Kat Richardson - Downpour

I turned my palms out and raised my hands to chest height. “Calm down, Ridenour. I’m just trying to figure out what went wrong here and caused the deaths of two people. I’m not trying to upset you or degrade May’s memory.”

“Four people,” Ridenour snapped back, wriggling his coat up onto his shoulders so he could free his arms and move the chair back upright.

“Four? How do you count that?”

“Leung, Strother, Scott, and my—and May. It’s goddamned Willow’s fault.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s not,” I said, letting my hands fall to my sides. I could feel the pressure of Quinton’s presence moving back a little, keeping out of Ridenour’s focus. “And I notice you didn’t say she’s responsible for Jonah Leung’s death. So don’t you believe that anymore, or did you ever?”

Ridenour glared at me for a few seconds; then his shoulders slumped and he hung his head. “I don’t know. Ever since you showed up, I just don’t seem to think quite right. Or maybe I’m thinking too much. There are moments when I feel . . . connected to something and I think I know things I couldn’t know—as if someone whispered them in my ear—and then . . . it’s just gone. The same way May was just . . .” He raised his head and looked at me, the watery light through the windows streaking his face with age he hadn’t lived. “How did you know about May, anyhow?”

I almost turned my head toward the place Jin’s suit had lain, but I gave a rueful smile and kept my eyes on Ridenour. “Weird stuff is my territory, just as the park is yours. Someone told me.”

“No one knows. Except Willow. That’s why I always thought—well, you know what I think. Who told you?”

“Someone like May.”

He squeezed his eyes closed and his face crumpled. He had to swallow hard a few times before he could speak. “At first I didn’t know. That she wasn’t . . .”

I just nodded. To say she hadn’t been human or real would have been too much, and Ridenour was hurting enough by talking at all.

“Why did you believe Willow sent May away? Was it only because she knew about her?”

“No. There was paper . . . yellow paper with Chinese written on it. Folded like a flower.”

I crouched down beside the chair, turning a little to keep from blocking the light as I pulled one of the scraps from my pocket. “Were there other pieces around, like this?” I asked, holding out one of the bits of fabric I’d plucked from the floor earlier. In the thin, sleetbattered light it was the color of dry grass.

Ridenour glanced at it and then looked again, longer. “I—think so. That sort of color, scattered around near her clothes.”

Now I almost wished we hadn’t cleared the suit and the dust away. “How were her clothes arranged?”

“They were . . . in a pile. As if she’d stepped out of them. With the yellow paper flower on top.”

“Ridenour, there’s no reason to believe it was Willow. The flower was a spell, just like the one that—that sent May back where she came from. Someone wanted you to see it and think it was Willow’s work because she’s Chinese, but you can’t be sure. Whoever did it had two of the papers—one to use on May and one to leave for you to find. What did you do with it?”

“I burned it.”

“Who else might have made it? Who else wrote Chinese?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Jewel, maybe . . .”

I doubted Jewel would have gone to the trouble of implicating her half sister. She didn’t like Willow, but she didn’t seem to have any grand plan against her. Once again, I sensed the hand of the mysterious child—whoever he was, I’d come to hate him—and I wondered if, on his trips to Seattle for Costigan, the child had stopped in Chinatown. . . .

“Ridenour, who was working on this building today?”

The ranger still seemed dazed. “Some contractors, I suppose.”

“Building contractors, renovators . . . ?”

“No, no. The resort is run by a management group that the park service contracts with. The group hires the people they need to do the seasonal cleaning and run the place on short-term contracts.”

“What about the building maintenance? Who does that?”

“We do, but, again, we contract for it. It’s mostly done as needed, since it’s usually odd jobs and immediate repairs, not planned things like the big renovation.”

The certainty welled up in my mind so fast I gasped. Ridenour and Quinton both stared at me.

Ilooked at Quinton. “I need my boots. We have to get going.”

He looked surprised but headed into the kitchen to fetch them. I turned my attention back to the ranger. “Ridenour, how can I find Darin Shea?” I asked.

He blinked at me and shook his head as if trying to clear it. “He’s usually around. People leave notes for him on the bulletin board at the Fairholm store and he turns up once he gets them.”

“What if no one’s home?”

“Most folks have a spare key around if you know where to search, and Shea’s got a few keys of his own for the places he looks after regularly.”

“I’ll bet he does . . .” I muttered.

Ridenour didn’t seem to have heard me very well and asked, “What?”

“Mr. Shea’s handy with locks, isn’t he?”

“He’s certainly installed a lot of them round here.”

“And I’ll bet he’s the guy you call when you’ve locked your keys in your car, too.”

“Well, you don’t call Shea—he hasn’t got a phone and mobiles don’t work up here, anyway—but he usually comes around the lake a few times a day, working and checking on things. If he’s around, he’ll always lend a hand with a lockout or a jump start. He carries most of his tools around with him in his truck.”

Quinton came back with my boots and his own. We both sat down and started putting them on.

“What sort of truck?” I asked Ridenour while I was lacing up. Shea had been using a pickup truck at the Log Cabin Resort when we’d met, but it hadn’t been registered to him, and I couldn’t quite remember what color the battered old beast had been. Something pale, but it had been hard to be sure under the coating of road dust and mud.

“Just an old truck, light blue with a shell. Why?”

“Do you know where he is? Was Shea working here today?”

“No, but he’s done work here in the past. I think I saw the truck at Rosemary earlier. . . .”

“What’s Rosemary?”

“The Rosemary Inn, back along the road here. It used to be a camp and hotel, but it’s the Olympic Park Institute now. Not much going on there this time of year and the sign’s a little hard to spot sometimes.”

I stood up. “Can you get to Rosemary from here on foot?”

Puzzled, Ridenour got up, too. “Of course. There’s a trail from the meadow down here all the way up the shore. It’s not very far from here to Rosemary—half a mile at most. They bring school kids and Sierra Club groups out here on nature hikes and education retreats all the time. We even show them the hatchery sometimes.”

I glanced at Quinton and back to Ridenour. “We have to go.”

“No! You know something about May; you have to tell me.” He reached for my arm and I deliberately turned aside. I couldn’t risk being detained any longer by Ridenour.

“Not now. Come to the Newmans’ house tonight and I’ll tell you everything.”

He tried to object, but I’m fast, and Quinton and I dashed for the kitchen and out, slamming the door behind us to slow him down. We yanked on our coats as we bolted for the Rover. Ridenour wasn’t very far behind us, but he didn’t give chase for long, returning to the lodge to lock up, I supposed, caught by his duty.