Night Tides Page 3

  And as she was feeling proud of herself for her strategy, she ran straight into the path of an old pickup truck driving without headlights.

  Its tires bit the pavement and she slammed her hands onto the hood, as if she had the strength to stop it. It halted inches from her, engine wheezing as it fought not to stall.

  For a long moment, neither she nor the truck moved. The metal was warm beneath her palms, and she felt the engine’s rough trembling. It was an uncharacteristic vehicle for this neighborhood, and doubly so for riding with its lights out.

  Then the headlights came on. The driver leaned out and said, “Sorry about that. Forgot to turn on the lights. You okay?”

  Something about the voice seemed familiar, and it chilled her far more than the rowdy would-be fraternity rapists following her. But she couldn’t see past the light. “Yeah,” she said, and moved aside. “I should’ve been paying more attention too. No harm, no foul.”

  The truck rattled off into the night. She tried to see into the cab as it passed, but the driver remained a faceless silhouette.

  Porch lights were coming on around her. She took off again, indirectly toward home. She’d had more than enough excitement, in every sense, for one night.

  AT LAST SHE emerged onto Williams Street, the demarcation line between the quiet upper-class neighborhoods and the rest of eclectic downtown Madison. Minutes later, she unlocked the back door of the diner she owned. She looked behind her to make sure she hadn’t been followed, but all the streets were empty and silent.

  In her apartment above the diner, she methodically locked the doors and ensured that all the blinds were down. Then she undressed again, showered, and pulled on a clean, oversize T-shirt. She wrapped her wet hair in a towel, then checked the blinds again. Satisfied that no one could see, she went to her bedroom closet.

  On the top shelf, in the back, inside a Kohl’s department-store box and wrapped in a silk scarf, lay her weapon of choice. She carefully removed the laptop computer from its hiding place and carried it into the living room. She cultivated a reputation as a technological Luddite; none of her friends knew she even owned a computer, let alone that she used it for a single—and singular—purpose.

  As she reached for the touch pad, she noticed that her fingers were shaking. She smiled; at one time, a night like this would’ve left her huddled, sobbing, in the back of her closet. Now it barely made her hand tremble.

  She got online and clicked on her lone bookmark: the blog for The Lady of the Lakes. This was her secret identity, something no one else knew about. It was also the only practical way to pass on the things the lake spirits showed her.

  The spirits had first requested her help five years previously. It had been a particularly maddening encounter, as they repeatedly teased her almost to orgasm and then pulled back, leaving her hovering on the edge. When she was finally allowed to climax, the sensation had overwhelmed her, allowing the spirits to communicate with her in an entirely new way.

  She’d been given her first vision—so vivid she could recall even the most minor details. She saw a white police officer gleefully beating a skinny black teenager at one of the isolated boat ramps located along the isthmus. The wet crunch of each blow stayed with her, as well as the muffled “Oomph!” from a boy too battered to cry out. The cop occasionally dunked the boy’s head in the lake, to revive him when he passed out from the pain. When the scene faded, the spirits told her in no uncertain terms: The truth must be known.

  The next day she cautiously went to the police to report it as an incident she’d personally witnessed. They insisted there was no officer matching her description, and no similar crime had been reported. She got the same response from the newspaper. Embarrassed, she’d tried to avoid the lakes after that, but the spirits’ hold on her body was too much to resist.

  Months later, on a visit to the state historical museum, she’d stumbled across the officer’s face again, in a photograph from 1975. With his name as a starting point, she found that he’d been acquitted of beating a black teen in 1970. Yet, if the vision was true, he’d actually been guilty.

  Rachel found an e-mail address online for the victim, now a middle-aged bus driver living in Mount Horeb. The spirits insisted the truth must be known, but, after her experience with the police and newspapers, she was afraid of more humiliation if she wrote him directly.

  Then it occurred to her that an anonymous blog, where she could post these visions, would be ideal. And so The Lady of the Lakes was born. And with the judicious addition of local gossip and legitimate news, plus a few tricks to make sure she remained untraceable, she managed to hide the lake spirits’ messages in plain sight.

  The response had been immediate and overwhelming. Posters jumped to add opinions and other bits of gossip, making the “Comments” section as full of information as any of her entries. And one of the first replies had been a heartfelt thanks from the bus driver’s daughter, who said it was the first time she’d seen her father cry with joy.

  She paused for a moment, wondering again if this time they meant something different by Help her. She needs you. But what? The lake spirits had said nothing about the first two girls; Rachel had picked up the details from the idle talk of the police who frequented her diner. They never glanced twice at her when she refilled their coffee, and it never occurred to them that their gossip might be overheard. She was careful to paraphrase and reword, though, so that nothing could be traced back to the officers involved, and from them to her.

  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

  POSTED 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 the
y 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 b
een 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.