“A car?” Ridenour questioned, half frowning and half smiling. “There aren’t too many places in the lake where a car would be visible if someone were fool enough to drive one in. It’s pretty deep out there.”
“So I hear, but there certainly is a car up near the northeast shore, about a hundred feet off East Beach Road.”
“Seriously?”
I nodded. “Yes. Bit of a lonely stretch just west of where the lake comes to a point behind that big house . . .”
“East Beach. Well . . . yeah, I suppose that’s about the one place a car wouldn’t just sink all the way to Hades out there. That’s an old landslide area; filled in part of the valley about eight thousand years ago and formed the two lakes here. The rest of it’s all glacial and deep as hell. I wonder what cabin-crazy son of a bitch drove his damned car into my lake.”
I made a clueless face and shrugged. “No idea.”
“You didn’t scare someone into the lake, now, did you, Miss Blaine?”
“Hell no. I was just looking for my witness and someone said he might be farther out along the shoreline. I got a little lost and ended up going down the wrong tiny dirt road.” I’m not too proud to make myself out to be a fool if it serves my purpose. “I got down to the end, realized I was in the wrong place, and got out of my truck to see if I could turn around or if I’d have to back out. And there’s a car in the water—just under the water, really, but, as you said, the water’s so clear that you can see down a long way. This isn’t even down more than two feet on the highest bit.”
Ridenour’s frown deepened. “Huh,” he grunted, staring into the distance. “I guess you’d better come show me, if you think your ferret’s all right now.”
“She’s dry enough to warm up on her own now.” I handed him the damp towel and he returned my wet scarf. “Thanks.”
He opened the door and we left the hatchery, heading for our respective trucks. “Do you need to take that critter home first?”
“No, I’m staying at a hotel in Port Angeles tonight. I have her cage in my truck and it’s warm enough. She’ll go to sleep no matter where she is—kind of like a kid.”
Ridenour’s stride faltered and for a second his face paled; then he caught back up to me. “I’ll bring my truck around and join you by yours. Then we can both drive out to the site.”
“All right.” I’d half expected him to ask me to come with him, but something had distracted him enough that he didn’t question whether I was leading him on a snipe hunt.
I walked back across the clearing and past the ranger station to the visitors’ parking lot. Chaos was more than happy to snuggle into her dry nest and give me the cold shoulder as if her aborted attempt to be a Popsicle were my fault. I rolled my eyes at her and shut the back hatch. By the time I was in my seat, I could hear the ferret crunching away on her kibble as if swimming in icy, haunted lakes was nothing unusual for her.
Ridenour pulled up and waited for me to get my engine started and pull out ahead of him. He followed me all the way to where the dirt track down to the lake lay exposed and churned up by my abrupt departure earlier. I rolled down my window and pointed to the road. Then I drove a bit past it, to the place I’d first seen Leung, and parked the Rover so I could walk back and join Ridenour, who’d parked his own truck beside a stand of frost-burned bracken ferns on the other side. The area now seemed almost unnaturally dull and quiet, the bright Grey overlay faded to thin mist for the moment.
“This it?” he asked as I joined him.
I nodded. “Just down there. You can see I made a bit of a mess.”
“Well, I won’t cite you, this time,” he said in a forced jocular tone. “This path is supposed to be cleared up in the summer, anyway, so we have access to as much of the shoreline as possible without having to bring out the boats.” We both glanced down the track and I was relieved to see no sign of Jin. “Stick close,” said Ridenour, starting down the trail. “I heard a cougar across the lake earlier and it might still be around.”
“You mean that awful screeching sound?” I asked.
“Yeah. Some people say it sounds like a woman screaming. Me, I just think it sounds like cougars.”
I wasn’t sure if he’d made a really horrible joke or no joke at all, so I said nothing and followed him down to the water’s edge, back to the place I’d last seen Leung’s car. It was still there, just visible as the daylight began to slant onto the lake from the west, illuminating the intrusive rust color of the wrecked car in the glowing greens and blues of the lake.
Ridenour glanced toward the water, apparently not quite convinced I’d really seen a car, and did a visible flinch when he spotted it. “Jesus! ” He started forward as if he was going to jump in and swim to it, but the knowledge of how cold the water was must have stopped him at the brink. He hovered at the edge, rocking from foot to foot as if he could barely restrain himself from action but wasn’t sure which one to take.
“I’m pretty sure there’s no one in there,” I said, not sure at all, but the last thing I wanted to deal with was a ranger with hypothermia. “The car looks like it’s been in the water a while.”
He stopped his indecisive swaying and turned back to look at me, his expression mournful. “If there was someone in it, they’d be dead by now,” he said with a sad nod. “I guess all we can do is have it hauled out.”
“How are you going to do that?”
He bit his lip and frowned at the ground. When he spoke he seemed to be talking to himself more than to me. “This road’s too narrow and soft to support any truck that could pull a waterlogged car out of the drink. We’ll have to get the barge. It’s docked down at Fairholm, but it’ll take an hour or more to get it up here and then another hour and a half to haul the car on board and take it to the boat ramp where we can get it on a flatbed and out to the county yard. We’ve got about three hours of light left. Then the sun goes behind the hills and it gets darker than the inside of a grizzly out here.” He rubbed one hand through his hair. “They’re not going to like working on Sunday . . . but I can’t give ’em a choice. They’re just going to have to do it. Can’t let that sit there any longer than we can avoid—it might slide down and sink.”
“Who aren’t going to like working on Sunday?” I asked.
He stopped staring at the drowned car and turned his head to talk to me. “The boat crews don’t work weekends in the winter—usually they don’t work up here much at all this time of year. Most of ’em have other jobs in the off-season. Damn it, I wish I had a diver with a dry suit up here! I want to know if I’ve got a body in that car.” He glanced up at the sky and muttered, “Don’t let this be a goddamned crime scene. I do not need a murder in my park!” He turned his gaze back toward the lake, rubbing his hands over his face and muttering something I couldn’t quite hear, but I thought he said, “Kill you my damned self.”
I stepped closer and put my hand on Ridenour’s shoulder. “Hey, you all right?”
Ridenour jumped as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Yeah, yeah. I’m just . . . I gotta wonder what the hell a car’s doing in my lake. It doesn’t look like it drove in here recently, so . . . I have to think the worst, and I’ve already got the culprit in mind. . . .”
“Don’t start fitting someone for handcuffs. Wait until you have some real information before declaring this a major crime.” As if I could talk. So far, everything was pointing to the ghost having told the truth, and the car was evidence of murder. But it wouldn’t be reasonable of me, a stranger, to agree to Ridenour’s visions of the worst.
He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. “OK. All right. We’ll assume it’s just an abandoned car for now, but it’s got to get moved tomorrow. I’ll head back to the center and put in calls for the crew and equipment. I’ll get the county in on it so they can take the car once it’s out of the lake and then we’ll see.... Which hotel are you staying at, Miss Blaine? If I need you, can I call on you?”