Night Tides (4 page)

Finally she began to type, transcribing what she’d been shown by the spirits. It did not take long. Then she posted it, verified it was up, and shut down the computer. She returned the laptop to its hiding place, turned out the lights, and crawled beneath the cool sheets, only then disturbing the cat sleeping obliviously at the foot of the bed.

She was asleep within minutes, although her dreams were filled with terrified girls pleading from the lakeshore and menacing silhouettes behind bright, blinding lights.

CHAPTER THREE

P
OSTED BY
The Lady
to
The Lady of the Lakes
blog: The police won’t tell you about it yet, but another young woman was accosted on the isthmus last night. She has dark hair and a Celtic knot tattooed on her shoulder. The Lady hopes that she’s not in the same predicament as Ling Hu and Faith Lucas, but I’m afraid she might be. Maybe if the police spent more time patrolling and less time worrying about making their ticket quota on the Beltline, this would be a safer town.

From the
Wisconsin Capital Journal
, published four hours after the above posting appeared on
The Lady of the Lakes:

THIRD UW STUDENT DISAPPEARS

By Julie Schutes, staff reporter

And another one gone, leaving only her clothes.

Madison police have classified UW sophomore Carrie Elizabeth Kimmell as officially missing after personal belongings, including items of clothing, were found at a lakeside construction site.

According to Detective Martin Walker, Kimmell’s case was filed as an endangered missing person, due to her history of depression. He would neither confirm nor deny any connection to the recent disappearances of Ling Hu and Faith Lucas, both UW students. In both prior cases, personal belongings were found at isolated locations on the isthmus.

At seven that morning, Rachel stood behind the counter of her small, eponymous breakfast-and-lunch diner, Rachel’s. The sun blasted through the big front windows and off the white walls, filling the place with clean, natural light. Conversations, clinking silverware, and the soft music of Jamie Cullum provided the soundtrack. The place smelled of fresh cooking and the slightly metallic odor of air-conditioning.

There had been no diner in Rachel’s future when she graduated from La Follette High School, then started college with dreams of being a veterinarian. But she had no head for memorizing arcane scientific information, and the bloody dissections sent her scurrying instead for a fallback business degree. An internship with a local catering company convinced her she could do a better job than they were doing, so she dropped out a semester from graduation, borrowed some money from a fund for women-owned businesses, and started Rachel’s Soirees to Go. A year at that showed her that what she really wanted was her own place, where the people came to
her
.

So she sold the catering business at a loss and used the money as a down payment on Trudy’s, a well-established diner whose owner was ready to retire. That had been ten years ago, when she was twenty-four. It had been the one constant through the ups and downs—mostly downs—of her life since then. Well, it and the lakes.

Now she waited patiently while a white-haired professor of literature decided what to order. Oswald Dunning, expert on Chaucer and author of the thick textbook a nearby student patron was reading, had walked the five blocks from his house to breakfast every morning for twenty-two years, first for Trudy and now for Rachel. Rachel had seen his iron-gray hair go white, then thin, and finally sparse. Age spots and thick knuckles marked his once-wiry hands. In contrast, she was pretty sure the nigh-indestructible tweed jacket he wore in all weather would outlast not just Professor Dunning but them all.

Other regulars lined the counter, while a few newcomers sat at the tables. Usually the newbies were college students: trim, sexy girls in fashion-magazine casuals and boys still learning to groom themselves without their mother’s insistence. Rachel never advertised and was content that word of mouth spread through the bohemian isthmus population just fast enough so that when one set of student regulars graduated, others appeared to take their place.

On a whim, Rachel had redone the walls in white dry-erase marker board, and now elaborate customer graffiti danced alongside descriptions of the day’s specials. As she watched, one of the college girls put the finishing touches on an elaborate line drawing of a unicorn standing among flowers, then signed her name and, beneath it, wrote her Web site address. She crouched so low on her heels that her jeans displayed a third of her turquoise thong and all of the tramp-stamp tattoo across the small of her back.

“I believe I shall have an omelet of ham and cheese,” Professor Dunning said at last, and stood the laminated menu between the napkin holder and ketchup bottle. “I’ll need the protein to reach the blank slates in my freshman class. The girls are little more than suntans and brassieres, and the boys know nothing except computer games and pornography.”

“Oh, they can’t be that bad,” Rachel said as she wrote down the order. “After all, we were young once.”

“When I was young, men had goals and women had modesty.” He smiled and shook off the bitterness. “And you still
are
young, my dear.”

“I’m thirty-four; that’s not young. It’s the point where people start planning their midlife crisis.” She put the order on the carousel and spun it for the cook.

“I’m not an expert on semantics, but if you can plan it, I doubt it qualifies as a ‘crisis,’” Dunning said.

“I plan all my crises,” Rachel said with a wink. “And I use index cards instead of a spreadsheet. That’s how I know I’m not young.”

“Well, the man at the end of the counter is also young by my standards, and he hasn’t taken his eyes off you since he sat down.”

She turned, then realized the man in question actually
was
watching her. She blushed and looked away quickly. That end of the counter was Helena’s area, so Rachel had not taken his order. She slipped into the kitchen and peered out through the narrow serving window.

“Whassup?” Jimmy the cook asked as he glanced up from the griddle.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just checking on something.”

The man was about Rachel’s age, with unruly brown hair that needed cutting. He wore a dark-blue button-down shirt with no tie and carried a PDA in his pocket. He was broad-shouldered, clean-shaven, and square-jawed, and he perused his newspaper with eyes that, at this distance, looked either blue or green. He radiated intelligence, strength, and total self-confidence—exactly the kind of man Rachel couldn’t stand. Her ex-husband was that kind of man—or, rather, desperately wanted to be: a beta male striving futilely to become an alpha. His bitterness had been one but not all of the things that had finally driven Rachel away, and she had no patience left for men like that.

And yet the man at the end of the counter didn’t give off that sense of physical danger she encountered in so many big, muscular men. He seemed to lack the simmering need to prove himself physically, and with a start she realized just how attractive that made him. Well, that and his boyish good looks. She felt a distinctive tingle in the pit of her stomach that she did her best to ignore.

The man looked up, and around, clearly wondering where she’d gone. When he glanced toward the kitchen, Rachel ducked out of sight.

Her waitress, Helena, poked her head around the corner into the kitchen. Helena had black hair, sharp features, and an easy smile; she’d known Rachel for most of their adult life. “Are you hiding?”

“No, I’m … looking for this,” Rachel said, and held up a spatula. The head fell off and clattered into the sink.

“You’re looking for a broken spatula?” Helena said doubtfully.

“Well, if I’m going to replace it, I need to know what size to—” She stopped, defeated.
“Yes
, I’m hiding, are you happy? The man at the end of the counter was staring at me.”

“All the straight men stare at you the first time they come in here,” Helena reminded her. “And the second and third time too. They don’t stop until you bite off their heads.”

“I wish you’d quit saying that,” Rachel snapped. “I know better.” But that wasn’t entirely true. Rachel was secretly proud of her lean, athletic body; she knew men loved her wild semifrizzy hair, even though she hated it. She also tended to inadvertently dress in ways that showed off her assets, as she had this morning, in a sports-bra top and tight denim shorts.

“You don’t know squat,” Helena retorted. “So what if he’s staring at you? You’re an attractive woman, he’s …” She stood on tiptoe to see past Rachel through the serving window.

The man lifted his coffee cup but was so busy looking around that he missed his own lips and spilled the hot liquid on the counter. He quickly put down the cup and wiped up the spill with a napkin, checking to see if anyone had noticed his clumsiness.

Helena suppressed a giggle. “Ooh, he’s an ice-cream cone on a hot day, isn’t he? Look at those eyes.”

“Please,” Rachel said with a scowl. Helena had been out as gay since junior high school. “You never licked an ice-cream cone in your life. You told me that, remember?”

“Even a vegetarian can admire a well-cooked steak,” Helena said archly.

“He probably watches the Packers religiously, ice-fishes and deer-hunts, has a snowmobile, a Jet Ski, and a porn folder on his laptop. I bet he even knows Brett Favre’s birthday.”

“October tenth,” Helena said. “And that’s a lot of hostility to cook up for nothing more than a simple look. It’s been a while for you, hasn’t it?”

Rachel put her hands on her hips. “Helena, if and when I decide to date again, it won’t be with some square-headed walking cheese log.” Yet even as she protested, she knew her assertions were wrong. Something about the man told her that, whatever else, he was more than he appeared. And despite her best efforts to negate it, the need to learn what that might be was growing exponentially.

The bell over the door chimed, announcing a new customer. Helena said, “Excuse me; my public demands me,” then froze in midstep. “Oh,
shit,”
she hissed. “It’s
Caleb
.”

In the doorway stood a tall man with graying hair worn in a crew cut. His unbuttoned flannel shirt revealed an olive U.S. Marines T-shirt. He had a few days’ salt-and-pepper beard and regarded the dozen patrons at the counter with utter disdain. As he walked past them, the cuffs of his unbuttoned sleeves raked across the backs of the customers’ heads. “Hey!” the girl who’d drawn the unicorn said, but Caleb ignored her. He chose a stool at the far end, in Helena’s section, next to the man she and Rachel had been discussing. The man glanced at Caleb, then returned to reading his paper.

Caleb grabbed the edge of the counter and, with a theatrical groan, twisted on the stool until his back popped audibly.

Rachel’s stomach tightened into an apprehensive knot. After the events of the previous night, she was already on edge, and this didn’t help. “What’s he doing?”

“That spine-cracking thing he does,” Helena said. “Maybe this time he won’t—whoops, there he goes.”

Caleb fished a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, stuck one between his lips, and lit it. He snapped his old-fashioned metal lighter closed with a flourish. He turned to the blue-shirted man and asked, “Are you done with the sports section?”

“He’s smoking again,” Helena observed disdainfully.

“Christ,” Rachel muttered. She scanned the other patrons to confirm what she already knew: None of her cop regulars was around. Caleb would’ve checked that too, before he came inside. “Hey, Jimmy?”

The cook, who had ignored both women and lingered diligently over his grill, now shook his head without looking up. “Uh-uh, I’m not paid enough to deal with that. He’s one of those crazy ex-soldiers. He might hide in the bushes and gut me like a trout when I leave.”

“Oh, grow a pair, will you?” Rachel said. “Besides, I was just going to say, get ready to call 911 if I tell you to. I’m hoping it won’t come to that.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Helena said quietly.

“No. It’s my diner; it’s my problem. Just try to keep everyone else distracted.” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and set forth to face the dragon.

This wasn’t her first clash with Caleb Johnstone. On his initial visit a year earlier, he’d come behind the counter—something
no one
did without permission—and rifled through the order tickets to add something to his sandwich. Rachel would have asked him to leave, and possibly banned him for good, but Helena got there first and handled it more gently.

Then, eight months ago, he’d picked a fight with another patron over the boy’s gay pride T-shirt. He’d broken the boy’s nose and threatened to show Helena how a “real man” treated a woman, saying it would “stop all that carpet-licking.” Rachel had sworn out a restraining order against him that was still in effect, which meant he could be arrested immediately. Still, she hated to involve the police except as a last resort. That kind of publicity was hard to overcome.

Caleb looked up at her as she approached. “Hello, bay-bee. Still afraid of me? I bet you’ve already called the police to come protect you and that cute little dyke over there.”

Rachel felt silence spread through the room. She crossed her arms and said evenly, “Put out the cigarette, Caleb. And leave.”

He deliberately took another puff and said, “For a kiss.”

Rachel knew she was turning red, as she always did in situations like this, as much with fury as embarrassment. Still, she couldn’t back down. Quiet and steady, she said, “Caleb, completely aside from the fact that you could be thrown in jail just for being here, there’s a no-smoking ordinance in Madison. So put out the goddamned cigarette, then go.”

Caleb deliberately looked straight ahead, an infuriating little smirk on his lips. “Make me.”

She laughed for the benefit of the people watching, then leaned her hands on the counter. Through a forced smile she said, “Caleb, come on. Do you
want
to go to jail?”

“Sure.” Then, in a loud voice, he added, “After all, wouldn’t want to offend the goddamned hippies who let people like me fight their wars while they pass all these ‘poor me’ laws. Pretty soon a man won’t be able to fart without a license.”