meet you in person, but then, with your unique skill set, I hope you'll understand my hesitation. I have a unique skill set, too, as I'm sure you've gathered."
She had a silky-s
mooth voice with something of a bite at the end, the way honey might mask the almond taste of arsenic until it was too late. No Guatemalan accent to this one. "You have Olivia," I said.
"Yes."
"Just like that? You just admit it straight out?"
She sighed, as if I'd already pushed her patience to the limit. "Why evade? I have her and I intend to keep her."
"Why?"
"That's no business of yours. Now, listen, Myron, you're obviously a smart fellow. I've been watching you from afar for a while. In fact, I'm actually quite grateful to you, all the attention you've managed to get from the Department and others. They've been so focused on you over the years that they've failed to notice me, which is just the way I like it. But this nosing around after me, it has to stop. I thought I was fast enough to take care of things, but I didn't expect Olivia's parents to go to you—at least not so quickly."
"Oh, why worry about something like that?" I said. "Kidnapping, murder … You've certainly made bigger mistakes."
She laughed. It was a laugh with absolutely no warmth to it, so the sound was jarring.
"Wit," she said. "I do appreciate wit, Myron. Now, let's get down to business, shall we? Perhaps you've already noticed your girlfriend's unfortunate memory loss."
I didn't answer.
"Come now, Myron," she said, "let's not play games. It will just temporarily postpone the conclusion you will eventually have to come to."
"Which is?"
"Which is … that unless you drop this whole business of Olivia, I shall take a lot more than one day of Jak's memory. I shall take it all."
I said nothing. What could I say? She might be bluffing, she might not have the ability to erase that much of someone's memory, but I'd already seen enough evidence of her power to believe her.
"I have to say," she went on, "this poor girl loves you a great deal. A great deal, Myron. The way she feels when she looks at you, so adoringly … Well, it would be a pleasure to take all those memories, let me tell you. An absolute pleasure. Young love like that, it's so pure, so sweet, even coming from someone so broken as Jak. What if I took all of her feelings right back to the moment she met you? Wouldn't that be something? She'd look at you and wouldn't even know you. I've done it before, Myron. You may think I'm lying, but I have done it before, and it's never pretty. The mind usually can't deal with such loss. Usually, if they survive at all, they end up in a coma from which they never wake."
The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold Page 14
