I kept on walking toward the steps that went up to the door. “Hello,” I called out. “Ranger Ridenour sent me down to talk to Mrs. Newman.”
I went up the steps, keeping my eyes on the man with the rifle. I wanted to put my hand in my pocket to keep the ferret from doing something that might upset him, but I didn’t think he’d like it if I hid my hands suddenly. As I got closer I could see him better in spite of the backlighting: He was about my height, middle-aged, judging by his posture, a little stocky. . . . Details were still hard to see with the bright electric light behind him, but when I reached the open doorway, I realized he was black and wearing dark clothes. Clallam County was so overwhelmingly Caucasian that it was almost startling to see him.
I nodded and offered my hand. “My name’s Harper Blaine. I’m a private investigator and I’d like to speak with Mrs. Newman.”
The man put the rifle down just inside the doorway. He looked me over but didn’t take my hand. “What do you want with my wife?”
“It’s about her father.”
Newman crossed his arms over his chest. His energy corona was a dull, unhealthy olive green fired with jagged bolts of frustrated orange. “What about him?” He clearly wasn’t going to let me in without more information—if he let me in at all.
“Mr. Newman, you may have noticed some activity down on the lake this afternoon, just a hundred yards or so down the shore.”
“We certainly did. Jewel’s been agitated ever since. She’s sick and she doesn’t need any more upsets today, so if you’ve come to make any more trouble, you can go back where you came from right now.” The orange sparks around his head went red as he glared at me.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Newman, but I’m afraid I may need to upset her further. The car they removed from the lake was her father’s. I can go away and let Mr. Ridenour come speak to your wife tomorrow if you prefer, but I don’t think he’ll be any easier on her. He’s currently pursuing her sister and he doesn’t seem to have a very positive attitude about the family.”
Newman snorted. “That’s the truth. But you won’t be coming up here and upsetting her, either. Whatever’s happened to that old car, it’s nothing to do with Jewel.”
“Mr. Newman, there’s a body in the car.”
“Well, it hasn’t got anything to do with us.” Everything about him seemed to darken and pull in.
Distantly, a noise moved through the house and a weak voice tried to call out, but the words were too hard to hear. I could see something that sparkled with magic skitter across the floor of the open second-story balcony and down the stairs on my right. Whatever it was died out as it got halfway down. A rhythmic thumping started. I could tell from the slight tightening at the corners of his eyes that Newman heard it; he just refused to acknowledge it in front of me.
I tried again, this time leaning a little on the Grey to persuade him. “Mr. Newman, I really think your wife will prefer to hear this from me. I know a few things about what happened to your father-in-law that Ridenour doesn’t.”
He frowned, considering. I think he still would have slammed the door in my face, but the thumping had grown closer and now the voice called out again, strong enough to make itself heard and shivering with the sound of power. “Geoff, let the woman in.”
Geoff Newman snorted in disgust, but he stepped back and let me enter the house.
From the entry, the living room’s two stories of glass windows flooded the room with the light of late afternoon. It was gray with thin streaks of pink today as the clouds broke, but it would have been spectacular in summer sunshine with the colors of the lake reflecting onto the white and scrubbed-wood walls. But as arresting as the view was, the woman on the staircase landing was far more commanding.
Given her family name, I had expected her to be purely Chinese, but one of her parents plainly hadn’t been. She was only slightly lighter-skinned than her husband and wore a vintage silk housedress that made her look like an image from some other time and place. She wasn’t tall or beautiful; her posture was stooped and broken far beyond mere age, and she held herself steady with two heavily carved canes. Her face was broad and dark, lines of pain destroying the oncegraceful arch of her brow and obscuring the tilt of her eyes. No, she wasn’t pretty and probably never had been more than “exotic” with her Asian features in dark brown skin, but a dim nimbus of energy strands in blue, green, yellow, and red reached out from her in every direction, touching a million things, even though the power of each strand individually was weak. She coughed like someone who’d smoked two packs a day since age five, and the energy around her retracted for a moment, pulling back into her as if it sought to keep her going just a little longer.
Then she caught her breath again, a glow of sweat on her face, and looked down at me and her husband. “Come up,” was all she said, her voice quiet, but as it rode down to us on the amplifying effect of magic, we had no difficulty hearing her. Then she turned around, lurching in a pain-wracked half circle, and went away, her canes thumping on the hardwood floors as she vanished into the upstairs hall.
I stepped inside, watching her disappear. I felt as if I’d walked through a net of electricity, sensing the persistent pulse of her power in the very walls of the house. The energy the building had seemed to soak up from the lake was plainly the source of some magic of hers.
Newman huffed and closed the door behind me. “You can follow me,” he said, orange and red sparks jumping from him in the Grey.
He led me up the stairs on the right, though now that I was inside, I could see there was a second staircase to the left that led up to the open gallery running across the otherwise-open vault of the living room. A closed hall at each end led to private rooms that gave off the dull, cold radiation of emptiness. The house had been designed for a lot of people, but it housed only two.
“Don’t get the impression I’m in favor of this,” Newman warned me as he started up the stairs, ignoring the heavy rail of a chairlift installed on the staircase’s back wall. “Whatever you’ve got to say, you’d best say it quick and get out. I don’t want you upsetting Jewel any further. She adored Steven. Don’t you believe anyone who says otherwise. Especially not Ridenour. That is one angry, bitter man, and you can’t trust a word he says.”
I raised my eyebrows, but I didn’t say anything. Newman cast a hard look at me as we reached the top of the steps. “Are you listening to me?”
“I am. But so far you haven’t said anything.”
“You have a fast mouth.”
I just used my fast mouth to smile at him.
He snorted again and led me down the hall to a door that stood ajar on the left—the water-facing side of the house. He tapped on the door and said his wife’s name. “You ready for us?”
Her voice came back, much softer this time than before. “Come in, Geoff. Ask our visitor to wait.”
Geoff looked at me and I shrugged, leaning back against the opposite wall in a show of patient nonchalance. He nodded and, for the first time, he didn’t scowl. The spiking energy around his head dimmed and he entered the room, taking care to block my view and close the door completely once he was inside. I loafed in the hall, watching the play of strange energy along the floors and shooting at random through the open spaces. It was a lot like what I’d seen on the shore outside the ranger station farther down the lake. I wondered whether it was the standard configuration of magic here, or if there was something special about the places where I’d spotted it so far. A few of the strands crawled toward me and started to curl around my body, stroking at me like the tentacles of a curious octopus. That, I thought, was not normal, so I caught one between my fingers, taking a cold electric shock for my pains, and flicked it away before I bent an edge of the Grey around me, making a thin, silvery barrier between me and the sneaking strings of energy. They pulled away with a jerk and disappeared into the walls.