Hannah and Dylan smiled. Ethan frowned. "You made him go away.”
"Maybe. Sometimes they just go away on their own," I replied. I wasn't sure how I knew that. Guessing? Or dredging something up from memories I'd buried a long time ago?
Ethan would have said something more if his mother hadn't given him a swat on the backside. "Don't be rude. Now head upstairs. Go see Daddy!”
The kids scampered toward the elevator.
Patricia looked at me with a spooked expression.
"Do you need a lift to the funeral?" I asked.
She took a step back from me. "No. I'm not going. I can't get a babysitter and I can't just leave them with their father." She shook her head and kept backing. "And I don't want to see you here again. I don't want you near my kids again." Then she turned and bolted after her children, catching up to them and pushing them toward the elevator, fear boiling off her in anxious orange clouds.
As she ran away, I could see her strand of yellow energy turn a dull ash color, knotting on itself and vanishing through the buildings toward wherever Celia had fled. Before the elevator doors closed between us, it snapped and fell away like a burned branch collapsing into broken coals and cinders.
I let myself out, heading back for my office, and found myself laughing, aching gusts of amusement that brought tears to my eyes. If Patricia could have seen me, I imagined it would have confirmed her apparent opinion of my threat level.
Now I knew how this Grey time thing worked, but I needed an area with more history and mess to practice in. I could think of no place better suited than the messy historic district. And no one would be too surprised by a person acting a bit odd there; I'd have plenty of company.
Back in Pioneer Square, I saw what I'd expected to see: the Grey, streaked with glimmering layers of history, sheet-thin sections of time riven with sudden cracks and upheavals like sedimentary rocks pitched to the surface by a massive earthquake. Knowing what to look for and how deep into the Grey, I could spot tracks, shards, and loops of time scattered and strewn over the broken landscape of the Grey, each disordered slice or spire spinning out a ghost image or a pall of sensation. When I moved near them I felt the same prickling on my skin I'd felt near Celia, rather like the feeling of shaving with a dulled razor.
It was noon on a Saturday and Pioneer Square was moderately busy with locals. I was destined to look like a freak of some kind with this experiment, so I didn't worry about which kind. I turned in at the alley near my office building. Sinking into the Grey, I moved near one of the zones of heavy time striation and ran my hand along what seemed to be the edge. I felt it prickle and rime a cold flutter against my palm.
Back when I first met the Danzigers, Albert had led me through a tunnel open only in another time. I had done it by accident then. I could do it again on purpose. I didn't try to push them this time; I just nudged the layers of time sideways, letting them tip and looking at them as they slid over each other, flickering silver images of history in the cold mist and hot neon of the Grey. When I found one that looked empty and different, I concentrated on holding it and let myself slip.
The sickening pitch of sudden movement through the Grey made me retch. I hadn't experienced that sensation in quite a while and I didn't like the reminder. With an abrupt jerk, I staggered to a stop— though I hadn't moved in space. Swallowing back a rush of bile, I looked around. The soft orange of my office building's terra-cotta walls was gone and a building of wood and shingle stood in its place. Across the brick street another wooden building bustled with business where my parking garage normally stood. I stepped to the door that led to the nearest building and tried to open it. It resisted my efforts and I had to concentrate very hard on moving it. At last, it swung aside and I went through.
It was difficult to do anything in this shadow of the past. Everything resisted my attempts to move it—Carlos had said the past resisted bending. I found it easier to wait for someone else to open a door and slide through behind the oblivious memory of the person than to try and wrestle the doors myself. The shades demonstrated a wide range of consciousness. Some saw me and treated me as if I were like them; others didn't see me at all. A very small handful saw me, but seemed aloof or upset by my presence, and some of those tried to talk to me or touch me. I shook them off and looked for a way out of this plane of time—this temporacline?
It was much harder to spot the layers and shards of time from inside one but I caught the cold eddy of one's edge and tilted it, sliding again toward something. I felt several forces tugging at me, like currents, and headed for the strongest, jolting back to the alley behind my building and out of the Grey. That wasn't quite what Id wanted, so I tried again, sinking into the Grey, searching for the corrugated ripples of time planes. Again I found them, but I studied them more this time, looking for something specific.
I finally found one with no building in front of me and pushed it aside, then slid with the same sickening sensation of vertigo. This time, mudflats dropped away beneath me and for a moment I hung in the air at the street level of my own time. A sense of panic rescued me and I scrambled back to a more built-up time. I didn't want to risk falling to the original mudflats and then trying to reemerge in a building that sat twelve feet higher. But I stayed in the Grey this time. No sudden dump back into the normal.
At last I pushed it back and leaned against the alley wall, catching my breath. I felt as if I'd just completed a heavy workout. Glancing at my watch, I cursed. I had twenty minutes to get to Lake View Cemetery.
CHAPTER 26
The cloud cover was solid and lowering but still not a drop of rain had fallen. The expectant chill was perfect for a funeral. When I arrived, the service had already started. The crowd was large and I spotted a lot of familiar faces: Phoebe and the staff from Old Possums; most of the poltergeist crew; Amanda; and a cluster of people so blank and worn with grief and shock that they had to be Mark's family. I also saw a large hot spot of yellow energy hovering over the crowd like a poisonous storm waiting to break.
Following the threads of yellow from the mass, I spotted each of the séance members: Ken and Ana; Ian several feet behind them, bleak-faced; Wayne with his arm around Frankie's shoulders as she sniffled; Tuckman near Marks parents; Terry alone. No sign of the Stahlqvists or Patricia Railsback. As I picked them all out, I noted one more face: Detective Solis. He was staying to the back where the rolling ground rose a little. I worked my way around toward him, thinking that the presence of Celia at the funeral further ruled out either of the Stahlqvists as the killer—I expected to find the entity cleaving to its master.
I stopped next to Solis. He didn't look directly at me, but cut me a glance from the corner of his eye and inclined his head a little. "Still working?”
"I knew Mark," I replied in a quiet voice.
"Yes. Not, I assume, so well as Cara Stahlqvist knew him.”
"No. And I noticed she's not here, so you don't think she's the murderer.”
"She's an interesting piece of the puzzle.”
"In what way?”
"This case turns on a woman and her lovers—those she accepted and those she rejected. We confirmed Mrs. Stahlqvist's affair with Lupoldi and the information you gave us about the brooch—very dramatic. She preferred to make the advances—to choose rather than be chosen—she rebuffed others even though her relationship with Lupoldi was stormy.”
"Others?" I asked.
He jerked his head toward the cluster of Tuckman's youngest subjects. "The usual sexual stupidity.”
I wondered which of them he meant—if not all three. Cara's interests didn't seem to lie with women, so that let Ana out. But I recalled Ian's attention to her bustline and Ken's sudden bitter tone at her name. All three had been hurt in the séance, but Ana least. Was the woman at the center the killer or the cause?