Sunday carillons and children’s shouts welcomed another fall of feathery snow outside my windows. This lot was thick enough to stick, and the rare white stuff turned the thin morning sunlight into a diffused glow suitable for the instant holiday. I rolled out of bed, shivering, and turned up the heater while I took a shower and did some stretches to loosen up my cranky knee and shoulder.
I’d stayed up too long after I’d come home, petting Chaos and thinking things I shouldn’t have, and now I was paying for it under the barrage of morning sanctity. Next time I moved, I swore I’d check for bell towers before I signed anything.
I just couldn’t get my mind into job mode—besides which, I’d worked Nan Grover’s cases on Saturday and knew where to find a couple of her wayward witnesses pretty much whenever I wanted. There wasn’t much else to do on that score, so going to the office was pointless. I didn’t want to moon around the condo all day, but all I could think of to do was replace my coat and I hate shopping. With a choice between hated activity or idle speculations and idle hands, I figured I’d be better off shopping.
I ended up in Fremont, lurking in the back office of Old Possums Books ‘n’ Beans, wearing out my friend Phoebe’s ears with tales of woe and wrath over Will until she decided I needed to eat and dragged me to the nearest restaurant.
I poked at my breakfast and Phoebe frowned at me. “If Poppy saw you treat good food that way, he’d talk you blue.” Phoebe’s family owned a restaurant and food was taken very seriously, especially by her parents, who considered my rangy frame a personal challenge to their aesthetic sense. “You know you better off without that man.” Phoebe’s mild Jamaican accent rendered it as “wheat-oudt dat mahn.”
“Yes,” I said, stabbing a potato. “I don’t need anyone else’s doubt and paranoia—I have plenty of my own.”
She smacked the back of my hand with her napkin in a gesture exactly like her mother’s dish-towel reprimands to anyone who tried to sneak a taste from her pots. “Don’ start that. Doubt and paranoia are part of your job—you don’ got to take them home. Besides, those rawboned men got no wind—how’s he gonna keep up with you, all skinny like that? You’d wear him out. You need a man with some strength. Strength of character at least. Imagine saying you’re too difficult for him!” Phoebe snorted. “Jackass.”
I laughed. That was not a word I’d ever have applied, but the vision of slender, silver-haired Will with donkey ears à la Pinocchio was irresistibly funny.
Phoebe grinned at my laughter. “That’s better. Now, what’re you gonna do the rest of the day? Don’ say you goin’ back to work. Nor home mopin’.”
“No,” I replied, still chuckling. “I have to buy a new coat—I wrecked my old wool one last night and it’s too cold to go without. You know how I shop for clothes.”
She nodded. “You buy whatever’s closest to the door and get the hell back out.”
Which was exactly what I did, so I nodded, too. “All right then. You finish your breakfast so I don’ be tellin’ Poppy you starvin’ yourself and I’ll take you shoppin’.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Mom.” That earned me a stern look that went completely awry on Phoebe’s round, good-natured features, but I did finish most of my meal before we left.
We were shoulders deep in the racks at Private Screening—a vintagewear shop down the street from Phoebe’s bookstore—when my phone went off and what passes for normal life reared its head.
“Hi, Miss Blaine. This is Fish from the morgue. Sorry to call on the weekend, but I found some stuff and I thought you’d want to know.”
“You work on Sunday?” I asked, tangled in a mohair monstrosity from the fifties.
“People die seven days a week. And my boss usually stays home on Sunday, so I could search the database without him getting mad.”
Phoebe glared at me. “Is that work, girl?” she asked, her voice rising and falling in annoyance.
“Yes.”
She snorted. “I shoulda known from the way you perked up.” She helped me out of the coat as I tried to talk to Fish.
“What did you find?”
“Some of the records are pretty old, but I’ve got a few other deaths with similar wounds and blood loss, and they go back to just after the fire, during the reconstruction. Not a lot of them, but a few in dated clusters. All Pioneer Square and the lava beds.”
“Lava beds?”
“The area around the new stadiums was the red light district. They called it the lava beds. Most of the matching deaths were south of Yesler, and they coincide with periods of destruction or construction. Just like the recent ones.”
“How many?”
“I got… eleven solid over the fifty years or so between the fire and the earthquake in 1949. There might be more, but they didn’t come up specifically. I might find them if I did the search by hand.”
“No, Fish, please don’t bother. This is fine—it establishes a pattern over time and an area to search. Thanks.”
“What are you going to do with this information?”
“Would you believe me if I said I was going to go hunting for monsters?”
He laughed. “I might. Could be anything down there, and with this long a pattern, it’s not a human—unless it’s a copycat, but they like to copy highprofile crimes, not obscure accidental deaths.” Interesting: Fish was taking the idea of a nonhuman killer in stride—or seemed to be. I filed that mental note for another time.
“Is that what the coroner is calling them, officially?” I asked.
“Not officially. Misadventure is most likely, but he hasn’t closed any of these except Cristus, so far—and only because the family pressured him. The deaths are strange, but they don’t look like murder or accident or natural causes and there’s not much else.”
“So Robert Cristus had family.”
“From what I saw, not the sort you’d want to snuggle into the bosom of.”
“Maybe that’s why he lived on the streets.”
“Could be. Uh-oh… Gotta get back to work. Call me if you find any monsters. I want to get first shot at the necropsy.”
Fish cut the connection and I stuck the cell phone back into my pocket.
“What you was saying about monsters?” Phoebe asked, holding out another coat.
“Oh… a joke.”
Phoebe frowned at me. “Don’t be tryin’ that on me. You up to something.”
“And I’m not going to tell you what.”
Phoebe made another snort. “How’s that one?”
I put on the dark wool coat and felt wonderful. The sleeves were long enough to cover my wrist bones and the hem came all the way down onto my thighs, both of which were rare for me. I gave it a suspicious stare, half expecting some Grey gleam, but it was just a coat—a nice coat—and that pleased me even more. Of course, it turned out to be an expensive nice coat, but that wasn’t unusual. I bought it anyway, hoping it wouldn’t go the way of the previous one.
Another fine flurry of snow had started up by the time we left the shop. I thought I had spent enough time feeling bad about my morning and the weather, so I thanked Phoebe and took off, much to her disapproval. I needed to get started on interviewing ghosts before the weather got any worse.
The voice from a coffee shop’s radio assured listeners that the snow wouldn’t last and the temperature would soon be rising, but it didn’t feel that way to me. The kids I’d heard shrieking in the snow that morning were probably hoping he was wrong as much as I hoped and doubted he was right.
The darkening sky seemed bleak and portentous overhead as I headed for work. I’d have to contact Quinton; I needed someone to watch out for me down in the tunnels and out in the streets. I wasn’t always sure how safe or visible I was when I went Grey-walking. I’d dodged a ghost through the layers of time once, but I didn’t want to repeat the feat, especially if there were other people around who might cause problems—or get upset. I’d had my fill of that for a while. And Quinton not only had a stake in the proceedings, he didn’t mind my oddities, which made me downright happy.