Possession (40 page)

“I guess God told me.” She smiled. The white light seemed to expand and brush her shoulder, sending a hint of warm summer breeze through my stuffy office. “I think everything will be all right now.”

I took a deep breath and felt lighter with it. “Will it?”

She nodded. “Yes. I’m sure of it. Your friend made that terrible ghost leave. Forever, I think.”

I glanced at Stymak for confirmation and he nodded vigorously, his eyes bright. “Oh, yeah. Banished like a bad dream. I still don’t like him, but he can really pull a ghost’s cork when it needs to be done. I gotta tell you, that was the freakiest thing I’ve ever seen in a lifetime of freakiness.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

He shook his head. “No. I don’t think you can. Unless you’ve seen it, it’s not even in the imaginarium of most people.”

“Trust me. I’ve seen it.”

If his eyes had widened any farther, they’d have fallen right out of his head. I gave him a sheepish smile. “I should have warned you about that. I am truly sorry.”

“No, no . . . It was . . . Well. It scared the crap out of me, but the experience was worth it. And I will never see something like that again—I hope.” He seemed more awed than upset or freaked out.

Olivia and Levi nodded agreement, seeming a little dazzled. Goss sat still and looked beatific.

“What about . . . the others?” I asked. “Jordan, and Kevin, and Julianne . . . ?”

The light brightened just enough to notice. “They’re fine,” Goss said, her calm unruffled. “They stayed until we were done with that terrible woman. Then they went away. But they’re fine, now.”

I could only stare at her, agape, a touch awed myself at the calm certainty she exuded.

The whiteness in the corner gleamed and something shot outward from it that was too brilliant to look at. A sound like a clap of wings and thunder shook the office and the radiance erupting from the corner was too dazzling to bear. I closed my eyes, but the searing light could not be blocked. When the flash had died away and I could see again, I glanced at where it had been. The corner was dim and empty and the room was just as it had been before and somehow nothing like it, neither better nor worse yet changed completely. I felt shaken and transparent, but I didn’t want to sit down or go to sleep. No one seemed to want to move at all for a minute or so and the expressions on their faces were beautifully stunned.

Eventually the strange feeling that held us captive faded and we went our separate ways. Stymak went with Lily Goss and Westman said he’d get a cab to the care home. Carlos had already taken the shrine away and I knew there was nothing to worry about on that score. I drove Olivia home and we didn’t talk on the way.

This time I pulled into the driveway to let her out. The house was lit up as if to banish every shadow that had ever lingered in the world. As Olivia ran up the walk, her brother Peter came out and hugged her and swung her around like a child.

“He woke up! Dad woke up!” he shouted.

Olivia squealed and kissed him, hugging him back so hard she knocked the breath out of him. Then she broke away and ran back to me, her stride free and smooth, with no sign of her earlier limp.

“Did you hear? Dad’s awake!”

I grinned at her. “I heard. Congratulations.”

She nearly jumped through the window to hug me. “Thank you!” she whispered into my ear. “You did it!”

“You did it,” I replied. “I just chase ghosts. You, and Levi, and Lily, and Stymak did it. Now go inside. Go.”

She backed away from the Land Rover, grinning wide enough to crack her jaw, then whirled and flew into the house, screaming,
“Dad! Daddy!”

I sat there and grinned myself for a while, then drove home elated. We had done something—whatever it was, however we did it—that was good and that felt wonderful.

EPILOGUE

_I
wrote it off to
adrenaline, but I didn’t feel as sore and ragged as I’d expected to on the way home. But it turned out I really wasn’t hurt. When I went to shower, although my clothes were torn, filthy, and bloodstained, I wasn’t. My injuries had vanished except for the mildest pink traces on my legs and arms. My shoulder was fine, too. I’d certainly been in a bad way when I’d arrived at the office, but sometime between then and getting home again, the hurts had been wiped away. I never did find out how, though I suspected it was something to do with the brightness that had lurked in the corner of my office.

Lily Goss said it was the work of an angel. She claimed to have felt it standing over her shoulder. Or maybe that had been her sister, Julianne. Of the identity she wasn’t sure, but the presence of something that radiated goodness was not a point she would argue. It had been there and that was that. And that was why she wasn’t upset that while I had been chasing Limos and the rest of them had been holding tight to Hazzard and the souls of their loved ones, Julianne Goss had slipped out of the world. Of the three patients, only Julianne didn’t wake up. She died quietly and with no fuss at 10:27 p.m. Lily seemed relieved and even happy for her sister and I suppose that’s the best we could have hoped for. Her doctor said he didn’t know how she’d held on so long. He didn’t use the word “miracle”—it didn’t seem appropriate in the face of death—but it seemed to hover in the air nearby.

Kevin Sterling and Jordan Delamar both improved at remarkable speeds, though even the most optimistic doctors weren’t sure how much their lives would return to normal—they’d been injured and bedridden for a long time and it’s slow, hard work coming back from such a state. The Sterling family seemed to take the news well and it appeared that Labor and Industry was going to settle Kevin’s case without more fussing about the details, so the house might finally get finished, too. Olivia’s scars had faded to dim lines and the pain from her surgery vanished completely. She talked about possibly going back to dance class, but she wasn’t ready to make that decision yet—she wanted to spend some time with her family first.

Westman and Delamar exercised their legal right to marry as soon as Jordy was able to speak and write steadily enough to sign the paperwork and say “I do.” Westman sent me a copy of the wedding photo with a note of thanks, which I thought was very sweet of them. I declined the invitation to their party, held at Pike Place Market, since I couldn’t face the ghosts there again so soon—if ever.

The Great Wheel had to be shut down for two days to be inspected, but eventually it was declared mechanically fine and as safe as ever—how safe that was would be open to interpretation. The bizarre winds along the waterfront had caused some damage to parts of the new tunnel construction zone and the dismantling work on the viaduct and a few people had been injured, but none of them worse than a broken arm suffered by a woman who’d fallen down the stairs by the Great Wheel’s loading platform. The rest of the Independence Day celebrations hadn’t been affected by the wind or the localized downpour and the freaky weather was written off as just the usual sort of Seattle summer weirdness.

A month later I had dinner with Phoebe’s family again. I reveled in being around them and their unconditional love for one another. Even when one of them was being foolish or bad, the rest stood by them or cajoled them back into line and generally acted . . . well, like family. My own family was small, fragmented, and fragile, but if Carlos was right that the ties of affection are as strong as the ties of blood, then I was, in my slow and often makeshift way, creating my own family from what I had with Quinton and by the Masons’ example.

Though, on the family front, I wasn’t seeing as much of Quinton as I wanted to. I hadn’t expected to as the situation with his father deteriorated, but it was still a sharp little thorn in my side that just as I was starting to get into the idea, my tiny family was being put under considerable strain by his father. But one thing I was learning from the Masons was that you work with what you have. Quinton was spending a lot of his time preparing to leave the country and fix what his dad had broken—the more we found out, the worse it looked, and that wasn’t even considering the hurt and betrayal that was now irremediable between them. I hadn’t heard what the final extent of James Purlis’s injuries was, but I assumed I’d find out eventually.

I had said I’d go with him, but Quinton asked me not to.

“Why not?” I asked, puzzled more than hurt.

He pulled me close, wrapping me in his arms. I could hear his heart beating steady and calm, the warmth of him enfolding me like a cloak. “Because you are the one and only Harper Blaine and you can’t just disappear. I’m already nobody. I can slip through holes in the system. But he’ll see you coming. He’ll track you and I can’t stop that. I don’t want him to know you’re a threat until it’s too damned late for him to stop us.”

“What about you? Won’t he know you’re out there, hunting him down?”

“He might think it, but he won’t be sure. He knows I don’t want to leave you—he counted on it before and I think he’ll count on it again—and so long as you are here in Seattle, doing what you normally do, he’ll be unsure where I am and what I’m doing. It’ll puzzle him and then it will bother him, and eventually his uncertainty will trip him up. I know him better than he knows me now. And I’m going to use that against him.

“It’s a lot to ask of you, I know. I’m sorry,” he continued, “but will you play along and remain here until I let you know it’s time?”

“It’s going to be hard to pretend you’re here when I’ll be wishing all the time that you really were.”

“I’ll always be here,” he said. He pressed his finger to my chest between my breasts. “I’ll always be right here.”

“Where?” I asked, teasing and ruffling his hair. “Here?” I kissed him.

He laughed and kissed me back, then kissed my neck and worked his way lower, saying with each kiss, “here . . . and here . . . and here . . .” until we were giggling, and then gasping and not talking at all. . . .

I knew I’d do what he asked when the time was right—I had no choice. There were forces beyond the normal at work and it is, after all, my job to fix that sort of thing. And there is also that other strange thing at work: love.

For now, I was going to treasure what I had and do my best with it. I’d fix the rest of the world later.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

_W
hen I started this book I thought it would be fun to write one that was just about ghosts and hauntings. Of course, that’s not quite how it worked out. . . . But if you’re going to talk about ghosts in Seattle, the obvious places to start are Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square. Since I’ve done a lot around Pioneer Square, I decided to concentrate on the market this time, and I couldn’t have picked a better spot—it’s the mother lode of freaky Seattle stories. At the same time, the activity around the construction of the State Route 99 tunnel became an irresistible addition since the area is linked to some of the weirdest and most bizarre events in Seattle’s history—and you know how much I like weird events—so I started looking at the proposed route for the tunnel to see what sort of fictional havoc I could wreak on my town. And, of course, Seattle obliged by providing the sites of a tragic accident and the offices of a serial killer on either end of the route, with all sorts of strange things in between. I just couldn’t resist stirring them up and seeing what happened.

During the final editorial cycle, I found a note from the copy editor of this book expressing some surprise (or possibly doubt, horror, or curiosity) about my referring to Linda Hazzard as a serial killer. Not only was Linda Burfield Hazzard a real person, she is one of the few women to be recognized as a serial killer and she was the first ever recorded in Washington’s unhappy history of them. There are quite a few articles about Hazzard online—including several on my usual haunt, HistoryLink.org. The best known of several books about her is
Starvation Heights
by Gregg Olsen, which is guaranteed to give you the creeps. I also got information about Hazzard from the ladies of the Clallam County Historical Society while I was doing research for a previous Greywalker novel,
Downpour
. I really couldn’t have made up anything as dreadful as the details of Hazzard’s crimes. Truth is, once again, more outrageous than fiction.

The tragedy of Cannie Trimble is also sadly true and is another bit of strange Seattle history that I picked up initially through an article at HistoryLink.org. She’s a bit of a mystery, as there seems to be little information about her other than the reports of her death and the fact that she was married to one of the wealthiest men in Seattle at the time. There’s also a debate about her name—some archives and articles list her as Cassandra or Cassie Trimble, but comments from surviving relatives claim that her name was actually Cannie. I made her into a sad but helpful spirit, and I wonder what she was really like—smart and funny and full of life, I hope—but I suppose I’ll never know.

I took some liberties with the disposition of Gas Works Park, which actually was undergoing ecological restoration in the first quarter of 2013, but there never has been a secret door into the abandoned coal gas processing plant. However, you can fly kites off the top of the mound that covers some of the factory’s wreckage—it’s a great location with a fantastic view and constant wind.

Pike Place Market is famously haunted and Mercedes Yaeger has conducted tours of the market’s ghostly sites since the early 1990s, as well as written several books on the topic, which I read as research for this book. I also went on the tour with fellow writers Liz Argall, Melissa Mead Tyler, Stina Licht, and Cherie Priest and had a wonderfully spooky time. I didn’t have to make up any of the stories about the market that I included in this book—they’re all true, as are most of the ghosts. As I write this, Kells is still in the process of renovating the upper floors at the former Butterworth Mortuary building, but you can still get a drink downstairs in the old embalming and crematory rooms, where things do, once in a while, go bump in the night. If you want to experience some of this for yourself, take the ghost tour the next time you’re in town, or walk through the market after dark with your ears pricked and your eyes open.