Chapter 13 Rusalka
Rusalka
I received a text that my car was ready. I had to admit, I’d gotten pretty used to the spotty El Camino, but I was eager to have my own car back. I got Detwiler to take me to Lister’s dealership.
Detwiler’s brow was furrowed. “El-Tee, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What the hell happened back there?” His voice shook in anger, something I’d never seen in the guy before. “They were gonna kill that girl.”
“I know,” I sighed. Detwiler was a good egg, and I decided I could trust him. “That’s how I see it, too. Hopefully, CPS will be able to help that girl, keep her away from this.”
“What can we do to help?”
I exhaled. “I’m gonna give a copy of my report to CPS. And I’m not gonna let this go.”
He nodded sharply. “I’ll give mine, too.”
“But we have to be careful,” I told him. “Watch your back. The sheriff commands a lot of loyalty, and he can sink your career.”
Detwiler shook his head. “I’m not worried about my career. I didn’t become a cop for this.”
“Good man. Keep your eyes and ears open.”
As we pulled into the dealership, I could tell something was off. Most of the expensive cars and trucks from the front row of the carefully arranged display had been removed. Even the candy apple red Corvette was missing from its platform.
I wasn’t buying the idea that business was good enough for Lister to have sold them all. As Detwiler and I circled around back, I saw that the service area was full of cars under tarps and car covers.
“Wonder what happened here,” Detwiler mused.
He parked the patrol car and we got out. Nobody was immediately around, so I pulled up a car cover.
I stared at the gorgeous red Corvette. On its hood, someone had spray-painted in black a snake eating its own tail.
“Detwiler,” I said.
He’d pulled a tarp aside on a truck. The whole side of it had been painted similarly. The paint was fresh—still tacky. Maybe even from tonight.
I looked at all the cars, counting them under my breath, expecting that they’d all been similarly vandalized. “Do you know if this was called in?”
Detwiler had a quick conversation with Dispatch on his radio, punctuated by those irritating beeps I’d come to associate with the new system. “No reports, El-Tee.”
A man in service coveralls approached. “Hey!”
Detwiler turned to the man. “I see you’ve got some trouble here, sir.”
The service technician flushed. “We’ve got that under control.”
“You don’t want to make a report? For your insurance?”
The man shook his head. “Boss said there’s no point in getting stupid kids in trouble. We’ll try to buff it out.”
“You’ve got cameras up.” I pointed to the lights overhead, where dome-shaped cameras were mounted.
He frowned. “The cameras got nothing. It was like the power cut out.”
Detwiler and I looked at each other. There wasn’t anything we could do if they weren’t making a report.
But it looked weird as hell.
Predictably, I got stonewalled from talking to Lister.
He wouldn’t even talk to Detwiler. But I was able to pick up my car.
I didn’t trust Lister, but getting work done at the dealership had given me a plausible reason to keep trying to talk to him.
And that had come to nothing. I figured he’d overcharged me for tires by at least a couple hundred bucks.
I had Detwiler follow me to the next exit on the freeway and scan my car for bugs with a new gadget Patrol had acquired.
While he did so, I crawled under the car to check the brake lines.
Everything looked good, and Detwiler came up with nothing.
Maybe I was just paranoid. Maybe the dealership had their hands full dealing with that vandalism.
Whoever was at the beach at Sandpiper Run was at the dealership, too, and I chewed on what Viv had said about… witches.
I wasn’t sure what I thought about witches.
I knew there were weird things in Bayern County, like preachers performing apparent exorcisms by candlelight.
Belief in the supernatural was a powerful thing, and certainly some people in the county believed.
But I resisted expanding my personal cosmology to include witches handing out curses.
I needed to think of mundane explanations for the crimes I investigated first…
and the most mundane explanation was that someone like Viv believed they were a witch, and purchased a few cans of spray paint.
It was the law that driver’s licenses had to be given over to buy spray paint, to deter vandalism, and I could theoretically run down recent sales in the county.
I wasn’t sure that would yield anything.
People kept cans of spray paint in their garages for years.
Even if I could investigate the vandalism at Lister’s dealership, I didn’t have access to perform a paint match.
And if I could prove that Viv bought black spray paint at the local hardware store last night and didn’t have an alibi, I would be no closer to finding the truth without evidence.
Nick’s SUV was in the driveway when I got home. As he always did when he got home first, he’d left the porch light on for me. I let myself inside the house. He’d left the light over the stove on for me, too, and snoring echoed from the bedroom.
I locked up and left my keys in the bowl on top of the refrigerator. I took some ibuprofen and antibiotics for my leg and got into my pajamas.
I slid into bed, between Nick and Gibby. Gibby was awake, giving an aggrieved huff when I climbed in. He closed his eyes and was soon snoring heavily.
I’d grown accustomed to this, the warmth I felt sandwiched between the two of them. I loved them, and I could trust them entirely, with everything I was.
It wasn’t like there weren’t other people I trusted with my life. I trusted Monica, and the chief, and probably also deputies, like Detwiler and Jasper. But trusting someone with my life was a very different matter than trusting a person with who I was.
Maybe I would always be on the outside, looking in on relationships. But what I had here, in bed with me…that could be enough. The snores and the dog hair and the late nights.
That was enough, and I wouldn’t let it go.
—
A green flash seared my vision, then faded, leaving me in the dark.
I was eleven years old then, creeping through the yard at night, toward the well. I hadn’t forgotten the feeling of something brushing against my leg in the dark. I was afraid an animal was trapped in there, in the poisoned water, one that needed my help.
I crouched by the edge of the well. The pump hummed a low pulse, and I felt like I was sitting next to a hive of bees.
“Hello?” I whispered. I stared into the dark, searching for ripples in the water. I reached down with a stick and stirred. If there was a snake there, I could catch it and pull it to safety.
Something grabbed the stick and tore it away. I flung myself back and landed on my backside.
Slowly, I crept to the edge again.
Below the buzz of the pump, I heard a musical hum, the hum of a woman, echoing off the well’s earthen walls, then the distant cry of a baby.
I called out to it. “What’s down there?”
Water churned, and something pale roiled beneath. The moon’s reflection fractured in the black, and I glimpsed the profile of a woman below the water.
I leaned forward, toward that musical humming.
“Who are you?” I needed to know.
I jumped as someone grabbed the back of my neck, drew me away. My mom.
Her eyes were as black as the pool.
“Mom,” I gasped. “What is it?”
She closed her eyes as the thing in the well cried with the sound of a baby.
“There’s a spirit in this place,” she said. “A spirit with many voices, many stories of pain and suffering. She takes on the suffering of the dead, takes their voices and their faces and visits her wrath upon men who abuse and kill women and girls. She’s a vengeful spirit, summoned by grief.”
I heard the baby cry again and strained away from Mom to look into the black water. “Is…is my sister down there?”
“She is your sister. She’s a hundred murdered women and girls. She is Rusalka.”
—
I lurched upright in bed, gasping.
Gibby yelped at my feet. I must’ve kicked him.
I forced myself to steady my breathing. I was soaked in sweat; it dripped down my chin in rivulets and my T-shirt was stuck to my chest. Morning trickled gray light beneath the curtains.
I jumped when Nick began to rub my back. “Hey, you okay?” he asked, his voice slurred by sleep.
I pushed my hair out of my face. It felt cold and slimy as algae. “Yeah…yeah, I think so.”
Nick was sitting up beside me now. “Another dream?”
I nodded. “I dreamed about a thing…a thing in the bottom of the well at the house I grew up in.” The thing called Rusalka. It conjured up half-remembered fairy tales about wronged women who lay in wait at the bottoms of rivers to drown men who passed by.
And I didn’t want this thing to be part of my world. I wanted my world to be rational. Orderly. Unhaunted.
Nick exhaled, waiting for me to continue. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’m not sure.” It was still too fresh in my panicked brain to put into words.
He took my hand. “I’m worried about you.”
“I know.” I leaned over to kiss his temple. “I’m okay.”
I pulled the covers back and swung my legs out of bed. I wanted nothing more than to take a shower and make sure I was thoroughly and truly awake.
Pain lanced through my leg, and I hissed.
Nick rolled out of bed. He turned on the bedside lamp to scrutinize my injury. The stitches still held, but my calf had continued to swell. The wound was greening and mottling around the edges.
“That doesn’t look good,” I observed.
“No. It doesn’t.” He probed it gently with his fingers. “I’m going to call you in some stronger antibiotics. If they don’t kick in, we may have to do a debridement.”
Reflexively, I pulled my leg away from him. “That doesn’t sound like fun.”
“It’s not. But you don’t want to get gangrene.”
Gangrene. I didn’t think people got gangrene anymore.
I climbed to my feet, headed to the bathroom, and stood in the shower, washing the wound with antibacterial soap.
I smeared it with antibacterial ointment, using close to a quarter of a tube.
I didn’t want to be slowed down by a medical procedure.
Nick wrapped my calf up in a bandage while Gibby watched and tried to nip the ends of the gauze.
“How’s Mason?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
“I checked in with ICU. Still in a coma, and the pulmonologist isn’t happy with the state of his lungs. Some kind of deterioration forming in there, likely an infection. They’re hitting it with some nuclear-weapons-grade antibiotics.”
“Poor kid.”
“Yeah. Here’s the weird thing.” He leaned on the sink, crossing his arms. “I saw something like that once before.”
“When?”
“A few years ago. An older lady. I first thought it was histoplasmosis, and prescribed antifungals. She turned up in the ER one night, struggling to breathe. She died a few weeks later, and I remember that her films were weird like that, a weird deterioration.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“Not offhand. I’m gonna have to look through records to figure it out. This makes me wonder if there’s some kind of bacteria or fungus in the water that’s affecting people with compromised immune systems, or the young and elderly.”
“But I’m betting your elderly lady didn’t go swimming in the Sumners’ pond.”
“Might be a microbe transferred by birds or something.” Nick’s gaze was distant, and I could tell he was already running tests in his mind. “I’ll go bug Mason’s pulmonologist. And I’ll get some samples from Ross Lister.”
It made sense, like there was some kind of connection among these cases.
But I had no earthly idea what.
And no unearthly one, either…a witch couldn’t kill through lung infections, could she?