The crane slowed its ascent and the crew watched it with anxious expressions. “Must be something awful heavy in there,” Ridenour muttered beside me. I didn’t give him a glance; I just stepped closer to the water’s edge, feeling an urge to reach for the car as if I could help pull it free from the lake.
“Come on, come on,” I murmured. “Let it go.”
Leung’s flames leapt in the corner of my eye as I started to raise my hand. I could feel the water lap at the toes of my boots and I turned my head toward the ghost. Encased in the red and orange of remembered fire, he also stared up. We both turned our sights on the car, willing it to keep moving, to clear the lake....
The crane gave a squealing sound and lurched back into motion, the web of the lake’s hold on the car falling away as the car suddenly lifted free of the surface. Water rushed back to its source from the broken windows and crooked doorframes, and the noise sounded like the heavy sigh of a giant. Leung’s ghost turned toward me. Then he flamed up in a sudden bolt of red energy visible even in the wan sunlight of the afternoon and vanished with the stink of burned hair. I felt the same sense of emptiness that had accompanied the disappearance of the Russian girl’s ghost. Was the last remnant of Steven Leung now gone forever . . . ?
I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned a little farther to find Ridenour reaching to pull me away from the water’s edge. “Come on back. We don’t need you in the drink, too. It’s getting damned late and we’d never get out of here before dark if we had to fish you out as well.”
I nodded and retreated with him a few feet to watch the barge crew swing the car over the side and into the well of the craft.
When we returned to the Storm King ranger station, Strother was standing in the parking lot, keeping watch for the flatbed, which drove in about thirty minutes behind us. The barge was also nearing the dock by that time and the pointing and parking, shouting and maneuvering of both the barge and the flatbed took longer than I’d have expected. The two men and the truck driver did eventually get the flatbed backed a few feet down the boat ramp and the barge tied up just right so the barge would have a shorter distance to move the crane arm when unloading the car. The truck driver didn’t seem happy about the water; he hadn’t brought hip waders and he took pains to let us all know he didn’t see how he was going to secure the load without getting wet. With the wind finally coming up along the lake as the sun tilted toward the western rim of the valley, the barge crew and the truck driver were especially eager to get finished and headed back toward home soon.
More shouting and pointing went on until the problem was solved by the man in the dry suit who’d worked the smaller boat around the sunken car. He jumped to the dock and did the wading end of the business himself, though not without a show of annoyance. Strong words were exchanged in all directions, and the driver looked relieved when he could move the truck up onto the gravel above the water and tie the car down to his own satisfaction. The man from the barge rolled his eyes and returned to the craft after trudging back up the short dock to untie the vessel and jump aboard across the widening stretch of water. The jump wasn’t so good this time and he had to scramble to get in, but he made it, and the barge began chugging away from the dock and out into the deeper water to head west and south to Fairholm.
While the trucker was checking on the straps he’d used to secure the car to the flatbed, and Strother and Ridenour were arguing between them, I took the opportunity to climb up on the bed of the truck and look into the remains of the car.
A skull, some dying fish, and a litter of bones floated in a puddle trapped on the floorboards. Ridenour shouted as he noticed me leaning in through the broken driver’s window.
“Hey! Get out of there, Miss Blaine! It’s not safe.”
I turned back to shout over my shoulder at him, but I didn’t leave the car. “There’s a skeleton in here.” I looked back into the car and saw something gleaming green and gold through layers of Grey in the back footwell. “And some other things on the floor.” Besides water, the car seemed to leak a Grey mist. I wanted to take a closer look, but now was probably not the best time to try it, with tempers running a bit high and the hour growing late.
Ridenour and Strother both scrambled up to join me while the driver protested that they were keeping him from leaving. They told him to wait while they shoved up beside me to take a look.
Strother looked a little green as he spotted the skull, sticky with bits of soapy flesh still sticking to it here and there.
Ridenour shook his head in annoyance. “Damn it, now there’ll be a bunch of damned investigators up here, making a mess in my park.”
“Any idea whose car this is?” I asked. I knew exactly whose, since the license plate currently sitting on the desk in my hotel room matched the plate barely clinging to the front bumper. The whole front end had been folded into a V by impact with something I assumed was the cedar tree I’d first seen the ghostly car burning under, but I wasn’t going to hand over that information. Someone might or might not figure out the tree connection, but as far as I was concerned, the most important thing was done: Leung’s disappearance and death would now be investigated by someone. I just had to make sure whoever had hidden it in the first place didn’t have power enough to bring the investigation to a halt.
Ridenour and Strother both backed up and began looking the car over until Strother shrugged and Ridenour scowled. “That’s Steve Leung’s car. I haven’t seen or heard from him in . . . must be five years. I wonder—”
“I’m wondering the same thing,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s unlikely that the skeleton found in a missing man’s car would be anyone other than the missing man?”
Ridenour’s expression went darker. “He could have killed someone, and then have run off and hid. . . .”
I gave him a doubtful look. “Do you really think so? Do you think a man in his sixties is going to just dash off and leave a body in the lake?”
“No, I don’t guess so.... Hey, how would you know how old Leung is?”
“He’s one of the guys I was looking for while I was up here. But I didn’t find him and no one knew where or when he’d gone. He didn’t change his address with the post office or the people who send him his retirement checks. Looks like I’ve found him now.”
“Hell,” Ridenour swore. “I guess I’ll have to go talk to Jewel.”
“Is that one of his daughters?” I asked. I knew but couldn’t let on.
“Yeah. Why were you looking for him, anyway?”
“I’d rather discuss that with his daughters.”
“Well, you won’t have any luck catching up to Willow—no one from law enforcement’s been able to catch her in years.” Ridenour’s tone was pointed and bitter.
“So she’s a troublemaker?” I asked, making a mental note of the name—Shea had called her “Willa,” and I now assumed that was just his accent in play, not her actual name.
Strother made a wry face and answered before Ridenour could. “Bit more than that. County and city both have standing warrants on Miss Leung for various violent and property crimes. So far, no one’s had any luck bringing her in on any of them.”
I’d have to find a way to get to her, even though every local authority had failed. What fun. But I said, “I guess I’ll just have to go with Ridenour to see the other sister.”