“Does Willow smoke?” I asked.
The men glanced at each other, as if each sought the answer in the other’s face. “Probably not tobacco . . .” Ridenour said.
Strother’s face hardened a moment as he frowned at the ranger. Then he shook his head. “No idea. But who knows what habits she might have picked up, living rough out here?”
I suspected there was something else to it. The odor around her hadn’t been that of a smoker of any kind and she hadn’t taken a lot of the plant—only about half the small growth from the planter, which would have fit nicely in her pocket. I didn’t think she was stealing it to ease a nicotine fit. Though why steal it at all when it literally grew wild? I guessed I’d have to find her again and ask her.
“Does anything else look tampered with?” I asked, but neither Ridenour nor Strother could see anything more that had been disturbed.
I heaved a sigh and headed for the door, buttoning up my coat. “Then I guess we’re done here. I’m going to walk down and see if I can pick out Willow’s path. If I can figure out where she went, maybe we can find her again.”
“I’ll go with you,” Ridenour said. “After all, you’re no woodsman and you don’t know your way around the area.”
I gave him a hard look and leaned into it through the Grey. “You need to drive back down to the bottom and start at that end. There are two trucks here and I can’t drive either of them, since they’re official vehicles. And we need to start while the sun’s still up. I don’t want to be scrambling down that trail in the dark.”
Both men looked at me as if I’d gone insane. They argued with me for a while, but I finally talked them into heading down the mountain on their own before we lost any more light. I had a gun and some brains; if they gave me my purse, I’d also have my flashlight and other useful things. I was the obvious choice to follow the trail down since I didn’t have to drive.
And I wanted to get a better idea of how Willow had made it down the mountain. If I was lucky, I’d be able to see where she’d headed long before I got there—or either of the men did.
EIGHTEEN
I wasn’t halfway down when I wished I’d ridden back to the lake instead of hiking by myself. Surely I could have figured out where Willow was headed without having to stumble along in the brush.... There was a trail, but it was steep and treacherous with loose scree. I couldn’t see where I was headed half the time and only the fading glimmer of Willow’s energetic trail told me I was on the right path. Here and there, I lost it and had to take a recon in the Grey to find the steadily fading sign of her passage—a hint of dimming colors on the silver mist. It was also growing dark a lot faster than I’d expected and I realized I’d lost track of time. It was past noon and the winter sun was heading for the notch in the mountains before it sank into the sea. Yet another meal missed . . . For a moment, I thought I should have started carrying protein bars or some kind of snacks in my bag. Then I remembered the bears and cougars prowling in the hills and was glad I hadn’t.
I continued, hoping I would make it to the populated levels soon. After a while, I came around a switchback on the trail and suddenly had a view toward the lake. I was lower than I’d thought, with maybe thirty feet of elevation yet to lose before I’d be down on the dirt road that connected the houses and campgrounds along the northwestern shore with Fairholm on the far west and Piedmont on the north.
The trail had brought me out closer to the Piedmont end, and I found myself looking down toward the hook at the lake’s most northern end on my left and a deep, round miniature bay on my right. A delicate-looking bridge crossed the tiny bay from arm to arm. A rambling log building stood just northwest of it. I stared at the odd hole in the shoreline, thinking I knew something about it, but not quite bringing it to mind. I started walking again, knowing the information was more likely to pop into the front of my head if I didn’t work so hard at it. With only four switchbacks to go, the information came: The hole must be Devil’s Punch Bowl.
Strother had said Costigan—no fan of the Newmans—lived there. I wondered if he was a friend of Willow’s, since the trail she’d taken down the mountain seemed to end just a quarter mile from his house. And did he have anything to do with the lurching thing that had come up from the lake a week ago while I’d watched at a distance? I’d have been willing to bet he did. That made him the fourth magic flinger I’d found around the lake—if I counted whoever was making the Grey do strange things near the hot springs.
I stopped and thought about the location. Jewel’s house lay in the mouth of the dragon-shaped lake, to the east and slightly north, with Lake Sutherland farther east behind it. Turning, I could see Fairholm down to the extreme west and a couple of miles south of Devil’s Punch Bowl. The lake wasn’t actually very long from north to south and had, in effect, two north shores, the top of the dragon’s head being the more northern and eastern shore where I’d found Leung’s ghost the first time; and the dragon’s back stretching nearly level from just below my position at the back of the dragon’s head to Fairholm at the tip of the dragon’s tail on the extreme west. The only landmark on the south shore—which wasn’t very far south—was Barnes Point, where the Lake Crescent Lodge and Storm King ranger station sat, the rest of the southern shore—the dragon’s belly—being steep and mostly barren next to Highway 101 all the way to Fairholm. The bright lines that ran toward Sol Duc were barely threads seen from here, but I could tell they were pointing south, exactly as I’d expected.
Willow had said something about cardinals. At first I’d thought she meant something like the Catholic kind, but she’d also said I’d have to restore the quarters and I didn’t think that was a coin. I’d seen enough spell work in the past four years to have picked up a few principles, and one thing I knew was that the points of the compass—the four cardinal directions—turned up again and again. Many traditions start ceremonies and spell casting asking for the protection and attention of the powers of nature by addressing each of the directions; it’s called “calling the quarters.”
I sank into the Grey, past the level where the seeping puddles of light and color lay, down as close to the humming and muttering of the grid as I dared, and looked out at the lake without the distraction of buildings and roads. I studied the lines of power that lay in the matrix of rock and water, searching for the crossing leylines that would tell me if I was right or wrong. There was the throbbing river of blue that crossed through Lake Sutherland, shooting straight from the curve of Devil’s Punch Bowl. And across it, gleaming green sparked with gold, I could see another power line. It was harder to pinpoint where this one crossed the edges of the glacial trench that contained the lake since I was looking at it from the side, but it seemed less focused and slightly crooked, like a line painted by a drunk and then walked over while it was still wet. At the tail, seemingly unconnected from the power line, but dragging it in a loop as if it were a garden hose caught on a stake, the sudden fan of energy struck out toward Sol Duc.
There was something wrong about the geography of the big power lines.... They should have connected four cardinal points by two straight lines that crossed in the middle. But they didn’t. It looked as if both lines crossed just offshore of Jewel’s house. And while the Newmans’ house and Devil’s Punch Bowl seemed to be in a straight line, that line lay imperfectly west to east, and there didn’t seem to be any anchor points for the other line that should have run north to south. It just meandered from about where Steven Leung’s car had come ashore at last to someplace near the ranger station at Storm King, then sent its lazy, looping tail off into nonsense directions that touched the cliffs, Fairholm, Pyramid Mountain, and points south and west without any pattern I could make out.