I returned to the ranger station and interrupted an intense staring contest. Neither man spoke, but their expressions indicated an unpleasant topic had been cut off in midsnipe. They weren’t going to pick it back up in front of me, so I went ahead and announced that the barge was passing the point.
Ridenour jumped up from the desk, cutting his gaze away from Strother’s with a sharp twist of his head. “Well, then, we should go up to the north shore and keep an eye on them.”
Strother lowered his inquisitive eyebrows into a scowl. “I should stay here and wait for the truck.”
Ridenour returned the annoyed expression, but he couldn’t argue much since he’d been the one to insist on sending the truck the long way. “All right. You coming or staying, Miss Blaine?”
I was a little conflicted. On the one hand I wanted to be as close to the action as I could; but I’d need to be here when the barge unloaded the car—that would be the best chance I’d have to get an upclose look at it and what might be inside. But I didn’t need to watch the preliminaries and I wanted to talk to Strother without Ridenour’s overbearing presence, so I said, “I need to use the ladies’ room. I’ll follow you up in a minute.”
Ridenour looked slightly appalled, but he shrugged and went out. I held Chaos out to Strother. “Would you hold on to her for a moment? She likes to eat soap, so I don’t want to take her with me.”
Strother looked a little nervous, but he took the ferret in both hands. Chaos sniffed him and flicked her whiskers. “She doesn’t bite,” I said, handing over the leash as well. “She’s very friendly. Just don’t let her get near your pant cuffs.”
I went out to the restroom and returned in a few minutes to see Strother tickling Chaos’s belly and trying to wrestle a pencil away from her at the same time. The ferret was adamant about keeping the pencil, but she wiggled around on her back on the desk, her head going one way and her butt going the other. She didn’t growl or squeak, because ferrets don’t, but she would have if she’d thought of it. She seemed to be having a good time playing with the deputy.
“You guys doing OK?” I asked.
Strother looked over his shoulder and Chaos took the opportunity of his distraction to hop onto all four feet and try to yank the pencil from his grip.
“Hey,” Strother replied. “She sure is feisty.”
“That’s her stock-in-trade. There’s not a lot of back-down in a ferret.” And there didn’t seem to be much in park rangers or deputy sheriffs, either.
He nodded, twitching the pencil out of her mouth as soon as she tried to get a better grip. Chaos launched into a weasel war dance hopping all over the empty desktop, waving her open mouth and showing off her tiny fangs. Strother laughed. “Damn, got some muscle there. She’s a lot tougher than she looks, too.”
I just smiled and picked the ferret up from the desk. She wiggled around in my hand for a moment, then resigned herself to having lost her pencil and scrambled up onto my shoulder to get a better view. “What did I interrupt?” I asked, keeping my eyes off him.
“It’s a personal matter,” Strother said, glancing around before looking at me again. “So, is it true you found this car in the first place? Ridenour said some investigator found it.”
“That’s me. I don’t know that I’m the first person to see the car in the lake, but I’m the first to have reported it. I didn’t mention this to Ridenour, but I suspect the car might belong to a man who disappeared a few years ago. There’s no missing person report, but he’s definitely not where he ought to be and no one seems to know where he is.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell the ranger that? This is his territory.”
“He seems a little biased. And proprietary. I’m afraid he might not be entirely honest with me about the people and situation up here if I asked.”
“I can understand that impression. He’s got the park’s welfare to think of and sometimes he does . . . uh . . . take things a bit personally.”
I nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. So I’d like to get a look at the car when it comes up, before it gets into the yard where things might be tampered with. Ridenour might not like that. Will you help me get a look at it when they bring it back to unload?”
Strother gave it some thought. “I don’t see any harm in it, so long as you don’t touch anything. But you see anything odd, you sing out. Hard enough trying to juggle the paperwork on this multijurisdiction crap without any cross-agency accusations of incompetence down the road.”
I smiled at him. Strother was young, but he wasn’t a fool, even if he didn’t do much to dispel that initial impression. “I’ll do that.”
We shook hands on it and I went out to my truck to drive up and join Ridenour while Strother stayed behind, waiting for the truck. I envied him the quaint little ranger station—it wasn’t warm, but being there was more comfortable than standing on the frost-hardened shore was going to be.
Ridenour had gone back to the spot I’d taken him to before and I joined him, walking down once again from parking my truck next to the road. The pools of yellow and blue light were back, glowing like something radioactive in an old science fiction film. But though the energy was back, no ghosts had returned to the spot where Jin had squatted to raise the truck.
When I reached the edge of the water, the barge crew was already firing up the dredging crane and trying to maneuver into position to grab the car. They seemed efficient, and I imagined the cold was spurring them to get the job over with as quickly as possible, but it still took quite a while to get the barge and crane aligned to someone’s liking. Ridenour, standing back from the water’s edge, kept his words to himself, but I could see his jaw clenching and unclenching as he watched.
The clawlike extension on the crane arm descended, but the car was a weird shape for the tool and they only ended up pushing the wreck deeper into the water. We could hear the cursing from the barge as the crew repositioned to try again. Eventually, a small boat with an outboard engine cast off from the barge with a man in heavy-duty dry gear towing a hook and cable out from the crane. He got up close to the car and reached out to catch the hook on the nearest bit of doorframe. He had to stick his legs through some straps on the opposite edge of the boat and let the outboard engine act as a counterweight while he leaned out to get the hook seated a little more securely.
The small boat tipped up as if it were going to spill the man into the lake, but he didn’t quite go far enough, and he righted himself before turning back to wave at the crew on the barge. Then he steered the workboat to the side about twenty feet.
Once the smaller boat was out of the way, the crew reeled up the hook until the slack was gone and the car had begun to rise off the slippery bottom. The car turned and rolled a little as it came free, dragging along the gravelly slope for a few feet, and then stopped. The man in the small boat came in close again and motioned the crane operator to let the car down a little. As the cable slowly lowered and slackened, the car settled and stood still. It took several tries to get the hook on and the car moved into a position that pleased everyone. Ridenour plainly found it tedious.
I mostly noticed the cold, some of which had nothing to do with the ice on the ground. The edge of the lake had the same weird silver covering in the Grey up here, and the colorful balls of errant energy stung me when they hit, like small electrical shocks to my already-sore belly. I spent a lot of that time on the shore biting my lip and holding back from wincing.
Finally the barge crew members were satisfied with the disposition of hook and car and began to reel in the cable. This time the car came straight out of the water as the cable was taken up. Once the barge crew raised the car a little and saw it was stable, the man in the dry suit returned the workboat to the barge. When he was safely aboard and the smaller boat secured to the back of the barge, the crew lowered the claw again. This time it grabbed onto the misshapen car, the lower jaw sliding under while the upper bore down. The metal of the waterlogged Subaru groaned as the claw closed up and the crane began retracting. As the car rose, water poured out of it. Even with the gush of water, anyone could see the crushed front end and burnscarred metal, but to me the lake seemed to be reaching up, trying to keep hold of the vehicle with a web of ice blue and moss green energy that clung to the car as it rose.