Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Read online

  And, in fact, the day after the insurance adjustor’s report had come—which had been three days after the county had allowed us in to clear all of my inventory—half of the garage had collapsed. Apparently when the volcano god tunneled under the building, he’d weakened some of the surrounding soil substructure. Or something like that. I was just glad that no one had been hurt.

  We’d had the contractor set up a ten-foot-high chain-link fence around the whole place in an effort to keep neighborhood kids out while I healed up and made up my mind what to do with the garage.

  It was my life, the life I’d built for myself after I’d realized I didn’t fit anywhere, so I’d have to make my own place. And I’d done it. Found a place to belong—and when Zee, the grumpy old fae who owned it, had been forced to admit what he was and move to the fae reservation, I’d made it my own.

  And here it was, lying in wreckage at my feet. I knew that the right thing to do was to squeeze more money out of the insurance company, bulldoze the remnants, and sell the lot for what I could get.

  Any car built in the last decade needed plug-in parts-changers, not mechanics. Most of the cars I fixed were older than I was, owned by people who could barely afford their forty-year-old cars. There wasn’t enough money to be made in the business to justify dumping in more.

  Adam’s contractor thought we’d need to throw in fifty or sixty thousand dollars more after the insurance money kicked in to rebuild because there were so many things that would have to be brought up to the current building code. Most years I was lucky if I cleared fifteen thousand, and that only because of the cars we rebuilt for the collector’s market and because my right-hand man, Tad, worked for freaking peanuts.

  I’d come here today to say good-bye when Adam wasn’t here to see me do it. If I’d come here with him, he’d know how much this battered building mattered to me, and he’d rebuild it himself if he had to do it using nothing but the rubble lying around.

  It wasn’t worth that. Wasn’t worth a moment of Adam’s worry—I’d given him enough pain the past year or so. He didn’t know that I knew he woke up in the middle of the night and put his head against my chest to hear my heart beat. Didn’t know I knew he had nightmares that Coyote hadn’t come in time to fix me.

  Being important to someone, to anyone, was something I’d hungered for most of my life. Adam was the lodestone of my life, and I didn’t like it when I hurt him.

  An unfamiliar car pulled up beside me. I turned around to see a gold Chevy Tahoe that had seen better days. It bore a graceful stencil “Simon Landscaping and Lawn Care,” complete with address, phone, and contractor license number.

  The driver’s side window rolled down next to me, and a woman I’d never met before said, “Please tell me that you’re Mercedes Thompson, who is now married with a different last name that no one can remember. Because this is the third time I’ve driven past here in the vain hope that I’d run into you.”

  She was human. I blinked at her, pulling on my professional self—I was at work, even if my garage was in rubble. “Yes?”

  “Yes?” she repeated with the same questioning inflection I’d given it.

  “Yes. I’m Mercedes,” I told her with a smile. Professionalism allowed me to bottle up all the angst until I wasn’t in the presence of a possible customer. I was very grateful to this stranger for allowing me that retreat. “And it’s Hauptman.”

  Her jaw dropped. “Hauptman the Alpha werewolf of the Tri-fricking-Cities? That Hauptman?”

  I nodded, and she banged her forehead into her steering wheel. “How could they have forgotten that? Her husband’s a werewolf, she said. I almost called him, you know? Probably would have if I hadn’t run into you here.”

  I cleared my throat, wondering how to pull her up without offending her. “You needed to talk to me?”

  “You probably think I’m a freaking idiot,” she told the steering wheel. “This is why I send out my assistant to talk to people.”

  I found myself smiling at the remnants of my garage. “No worries,” I told her. Life goes on. What was it Coyote had told me once? Change is neither good nor bad. It’s just change. Frightening, but survivable. I’d survived a lot worse than the destruction of my garage—and I’d learned a lot along the way.

  “What can I help you with?” I asked her.

  She took a deep breath, glanced at me from under her bangs, and said, “I’m in love.” Then she looked horrified and surprised, and red swept up from her jaw to her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to say that. He doesn’t know.” She looked at me, this woman whose name I didn’t have, with total urgency. “You can’t tell him, okay? Not a word.”

  I cleared my throat. “That’s not going to be a problem unless I know who he is. Is it someone I know?”

  She shook her head. “No.” Then, “I don’t think so.” She looked at me. “Shoot me now. Shit. I practiced. I had this smooth speech-thing.”

  “Yeah,” said a voice behind me. “I think that you might ought to’ve used it because we don’t got a foggy idea of what you need.” Zack’s voice was kind even if his words weren’t particularly gracious. “Mercy, it looks to me like someone managed to slide under the fence between now and the last time we looked. I don’t believe they managed to get anywhere dangerous—” Which meant he trailed their scent around, and they hadn’t gone into the building or burrowed under the large and heavy metal plate we’d put over the outside opening into the tunnel. “Still, it would be good to get this place bulldozed before someone manages to kill themselves exploring.”

  “Okay,” I told him. “I’ll call Bill today and give him the thumbs-up.”

  Zack’s hand came up and ruffled my hair. He was a new wolf to our pack, but once he’d gotten comfortable with us, he’d started touching everyone. I’d have thought it would bother me, bother some of the others more. But he was a submissive wolf—those are pretty rare—and all the touching had turned out to be just what the pack needed to get comfortable with all the changes that had been coming their way. Our way.

  I think we were what he needed, too. When he’d come to us a couple of months ago, he’d been—as Warren described it—jumpier than a jackrabbit on speed. Now that Zack had settled down, there was a happy cloud that followed him wherever he went, spread by his touch. Maybe that’s why Adam had sent him with me today. I’d needed a happy cloud.

  I gave the woman a smile in hopes that would reassure her. “Maybe we should start with introductions. I’m Mercy, and this is my friend Zack. You are?”

  “Lisa Simon,” she said, sounding relieved that I had taken over the conversation. “I am so glad I found you. I have a—” She stopped, held up a hand. “I’ve got this now. I have a yard-care company centered in Yakima, but we service all the way from the Tri-Cities to Ellensburg—about a hundred-mile radius. We do everything from designing yards to maintenance, and I have two crews of four people each who work for me full-time. For the last eight years, I’ve been maintaining the lawn for Richard Albright.”

  I blinked. “The Richard Albright?” Wealth, brilliance, eccentricity, and notoriety had haunted the Albright family for probably a hundred years until a couple of very-high-profile suicides, and an unsolved murder or three a decade or so ago had brought the notoriety to a climax that ended up with everyone in the family dead except for Richard Albright. As I recalled, he’d been in his early twenties at the time, and his wife’s had been one of the unsolved murders.

  “That’s the one,” she said.

  “He moved to Canada right after the trial,” Zack said. When I looked at him, he raised both hands slightly, and said, “It was all over the tabloids. No one who ever walked into a grocery store didn’t know about the murder trial and everything.”

  Lisa nodded soberly. “And after a few years, he moved, very quietly, to Prosser.” I blinked at her. No one rich and famous moved to Prosser. It was a small town about thi
rty miles west of the Tri-Cities. It wasn’t a “pretty people” place like Walla Walla, which was pressed up against the Blue Mountains and beautifully green. Lisa had missed my surprise and continued to impart information in a circuitous fashion. “He never leaves the grounds. Not ever.” She looked at me. “And three days ago, I found out why not.”

  I could feel the headache come on. She didn’t want me to fix his ’Wagon. “Ghosts,” I said, wondering who she’d been talking to.

  “His dead wife,” she said at the same time.

  “I don’t hunt ghosts,” I told her. The only time I’d tried had ended up with bodies.

  Her mouth firmed. “I called in some big favors to get your name.”

  “Who talked to you?” I asked. The wolves knew that I could see ghosts, I was pretty sure, though I didn’t make a big deal of it. That left . . .

  “My best friend’s husband is Wenatchi and Cree. He’s a historian and folklorist. So I called her and he called me back this morning with your name. He said you are a walker and a spirit speaker and that you could help me. He said to tell you that Hank Redtail owes him a favor, and he is calling it in.”

  Hank’s last name on his driver’s license wasn’t Redtail—but just as I turned into a coyote, he turned into a redtail hawk. For some of the traditionalists, a person’s name had more to do with who they were than what their birth certificate said.

  I pulled out my phone to call Hank, but saw that sometime in the last four hours he’d sent a text message. Ghost strong as this is bad news. Listen to the story.

  I ground my teeth, took a deep breath, and said, “Hank tells me I need to hear you.”

  Lisa’s Story

  Richard Albright’s place used to be a horse farm. Most of the stables stood empty, if well kept and pretty, but the small, two-stall stud barn was Lisa’s for equipment storage or anything else. It had an empty office with a working minifridge stocked with bottled water, and a bathroom. Since his place was ten miles from anywhere, the bathroom was useful.

  For a week in the spring and another in the fall, she’d bring a whole crew in to work the flower beds, clean out fountains, and do general repair. But because of the need for secrecy, Lisa did Albright’s place by herself twice a week the rest of the year. Sometimes, Richard Albright came out and joined her. The first time he’d done it, he’d introduced himself as Rick and told her she was supposed to find things for him to do. So she’d done as he asked. He hadn’t known anything about plants or landscaping—or even mowing—when he started. It took her six months to figure out that “Rick” who came out a couple of times a month to work with her was Richard Albright, multibazillionaire who was the most notorious “escapee from justice because he was rich” on the planet.

  She’d thought about it for maybe five seconds and decided to keep on treating him the same way she always had. They grew to be friends. About four years in, she realized the reason that the last four men she’d dated had been so boring was because she was comparing them to the funny, smart-mouthed guy who trimmed blackberry bushes with her. She wasn’t an idiot. There was no way someone like him was going to be interested in his groundskeeper; she didn’t mind. It just hadn’t seemed worthwhile to keep dating once she knew, so she stopped.

  It had been tough, not saying anything, but Lisa was tough-minded. And it was easier to have an unrequited love than to get all fussed and dressed and go out on dates every Saturday with men she was never going to fall in love with. So she’d quit dating, quit dressing up—and on the whole she was happier than she’d been before.

  • • •

  “I thought this was about a ghost,” I said. “Much as I enjoy—enjoy is the wrong word, sorry—as much as I am willing to listing to your painful romance story, there isn’t much I can do for you in that area.”

  Lisa blinked at me. “Right,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Zack put his hand on hers, where it rested on her car door. She gave him a tremulous smile and started her story again.

  Two days ago, Lisa had mowed half the lawn, gone through two water bottles, and set out for the bathroom in the stud barn. The matter was of some urgency so she was dismayed to see an “Out of Order” sign on it. Taped to the bottom of the sign was a sheet of lined paper.

  “Lisa,” it read. “Sorry. Well woes, apparently. Should be okay by next week. If you need to use the facilities, come on up to the house. —Rick.”

  Had it not been urgent, she’d have just packed up and gone into town. As it was, she headed up to the main house and rang the doorbell. She’d planted the azaleas on either side of the door where they’d be sheltered from the cold and wind. She’d grown the hanging baskets and hung them herself.

  And she’d never been inside the house, not in eight years.

  “Hey,” Rick said, answering the door. His hair was ruffled as if he’d been dragging his fingers through it. His shirt had a hole in it, just left of his navel.

  In short, he looked like he did most of the time he was out working with her. But his bare feet were on marble tiles, and the ceiling was ten feet or more over his head. Hanging on the entry wall behind him was an oil by a Western artist who’d died a hundred years ago and was well enough known that even Lisa, who had no interest in art of any kind unless it was green and growing, had heard of him.

  And suddenly it wasn’t her buddy Rick who was standing there, but a bazillionaire who she was bothering, and she couldn’t open her mouth and make noise come out.

  He looked at her, and instead of looking haughty as she’d half expected, his mouth curved up.

  “Bathroom,” he said, stepping back. “Come on in, Lisa. Down the hall, first left, past the hot-tub room, and through the next set of doors. Or you could take the third left, fourth right, or up the stairs and, since there are more bathrooms than bedrooms, I expect you could find one.”

  “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  “Not a problem. It’s just me, here. I only need one bathroom at a time.”

  But she’d already passed him and headed for the first bathroom he’d told her about. She’d been mute. She’d mumbled. And the third thing she tended to do when she was uncomfortable was babble. Given that she really had to pee right now, she really, really didn’t want to babble about that to the man she loved from afar.

  When she turned to the left, there was a floor-to-ceiling glass wall on her left with a sliding glass door. On the other side of all that glass was a room filled with ferns and a huge hot tub. The cover was a deep brown that contrasted with the bright green ferns and the pale off-white of the tile on the wall and matched the dark brown marble tile on the floor. Daylight for the ferns drifted down from a pair of skylights and illuminated a statue of Pan in the corner.

  The sly old faun was raising his pipes to his wickedly sensuous mouth, and he gifted the rest of the room with a distinctly Grecian look. She waved a hand at the statue because it seemed . . . polite and hit the bathroom with a sigh of honest relief that not even the imposing acres of marble and wood and things expensive that were all over that room could detract from.

  She finished up quickly, washed and dried her hands, and opened the door. She turned her head to say good-bye to Pan—and screamed.

  “I’m kind of embarrassed about that,” she told me. “And I’d rather not have to confess to screaming like a B-movie queen, but—” She shrugged.

  She’d only been in the bathroom a couple of minutes. And in that time someone had taken off the cover to the hot tub and dribbled body parts all over the hot-tub room. A leg, clean sliced like someone had put it through a band saw, lay on the floor in front of the statue of Pan. Another leg was positioned so the cut end was hidden by the hot-tub stair. The woman’s legless and armless torso was arched over the edge of the hot tub where the hot water bubbled red as blood. Red with blood. The woman’s head was balanced on the edge of the tub closest to Lisa.

  When L
isa screamed, the eyes opened, and the detached head said, “It’s his fault.” Lisa later remembered hearing the words as clearly as though someone had whispered in her ear, though the glass blocked the sound of the bubbling water, and a detached head couldn’t speak—no air.

  And that impossibility finally cued Lisa in that what she saw wasn’t real. A moment later, an arm wrapped itself around her and tugged her away from the hot tub and out the front door.

  Rick sat her down on the top step on the porch and forced her head between her knees. When she could focus on what he was saying, she heard, “Tell me, damn it. You saw that. You did. You saw.”

  She blinked a couple of times and pushed against his hands. He let her sit up.

  “What the freak was that?” she asked him. “Rick? Do you have aspirations of being the next George Lucas or David Cronenberg or something? I’ve got to tell you, it really had me going until the head started talking.”

  He sat down beside her and looked up at the sky and gave a funny half laugh. “You saw that.”

  “The body in the hot-tub room? Yes, of course I saw it. It was brilliant.” She reconsidered. “Sadistic and horrible. But brilliant.”

  He rubbed his face, then rubbed his hair and laughed again. “I thought I was crazy,” he whispered. “Fourteen years. No one ever sees it.”

  Lisa just stared at him.

  “It won’t be there now,” he told her. “You can go look. But she never stays for long.”

  “She?”

  “My wife,” he told her, and he put his head in his hands. “She’s dead. She’s dead, and she won’t leave me alone. No one sees her, no one ever sees her, but me.”

  “You mean,” said Lisa, suddenly understanding what had happened. “You mean that was a ghost?” She blinked at him. “You see that all the time?”

  • • •

  My half brother Gary answered the phone on the fifth ring. “Wait just a minute,” he said, sounding a little breathless.

  I waited, listening to a few grunts and my brother’s croons. I had an unsettled thought that there was a woman involved in this wait, just as he came back on the phone—though it wasn’t quite the right grunts.