Chapter 24 Unseen Allies
Unseen Allies
I met Jasper at the Hag Stone at dusk. The coordinates he’d given me were for the oxbow in the river, where I’d taken my water sample.
I pulled into the lot and parked behind a sheriff’s office van, so this might be official business.
Still, I had an uneasy feeling about this, and I brought Gibby with me.
I hadn’t been keen on leaving Nick. I’d checked in on him.
He’d arisen in the afternoon and had been talking with lawyers, pacing the floors and gesturing into the air.
I knew to let him be when he had these kinetic bursts of action.
I kissed him on the shoulder before I left, and he tangled his fingers in mine.
“Anna.”
I paused, holding Gibby’s leash.
“I’m going to fight this.” His face flushed with anger.
“I know.” He knew when to fight for others, and now for himself. “And I’ll do anything to help.”
He nodded. “But if I lose…”
“If you lose, we’ll move to Alaska.” I meant it to sound light, but it came out like a vow.
In that moment, I loved Nick more than my entanglement with Bayern County. And I hoped that moment would last.
I climbed out of the car at the trailhead, and Gibby came with me. I didn’t turn on my flashlight. But I rested my hand on the butt of my gun as we ducked soundlessly under the chain gate and made our way to the river’s edge.
The forest was thick around us, closing over our heads, blotting out the stars. We walked, noiselessly, down the path to the river. In the dimness, I spotted a familiar figure holding a flashlight at the river’s edge.
I didn’t go to him right away. I held Gibby’s leash and scanned the dark, listening. Once satisfied that there was no one else here, I approached him.
“Jasper? What’s up with the cloak-and-dagger?” I tried to sound casual, but probably failed.
“Hey.” His gaze swept the woods behind me. “Did you get followed?”
“No,” I said warily.
He exhaled. “I was followed earlier tonight, by a car with plates from Lister’s dealership.”
He glanced down to my side. “And who’s this?”
“This is Gibby.”
Gibby leaned against my leg, uncertain.
“So, what are we doing here?” I asked.
He knelt, showing me a bag full of a dozen glass vials. “My friend at EPA needs some convincing. I’m bringing water samples to him from nearby bodies of water, for him to test unofficially. If there’s something there, that might spur his superiors to action.”
“I’m excited that you were able to get someone to take you seriously,” I said dourly.
“But I wanted to show you something important.” Jasper took what looked like a flashlight from his bag.
“This is a UV light. Gasoline, benzene, and several other aromatic compounds glow in its presence.” He flashed a beam of UV light at one of the vials, and the surface glowed with an unearthly light.
I suppressed a shudder. It reminded me of fox fire.
“It’s an old firefighters’ trick. Tells you where the accelerant is before mass spectrometry can be used to identify it in an arson case.”
He gestured for me to follow him, and we walked to the water’s edge. It was a curiously quiet darkness; I heard no frogs or crickets, only the rush of water in the distance. It sounded like water moving in a sink in a public restroom, echoing and cold.
Jasper swept his light ahead of us, and I saw nothing remarkable at first. But as we approached the river, soft fluorescence gleamed around us on foliage, on the ground. He turned the beam to the water, and a sheen glowed on the surface, looking like a faint oil slick.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“This is some kind of artificial compound. I’m betting it’s Vapozene, one of Copperhead Valley Solvents’s proprietary benzene compounds.
It’s a very strange one, chemically. Its viscosity and oil-like characteristics mean it can persist in the environment and doesn’t evaporate straightaway, like most aromatic compounds do. ”
“Vice is investigating the use of one of Copperhead Valley Solvents’s benzene compounds in the manufacture of meth. But…why dump it if it’s valuable?” It didn’t make sense to me.
“Copperhead Valley Solvents typically produces massive quantities of this stuff. Sales may have slowed, and they may be looking into cheap avenues for disposal.”
I frowned. “I guess there might be another limiting factor in the amount of meth the local dealers can create. They can probably get only so much pseudoephedrine.”
“What I’m saying is just conjecture at this point. EPA will have to make sure before pointing the finger at the company.”
“And what does that mean for those involved in illegal dumping?”
“Fines, likely. If there was knowledge, EPA will probably push for any applicable civil and criminal charges. My buddy says that if he can, he’ll nail them to the wall, all the way down. I sense that you’re on the same page?” He looked at me hopefully.
I nodded sharply.
I seemed to be amassing unseen allies.
—
Jasper said he was heading to the state capital that evening to drop off his samples. Which was probably a good thing, since the Kings of Warsaw Creek had a way of creating obstacles for those against them.
Since Jasper had had the opportunity to kill me and take me off the investigation permanently and he hadn’t seized it, I was willing to believe he wasn’t involved in the string of near-drownings and deaths I was investigating.
This situation had been sketchy as hell, and he had been on the up-and-up.
I felt guilty for suspecting him of any wrongdoing.
When he’d left, I checked my trail cam. To my disappointment, someone had sprayed black paint over the lens, and the SD card was missing. The witches of Bayern County got around.
I took it down and crouched at the riverbank.
I felt both at the edge of realization on this case, and the height of frustration.
I had to be very, very careful to make sure my case against Sumner and Lister stuck.
But that meant I had to find Viv, and the evidence was leading me nowhere.
It was all well and good to hit Sumner in the wallet, but I wanted more.
I wanted him and his cronies to be held accountable for what they’d done to Dana and Viv.
I wanted to remove their political capital, to shame them, to reveal them as the monsters they really were.
I reached out to the monster that lay beneath the water.
I knew she was there; I could hear her breathing in the back of my head.
Gibby sat still beside me, his ears alert.
Maybe he heard her, too, or maybe he just heard my voice.
I understood Rusalka—whether she was Dana or not, whichever face she chose to wear.
I understood her desire for vengeance. I knew, deep in my heart, that Dana was dead.
Dead like thousands of other girls across the country who were dead and buried in forgotten places, mourned and lost forever, for the whims of men.
At least my father never did that, for all his evilness. He put girls where they would be found.
I reached forward, stirring the water with my fingers. I tried not to think about the pollutants in it.
“Rusalka,” I whispered, “I want what you want. I want these men to pay. If you kill them outright, their reputations will live on. Even now, people are likely planning Quentin Sims’s funeral, canonizing him in their heads and with their words.
They will admire the money and influence Sumner and Lister wielded.
Help me take them down, ruin their reputations, dispel their power for all time. ”
The words flooded out of me like a dark incantation.
The black water burbled, and Gibby whined softly.
The moon gleamed on the water, a distant, pale coin. I reached into the river for it, jammed my fist into the mud. I lifted the mud high above my head, letting poisoned water run down over my arm.
I opened my hand.
It was full of tiny pearls. Three of them, nestled among ordinary milk quartz and rusted iron slag.
I turned to the island at the oxbow’s center, where angry geese slept. Something moved underwater, undulating, toward the island. Whether it was a snake or something from my dark imagination didn’t matter.
It was leading me to the island.
My heart beat, slow and steady, against my rib cage.
I told Gibby to stay. I stripped off my shoes and my jacket and left them on the shore.
The river was poisoned, but I needed to risk this.
My gun stayed behind, too. Somehow, I sensed that it would be rude to carry a weapon into the Rusalka’s domain.
I waded into the water. The current swirled around my thighs, and silt pressed soft against the soles of my feet.
I waded in up to my chest, feeling the warm water pushing against my sternum.
I took a deep breath to fill my lungs with air, and kicked off, letting my arms pull me through the slow current. Something brushed against me in the dark, maybe some debris or fish. Maybe she was testing me, making sure I was brave enough to see what lay before me, on the island.
I inhaled and exhaled in time with my pulse, slipping through the water. I reached forward for the moon, feeling the water caress my cheek, keeping the island in the distance in sight.
Water streaming from my shirt and pants, I pulled myself up through the cattails of the tiny island. It was only about fifty feet wide, a teardrop shape in the center of the oxbow, shaded by a clump of trees.
The geese in their nests regarded me silently, raising no calls of alarm. They knew I was also of the forest, and I knew they wouldn’t deter me.
I closed my eyes and reached out as I had so many years ago, when I was dowsing, for water and for dead things.
I visualized silvery water rushing all around me, staticky in texture.
Maybe that was the Vapozene in it. It dug into the marshy center of the island with veins that thrummed and chewed into the mud.
Years from now, this little island would be worn away and the river would rush straight through once more.
The trees would drown, and the island would be forgotten—just like all the missing girls.
The ground was dotted with nests. But there was one place where there was no nest, no river birch tree, and where no grass grew. I walked to it, half seeing the pattern of water encroaching upon it. There was something not right about this place.
I found a flat rock about the size of my hand and used it to scrape at the sandy dirt. It was loose and glittering in the moonlight. I dug like a child hunting for shells at the beach, searching. This looked like that place in my vision, where Dana was curled in on herself in a burnt nest.
A splash sounded at the bank, and I turned, expecting Rusalka to appear. But it was only Gibby.
I scolded him. “You should’ve stayed at the bank.” I didn’t want him exposed to the toxic sludge here.
But he’d seen me digging, and he wanted to dig, too.
He and I dug deeper, scraping away layers of gritty dirt streaked with black.
Something had burned here, long ago, and stained the soil.
Organic things that were burned tended to decompose quickly, but the crystals in the sandy soil here had been changed by fire, warped…
fused together by unnaturally high temperatures.
I paused when my rock struck something black and hollow. Gibby snuffled it, and I brushed dirt away.
Bone. Smooth and black.
The geese watched us, every head on a silent, black, snaky neck turned to witness us.
I should’ve stopped and called someone, but we kept going, trapped in the spell of what we were uncovering. We scooped the sand away from the claws of ribs, from a clavicle. I swept sand away from vertebrae, from a jaw.
Human. Curled up in a fetal position, like a dead bird in a nest. Judging by what we’d excavated, it was a small human. Likely a woman.
I leaned forward to blow sand away from the clavicle. The remains of a charred necklace floated in the shallow grave. Even in this darkness, I could distinguish a moon and a river pearl.
A shudder racked through me at this discovery, this truth hidden away for so long. Moonlight flooded her bones, outlining evidence of her last moments on earth.
“Dana,” I breathed.
A deep, female sigh exhaled into the air, disturbing the roosting birds in the trees above me.
—
I returned to the other shore and put on my shoes and gun like a civilized person. Gibby shook off a galaxy of stars into the night. I tied my stringy hair up. Civilized.
I called for backup, for Forensics and Monica, and for someone to guard the scene.
I waited at the trailhead. I’d have to explain why I was here so that what I’d found would be admissible into evidence.
That was easy: Jasper had invited me. He was taking samples for EPA.
He had left, and I’d noticed the area where nothing grew on the island.
My dog—my dog who had shown a talent for finding dead things—had swum out into the river and started digging.
As a dog owner, I went after him. As one does.
And there was Dana. I crammed that mystical experience into terms of rules and logic and chains of evidence… so I would be believed.
Forensics came, as did the coroner’s office.
I’d told them to bring hazmat suits, on account of the chemicals Jasper expected to be in the river.
They’d brought a boat and a body bag and bright flashlights, which they swept through the forest. They wouldn’t dig Dana up until daylight came, but Forensics would do what they could in the dark.
Finally, someone saw her.
Monica came to stand beside me. “That’s some amazing police work, Anna.”
“Thanks. I just hope we can start nailing those sons of bitches.” I frowned at my phone. I’d been trying to call Jasper to tell him what I’d found, but it kept ringing into silence.
Monica took a deep breath. “Have you been listening to the scanner?”
“No.” I’d been under the forest’s spell.
Monica gripped my arm. “I just found out…Jasper was in an accident. His car went off the road on I-71. Flipped and turned into a fireball.”
I sucked in my breath. “Is he okay?”
Monica shook her head. “He didn’t make it.”
My hands balled into fists and bile rose into my throat.
“He was a good man,” I whispered. “He was just here.”
Monica put her hands on my shoulders. “We’re gonna get them, okay? We’re gonna get them all.”