Kat Richardson: Downpour

The clerk tapped the map. “Right here on Lake Sutherland. Just head up to Lake Crescent and turn left at the sign for Lake Sutherland Road. Pretty country even at this time of year, especially if you can be up on that end of the lakes when the sun’s going down.”

My interest was definitely piqued since I didn’t recall anything unusual from my last viewing of the lake. “Does something happen at sundown?”

“If the clouds break right, the sun shines through a low point in the surrounding hills and turns the surface of the water pink and red and orange just before it goes under the horizon. It’s right pretty, but you can’t see it any other time of the year.” He made a circle on the map with his fingertip, covering the western edge of Lake Sutherland and over onto the northeastern shore of Lake Crescent. A distant, muffled roaring sounded in my ears and the flickering flames that teased the corners of my vision grew brighter for a moment as the clerk said, “Someone tried to name the area ‘Sunset Lakes’ once a long time back when they opened up the first leg of the highway, but it didn’t stick since you can’t see the phenomenon during the warmer months. People don’t want to hang around to watch the sunset when they’re freezing their hind ends off,” he added with a chuckle. “Even back in the day, tourists were big business. Not like the area’s had a lot of settlement up there. Mostly lumbering in the early days, fishing, a bit of mining for a while, but not much, and the whole area’s pretty much shut down from the end of October through April, when the resorts start opening up. A few hardy types live up there the entire time, but it’s mostly just summer places and the big lodges in the national park property.”

“Any idea if Steven Leung lived there full-time after he retired?” I asked.

He thought about it for a moment. “I’m not sure. It’s hard to get by on a retirement salary if you have to pay rent in town and a mortgage at the lake, so I’d guess he did, but I don’t know.”

“Did you know him while he was working here?”

“Only to nod to. He started out in the surveyor’s office and transferred here when he started slowing down a bit. But he still did a lot of the physical work on assessments and I didn’t work directly for the assessor then, so I didn’t see a lot of him. Seemed like a nice fella, but kind of quiet, as I remember.”

“Unrelated topic: Do you have any title records for a Darin Shea?”

He looked but could find nothing to show Darin Shea had any ownership or interest in any land in Clallam County. Not that I’d expected any—roving handymen aren’t the sort to invest in real estate.

The clerk couldn’t supply much more information on Leung, either, and his paperwork was backing up while he was chatting with me. I reluctantly let him go back to it. I had a bad feeling about what I would hear next, but still I went down the hall to discover what I could about Leung’s retirement checks.

The treasurer’s office was responsible for the retirement payments, and though the woman managing disbursements wouldn’t give me specifics, she was willing to confirm that the payments still went out every month, direct-deposited to Leung’s credit union account—another case of no human hands touching a check....

I wondered what happened when people died and how long it took for the county to demand the overpayments back from the family of the deceased. Her answer was complicated and not very reassuring. It seemed all too easy for a dead man to keep receiving his pay until some other authority—usually the IRS—got nosy. It occurred to me that if Steven Leung had been dead for the past five years, even a small retirement payment would add up to a big chunk of money. If he’d been killed, would that—and the taxes—have been worth the cost of murder?

I kept on poking, though I turned my focus mostly on Darin Shea. I tried the licensing bureau, the office of business taxes, the DMV . . . but I couldn’t find anything more on Leung that I didn’t have already; nor could I find any paperwork for Shea, not even a suspended driver’s license. Neither man had any criminal record or fingerprints on file that the county resources could turn up. That didn’t surprise me for Leung, but I had to hope I could find a crack in Shea’s blank wall before Nan went to trial with him. I had to admit, though, that I was less interested in Shea than in Leung’s disappearance.

Once I was done with the county offices, I went searching for a place to have lunch and compile my notes before I drove up into the mountains that loomed over Port Angeles. As I headed back to my truck, I mentally damned the systems that both invaded our privacy and made it possible for a man missing or dead for five years to continue to collect his stipend and pay taxes. Money is a remarkable motivator and unpaid taxes would have gotten someone looking for Leung a lot earlier than this, but with no human actually cashing or cutting a check, the organizations most likely to kick up a fuss and cause trouble hadn’t even noticed. And someone may have profited by that.

I had coffee and a bite to eat at a tiny place called the Veela Café, while Chaos hung her head over the top of my bag and did her best to look cute and wheedle crumbs. The manager blinked at the ferret and then made a point of not seeing her as she handed over my plate.

“You might want to sit in the corner by the computer desks,” she said, “so nobody gets freaked-out by your . . . toy.”

“Thank you. That sounds fine,” I replied, taking the plate and sitting where she suggested, far from the window and slightly screened from the other patrons. I supposed she was concerned for her foodhandling license, or possibly the reaction of other customers—some people mistake ferrets for rats and that wouldn’t do her business any good. If it hadn’t been so cold, I could have eaten outside, but today I would have frozen, so I was grateful for the woman’s restraint and generosity. Once we were in our corner, I fed Chaos part of the meat from the sandwich. I’d have to give her some more food and water when we were somewhere more appropriate, but for now it was adequate to convince the furry kneesock that she wasn’t hungry enough to eat my purse.

The Veela Café was just off the major intersection of the original downtown. The buildings were old brick and masonry from the days when Port Angeles was a thriving customs port exporting lumber and minerals from the hills. The customhouse had long since moved, the lumber was protected forest, and the minerals were mostly gone, so the businesses that now occupied the old buildings ranged from the traditional to the bizarre. My little coffeehouse was sandwiched between a fancy seafood restaurant and a shop that catered to fans of the Twilight books and films. Across the street was the venerable Lincoln Theater—now showing second-run films and community production plays—cheek by jowl with a Chinese restaurant of the red-paint-andgilt-trim school. The eclectic collection made me smile a little even though the businesses were outnumbered by For Lease signs. County seat or not, Port Angeles, like a lot of towns on the Peninsula, was struggling under the unstable economy. It was a little depressing. By the time I’d finished eating, I was more than ready to head into the hills and look for the house. The ghost images in the corners of my eyes were growing dimmer and that worried me. While phantoms do fade over time or simply go away, they rarely do so at such a discernible rate of decay; they either linger and dwindle or they go completely in one fell moment.

Anxious to find an explanation for the vanishing spirits, I cleared up quickly. Then I put my notes and the ferret away, returned to the Rover, and pointed it up the road to Lake Crescent.