He rolled his eyes and buckled up. “We have to get up to the old watchtower on Pyramid Mountain. Road’s pretty rough, and it’ll take about fifteen or twenty minutes. Hang on and pray we catch her.”
The pickup lurched and leapt along the road and out onto the highway. Ridenour pointed it northeast toward Lake Crescent. I thought now was the time to ask a few questions, while the road was still smooth.
“What’s Willow doing at a park service greenhouse?” I asked.
“Forestry service and I have no idea. Maybe checking on something she put there herself. Forestry has a few greenhouses scattered around on the ridges to grow native plants for replanting in slide areas and where we’ve had to do redevelopment and construction. That way we anchor the soil and get the ecology back on track faster. But none of us check up on them frequently in the winter and one extra planter full of something might not be noticed. I wouldn’t put it past Willow to plant something illegal or dangerous and not worry too much about the consequences.”
“So you trust your tipster to have steered you right? It sounds like those greenhouses would make a pretty good spot for an ambush.”
Ridenour snorted. “Willow is dangerous and crazy, and there’s no love lost between us, but I can’t imagine she’d go out of her way to try to kill me.”
“That’s not quite what I meant. . . .”
He turned the truck sharply off the highway and onto the road that led to Fairholm where the barge was kept. I could see it tied up at the dock as the road rose a bit and turned to the west, toward the ocean and Pyramid Mountain. And there was the same bright array of energy lines that sprang out of the water and headed south toward the hot springs. It was just as it had been on Sunday, just as I’d seen it near the springs.
Ridenour interrupted my thoughts. “I’m not much for guessing what people aren’t saying, so whatever you’re thinking, you’d better spit it out.”
“I’d imagine everyone around here knows you’re pretty hot to catch Willow. What if one of them wanted to get you out of the way? Telling you Willow is someplace isolated and dangerous where you might nab her seems to get you moving pretty fast.”
Ridenour made a growling noise. “Now you’re assuming I’ve got enemies around here who’d like to see me dead. You have one hell of an imagination, Miss Blaine. Mostly we’re all pretty friendly up here.”
I reserved judgment on that. I’d garnered the impression that the Newmans weren’t great friends of Ridenour’s, and certainly Strother didn’t think as well of him as Ridenour might imagine. According to Strother, the Newmans didn’t get along with their lakeshore neighbor Elias Costigan, and no one seemed to trust Willow Leung, who probably returned the sentiment in spades. Even if Jewel Newman hadn’t said so, the strange things I’d already seen around the lake had convinced me there were other magic workers in the area. It was a safe bet there were rivalries and grudges galore between them, and I knew they’d be downright thrilled if Ranger Ridenour stopped keeping such a close eye on “his” park and let them get on with their casting and calling without needing to be discreet and sneaky about it. Not that any of them seemed overly concerned with being sussed out, so far as I could see. The lack of population gave them a fairly open field most of the winter.
Ridenour changed the subject. “So what the hell did you think you’d seen out at the springs to make you go wandering round like a pie-eyed idiot?”
“I’m really not sure,” I replied. “It’s a little strange out there, if you don’t mind my saying so, and once I was walking around, the place seemed a little spooky. It doesn’t have a reputation for being haunted or anything, does it?” The weird effects of the energy lines I’d seen could just as easily be written off to some generic ghost story as to magic, though I knew the difference.
Ridenour turned the truck onto a dirt road that headed up the steep slopes that ringed the west side of Lake Crescent, and I had to hold on to the armrest as the surface got rougher.
“Not haunted as such, though you could say it’s got its share of spirits. Used to be a fancy resort there in the early nineteen hundreds. It burned down after a couple of years and then it was just a ruin for a while. Then it was rebuilt and the water went bad. The new buildings were built in the seventies and the filter problems were fixed, so it’s been back in seasonal business since. Before that, the hot springs used to be a special place for the local Indians—maybe that’s why the resorts have always had such hard luck there. People claim to see all sorts of crazy stuff out that way: Indian ghosts, walking trees, lightning fish—”
I interrupted him, puzzled. “What’s a lightning fish?”
“Sort of a Native American dragon,” he said, not slackening the truck’s pace much over the rutted dirt track. “They fly around in the clouds and spit lightning during storms. The Quileute claim the red fulgurites that show up in the ground at the site of lightning strikes are bits of the lightning fish’s tongue. They also say the hot springs are made of the tears of two lightning fish who fought over which one owned the mountains and lakes here. They battled for days on end, tearing off each other’s skin that dropped to earth to make the tree ridges, but neither one could win, so they hid in caves under the mountain in their frustration and cried hot tears that worked up through the ground. Really it’s volcanic seeps coming up through the sandstone around the springs, but, hey, that’s nowhere near as entertaining a story.
“Anyway, related geologic phenomena are what makes the nitrogen level in Lake Crescent so low—that’s what keeps it so clear and colorful. It’s also the reason animal remains that sink to the bottom saponify and float back up sometimes. The Indians claimed that white whales would swim into the lake once in a while through an underground river from the ocean, but I think it was probably dead elk or bears resurfacing. People imagine a lot of wild things when they don’t know the real cause.”
I gave a show of thinking it over. “The soap bodies I can sort of understand. But do people really think they see lightning fish flying around?” Had I seen one during the night? I remembered a shadowshape in the wind that looked like a flying lizard, but maybe that had been my imagination....
We were jouncing around a little more violently as the road dipped and rolled over the ridges, climbing toward the top of the triangular mountain that overlooked Lake Crescent from the west. I thought I spied a building on stilts ahead, but it was hard to get a look as the pickup lurched along.
Ridenour huffed. “When there’s a storm, some of them do. People can get a little cabin-crazy up here during the winter. It’s not so bad at the lake elevation, but it’s a lot worse when you get up in the snow line around Hurricane Ridge and the tops of the mountains here, like this one.”
“How about the walking trees?”
“You’d be surprised what some people think they’ve seen when they’ve been indulging in various substances. We get plenty of folks up here who seem to think nature is less scary with the application of medicinal herbs and alcohol. And there’s always someone willing to supply it,” he added in a grim undertone.
“Maybe Willow Leung?”
“I’m hoping not, but we’ll have to see what she’s up to with the greenhouse.”
He spun the truck onto an even smaller dirt track that cut away at an angle to the mountaintop, keeping us hidden from the crest. Ridenour pulled the pickup under a stand of trees and set the hand brake. He was panting a little as he turned to me. “You should probably stay here with the truck—it’ll be safer.”
I shook my head. “I’d rather come along. Besides, if you need backup, I’ll be right there, not way out here.”
He looked me over. “Strother said you’ve got a hell of a rep with the Seattle PD.”