“Sounds like the back of your truck,” Quinton interrupted, “only wet.”
That gave me pause. The house was neat, orderly, and prepared for a stint of bad weather—if we’d had some gasoline, we could have had the generator running, which would have given us plenty of power to run the water heater as well as the lights. If the propane tank hadn’t been empty, we’d have had heat, a working stove, and a refrigerator, all without main power or a gas line. I’d assumed the house had been cleaned and closed up, but Leung’s clothes were still in one of the closets and the shotgun hadn’t been locked up, but left standing beside the kitchen door in case of aggressive wildlife. Except for removing the gas cans that must have been around and having the propane tank drained and purged, Geoff Newman hadn’t done anything to the house but shutter it up and lock it. Leung hadn’t been a hoarder; he’d been ready.
“It is like my truck. He carried things he thought he might need if he got stranded or in trouble. He even had his old surveyor’s transit. I’ll bet these are the things he packed when he was still working and didn’t see any reason to remove them once he retired.”
“So you need to concentrate on what doesn’t fit—if anything.”
I read through the list again. “This is strange. Even ignoring the dead fish and soda bottles, there are some odd things in this collection. The weirdest has to be the extra finger.”
“That’s a little gruesome. Where’d that come from?”
“From a grave,” I thought aloud, remembering the petty, squabbling dead of Tragedy Graveyard.
“A zombie was in the car?”
“I don’t think so. I think someone laid a spell for Leung in his car. I don’t know what it did, but that’s my guess.”
“A spell?” Quinton frowned. “Mara doesn’t need bones to cast a spell.”
“Not the kind she does, no. But not all magical systems operate the same way. Mara was telling me that one of our mages out here might be using hoodoo, or something akin to it, and that practice definitely does use bones. I’d guess anything involving a human finger isn’t a nice thing. The rest of the spell has washed away by now, so no telling what it was. What else doesn’t fit?” I wondered aloud, reading the page yet again. “A rock, a pair of lineman’s pliers, a screwdriver . . .”
“Aside from the rock, those don’t sound too odd.”
I looked up. “According to the list, Leung had a complete tool kit in the back. He didn’t need to have an additional screwdriver and pliers in the front seat. He certainly wasn’t fixing anything while he was driving. Besides those, there’s this stone—some kind of quartz and it weighs eighteen pounds.”
“Wow. Maybe that’s your anchor.”
“Maybe, but what was Leung doing with it? The dead near Costigan’s house said Leung had been killed for the anchor—or because of it. Jewel said . . . her father was going to do something about the lake.... Whatever he was doing, he either didn’t do it right or he never finished.”
“Not before someone killed him.”
“But if the rock is the anchor, then the anchor was in the lake. Why didn’t that fix the problem?”
“Anchors don’t do much good if they aren’t set,” Quinton said. “Maybe he hadn’t put it in the right place.”
“But why would his killer risk putting the anchor back into the lake at all? The problem here seems to have started in 1989 when the magic got wild. The only person who wants to shut that off is Jewel Newman, and if she’d killed her father for it, she’d have made sure the anchor got replaced properly. The others benefit only so long as the anchor is out of place. I can’t see why one of them would risk shutting off the power by throwing the anchor stone back into the lake at all.”
“What if they didn’t know?”
“You’re suggesting an ignorant mage.”
“At least one of them is self-taught. Which is sometimes the same as mud-ignorant.”
“I don’t think Willow killed her father.”
“Then it must be the mysterious number five.”
I sighed and sipped the weak tea Quinton had made by warming up cups of water on top of the Franklin stove. “I still have no idea who that is. Or if it’s the rogue or the child. I can figure out the nexus and the puppeteer—that’s Jewel Newman and Elias Costigan. I know the east must have been Jonah Leung or Willow’s mother, because they’re both dead. Willow could be the child, but she could also be the rogue.”
“Think about it from the ley weaver’s viewpoint. They’re his terms, so the titles are based on his ideas.”
“Which is something I can’t begin to fathom. And it’s not helping.”
“Then leave it for now and we’ll need to attack a different part of the problem. What’s on the last sheet of paper?”
“It’s Alan Strother’s car log for the day he died. It shows the locations and times where his car stopped. For most of these, I can tell whom he went to see by looking up the residents on the other list. I also see when he clocked back in, how long he was out of the car—that sort of thing. But there are these holes. . . .”
“So he checked out the houses on the list and then what?”
“He drove around. Back and forth a few times. It didn’t make a lot of sense and I’m still trying to figure out the pattern.”
“Who’s still on your list to talk to?”
“Almost all of them. And now I want another look at that rock, too.”
“I guess we’re driving back to Port Angeles, then.”
Faith was curious about why we wanted to look at the rock. “It’s not some kind of precious stone. It’s just a rock. Probably fell into the car when it sank.” But he pulled out the box of personal effects that weren’t too rotted to touch and let us have a look anyway. He did insist on our wearing gloves when we handled the stuff, though. Just in case.
Out of the water, the objects no longer exuded a Grey mist. Most were so inert, they looked like shapeless blanks in my sight—but not the rock. It glowed green and gold with something burning in its core like a banked fire, and it whined and whispered like distant radio signals. If it wasn’t the anchor, it was something equally magical. Quinton looked at the rock while I talked to Faith.
“Not much to go on,” I commented, stirring the smaller items with my gloved fingers. “Screwdriver and pliers are interesting. . . .”
“We’re thinking whoever sabotaged his brakes and fuel line left them—they don’t match the set in the back,” Faith said, confirming my belief that he was no fool. “It’s too damn bad they’ve been down there so long that we’ve got no viable traces on them. The cold water preserved a lot more than we could have hoped for, but it’s still pretty slim pickings.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. I could see Quinton rummaging in his backpack, but I ignored him for now and did my best to keep Faith’s attention off him, too.
“So are we all. What do you make of this stuff?”
“Not a lot, I have to admit. Looks as though he was prepared for any contingency except being murdered and dumped in the lake.”
“Yeah, Leung was a careful guy, but he was a little superstitious, from what I’ve picked up. Believed in demons, I’m told—Chinese demons, that is, the sort who can’t turn corners and are afraid of the color yellow. You know he always wore something yellow or red?” He nodded to himself. “That’s what I’m told.”
“It must have made him easy to see in the brush.”
“Don’t know about that. Never went hunting with the man. Judging by the rifle, though, he wasn’t averse to it. Some folks think it’s cruel, but round here it can be the difference between making it and going on welfare.”
Quinton held up a meter of some kind with a couple of probes hanging off it. “Do you mind if I test this crystal?”
Faith gave him an odd look. “What sort of test?”
“I just want to see if it’s holding an electric charge.”
“It’s been underwater for a while.”