Possession (27 page)

“I—” I started, but she cut me off, rising to her feet with the books bundled in her arms.

“No. No excuses, no thank-yous, no rattling on. You got work to do and you are going to go do it. Now,” she added, nudging my nearest foot with her own, “go on. What’ve I got to do, throw you out? Go on. You’re going to do it anyhow, might as well get on with it.” She prodded me to the door like a mother hen and loaded the books into a bag, which she shoved into my arms. “Now, out you go, Harper. And you come back for dinner next month. Poppy’s got to fatten you up for that man of yours.”

She winked at me and nearly pushed me out the door.

SEVENTEEN

_I
t wasn
’t raining, but it was thinking about it again. I hurried to the Land Rover with my bag full of books, not wanting them to get wet before I could look them over. Not to mention that Phoebe would skin me if they were damaged. I was troubled by the image of the Great Wheel, too. What we’d deciphered indicated some connection between it and the ghosts and the phenomena that the patients were experiencing, but it didn’t lie on the tunnel route per se, and damned if I could understand what the link was. It was on the waterfront and the accidents were all associated with the tunnel. The waterfront would be deeply affected by the construction and the tunnel, but . . . so what? How did that concern ghosts? What was Linda Hazzard doing in the mix—something about hunger, but what? Purlis was probably linked to all this, too, but that was another connection I hadn’t been able to discover yet. I just wasn’t seeing something and in the meantime I was chasing my thoughts in frustrating circles.

It was still early enough to ask a few more questions and going home would only remind me of Quinton’s absence. I headed back to the market to take another look at the bluff I’d drawn, above where Princess Angeline had lived and near where Linda Hazzard had killed her patients and had their bodies cremated without ceremony or tears.

It was sufficiently close to dinnertime that the streets were busy, but the parking lots were in flux, with the morning shoppers leaving and the evening revelers not yet arriving. I managed to find a parking place for the truck on one of the steep streets next to the market. The back-in angle parking was tricky and I almost thought the Land Rover would tip onto its side and roll down the hill to fall off the edge and onto the waterfront below, but it didn’t. I hurried down the sidewalk toward Steinbrueck Park.

I crossed the road to the park and sat down near the homeless memorial, imagining that this must have been almost directly above Angeline’s shack. I wondered what it was like to live at the edge of the city then, when ships lay at anchor to be unloaded by smaller boats and the goods hauled up the steep hills in carts.

“Bad clams,” said a voice beside me.

I turned my head sharply. “What?” The woman next to me wore a white garment that wrapped her in light. She wasn’t so much a ghost as a presence with a vague shape and a face hard to see in the luminance that shone from her.

“The city made the water dirty. Bad water made the clams bad. Not all the time, but enough.”

“Are you . . . Kikisebloo?” I asked.

She nodded. “You shouldn’t be here. The land is riddled like the timbers of old ships and the vileness comes with strangers. It rises, a tide to sweep away the new and the old. It will sweep you with it, if you cannot manage the ones you cannot love.”

“I don’t understand. Do you know how this all goes together? The ghosts and the patients and the tunnel and the Wheel? And my not-quite-father-in-law?”

She gazed at me as if looking inside my soul. “What stands may fall like the great forests fell before the ax. Look to your own. The answers you truly want are there. This moment passes. The Wheel may turn or it may fall into the sea. Who knows?”

“I think someone must know. What’s the connection between the Wheel and the ghosts who are haunting the sick people?” I demanded.

“I cannot say. There was a way here, long ago. Up through the pines from stony shore and mucky strand. Up from the boats, up from the hoardings of men who are blind to what they do.”

She began to dim and age before my eyes, becoming the old woman in the photo taken in 1907. “I do not like the future that I see. The worms have eaten till the wood is rotten with them. It is like my old shack and cannot stand much longer if they remain. I miss my father and mothers. I miss my brothers and sisters and my little daughters, my Mary and Enie. You should not miss them. But you must look in the graveyard. Look to the graves. Look to your own, to your husband, for answers. It is a dark thing to be alone and hungry.”

She shimmered away and left me on the bench, looking back toward the market. I wasn’t sure I had anything more than I’d started with, except she seemed worried and she wanted me to ask Quinton something—something about his father, I imagined.

I muttered under my breath, annoyed with the obtuse conversation of spirits. Graves . . . There were graves—or at least a cemetery of sorts—in the market. What if Angeline had meant the secret cemetery in the Soames-Dunn courtyard where Lois “Mae West” Brown was buried—among others?

It took me a little while to figure out which building I wanted—the names on old historic buildings are sometimes obscured by newer signs and additions, like awnings. But I found it nearby and went through the arcade, lured by the watery sunlight visible at the end of the hall. I stepped out into a deep courtyard, a high wall in front of me scaled by a staircase that led to Post Alley. I could barely see the sign for Kells hanging in the alley above. Those iron balusters were the rails that Carlos’s assistant, Inman, had pushed me against and nearly tipped me over. I stared at the distance from the rails to where I stood and shivered at the idea of falling from there to this flagstone courtyard, already stained with fist-sized blotches like the remains of small homicides. I doubted I could have survived that fall headfirst, Greywalker or not.

The stairs were partially wrapped around a large sort of planter with a low, rambling plum tree growing from it up against the wall. I laughed, suddenly understanding Lois Brown’s joke—she’d said she was “plumb” sure she was dead—dead and buried under a plum tree. This was the secret cemetery—this quiet little courtyard with its tiny tree. I started up the steps to where I could swing over the rail and get onto the earth beneath the tree.

That was when the rain came. I could hear people dashing along the alley overhead and a few shouts and squeals of dismay as shoppers and tourists scurried to get under cover. I thought of backtracking into the building behind me—better that than the haunted bar up the stairs—but I was already getting wet, so I just zipped up my jacket and tucked my hair under the hood and down the collar to keep it from falling into my eyes.

I climbed the rest of the steps and over the rails to crouch on the soft ground beneath the tree. A few other plants had started up on a bit of grass, but for the most part it was barren except for an array of small objects strewn randomly across the ground. I crept around, looking at the objects. Some had plainly been put there by other people—the remains of a bunch of flowers, a cheap plastic ring with a note tied to it that read “Forever,” a handful of coins—but others seemed to have dug themselves from the dirt and wisps of ghost-stuff clung to them.

I carefully collected the Grey-touched things. I found another key much like the one that had fallen from the ceiling in Kells, two more buttons, a bit of old jewelry chain, and a funny little tool with a dull point at one end and the other end flattened into a disk a little larger than the end of my thumb.

There was also an old “flair” button with a rather naughty suggestion on it. I picked it up and rubbed some of the dirt off it. “One of yours, Mae?” I asked, looking it over. She didn’t respond, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had.

The ground under me shifted and I scrambled a little to stay on my feet, lurching closer to the railings and clutching them to keep from falling off the planter. For a moment, my Grey-sighted left eye showed a flicker of ghostly hands reaching from the soil, but they faded as I moved away.

A man stepped out into the courtyard, shielding his face from the rain with one hand. “Hey,” he called, “get out of that! It’s not safe up there—the planter almost collapsed a few months ago!”

I put my collection of odd treasures into my pockets and scrambled back over the rails and down the stairs.

The man scowled at me and shooed me inside, saying, “What the hell were you doing up there?”

“I dropped my key,” I said. “I didn’t know there’d been any problems with the planter.”

“It was months ago, but they had to shore up the wall afterward and I’m not sure it’s going to hold if the tunnel people keep on poking around. They buried some kind of sensor to monitor the tunnel there. Just making more messes than fixing them so far,” he muttered.

“It’s quite a project, isn’t it?”

“It’s a pain in the butt. Kind of like you.”

“Me?” I objected.

“I need to run my shop, not go climbing around saving tourists from being foolish.”

“I’m not a tourist.”

He gave me a cool look. “Then you should know better than to go climbing over rails around here. Now, go on. You’re dropping dirt on my floor.”

He turned his back to me, but I noticed he kept an eye on me in a mirror mounted by the cash desk until I left. The market’s tiny, cluttered shops must have been prime targets for thieves and pickpockets. I hoisted what little dignity I had left and took off through the back, defiantly, to trot up the stairs to Post Alley.

Taking a deep breath at the top, I braced myself for trouble and entered Kells. This time no horrifying vision of women with melting faces assaulted me. The worst scare I got was the ghost of a small girl who ran through me and then turned back to stare, saying, “Dance with me! No one at this party will dance with me.”

I put out one hand and she put a thin wisp of cold into it. It didn’t feel like a hand, but I closed my own over it anyhow and walked her into the hallway between the two rooms, making a slow circle as if I were just looking around. In the unobserved corridor between the larger rooms, I executed a couple of pivot turns and a swing out that let the little girl spin into the larger room that had once been the crematory. She swirled away in a spiral of smoke and glitter, giggling as she vanished. I walked through to the bar and caught the bartender’s attention, though he was already giving me an odd look.

“Hi,” I said. “I seem to have lost some things out of my pocket the other night. I was hoping they’d been picked up.”

“What sort of things?”

“Oh, an old button, a key, a pencil stub . . .”

His brows drew down. “Funny bunch of things to come back for.”

“Part of a scavenger hunt,” I said.

He shrugged and ducked his head a bit to look under the counter. “Huh.” He pulled out a cardboard box and set it on the bar. “Let’s see . . .”

The box had a ragtag collection of small objects that included quite a few car and house keys, car alarm fobs, some safety pins, a length of broken chain, one dirty pearl bead, buttons, a pocketknife, a brooch shaped like a dolphin, two wedding rings, a thimble, a button hook, six or seven pens of varying quality, a large metal grommet, and several lighters. There was one pencil stub and I picked it up, feeling a cold burn on my fingertips as I did. This was the right one.

“Anything else look familiar?” the bartender asked.

I picked through the trove, closing my right eye and looking only with my left for the black gleam of the ghostly artifacts. There were several more than I’d originally seen, and I picked them all up. The bartender squinted suspiciously at me, but didn’t object when I took the brooch and the grommet as well as several buttons and the old-fashioned house key. Neither of the wedding rings had any ghostly haze to it, for which I was grateful—I doubted I could explain taking one of those when I hadn’t mentioned it to begin with. I did wonder where the thimble had come from, though. Who carries a thimble into a bar? The button hook was intriguing because although it was an old object, it had no Grey gleam at all. I supposed it was something bought in the market and dropped by accident. Maybe it went with the thimble. . . .

“That it?” the bartender asked, looking at the small pile I’d made on the bar.

I glanced up at him, opening both eyes. “Yeah. That’s it.”

“Weird. OK, they’re all yours.”

I shoved the objects into my pockets with the ones I’d found outside and thanked the man as I left. I didn’t see any further sign of the little girl ghost or Linda Hazzard and I was grateful. But I did feel a renewed tingling and burning where my skin had been scribed with phantom words. Being near the market was becoming a liability for me. I needed to solve the puzzle and get away from this as quickly as possible. I didn’t have all the pieces I needed, but Carlos might be able to help on that score and at the moment he owed me, though I wasn’t excited about collecting.

I also needed to find Quinton, which meant finding his father. Quinton had mentioned Northlake when I’d seen him last and it was in that general direction that the convoluted and knotted line between us had stretched when Carlos showed it to me. I already knew Quinton wasn’t downtown, and his father obviously wasn’t operating out of that area himself—much too easily observed by his government colleagues and others. I might also find Inman in the area, since a demi-vampire doesn’t wander far without orders from whoever is holding his leash. Carlos would be more inclined to do what I wanted if I had a lead on his missing dhampir.

I had to admit, I was curious as to how Papa Purlis had subverted the dhampir—the ties of blood and magic between creator and “child” vampires are strong and usually broken only by destruction of one or both vampires, though dhampirs are rather unusual cases. Purlis had discovered something very dangerous and I wondered if he recognized it or even knew what he’d done. Sending Inman after me had been risky and foolish. It made me think he wasn’t aware of the importance of what he’d accomplished. But since I hadn’t seen any sign of Inman today, it was possible he’d figured it out. His Ghost Division needed to be discredited and burned to the ground before he had any more breakthroughs. Not to mention I was running out of patience with Quinton’s obsessive absences. I was the unreasonable, obsessive member of this little party and I didn’t want to share the distinction.