The Night Season (2 page)

CHAPTER

1

Present day

Technically, the park
was closed.

But Laura knew a place where the wire fence was split, and she had let the Aussies through and then climbed over behind them. It looked like a pond. There was, in fact, no place muddier in the winter in Portland, Oregon, than West Delta Dog Park, and that was saying something.

The dogs ran ahead of her in the standing water, splashing it behind them, already matted with wet dirt and dead grass. Occasionally they turned to look back at her, their warm breath condensing in the January air.

Laura wiped her nose with the back of her hand. It was a terrible day to be out. Her rain pants were slick with rain, her trail runners were soaked. She’d spent the early morning sandbagging downtown and her back ached. The stress fracture in her foot stung. Stay off it for six weeks, the doctors had said. As if.

The cloud cover hung so low that the tops of the trees seemed to brush it.

She loved this.

The worst weather, body aching. Nothing could keep her inside. Biking. Running. Walking the dogs. She was out there every day, no matter what. Not like all those poseurs who came out in the summer in their REI sun shirts and ran along the esplanade with their iPods and swinging elbows. Where were they in the dead of winter? At the gym, that’s where.

God, Laura hated those people.

Franklin glanced back at her, wagged his stubby tail, barked once, flattened his ears, and took off across the old road to the slough. It was their usual route. Penny, the puppy, stuck closer to Laura, zipping ahead ten feet and then circling back.

Laura heard it then. She had heard it all along, but it had faded to white noise, an ambient sound, like a jet passing overhead.

The Columbia Slough.

She knew it would be high. They’d had a ton of snow in December. Then it had warmed up and started to rain. That meant snowmelt from the mountains. Lots of it. The storm drains were backed up. The Willamette was near flood stage. The local news was live with it day and night; they were considering evacuating downtown. But that was the Willamette. Miles away.

As Laura rounded the corner, past the trees, where the old concrete pavilion sat sinking into the slough bank, she was aware of her mouth opening.

In the summer, the slough was still and flat, blanketed by algae so thick it looked solid enough to walk on. That slough was so stagnant that Laura was surprised anything could survive in it. That slough looked like a bucket of water that had been left on the back porch all summer.

This slough was alive. It moved like something angry and afraid, churning fast and high. Whitewater swept along the bank, pulling up debris and washing it downriver. Laura saw a branch get sucked into the water and lost sight of it in an instant as it was swallowed by the seething froth.

Franklin was up ahead, nosing along the old concrete pavilion at the slough’s bank. He whined and gave her a look.

She called his name and slapped her thigh. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

He turned to come to her. He’d been a rescue dog. Her husband had found him on the Internet. He’d been kept in some barn in Idaho, given little food and no human comfort. It had taken them years to teach him to trust people. And it filled Laura with pride to know that he had turned into such a good dog.

Even with the noise of the slough, he’d heard her. He’d turned to come.

And that’s when it happened.

Did he slip? Did the slough rise up suddenly and take him? She didn’t know.

He was looking right at her, and in a second he was gone.

It took her a moment to move. And then she snapped into action.

Her dog was not going to die. Not like this. She ran. She didn’t think about the stress fracture. The sore back. The raging river. She ran to the edge of the bank, scanning the water for him, as Penny barked fiercely at her heels.

Her heart leapt. She saw him. A glimpse—a wet mound of fur struggling in froth. He was already moving down the river, but he was alive, his black nose just above water.

She had several options.

Maybe if Franklin hadn’t been looking her in the eye when it happened she would have considered more of them. She would have called for help, or run alongside the river, or tied a rope around her waist.

She knew what happened to people who went into water after pets.

They died.

But Laura had seen something in Franklin ’s brown eyes. He’d looked right at her.

“Stay,” she said to Penny.

And she plunged into the cold water after him.

Laura’s first sensation, in the rushing dirty sludge, was of not being able to breathe. She’d been hit by a car once, on her bike. It was like that. Like having all the air forced out of you by an impact of steel and concrete. Laura forced herself to take a deep breath, filling her lungs, and she tried to orient herself. Her head was above water, her wet braid around her neck. She was already turned around, already ten feet away from Penny, fifteen, twenty. The roar of the slough was unrelenting. Twigs and branches snapped against Laura’s face in the current, stinging her skin. Penny stood barking at the shore, pawing at the ground. Until Laura couldn’t hear her anymore.

Where was Franklin?

Laura struggled to see him, but at water level all she could see was more water. She was fifty feet away from Penny now. Sixty. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t see the shore. Just the sky, dark clouds, above her.

Float.

Cold water survival. You lost heat swimming.

Just float.

She took a deep breath and lifted her hands, already numb, foreign, like they belonged to someone else, and she spread her arms and bobbed on her back, and let the current take her.

The current had taken Franklin.

It would take her to him.

Cold water filled her ears. They ached. Her teeth chattered, the sound lost in the roar of the slough. Her clothes felt heavy, filled with water, dragging her down.

And then she heard him.

Laura rolled over and used the last of her strength to fight her way through the current toward the whimper. He was there, caught against the roots of a fallen tree, the water trapping him. He saw her and his ears perked up, and his paws paddled in vain toward her.

She got to him.

She didn’t know how.

She got to him and wrapped her arms around his neck. He could have fought her. Animals did that. Panicked. But he didn’t. He went limp. He went limp into her arms, and she was able to use the tree as leverage and push her heels into the silt at the bottom of the slough, and she managed to somehow inch them both to the muddy riverbank.

She collapsed beside him in the mud, still holding on to him, still not letting him go. Her heart was pounding. They were soaked. Franklin whined and licked her face.

They’d made it.

She rolled onto her back, almost giddy. They were alive. She’d like to see one of those fair-weather esplanade runners survive something like this.

Franklin shook the water from his mangy coat and Laura turned away, lifting a hand over her face. “Hey, boy,” she said. “Easy.”

He growled, his upper lip tightening. He was looking at something behind her.

“What?” she said.

Franklin’s eyes narrowed, still focused over Laura’s shoulder.

She shivered. Whether it was from cold or fear, she didn’t know.

Laura turned around.

In the mud of the bank, partially exposed, was a human skeleton.

CHAPTER

2

Susan Ward was
singing along to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” when she almost hit the seagull.

Portland, Oregon, was an hour from the ocean. But when it was windy at the coast, the seagulls were blown inland.

Since the storms started two weeks ago, the city had been infested with them. They got into open Dumpsters, and shat on decks, and stood around on the sidewalk arguing in small groups like first-grade girls at recess. They were angry, bossy birds. But Susan figured she’d be angry, too, if she’d just been blown fifty miles.

Susan laid on her horn, and the gull gave her an accusatory look and flapped off into the rain. He was a western gull—white with slate wings and a yellow bill. They were big birds, knee-high, and built like bouncers, not the scrawny gulls of the Atlantic. Susan didn’t know for sure he was male. It was just a theory. Something about the look he gave her.

She spotted Archie’s unmarked police car on the last dry patch of asphalt in the parking lot and managed to squeeze her old Saab in beside it, then put the hood of her slicker up and stepped outside into the rain.

It was early afternoon, but it looked like evening. That’s how it was in Portland in the winter. Permanent twilight.

The rain on her hood sounded like grease popping in a skillet. It made her crave bacon.

She looked down the hillside to where Oaks Park nestled up against the flood-swollen Willamette River.

Susan felt about parks the way she felt about nature in general. She liked knowing it existed, but didn’t feel the need to partake personally. This was not a popular point of view in Portland. Portlanders, in general, took great pride in their parks, and felt compelled to visit them regularly, even in the dead of winter when it was dark and the grass had gone to mud and no one bothered to pick up their dog poop. There were wilderness parks, rose gardens, rhododendron gardens, Japanese gardens, classical Chinese gardens, skate parks, public plazas, parks with fountains, public art, food carts, tennis courts, swimming pools, hiking trails, monuments, and amphitheaters. There was even the world’s smallest park, Mill Ends Park, which was roughly two feet by two feet. Susan had always found that last one sort of ridiculous.

Then there was Oaks Park. (“Where the Fun Never Stops!”) It had been around for as long as anyone could remember, which is to say about a hundred years. A couple dozen rides, a roller-skating rink, carnival games, picnic grounds. Wholesome good times for the whole family, punctuated by a few brief periods when it was the go-to place for drugs and a van quickie.

A dead body had been found on the carousel.

Susan smiled. Sometimes this stuff just wrote itself.

She finished slogging down the hill and made her way through the pretty white wooden archway to the fairway.

The cops standing around the carousel looked miserable. Hunched over, their black rain ponchos lifting in the wind, they reminded Susan of crows loitering around a carcass.

All but Detective Archie Sheridan.

He was standing away from the others, wearing one of those coats with fur-trimmed hoods that you get at army surplus stores before expeditions to the Arctic.

It was fifty degrees. Practically tropical for January, but he had his hood up. She only knew it was Archie because of how he was holding himself perfectly still, one hand in his pocket, the other around a huge paper cup of coffee, just watching. And because he was alone.

He looked over and saw her and held up the coffee cup in a sort of absentminded wave. His hangdog face was as creased as ever, crooked nose, heavy lids, but he had color to his skin again, and his eyes had more life. A green scarf covered up the horizontal scar on his neck. His brown curls poked in odd angles around his forehead.

“Is it her?” Susan asked him.

“Looks like it,” he said. “Robbins will issue an official ID from the ME’s office.”

Stephanie Towner had been reported missing two days before. The cops had found her car in the parking lot at the Bishop’s Close, an estate garden along thirteen acres of high river bluffs on the west side. Portlanders liked to take peaceful walks there when they weren’t crouching to take pictures of plants with their iPhones. The cops had found Towner’s purse at the top of a slick of mud where it appeared someone had taken a header down the riverbank. You could blame Darwinism. Or you could blame the bottle of wine her husband had reported that she’d had before she left. Maybe a little of both.

“I thought she drowned,” Susan said.

The corners of Archie’s mouth went up slightly. It had taken Susan a year to recognize the expression as a smile. “I think she did,” he said.

She followed his gaze to the carousel. It was housed in an octagonal-roofed pavilion that was open on all sides. Fifteen or twenty seagulls fought for space on the roof. They shifted their weight from one foot to another and squawked nervously. The iron fence that ringed the ride was open and Susan walked inside. One of the poncho-wearing cops put a hand out to stop her. “Not on the platform,” he said, jerking his head toward the muddy footprints on the carousel’s oak flooring.

She nodded and peered forward from the platform’s edge. The corpse was positioned on an ostrich. The ostrich was beautiful, carved out of wood, brown with a red and gold saddle. His yellow legs stretched apart, as if frozen in a joyful skip. Stephanie Towner was posed as if riding the thing. But it wasn’t convincing. She’d slumped down, her chin now pressed against the base of the ostrich’s neck, her arms dangling on either side of its belly. Thankfully, her hair covered her face. Susan couldn’t see well enough to make out many details. But it was clear that she’d been in the water. Or at least in mud.

Archie stepped up behind Susan. She could smell the coffee in his hand and the wet fur on his coat. The rain fell against the carousel roof. The seagulls squawked. “She was moved,” he said. “There’s mud and grass.” He turned to face behind them and motioned across the park to the picnic area at the river’s edge, where a chain-link fence lined the riverbank. “We found hair on the fence. Looks like the current washed her downstream and she got tangled up there. Then someone found her, got her over the fence, and dragged her here. Rain washed away any good footprints, but you can make out the drag marks in the mud.”

Susan got out her damp notebook and wrote all that down.

Archie was throwing her a bone and she knew it. He’d done that a few times over the last six months. It wasn’t his fault that she’d almost gotten herself killed a couple of times in his presence, but he didn’t seem to know that. So he gave her a heads-up on the weird stuff. Scoops. She was sure everyone at the newspaper thought they were sleeping together.

“Who called it in?” she asked.

“Crew working on the rink,” he said. “I think they’re doing something to the floor.”

Susan had grown up roller-skating at the Oaks Park Roller Rink. Everyone celebrated birthdays there. All the kids skated around under the disco ball until someone inevitably broke a bone and had to go to the emergency room. The rink was now the home of the Rose City Rollers roller derby team, a bunch of tattooed, big-thighed, badass girls in short-shorts. “It floats,” she said. “The rink floor. It’s on pontoons. When the park floods they detach it from the foundation.”

Archie shrugged and took a sip of coffee. “That’s clever. I guess.”

Susan craned her head toward the roller rink, which was at the other end of the park, and tried to catch sight of the workers. “You think one of them…?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Archie said.

She turned back to the carousel. It was ringed by three rows of animals on ascending circular platforms. Jumping horses. Standing horses. A cat. A deer. A dragon. Zebras. Mules. Pigs.

“Why the ostrich?” she said. Whoever had put the body there had gone through a lot of trouble. It couldn’t be easy getting a corpse over a fence. “It’s on the inner circle. Why carry her all the way in there?”

“What do they call that color?” Susan heard Henry Sobol ask. He stepped beside Archie, grinning.

Susan blushed and touched her hair, which she had recently dyed raspberry. “You are stealthy, for a large person,” she told him, tucking her hair back under the hood of her slicker.

Henry was wearing a watch cap over his shaved head, and his salt-and-pepper mustache glistened with rain. “Professional training,” he said with a grin. His black motorcycle boots were caked with mud, probably from the picnic area where the body had originally washed up.

“Let me guess,” Susan said. “You were a Navy SEAL.”

“Doorman,” he said. “I learned how to lurk.”

Susan never knew when he was kidding.

But she didn’t let on.

“I liked it purple,” he said. “What did you call that color?”

“Plum Passion,” she said. “It’s Manic Panic. This one’s called Deadly Nightshade.”

“Whatever happened to Clairol?” Henry mused to Archie, and Susan saw Archie smile.

“Moving a body is a crime, right?” Susan asked.

“Abuse of a corpse,” Archie said. “It’s a Class C felony in Oregon. People who really like abusing corpses go to California. There it’s only a misdemeanor.”

“Figures,” Susan said.

She’d already called the paper to get a photographer, but they were all out on assignment covering the flooding. The
Herald
would run a wire photo of the carousel, or a photo of Stephanie Towner in better days, if they ran a photo at all. Right now readers were more interested in whether their homeowner’s insurance covered mudslides than in women who fell into the Willamette and drowned. Even when they ended up on ostriches.

“Third person who’s drowned in the Willamette in two days,” Archie said.

“The city’s flooding,” Henry said, noticing the mud on his boots with a frown. “And people are stupid around water.”

“Yeah,” Archie said.

Henry gave Archie a look and tapped his watch.

“You sure you can handle things?” Archie said to him.

“Go,” Henry said. He pulled a handkerchief from somewhere in his coat, bent over, and dabbed it at his boots.

Archie turned to Susan. “I’ve got a thing across the river,” he explained.

He tossed his coffee cup in a park trash can, which was immediately beset by gulls, and then headed off in the direction of the parking lot.

Susan watched him go. Past the Tilt-a-Whirl, past the children’s train, and past Oaks Park’s hottest new attraction: “The Beauty Killer House of Horrors.” She remembered when it used to be your standard haunted house: glowing skull, hologram ghosts, scary dark hallways. Now it was all Beauty Killer crime scenes. Susan had heard they even had a mannequin made up to look like Archie, strapped to a gurney, with an animatronic Gretchen Lowell, like a giant Barbie, torturing him with a plastic scalpel. When Gretchen pressed the scalpel into the mannequin’s chest, a stream of blood jetted out three feet.

WEAR GOGGLES
, a sign at the entrance warned.

Everyone loved it.

“Saw your column about the skeleton they found at the slough,” Henry said.

“I thought you only read German poetry,” Susan said. But she was secretly pleased. She’d done a long story on the skeleton. In any other news cycle, it might have gotten more attention. She’d been disappointed when it hadn’t.

Henry rubbed the back of his neck. “What do you know about Vanport?” he asked.

She should have known he’d be critical. “What I wrote. The whole town was washed away in 1948. People died. Some bodies were never found. And the dog park where the skeleton was found is right where the town used to be.”

“The skeleton’s been in the ground sixty years, so he must have died in the Vanport flood?”

“I didn’t say he died at Vanport,” Susan said evenly. She’d had the same argument with her editor. “I said he died about sixty years ago, and was found smack-dab in the middle of the area that used to be the city of Vanport, before Vanport was washed away by a flood sixty years ago.”

“Just be careful what you stir up,” Henry said.

“I exude caution,” Susan said.

Henry snorted.

A hundred feet beyond the ride, the river churned chilly and brown, the current whipping debris by at a frenzied pace. A few seagulls circled above the water, but none dared to settle in it. The oaks at the bank were dead-looking, their tops disintegrating into the low wet mist that draped the city like muslin.

Susan had a sudden feeling of dread.

“What?” Henry said, looking up.

She shook it off. “Nothing,” she said. “I just got cold.”