Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (19 page)

Everyone jumped. Everyone. He’d never seen
that before.

Bronly turned around, and it was her turn to
give him an insincere smile. “Nothing we can’t handle,” she
said.

“Tourists? Vandals? Is this the kind of crime
I’d be handling if I came here?” he asked. Not that he was planning
to come here, but he hated it when people deliberately hid
information from him. Perhaps that was one of the reasons he became
a cop.

“It’s not really a crime,” Martin started to
say as the chef said, “It’s my fault. If I hadn’t moved the
table…”

“But you like the table there,” one of the
waitresses said. “It makes for a more efficient kitchen.”

“A more efficient kitchen is one you can cook
in,” the chef said, and sighed. He was older—that indeterminate age
some men got, where it was impossible to say if they were 35 or 75.
If Retsler had to guess, he’d say the chef was closer to the upper
limit than the lower one, but only because of the man’s calm. “I
just shouldn’t mess with it.”

“We’re going to have to mess with it,”
Stanley said. “That grill has to come out. We can’t keep repairing
it. And then what’ll happen? Will the new one get trashed?”

“Someone want to tell me what’s going on?”
Retsler asked.

“Nothing important,” Martin said, giving him
an insincere smile.

“It was important enough to interrupt our
meeting at a run,” Retsler said.

They all looked uncomfortable, the kind of
uncomfortable that people often got with outsiders whom they felt
would not understand. Retsler’s heart sank. He didn’t like the
feeling he had, but he was a cop and a damned good one, and it
looked like they needed something, so he pushed, even though his
instincts warned him against it.

“Let me take a look,” he said, and before
anyone could argue, he followed the flour footprints out of the
kitchen. They padded beside the newly installed stone path, which
he thought odd, considering the owner of those feet had been
barefoot. The stone should have felt better against naked skin than
the sandy rocks beside the path.

“Chief Retsler, please.”

He could hear Bronly behind him, but he also
knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep up with him, not in those
heels on this incline.

The path wound into the trees and away from
the parking lot, toward the mountain itself.

The footprints remained visible, even though
the flour should have dispersed after a few yards. He felt a
tingling he hadn’t experienced since his last years on the
Coast.

He wasn’t going to like this. He really
should have heeded their advice and turned around.

A six-foot-high mesh fence covered the path
and disappeared behind boulders that had clearly fallen off the
mountainside. Behind the mesh fence, grass grew summer tall, nearly
up to Retsler’s chest. The grass blocked part of a well-worn dirt
path that led to a boarded off opening into the mountainside.

That denied entrance into the Oregon Caves.
The Park Service had actually boarded it all off.

There was no easy access through the mesh
fence either. A large sign posted to the right stated that the
entrance to the Oregon Caves was a half mile away, with a map
provided in case the wanderer forgot about all the signs he’d seen
coming up to the Chalet.

The footprints continued on the other side of
the mesh. They followed the path all the way to the boarded opening
of the Caves. From this distance, it looked like the footprints
went into the Caves itself.

Retsler swallowed hard, that knot in his
stomach so twisted that he felt vaguely ill. He forced himself to
look at the ground underneath the mesh fence.

Sure enough, one of the footprints went under
the mesh, half inside the fence and half out, as if the fence
wasn’t even there.

He closed his eyes for half a minute. What he
saw was impossible. He knew it was impossible, he hated that it was
impossible, and yet it was there in front of him, which meant that
what he saw was very possible indeed. Retsler just had to figure
out what actually happened.

He opened his eyes. The footprint remained.
Dammit. He grabbed the fence with his right hand. The mesh was cool
against his palm. He shook the metal and it rattled, but it didn’t
give. He’d hoped that it was rusted, broken off somewhere that he
couldn’t quite see, and easy to move and replace. But of course,
the simplest and most logical explanation wasn’t the one that faced
him at the moment.

“Chief Retsler, really.” Ron’s voice came
from behind him, a bit breathless and a little exasperated. “You
don’t need to investigate this.”

He turned without letting go of the
fence.

Her perfectly coiffed hair had slipped its
bun, half of it trailing down the side of her now-red face. Beads
of sweat had formed on her collarbone, and sweat stained the area
around her armpits. Brambles and leaves clung to the hem of her
pants. She no longer looked like a society matron, but like a woman
who would have been a lot more comfortable in sweats and blue
jeans, a glass of water in her left hand.

“I don’t have to investigate,” he said,
“because you know what this is.”

Her mouth thinned. “I told you. It’s nothing,
really. Not what we wanted to talk with you about.”

“Nothing?” he asked. “Something did about
one-hundred dollars damage to that kitchen, maybe more considering
the cleanup time. Then there’s the problem of the grill and the
fact that your chef doesn’t feel like he can put anything in his
kitchen the way he wants it. Now, unless I miss my guess, the
Chalet is already operating at a loss. You want to tell me that you
can write off an expense, even a small one, that seems to occur on
a regular basis?”

“I didn’t say this had happened before,” she
said.

“No, your receptionist did when she came into
our meeting room,” Retsler said. “She said that she was sorry but
that ‘it’ was back.”

Ron’s eyes widened. She glanced over her
shoulders, but the remaining town parents hadn’t followed her, or
if they had, they were moving at an incredibly glacial pace.

Since she clearly wasn’t going to say
anything else, Retsler continued. “It’s also notable that your
receptionist didn’t give the vandal a gender. I thought maybe an
animal when I saw the overturned table, before I saw the
footprints. After all, we don’t call other people ‘it’ very often,
now do we?”

Bronly brought a hand to her destroyed bun,
realized that it was falling apart, and pulled out the pins. She
shook her head, letting her hair fall. The hair wasn’t blond like
he’d thought, but silver. With her hair at shoulder length, she
looked younger than she had a moment ago.

She still didn’t seem willing to answer
him.

“Why don’t you be up-front with me?” he said,
trying to keep his tone even. “When you set up this job, you didn’t
want an Oregonian. You didn’t even want an average chief of police.
You could have done just fine with some local hire, maybe a
disgruntled park service worker or someone who had retired up here
and just needed the extra money for a few hours of his time every
day. That is, that would be all you needed if things were normal
around Marble Village, which they’re not, right,
Ron
?”

He couldn’t help himself: he had to emphasize
her odd misleading nickname, maybe to keep the other anger in
check, the one that rose whenever he felt both embarrassed and
betrayed.

She held up a hand, as if her palm could
block his words. “We were doing a legitimate hire.”

Were
. He wondered if she even knew she
had used the past tense.

“No one could understand why we needed
someone full-time. And most people, they don’t like how remote it
is up here,” she said. “You’re perfect. You’ve been chief of police
in two remote towns, one here in Oregon. That’s all we’re looking
at.”

Yet her gaze didn’t meet his.

“Uh-huh,” he said in the back of his throat,
that Oregon acknowledgement that was both dismissive and somewhat
rude, something he hadn’t done since he moved to Montana. “You’ve
had Hamilton Denne up here, haven’t you?”

Retsler had worked with Denne in Whale Rock.
Denne was the Seavy County Coroner, and a local who first
introduced Retsler to the idea of the supernatural. That discovery
had strained their friendship. Retsler’s move might have broken it
entirely. He hadn’t tried to find out.

Bronly blinked, then took a deep breath. “We
had a mysterious death a few months ago. The Oregon Crime Lab
recommended Doctor Denne.”

Retsler hadn’t heard Hamilton called Doctor,
maybe ever. “A mysterious death. What did Hamilton tell you that
you had? A fairy? A troll? Maybe some kind of orc?”

She shook her head. “No, no, the victim was
human.”

“Really?” Retsler asked. “Then why was
Hamilton here? He likes things that resemble space aliens.”

That wasn’t exactly fair. Denne had saved
Retsler’s butt those last few years in Whale Rock, and had somehow
kept him sane. But Denne did like the stranger things in the world.
He found them fascinating.

Retsler just wanted them to go away.

“We had a desiccated corpse,” she said
softly.

“Which, given the dry conditions, the caves,
and the heat in the summer, shouldn’t be that unusual up here,”
Retsler said.

“Except that he was fine a few hours before.
Alive, laughing, and fat as a man can be and still be considered
strong and tough.”

She had known the corpse, and Retsler had
been rude. He felt a flush build around his ears. He willed it
away.

“I’m sorry,” he said in his formal voice. “I
didn’t realize you had known the deceased.”

She shrugged, blinked again, and he realized
she was fighting tears.

“We lost a few others like that,” she said,
deliberately ignoring his sympathy. “Tourists, it turned out.
Hikers, two of them. When we found those bodies, we thought like
you just did, that they had mummified because of the heat and the
dry conditions, and the alkaline nature of some of the stone up
here—God, we had a thousand explanations.”

“And none of them right,” Retsler said,
making it a statement instead of a question. Statements kept people
talking; questions made them stop.

“It was a
thing
.” She shuddered.
Apparently, she’d seen that
thing
, whatever it was. She held
up her hands. “Long story. Not appropriate at the moment.”

“But Hamilton helped you identify that
thing,” Retsler said.

“Oh, yes, after Chief Davis’s death,” she
said.

Retsler’s fingers tightened on the mesh. The
metal cut into his skin but he didn’t let go. “The chief was the
desiccated corpse?”

She nodded. “He was heading up Mount Elijah
to investigate a cougar sighting last we heard. Just two hours
before someone found him on the road. Like that.”

Tears welled again. The chief had meant
something to her.

Retsler shook his head. This was going to be
one of those stories he didn’t want to hear. Something
supernatural, something no one would believe until they saw the
thing kill something else, and even then they’d find it hard.

“I take it you all solved whatever it was
causing the deaths,” he said in the most clinical voice he had. If
Denne had been up here, he would have known just how angry and
trapped Retsler felt. He was back in Oregon, and he was back in
hell.

“Yes,” she said in a somewhat strangled tone.
“Yes, we figured it out.”

She straightened her shoulders, ran a hand
through her hair, then gave him a watery smile.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that the
previous chief had died suspiciously,” she said.

He shrugged. “We barely got through the
introductions.”

She glanced at his hand, still wrapped around
that mesh. “I feel like I’m not being fair to you. Doctor Denne
told me a lot about you, about the strange things that happened in
Whale Rock, and then I Googled you. We did do an open hire, we did.
It was just—Marble Village isn’t a normal place. People want
normal, they go to Cave Junction. Or Medford. Not here. And all of
the applicants, they were either too old or too practical or too
expensive. And so, I was complaining to Doctor Denne over the
phone, and he told me about you. That’s when I e-mailed you. That’s
when I hoped you would come home.”

This isn’t home
, he almost said, but
didn’t. Oregon was closer to home than Montana, that much was true.
But this part of Oregon was very different from the coast,
different enough to have its own weather, its own customs, and,
apparently, its own monsters.

He didn’t want to know. Better to return to
Montana, where the monsters were humans prone to domestic quarrels
fueled by too much alcohol and an easy access to firearms.

Still, he couldn’t just walk away. Not with
his fingers wrapped around this mesh fence, and that footprint
below. He’d always wonder.

He saw that as both a personal failing and as
a curse.

“All right,” he said. “Time to tell me what’s
going on here.”

She swallowed, blinked, sighed, clearly
steeling herself. Then her gaze met his.

“This one really isn’t important. We weren’t
going to mention it. No one’s been hurt, nothing has gone
wrong—”

“Except the damage,” he said.

“Which we can limit if we don’t move anything
in the kitchen,” she said. “The problem is that the new chef—and
it’s really not fair to call him new, since he’s been here five
years—he wants to make the kitchen more efficient. And the grill is
dying. We can’t keep repairing it. It’s from the 1930s. They don’t
even make parts any more and we can’t find any others.”

Retsler was still focusing on how she
started. “What do you mean you can limit it if you don’t move
anything in the kitchen?”

She gave him a small smile. “I feel so stupid
discussing this.”