Dark Waters, page 19
He stood and offered his hand. “Of course.”
She got to her feet, looking up into his kind, strong face. Then she stepped close, pressing her body against his. She was used to being nude, but this was the best kind of naked. Every part of her body that touched his skin felt warm, and when he put his arms around her it was like melting into safety.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too.”
She pulled away enough to look up at him. “And … I need your help. Something terrible has happened, and I may be the only one who can handle it. But I can’t do it alone.”
He smiled. “Anything at all.”
As if on cue, the cellphone in her discarded purse began to ring.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ETHAN SQUINTED UP at the sign over the door. “Art Waves, huh?”
“She does a lot with water imagery,” Rachel said. Betty had invited Rachel over immediately, apparently anxious to brainstorm a solution to their mutual problem, only no lights showed anywhere. Rachel used the brief time to tell Ethan about Kyle Stillwater, the old woman in her vision, and her missing lake spirits. He had listened calmly, and when she finished gave no sign he thought she was a lunatic. She loved him more than ever.
“It looks closed,” Ethan said.
“I’m sure the door’s open. She’s expecting us.” But Rachel made no move to try the handle. The darkness, the empty street, and the lifeless building made her nervous.
“And you think she can help you?”
“She understands what’s happened to me. That makes us sisters, of a sort.”
He put a hand on her arm. “I’ll be here no matter what, you know.”
She felt tenderness for him on a scale she never knew possible. She patted his huge, strong hand. “I know. But it’s not just about me. My spirits must truly be in danger, because they’d never just abandon me like this. They wouldn’t punish me for being tricked.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I can’t explain why, but I am. It’s … a feeling. So I have to help them if I can, just as they’d help me.”
He nodded. “I’ve had to trust my feelings sometimes too. Even when there’s no logical reason for it. It’s saved my life.”
“So I’d make a good soldier?”
“No. You’re already a good warrior.”
She stood on tiptoe to kiss him. Then she tried the door. Once again it was open, and she led him inside. She said loudly, “Betty? It’s Rachel.”
The track lighting came on, bathing the room in ambience and spotlighting the various artworks. Ethan stopped dead at the sight of the huge self-portrait.
“That makes me feel … inadequate,” he said quietly.
“It would make Milton Berle feel inadequate,” Rachel agreed.
“Where in your house would you even put that?” he asked.
“The game room, of course,” Rachel shot back, trying not to giggle.
They stopped when another door opened somewhere and Betty emerged from the shadows at the back of the gallery. She wore a tank top and jeans, both of which could barely contain her curves.
She paused when she saw Ethan. “I didn’t know you were bringing company.”
“This is Ethan,” Rachel said.
“We’ve met,” he said curtly.
Rachel looked surprised. “You have?”
“Yes,” Betty agreed. Then she turned to Rachel. “I should speak with you alone.”
“Ethan can know—”
“Then you can tell him when we’re done. But I’d feel more comfortable discussing this in private up in my apartment.”
Rachel turned to him. “Would you mind waiting down here?”
“Try not to touch anything,” Betty said, masking the snide words beneath a tone of extreme politeness.
Rachel gave Ethan a last look and what she hoped was a reassuring little smile before she followed Betty upstairs.
ALL THE DOORS to the other rooms in Betty’s apartment were closed, so Rachel could see only the living room. It was enough.
It looked like some Asperger’s sufferer’s idea of sophisticated homoerotica: Garish nude men were everywhere, from strange statues to black-velvet paintings. She noticed that on the inside, the doorknob was even the head of a brass penis. She tried to find someplace to focus her eyes that didn’t involve parts of the male anatomy.
“I got your notes,” Rachel said, intently studying the couch. “What do we need to do?”
“It should’ve been clear,” Betty said. “He killed that man Bloom and used the dead man’s heart to trap the spirits of the lake. They were already weakened by you, after all.”
Rachel flushed angrily. “Stop saying that. I didn’t make them do anything. But I do want to help them.”
“Why? So you can get off again, and then you can run home to your boyfriend? Is that all they mean to you?”
“No! They’ve been kind to me and helped me, and they do good for people. They don’t deserve to be sent into limbo for all eternity. And if it’s in my power to save them, I want to do it. You should want to as well. It might show them that you’re worth helping too.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Betty snapped. “You have no idea what I’ve gone through because of them. All right, so you want to help. It’s pretty straightforward. We have to summon Kyle Stillwater and force him to give up the heart. Then we can release the spirits.”
“Can we do it anywhere?”
“ ‘It’ what?”
“Release the spirits.”
“No, it has to be in the water. If I’m right about what lives inside that man, he won’t be far away from the water either.”
“So how do we find him when no one else has?”
“No one else knows what they’re looking for.” Betty smiled. “And how do you catch something? With bait.”
“What sort of bait?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“He came to you once but didn’t finish what he started, did he? He didn’t really have that tight little body of yours, did he?” Betty tapped Rachel’s behind, and Rachel reflexively slapped her hand away. She glared at the older woman, who shrugged and laughed. “He’ll want to do that. He’ll need to do that, to complete his dominion over his enemies. These spirits are as sex-mad as any man of flesh and blood, and the temptation of the one who got away will be too strong for him to resist.”
Rachel hated the excitement that coursed through her at the thought of Stillwater touching her again. It’s not me, she thought. It’s not really me. “So how do I go about letting him know I’m available?”
Betty laughed. “You really are having a hard time thinking. Your mind’s settling down to that one track, isn’t it? The answer is obvious. Go for a swim.”
“And he’ll just show up at the park again?” Rachel said, annoyed at how easily this woman could read her.
Betty stepped close, into Rachel’s personal space. It felt as weird as it had before, maybe even weirder. “I don’t mean at your usual place. I mean at his. Lake Wingra.”
AS SOON AS he heard the door close above him, Ethan petulantly touched about a dozen pieces of artwork. He knew it was childish, but it was late and the woman annoyed him. Then he wandered through the gallery, idly examining the other artwork. He knew enough to judge good art from bad, and most of this was mediocre at best. But the huge self-portrait kept drawing his eye, and he was glad no one was there to see him examine it minutely. Marty and Chuck had a single piece of homoerotic art—a small brass statue that was barely noticeable—in their home. Yet it had taken months before Ethan was able to stop concentrating on not looking at it, which of course amused Marty to no end.
Seeing Betty’s face, her full lips and vaguely Asian eyes, above a nude male body with an erect penis the size of his own forearm puzzled Ethan. What sort of woman was this Betty McNally? She didn’t really seem like a lesbian, and certainly she had the voluptuous form most men would relish. She could be bisexual, he supposed. Madison was a college town, after all. Yet when he’d met her at the diner, she’d looked him over like …
Like another guy, he thought suddenly. That was it. He knew that look, that belligerent chest-first pose, all too well. From junior high through his tour in Iraq, he saw it practically every day of his life. Betty’s impressive breasts distracted him so he didn’t recognize it at first, but now he did.
And that puzzled him even more. Was she a transsexual? It seemed unlikely, but whatever else she was, every instinct honed during the war warned him that she was trouble.
The ceiling squeaked as either Betty or Rachel moved around upstairs. He wished he could make out their murmuring voices more clearly.
———
“SO WHEN DO we do this?” Rachel said.
“No time like the present. How about later tonight? Say, two a.m.? We’ll meet where the spring comes out from beneath the tree. There’s an observation deck there. Know where I mean?”
“The Arboretum’s closed then.”
“Come on. You skinny-dip in the middle of town, don’t you?”
“So should we pick you up?”
Betty noticed Rachel staring, and smiled. “No, I’ll meet you there. I have to gather some things to help us break the spell. You do understand that’s what this is, right? A spell? You’re under one, and we’re going to use one to summon him.”
“I’m not worried about the terminology, just that it works.”
“Good.”
“But my friend downstairs will be with me.” At the outrage in Betty’s eyes, Rachel said, “He knows all about me, and I want him there. It’s not open to discussion.”
“Then I won’t waste my breath on it, except to say he may not like what he sees. Is he willing to watch you make love to another man—or at least something that looks like another man—in order to save yourself?”
Rachel didn’t answer. She hadn’t thought of that. In the presence of Kyle Stillwater, how would she behave? Was it fair to Ethan to make him watch that?
Betty smiled. “That’s what I thought.”
“Yes,” Rachel answered suddenly. “Yes, he is. If that’s what I need to do.”
Betty’s smile widened. It was a cold, malicious smile, filled with contempt. “We’ll see, won’t we? In two hours, then.”
RACHEL HELD ETHAN’S hand in silence as they left Betty’s gallery. He followed her around to the driver’s side and held the door open for her. “Since you’re the passenger, shouldn’t I do that for you?” she said.
“Next time,” he said. Then he climbed into the other seat and buckled his seat belt. The drive to the diner took only a couple of minutes, and then he walked her to her door. As she unlocked it he said, “Now what?”
“Wait for two a.m., I suppose,” she said. “Kill an hour and a half watching infomercials.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Not really.”
“You sound tired.”
“Well, we did just exert ourselves before we left your place.”
“That’s true. Do you want to lie down and rest?”
She laughed. “I don’t think that’s possible right now.”
“It’s that bad?”
The humor left her voice. “It’s all I can do not to scream, Ethan.”
He nodded sympathetically. “I can go away, if it’s what you want. I don’t want my presence to make things any worse. I’ll meet you back here a little before two.”
He was so sincere, so utterly earnest in his solicitous care of her, that she wanted to cry. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him with unmistakable ardor, pressing her body against his. “No. Come upstairs with me.”
“Can you—”
“I can do anything I want, Ethan Walker. And if I want to spend the evening as a slave to your every wish, no matter what, then I can do that. The question is, after what we already did, can you?”
She felt his manhood swell. “I think I can rise to the occasion, as James Bond would say. Is it what you want?”
“I want to do whatever you tell me to do. Nothing’s off the table. Or the bed,” she added with a little grin.
“Won’t it make things worse?”
She smiled. “You let me worry about that. You worry about what you’re going to make me do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
RACHEL AND ETHAN arrived at the gate to the Arboretum at one-thirty. It was closed, so they parked in the lot just outside it. They might get a ticket, but it was unlikely that Rachel’s car would be towed before morning.
The huge preserve—1,200 acres of forest and carefully restored prairie in the middle of the city—was popular with hikers, joggers, and bicyclists. In the winter, the trails were given over to cross-country skiers. Ethan didn’t know how often it was patrolled, but Marty had mentioned several times that the place needed a greater police presence. He hoped that meant they wouldn’t get busted for trespassing.
Both of them were exhausted, running on adrenaline and tension. For Ethan it was the same uncertainty he’d experienced in the army, when he was unsure where the danger would come from, or what form it would take. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and scanned the shadows for movement—a task made more difficult by the wind that made everything in the darkness move. It also made the air cooler than it had been in weeks.
“Her car’s not here,” he observed.
“Maybe she parked somewhere else.”
“There aren’t that many places to park, and the other end of the Arboretum is much farther from the place we’re supposed to meet. You think she stood us up?”
“She has as much reason to be here as I do,” Rachel said.
“There’s something weird about her, Rachel. I can’t put my finger on it, but I don’t trust her.”
“Neither do I,” she admitted, “but I have to see this through.”
Ethan pulled Rachel’s gun from the glove box. It was a short-barreled .45 revolver, and he spun the cylinder to make sure the action was clean. When Rachel had suggested bringing it, he insisted on being the one to use it. She protested, but he pointed out the obvious: He’d shot people before. She hadn’t.
He stuck the gun in the waistband of his jeans and let his T-shirt hang over it. Then they went around the gate and followed the two-lane road through the preserve. City noises surrounded them, yet with the trees and wind it was impossible to see anything except the next pinkish streetlight ahead. Their footsteps were loud against the pavement.
Ethan looked back over his shoulder. He had the sense of being watched and followed—something he was unerringly accurate about. It had saved his life more than once, and he felt it now almost like a physical hand on his back. No one was on the road behind them, and nothing was visible in the thick woods. He knew that on the right was thick forest, while across the road to their left stretched a marshy area crisscrossed with walkways for tourists and nature lovers. Hiding would be a cinch; following them, either through the swamp or undergrowth, almost impossible. And yet he was certain someone was.
“We’re being followed,” he said softly to Rachel.
He was impressed that she didn’t look around. “By whom?”
“I don’t know. But I’m sure of it.”
She sighed. “Not much to do about it, is there?”
“Not really.”
THEY REACHED THE trail that led down to the observation deck where they were to meet Betty. The woods were dark and impenetrable—so thick that even the moonlight didn’t penetrate.
“Spooky,” he said quietly.
Rachel took his hand. They had made love for almost an hour back at her place. She’d teased him and held him back as long as possible. She never imagined she’d hear a man like him beg for anything, but he had, and at last she’d allowed it. He’d clung to her so tightly that she worried he was having a breakdown, but he’d merely been overwhelmed by the sensation. They both dissolved into laughter and kisses when it passed.
“Don’t worry, big guy,” she said now. “I’ll protect you.”
He grinned. “If anyone can, it’s you.”
Rachel picked her way down the trail. It was tricky enough during the day, when you could see the mud and exposed roots that tried to trip the unwary. At night it was even more dangerous, and a turned ankle would leave her helpless in a way she definitely didn’t want. A flashlight was out of the question, since technically they were trespassing. Her lithe runner’s body was more suited to this than Ethan’s bulkier form, so she led the way. His grip on her hand was firm but not crushing, and she sensed the trust in it.
She stopped. He did as well, remaining a step behind her. She heard water lapping at the shore ahead of them. There was a break in the trees, and beyond it they saw the waters of Lake Wingra. Its odor rode the wind, different in subtle ways from the friendlier lakes Monona and Mendota. She’d avoided this lake for most of her life; one swim in it had convinced her that it was fundamentally different from its fellows. It hadn’t felt dangerous exactly, just disorienting and out of synch. Now she understood why.
“This place gives me the willies,” Ethan whispered. “I can believe an evil spirit would come out of it.”
I just hope we can put him back in it, Rachel thought.
They continued on until they saw a small concrete platform with a solid metal railing imbedded in it, looking out over a shallow channel. To one side rose a tall, ancient oak tree. Beneath it, as if emerging from it, a spring bubbled up and flowed down the channel to the lake.
Rachel leaned against the rail and looked out at the quietly churning water. She saw no sign of Betty. “What time is it?” she whispered.
Ethan checked his watch. “Exactly two o’clock.”
“Don’t worry, I’m here,” Betty said.
Rachel jumped and let out an involuntary yelp. She felt Ethan start as well.
Betty emerged from the darkness dressed in a long black sundress and carrying a satchel. She clicked on a flashlight beneath her chin. It made her face look long and angular. “Boo,” she said. Then she turned off the light.
