Kat Richardson: Downpour

Even in the Grey, she was a little ragged and incorporeal, as if she were fading with the passage of time. She steeled herself against her fear and spoke, her words trembling out into the air on a cold breath that made the sounds sharp and brittle on the ear, but totally incomprehensible to me. From years of hanging around Ben Danziger, I recognized the language as Russian, but I didn’t know what she was saying. I tried to let the words roll over me, to speak their meaning into my mind as some ghosts do, but I could catch only nonsensical snatches of what she was trying to tell me. She flickered and some of her substance was sucked away into the bright blue line at her feet.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Her mouth moved, but I didn’t hear the whole name, only “. . . ’trovna . . .” Then she was yanked backward along the gleaming cobalt line, her face transforming in terror as her shape collapsed on itself, flowing away into a stream of white light, like sand falling through the throat of an hourglass. I tried to reach for her, to pull her back, but I couldn’t catch a hold of her, and the only touch I felt ripped across my fingers and disappeared with the young woman’s shade. Only a lingering shriek in my ear and a pain in my hand, as if it had been abraded by the ghost’s passage through my grip, remained as the silver mist of the Grey stood momentarily empty around me.

Panting a little with surprise, I backed out of the Grey. As I returned to the normal world, Chaos heaved a sigh and started looking around for something else to bedevil. My ghost was gone. I put the ferret back on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, watching her make several sniffling searches of the room’s perimeter before she gave it the mustelid all clear. Then she ran back to me and put her front paws on my shin before scrambling onto my boot and trying to climb my leg to the top of the mattress.

“Lunatic,” I chided, picking her up and plopping her on the bedspread. Chaos immediately began rolling around on her back, wiggling and rubbing her ears against the cheap comforter. I stood up and went to the bathroom mirror as the ferret bounced and writhed around on the bed, digging at the comforter until she could get under it and snorkel around, raising a moving, giggling lump like Bugs Bunny burrowing to Texas in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Staring at my reflection, I mimicked the mouth shapes the ghost had made while she said her name. When I thought I had them right, I tried giving them voice. “Ahhh . . . llll . . . nnn. . . . Aaaannahhh . . . Anna.” I sounded like an idiot and looked like a moron, but I kept trying. “Mmm . . . buh . . . puh . . . Buh’trovna. Puh’trovna . . . Petrovna . . . ? Anna Petrovna?” I called her name, reaching for the Grey as I did. “Anna Petrovna! Where are you?” But the only sound was a distant kind of gasp and then silence, as if something had disappeared and left nothing but a void.

It was a strange name to come from the Grey like that. I didn’t like the coincidence of another weak ghost, like Leung, reaching out to me and vanishing, especially not a strange Russian girl who should never have been out on the Peninsula in that era. I’d dealt before with a Russian ghost who had no business being where and what he was, but he’d been strong, willful, and dangerous. Anna Petrovna was weak and helpless and . . . gone. Now there was a hole where she should have been, as if she’d been hacked from the fabric of the Grey with a dull ax. A chill ran down my back.

Chaos tumbled out of the bedclothes and thumped onto the floor, throwing herself into a frenzied war dance and baring her teeth at the blanket in her ire. I smiled, distracted from my unhappy thoughts, and picked the ferret up to toss her gently back onto the bed where she bounced around crazily with her fur on end, chuckling until she was exhausted and flopped flat as a ferret-fur rug across the nearest pillow.

“Well, I guess you’re ready for bed, then,” I muttered, scooping the limp animal up and depositing her in her travel cage. She flounced into her nest of old sweatshirt fabric while I finished setting up the cage. I could hear her issuing tiny ferret snores by the time I’d returned with her filled water bottle and food dish.

I shed my clothes onto the furniture and burrowed into my own ferret-disarrayed bed, falling asleep as quickly as Chaos had. I had a lot to do in the morning....

Six hours of sleep was less than I’d wanted, but I needed to start early since it was Friday and I wanted to get the paper trail wrapped up quickly enough that I could get back up into the mountains before dark. I did as much of a workout as I could manage in a hotel room with no equipment; then I showered and dressed while running interference in the ferret’s plans for world domination through shoe theft.

I got to the Clallam County courthouse as the building opened for the day. The modern low-rise of glass and concrete was just behind and around the corner from the graceful brick-and-marble edifice of the original courthouse that had been converted into a small museum. All current county offices and services were housed in the new building, and every person who’d come to court, gotten married, lost his house to tax foreclosure, or come to file a death certificate had left shreds of emotion behind, until the modern cement buildings had accrued a thin, constant cloud of Grey energy. The new building was well lit with skylights and windows, but it still had a touch of gloom to it under the drizzling clouds.

Even though all the offices I needed were in the same building, it took most of three hours to confirm that there was no death certificate for Steven Leung and to get through the tax and property records for his house. No one was obstructive, but the county was, like all counties in Washington at the moment, short-staffed to begin with and missing a few more who’d been furloughed for budget reasons or started their weekend a day early. The people who were at their desks were buried in paperwork and most were doing someone else’s job as well as their own, trying to wrap up as much up as possible before four thirty. As I searched for information, I kept seeing the flutter of otherworldly flames at the edges of my vision. I couldn’t quite catch a glimpse of Steven Leung, though. He seemed to have faded to the thinnest remains of a ghost—even more ragged than the mysterious Anna Petrovna had been before she vanished from my room the night before.

The assessor’s office, where Leung had worked, kept track of property taxes, but with so much staff doubling up, I struck it lucky—the clerk in charge of deeds and property records was also the acting tax assessor’s clerk. Property deeds and taxes are public records, so he was able to confirm that the house was still in Leung’s name and that the property tax payments were up-to-date via automated payments direct from his bank.

The clerk gave me the location of the parcel on which Leung’s house sat. I glanced at the slip of paper where he’d written the information and shook my head. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the area. Where is this?”

“It’s up by the lakes.” He pulled out a map of property lines and land parcels and opened it on a nearby table, passing a finger over the printed terrain until he came to the area around Lake Crescent.

On the map the big lake looked like the silhouette of a Chinese dragon puffing out a ball of flame in the direction of downtown Port Angeles. I followed his finger across the top of the dragon’s head, past the stretch of East Beach Road where I’d seen the phantom of Leung’s burning car, and across the highway to the irregular, elongated shape that seemed to have been spat from the dragon’s mouth.