Wicked Tempest: A Kate Waters Mystery (Kate Waters Mysteries Book 2) (11 page)

Kate decided the most important thing was to first suspend the statue as Thea had done. Stringing fishing wire around the statue, she then tied it to the light fixture in the closet. It hung at shoulder height. Below the statue, she unwound black string and molded it into the shape of a pentacle. The element wood was needed—Thea had used thin tree limbs—so Kate modified it with skewers from the kitchen. She laid them into a star-shaped pattern. When finished, she turned off the lights, lit a black candle and a stick of frankincense. An unsettling tension surrounded her, as though reality were ripping along the seams, letting in the unnatural.

Outside, the wind rattled against the windowpanes. It fueled the dread that had been building in her all night. She took a deep breath, centered herself in the moment, and then placed the candle, the incense, a small bowl of water, another with salt, and the last one empty inside the pentacle like she had seen in Thea’s closet. The empty bowl was for her blood. She knew this even while a part of her thoughts went through an alternate list of possibilities. Her skin crawled with a shiver. The blood was important. It would connect her to the protection spell. Without, there was no link to her specifically. According to Thea, hair and nails didn’t work as well, maybe because they were external elements of a person and not the source of their essence.

Using Jev’s athame, Kate pricked the tip of her finger. It hurt more than she had expected it would. She squeezed her finger over the bowl. Blood pooled into a dark, red bead, slowly at first, and then dripped two splashes into the bowl. The blood continued to seep out, four, five, seven splashes, enough for a teaspoon full. Quickly, she brought her finger to her mouth. The coppery taste peppered her tongue. Her finger throbbed. When she examined it, blood still oozed out, fast, and streamed into a crooked line down her palm and over the bones of her wrist. Bright red drops splattered on the carpet.

“Shit.”

Kate stood and hurried into the bathroom down the hall. Blood poured down her arm in rivulets, trailing to her elbow and dripping off at the tip. It splattered on the hardwoods.
Something’s wrong
, she thought. Her finger shouldn’t be bleeding so much. She wasn’t anemic and hadn’t taken aspirin for her head yet, which would have thinned her blood. A worry, ungrounded in any reason, burrowed into her mind—she was doing the spell wrong, she wasn’t a witch and couldn’t perform a spell or maybe it was too late.

Blood spurted from her finger now in thick pulse-gushing flow. Her heart pounded fiercely against her ribs. Her thoughts whirled with the same frenzied skip as she remembered in the vision with the black water. Helpless. Desperate. Huge splashes of blood smeared over the bathroom floor in a line toward the sink. A cry escaped Kate’s throat in a tone she didn’t recognize. She was alone, without David’s help, without Thea, and in her panic, she screamed out.

She lunged toward the sink. Her foot slipped out from under her. The world tipped sideways, unfurled itself in a wild vortex of shapes and light. Kate gasped for air as her body plunged to the floor. She tried to grab the edge of the sink, but the momentum of her fall was too great. Her tailbone struck against the floor and wrenched her muscles into an involuntary spasm. Her head whipped back, and her skull smacked against the side of the tub. A flash of white pain exploded and blurred everything in front of her into a blinding haze of colorful stars.

In a brief moment of paralysis, images broke through Kate’s mind again, those she had seen a few minutes ago, of some force trapping her in the dark water. They coalesced with those of the shark knocking her against the rock. She was there now, in the deep, cold ocean, but the shark had changed into the silhouette of a person…a woman, who crystallized into her view. She stooped over her. Her hair was long and matted, her eyes gleaming like metal. Seaweed wrapped around her middle, and where her skin showed, it was pale gray and blue, mottled with white spots beneath, spots that moved like fish eggs in their sacks.

Kate blinked her eyes and found herself in the bathroom again, but the woman was still there. Hands with fingers twisted like gnarled roots and nails as sharp and black as thorns reached out for her. Kate tried to scream out, but couldn’t find her voice. Fear had stripped her of it and pushed an icy current down her spine. The pull of sleep washed over her, and she had the sensation of falling through the floor and into the black water. It was the woman. She was making it happen. She was pushing her down, drowning her, suffocating the life from her.

Lightning struck outside and the clap of thunder was almost immediate. The phosphorous smell pinched at Kate’s nose. She shook herself awake and fought to regain her breath. The woman was still there. Kate managed to scoot back from her, away from the woman. Her mouth opened unnaturally wide, full of sharp broken teeth. She wasn’t human…she wasn’t real, Kate told herself. She kicked her legs, but they felt as heavy as bricks. She couldn’t coordinate her movements, almost as if the air around her had thickened, like water. Somehow, she was still in the water, still trapped in the vision.

The woman charged at her. Kate squinted her eyes shut, hoping to erase the nightmare in front of her. Her thoughts screamed.

None of this is real!
Get out of here!

Kate pressed her eyes shut, and when she opened them again, the woman was gone. The bathroom was empty or at least appeared to be. Scrunched in the corner, still feeling she wasn’t alone, Kate stood up using the wall for support. Her legs wobbled, and her hands trembled. She looked down at her finger. The cut had stopped bleeding. Something cold slipped around her as she stared at her finger. There was hardly any blood at all, and the floor was clean.

Kate turned to the mirror, at first startled by the tape on her cheek from where Linda had fixed her cut. She glanced over the floor again, wondering what she had slipped on. There was no blood or water. Her head pounded where she had hit the tub, so she knew that much had occurred. Then it dawned on her, the feeling of when she first started to fall and the direction she had slipped in. She hadn’t slipped backwards like she thought she had. Someone had pushed her forward.

A howling wind scraped through the edges of Kate’s dream—a moment with David at home in the kitchen cooking dinner together and discussing weekend plans—and jerked her back to the present. She didn’t want to wake up, and when she did, it came with a monster of a headache as she recollected all that had happened last night, the dead snake on her doorstep, the cut on her finger, and the chilling woman she’d seen in the bathroom.

She looked down at her finger. The cut was barely visible. It was her head where she had hit the bathtub that pulsed with sharp pain. A surge of dread filled her as she questioned what she had really seen. The vengeful storm goddess, Rán, or a hallucinatory episode brought on by her narcolepsy? Neither of the two was good. She shivered and instinctively reached over to David’s side of the bed. A wave of disappointment sank into her as her hand patted the cold, flat space next to her. He was off fighting his own storms.

Kate went to the drawer in her nightstand, grabbed her medication bottle, and swallowed one of her narcolepsy pills. If the woman in the bathroom last night really was just a hallucination, she certainly didn’t want it to happen again.

Outside, the trees shook and scratched their limbs against the house like fingernails on the windowpane. The storm seemed to loom over the city much like the curse in her mind. A crow cawed, and she wondered if it had found the snake in the trash, was pecking it apart at that very moment. Her thoughts returned to who had put it there. Andre or Thea? Thea might have stolen the statue, but for as long as she had known her, she had never threatened someone. Only cursed them.

Kate went into the spare room and studied the statue in the closet. She had what Andre wanted now. Now…she was definitely involved, and someone knew it.

Making her way to the bathroom, she focused instead on her workday. There was a new system to implement and a lot of data to collect and analyze. She showered, ate, and headed to the PNGS. On the way there, driving down Marine Drive, a straight stretch of road that paralleled the Columbia River, the wind shook her jeep so hard at times, she struggled to keep the jeep inside the lanes. She slowed almost to a stop to gain control.

An enormous disc-shaped cloud darkened the sky overhead, turned the daylight to a purple-gray hue, similar to the color of that woman’s skin in her bathroom. Kate shivered and shook her head. She turned up the radio, attempting to reclaim control of her thoughts. The shrill alarm of a weather threat came over the station:

The National Weather Service has issued a severe tornado threat to Multnomah and Washington Counties. Note this is not a test. A severe warning threat for possible tornadoes has been issued to the Portland Metro area. All persons are advised to stay indoors, away from windows, and in a tightly enclosed space.

Kate turned off the radio. Trees at the river’s edge belted back and forth. Loose debris in the fields tumbled across the road. Sticks flew across the graveled parking lot of the PNGS when she pulled in. She stayed in her jeep for a moment, apprehensive about stepping out into the blustery weather. A strip of siding peeled from the building and somersaulted across the lot. Her jeep rocked side to side. She watched the sky closely. The tail of a large cloud drew down overhead.

Stunned with both awe and fear, Kate watched as a funnel cloud formed right in front of her. If it passed through the lot, it could toss her vehicle around or topple a tree over it. She eyed the building, knowing if she were ever going to make a run for it, she had to do it now.

She grabbed her pack in the backseat. Another car turned into the lot, a white pickup she didn’t recognize. A man stepped out and crouched against the fierce wind. He had a black jacket on with white stripes on the shoulder, and Kate remembered Nick wearing something similar. He kneeled against the back tire, bracing himself against the wind. It wouldn’t be enough, she thought, seeing the funnel cloud draw closer to them. Its current path looked to cross right over the top of them. The tree in front of her started to bend toward Nick.

“Nick, watch out!” she shouted, even though he couldn’t hear her in the jeep.

They both needed to take immediate shelter. Kate opened her door. The wind shoved it back on her, and she strained to get out of the jeep. The storm’s pressure at her back reminded her of underwater currents, how they pushed and pulled against you, tangling you into their pathway. Nick waved his hand at her, signaling for her to get back inside her Jeep. She shook her head and pointed at the PNGS building.

A sharp smell permeated the air around them, acid and metal, and the crackling sensation of static surrounded Kate like an electrical cage. Her scalp tingled.

“Nick! Get out of there!” she yelled, pointing to the sky.

It was too late. The sky ripped open. A tentacle of white fire slashed down toward them. In the instant before she ducked her head, in the brilliant bright light, Kate saw her again, the woman’s face, her silver-blue eyes glaring down on her, gnarled hands stretching out to get her. The straggly limbs of the tree next to her took on the shape of the woman’s hair, the knotty branches her arms. She opened a cruel, dark mouth and the storm screeched out from it. Like a savage claw, a limb raked at her and Nick. Kate ducked and fell to the ground. An ear-splitting pop rang out, then a roaring cracking sound. The world fell around her as a force pushed her body down into the dark, murky water again, and the same suffocating drowning sensation crushed the breath from her lungs.

Nick shouted, but Kate could barely hear him through the wind. Overhead, she heard something entirely different. A splintering echo. She leaned against her jeep and peered up at the limb of a tree that had snapped from the trunk. It flew at her and Nick. He ducked under the back end of his truck just as the limb crashed down on the hood of it. Another branch twisted and flew at Kate. She scrambled to the ground, with rock and wood flying around her, and slid herself beneath the back end of her jeep like Nick.

They both faced each other beneath their vehicles. Another loud creak whined and a moan rumbled above. Kate grasped then that the entire tree was coming down on them. It pitched sideways before toppling over into the bend of telephone wires. The wires stretched like a rubber band.

“We have to get out of here!” she yelled at him.

Nick climbed out, motioning for her to do the same. He reached for her hand, but a cork-popping blast exploded over them as the wires broke from the poles. They flew through the air like electric snakes. Kate screamed as one of the wires zipped toward them. One touch and the wire would electrocute them.

Kate forced herself to move and sprinted as fast as she could with Nick across the lot. His eyes grew wide, and he stopped just as a wire twisted next to Kate’s foot, shooting sparks. She jumped to the side. Nick lunged for her, gripped her hand tight, and together, they made a break for the PNGS building.  

In that moment, for Kate, the curse was as real as anything, and the storm goddess Rán wanted her dead.

***

Wells threw his briefcase into the passenger seat of his undercover sedan. It held case files on Jim Kelley and Brooke Jennings. He scanned recently added transcripts from Brooke’s bank account with a listing of all her ATM transactions. Purchases showed her being at Rockaway, March 2nd through the 4th. Jim’s body was found on the 4th, the same day she left.

He made a quick call to the station and then stopped for coffee and a bagel on the way out of town. Two hours later, he rolled into the coastal town of Rockaway. Brooke’s transactions listed the Ocean Villa Condominiums as the hotel where she had stayed. On the map, it looked to be only a quarter mile from where Jim’s body was found. This presented a very likely connection between Jim and Brooke. He suspected she had been the one to discover Jim on the beach, but it still didn’t explain how the two of them had developed nearly identical marks on the back of their necks or why they both died only three days apart.

Wells followed the GPS to the condominiums, winding down a narrow, sand-blown road. Towering firs lined the driveway, and by the time he had pulled into the lot, a coat of ocean mist covered his windshield. Sea-colored shingles and statues of whales and mermaids adorned the corners and peaks of the Ocean Villa. He stepped from the car, refreshed by a salty cool breeze. Seashells clanked nearby, and the sound of dogs barking filled the blocks. It was a peaceful setting, not a likely place for a homicide to occur.

The parking lot was small, and lay to one side of the building. A light pole in the far corner was equipped with a camera. Wells walked to the front door and opened it. Bells chimed announcing a customer. A woman at the front counter was tallying receipts behind the desk.

“How can I help you today?” She had feathered, gray curls like a grandmother but her voice was more like that of a grandfather.

Wells took out his badge. “Good afternoon. I’d like to ask you a few questions if I could?”

Her eyes widened and she stopped totaling her receipts. “Sure, what can I help you with?”

“I need to speak with whoever might have been working the first weekend in March?”

She nodded. “That would be me. I’m pretty much here all the time.”

“What’s your name?”

“Beverly Miller.”

Wells pulled out a picture of Brooke from the front pocket of his jacket. It was the picture taken from her driver’s license. “Mrs. Miller, do you remember seeing this girl, Brooke Jennings, during that time? Her bank receipts show that she had been staying here, March 2nd through the 4th.”

Beverly reached for the photo and looked closer. “Yeah, I do remember her.”

“Do you have a copy of her booking that shows she stayed here?”

“I can look it up if you don’t mind waiting a minute or two.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

Beverly stepped over to a filing cabinet and searched through the top drawer. Computerization was still a giant leap away for the hotel’s daily processes, Wells thought, despite the video camera outside. He eyed a yawning cat in the window that rolled over, indifferent to his presence. It shut its eyes and curled its feet under.

Beverly came back with a folder, set it down on the counter, and began flipping through receipt printouts. “That girl in some kind of trouble?”

Wells turned his attention back to Beverly. “Sadly, she is deceased.” Beverly stopped flipping through the pages abruptly and looked up at him. “An accident of nature,” Wells continued. “She was struck by lightning. I just need to finalize some of her last transactions.”

“Oh, that poor girl.” Beverly shook her head. “How’s her boyfriend taking it? They looked like they were so in love.”

“Boyfriend?” Wells repeated. His back stiffened, and he shifted his weight closer to the counter. “She came here with a man?”

“Oh, oops, there I go blabbing my mouth again.” Beverly waved her hand and shook her head, seemingly to discount the words she had let slip. “I don’t know if it was her boyfriend, per se, but she was accompanied by a fellow. I didn’t charge them extra since it was only one night, and they paid for a room that slept four.” She grinned and shook her finger at Wells. “But you’ll be happy to know I did photocopy his ID too.”

“Fantastic, Mrs. Miller. I’d love to see that photo.”

“Oh, you can call me Beverly. It was my great grandmom’s name.”

“It’s a lovely name,” Wells replied.

She searched through an envelope in the folder. “Here we go,” she said, handing him a piece of paper. In the center was a black-and-white copy of a man’s ID, a black-haired man by the name of Andre Singer.

“I’d appreciate a copy of this and the receipts of Brooke’s charges, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure, no problem. It’ll just take a moment.”

“Oh, and one more thing,” Wells said, stopping her. “I was wondering about your surveillance camera in the parking lot. That wouldn’t happen to be active, would it?”

“We only go back two weeks. Then we record over it.”

“Can we replace it with a new one today?”

“Sure,” Beverly said.

Wells left with a folder of Andre’s photo ID, Brooke’s receipts, and the videotape that went back to when the couple had arrived. Beverly had played a slice of them on the video, seen walking hand in hand down the parking lot and kissing in front of their car. As soon as Wells got back to his patrol car, he typed Andre’s driver’s license number into the computer system at his dashboard. Andre’s record pulled up with a 1991 red Nissan sedan, a few speeding tickets, and one disorderly conduct. Nothing serious. He checked his home address. The listing caused him to do a double take. He said it aloud, “2304 Sherwood Lane.” That was the home of Suzanne Jones.

***

The funnel of the storm ravaged across the field and road. It picked up dust and plants and tossed them around in the air like a blender.

“Are you crazy?” Nick shouted at Kate when they reached the top of the steps. The two of them held onto the porch railing.

“Me? What are you talking about?” Kate said. “I wasn’t the one waiting out in the middle of the lot where trees and telephone wires hurled around.”

Nick combed debris from his hair with his hand. “I wasn’t just waiting; I was trying to save you.”

The wind howled and gusted wreckage through the lot. Nick leaned in closer to her to protect her from another branch that flew past them. Kate shifted back from him, realizing that they had been close enough to kiss.