River Marked Part 10

They looked like the otters who had watched me pull Benny's boat out of the brush.

I woke up with the dry mouth and feeling of impending doom that were not unfamiliar after I'd taken antihistamines. I felt the same way after vampire, demon, or fae attacks, too. After, because, not being prescient, I never knew when the sword of Damocles was going to fall.

It didn't matter that I knew quite well that the dream meant nothing. It didn't take a Carl Jung to see where the otters had come from. And I suspected that the imprisoned feeling was the effect of the antihistamine itself, which left me sluggish. The hunger? That was even easier. I'd been hopping back and forth from human to coyote yesterday; it would make anyone hungry.

I almost matched Adam's appet.i.te when we sat down for breakfast-cooked in utter civilization on the quarter-sized stove.

"Bad dreams," he said matter-of-factly. The mating bond had clearly given him insight at an inappropriate time again.

"Are we ever going to be able to control the mating bond when it does that?" I asked, shoveling in hash browns as fast as I could without having them dribble out the side of my mouth. "Did you get the whole thing?"

He smiled and nodded. "Otters and all. At least you ate one of them." He ate almost as fast as I did, but he was better at it. Unless I really paid attention, I never noticed him getting the food from his plate to his mouth. It was not so much a matter of speed but of exquisite manners and distraction.

"How's your leg and feet?" he asked as I washed up. He'd cooked, so I cleaned.

I wiggled my bare toes and did a few deep knee bends. "The calf aches a little, but the feet are fine."

"ARE WE DOING THIS BECAUSE GORDON SEEKER TOLD us to?" I asked Adam, as he drove us the short distance to the Maryhill Museum of Art.

"I'd intended to take you this morning," he answered slowly. "But I have to admit that I'm curious."

I put my hand on his thigh, and said, "We could head home-or drive to Seattle, Portland, or even Yakima and find a nice hotel." I looked out from the highway and down onto the river. From where the highway was, the river looked small and relatively tamed. "I have the feeling that if we stay, things might get interesting."

He gave me a quick smile before looking back at the road. "Oh? What gave you that feeling? People getting their feet bitten off? The ghost of your father? A mysterious old Indian who disappears at the river without a sign of how he left? Maybe Yo-yo Girl's prophecy of the apocalypse?"

"Yo-yo Girl?" I yelped. "Edythe is Yo-yo Girl? Yo-yo Girl Yo-yo Girl sent us here?" sent us here?"

He showed his teeth. "Feeling scared yet? Want to go somewhere safe?"

I couldn't help myself. I set my cheek against his arm and laughed. "It won't help, will it?" I said after a moment. "We'd just run into G.o.dzilla or the Vampire from h.e.l.l. Trouble just follows you around."

He rubbed the top of my head. "Hey, Trouble. Let's go find out what your mysterious Indian wanted us to know."

IN SEATTLE OR PORTLAND, THE MARYHILL MUSEUM would have been a nice museum. Out in the middle of nowhere, it was spectacular. The grounds were green and well tended. I didn't see any of the peac.o.c.ks as we walked from the parking lot to the entrance, but I could hear and smell them just fine. I'd seen it from the highway on the other side of the river while driving to and from Portland, but I'd never actually been in it before.

The first time someone tried to tell me about the museum, I thought they were crazy. In the middle of eastern Washington state, a hundred miles from Portland, a hundred and fifty miles from the Tri-Cities, the museum contained the furniture of the Victorian-era Queen of Romania and work by Auguste Rodin.

That was the first question answered by the slick brochure they handed us at the front door. Sam Hill, financier and builder of roads and towns-and this museum, which was meant to be his home-was a friend of Loie Fuller. Loie Fuller was a dancer of the early nineteen hundreds, famous in Europe for her innovative use of fabric and veils-and she was a friend of royalty and artists, notably Marie, Queen of Romania, (who designed furniture as a hobby) and the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Thus came the furniture of the Queen of Romania and a good-sized collection of Rodin's sculptures to the middle of nowhere.

Given its isolation, I expected that Adam and I would be the only ones in the museum, but I was wrong. In the first room, where the furniture and a.s.sorted memorabilia of the Victorian age held court, there were several groups of people. A pair of older women, a family of five that included a stroller, and a middle-aged couple. The room was big enough that it didn't seem crowded at all.

I found the heavily carved furniture beautiful, but stark and uncomfortable-looking-more suitable for a stage production than as something to have in your living room. Maybe a few cushions would have softened the square contours and made it more inviting.

The remainder of that floor was given over to a collection of paintings displayed in a series of interconnecting rooms.

Adam and I separated in the first room of paintings, taking different paths around the artwork. Most of it was very good, if not spectacular, until I came to an oil piece by a familiar painter. I must have made a noise because Adam slid up beside me and put his face against my neck.

"What?" Adam asked, keeping his voice low so as not to disturb the other visitors.

"Do you see that?" I said, nudging him toward the painting I was looking at.

It wasn't the most beautiful painting in the room, not by a long shot. There were also others more detailed, better executed even, but it spoke to me in a way the others did not. Here among English and Greek landscapes, portraits of maids and wildflowers, the cowboys looked a little out of place.

Adam leaned forward, which pressed him more tightly against me without being too flagrant, to read the display information. I snorted at him in mock dismay.

"I can see that you are not a true Westerner, or you'd have recognized him right off."

"No, ma'am," he drawled mildly, though I could see a dimple peeping out. I loved his dimple-and I loved it even more when he dropped into the accent of his youth. I especially loved the warm strength of him against me. I was so easy. "I'm a Southerner."

"Just like most of the cowboys he painted," I told him. "The West was populated by Southerners who didn't want to fight in the War Between the States-or who came here after they lost. That, my dear uncultured wolf, is a Charlie Russell-cowboy turned artist. Without him, Montana's history would just be a footnote in a Zane Grey novel. Charlie drew what he saw-and he saw a lot. Not a romantic, but a true realist. Every once in a while, some old Montana rancher still finds a few of his watercolors rolled up and forgotten in the bunkhouse. Like winning the lottery, only better."

Adam's shoulders shook. "I sense pa.s.sion," he said, his voice soft with laughter, tickling my ear as he spoke into it. "But is it the art or the history that speaks to you?"

"Yes," I said, shivering. "I showed you mine. Which one is your favorite?"

He pulled away and directed me to a painting on the next wall. The woman sat in a cave, a dim waterfall to the left and behind her, a pool of water at her feet. The extraordinary thing about the work was the luminescence of the central figure achieved by some alchemy of the color and texture of her skin and of the fabric of her clothing combined with the shape of her pose. Solitude Solitude was its t.i.tle. was its t.i.tle.

This had none of the dirt and roughness of detail that appealed to me in the Russell painting. This wasn't a woman who had to get up and wash her clothes and fix dinner. Yet . . .

"Okay," I said. "I wouldn't get tired of seeing that on a wall, either. But I'm warning you, it will look odd next to my Charlie Russells."

He kissed my ear and laughed.

The American Indian exhibit was in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Sam Hill had, apparently, collected Native American baskets along with his artwork. Lots and lots of baskets. Over the years, other things had been added-some terrific photographs, for instance, and large petroglyphic rocks. Still, the overall effect was a million baskets and a few other things, too.

Here, too, we weren't alone. The family from upstairs was examining the petroglyphs. The oldest, a girl, pulled free of her parents and put her face against one of the Plexiglas display cases.

There was a middle-aged Indian woman on her own. Her face was serious, though it was a face that was more comfortable with smiles than with grimness. There were lines of laughter and weather near her eyes and mouth, and all of her attention was on Adam and me.

It made me a little uncomfortable for some reason. So I turned from the stone carvings near the doorway to the baskets, putting my back toward the woman.

The baskets were extraordinary. In some of them, the designs of almost-stick-figure animals were surprisingly powerful in a way I wouldn't have thought possible with such extreme stylization as required by the weaving.

"It's a good thing I wasn't born back then," I told Adam. "I took an art course in college, and one of the projects was weaving a basket. Mine looked sort of like a disproportionate hammock complete with holes. I never could get the handle to stay on both sides at the same time."

But not even my history-driven pa.s.sion could keep me interested in the million and twelfth basket, as beautifully made as they were-and I outlasted Adam by a fair bit. These weren't the kinds of baskets used on a daily basis. Most of them were made to sell to collectors and tourists.

They reminded me of a history professor of mine who mourned the loss of everyday things. Every museum, she said, had wedding dresses and christening dresses galore, Indian ceremonial robes and beaded or elk-tooth dresses worn only on the most special occasion. People don't save Grandma's work dress or Grandpa's hunting leathers.

I couldn't help but wonder what Gordon Seeker had wanted us to see here. The family had moved on-I could hear the children talking in the hallway outside this exhibit room. I didn't see the woman who'd been watching us.

I paused by the big chunk of stone near the hall that led to the rest of the bas.e.m.e.nt exhibits. There were several blocks of stone, with petroglyphs incised into their surfaces, in the room. From one, a giant predatory bird glared at me.

"I wonder when this was done," I said, letting my fingers hover over the stone. I could have touched it-others were touching the gray rocks-but I couldn't quite make myself do it. As if the press of my fingers might damage it, when hundreds and maybe thousands of years of wind and rain had not. "And how long it took to carve it."

"These were taken out of the original site when the river was dammed, and the canyon they were in was flooded," Adam said thoughtfully, reading the little card next to the exhibit. "I'd figure it was carved a long time ago, or you'd see more roughness from the creation process. A thousand years almost certainly. Could be ten thousand, I suppose."

We had sandwiches in the museum deli, right next to the Rodin exhibit, then headed out to Horsethief Lake, about fifteen miles west of the museum.

JANICE LYNNE MORRISON WAS A THIRD-GRADE TEACHER and a camera nut. Her photos would never grace a museum, but she loved to sc.r.a.pbook her adventures. This adventure, in particular, needed sc.r.a.pbooking because she was unhappily certain that her life was about to fall apart.

They had stopped at a picnic area on the Columbia for lunch-after this it would be restaurants until they reached Lee's parents' house in Wyoming. Everyone had eaten, the remnants of the food were packed away for snacks, and the boys were playing on the rocks.

Lee was in the car taking a phone call. She wasn't sure when she first noticed the phone calls, maybe after school got out, and she was home more often. Her husband worked from home, and it was not unusual for him to get business calls and take them in private. But these calls came at the same time every day-eleven fifteen. When he got off the phone, he would make a great effort to do nice things for her-the kinds of things that someone who was feeling guilty would do. More d.a.m.ningly, he wouldn't meet her eyes, not right after one of the calls. Either he had a bookie or someone on the side.

After their vacation, she would talk to him about it-so she wanted to save all the memories she could.

She couldn't get both of the boys in the shot with the right light, so she kicked off her sandals and waded out into the water a few feet and tried it again. The light hit her digital screen so she had to use the regular viewfinder and put the camera up to her eye. It still wasn't quite right. She needed just a little more field of view. She took one more step back-and there was nothing beneath her feet.

As she fell backward, something snagged her leg and pulled her upstream. She struggled for a moment more, then grew calm. Peaceful. The water rushed past her and took all of her cares away.

Green eyes examined her with interest while some light-colored and fluttery tentacles that formed a fringe around its sharp nose caressed her. It opened its mouth, and she saw long spiky teeth before a wave caught her and pushed her away.

She didn't want to go away from the creature but had no will to fight its need. She staggered out of the water, coughing and choking from the water she'd swallowed. Blood dripped from a gash that wrapped all the way around her thigh just below the line of her shorts. Her head ached, and her eyes burned, but she was calm and happier than she'd ever been before.

It wanted her.

"Mommy, Mommy, are you all right?" A young boy-her son, she thought, what was his name?-held her arm. "Are you all right? Where's your camera?"

She reached out and took his hand-and the hand of the little boy who hadn't said anything, too. He was only wearing his pull-ups and one shoe. Another time, she knew that one shoe would have bothered her. But nothing bothered her anymore.

"Janny?" A man interrupted her before she got the boys to the river, and she frowned at him. Her husband, that was who he was. "Janny, what happened to you? Are you all right?"

He wouldn't let her take the boys, she knew, so she let them go until she understood what the new plan should be.

"Janny?" His voice was soft, gentle, and for some reason, that made her really mad. "Janny, you're bleeding. Did you fall into the river?"

"I need to rinse off the blood," she told him. Her voice came out a little garbled, but she didn't think it would matter. "Can you help me?"

He followed her into the river, though he wasn't happy about it. "It's probably not sanitary, Janny. There's water in the car."

While he argued, she took him deeper and deeper. The monster took him a few feet from where she'd fallen, dragging him under so fast he had no time to cry out.

"Daddy?"

The boys stood on the sh.o.r.e, and when she took their hands again, they followed her in. The habit of obedience and trust stronger than their instincts.

"Mercy."

"Mommy, what happened?" the older one wanted to know.

"Mercy, wake up."

"Daddy went swimming," she told him with a peaceful smile. It wanted Janny, but she hadn't been enough, so Janny had been sent back for more. But the monster was still hungry. "Why don't we go swimming with Daddy?"

I OPENED MY EYES, CONSCIOUS THAT I WAS BREATHING too fast and that I was drooling on Adam's leg.

"Sorry," I said groggily. "I didn't mean to fall asleep."

"I kept you up too late," Adam said in a tone that was not at all apologetic. "Satisfied" might be a better word. Smug. We hadn't been living celibate before we got married, but it was hard to get much privacy when Adam was pack Alpha and had a teenage daughter. Maybe we should buy a trailer of our own.

"Got to catch your sleep while you can," Adam continued. "I didn't get the full effect this time, but it sounded like another nightmare."

"Oh yeah," I agreed. The sick feeling in my stomach wasn't leaving very quickly. "Creepy in that slow-motion I-can't-stop-this kind of way. I think that Gordon's little talk about the cut on my leg has me thinking about old horror movies."

Coyotes don't make good slaves, he'd said right about the same time he'd said I was river marked. I'd forgotten about it in the oddity of his visit, but it must have stuck in my subconscious and given me that chilling little episode. I wonder what he thought had marked my leg. Maybe someone would tell us more that afternoon. he'd said right about the same time he'd said I was river marked. I'd forgotten about it in the oddity of his visit, but it must have stuck in my subconscious and given me that chilling little episode. I wonder what he thought had marked my leg. Maybe someone would tell us more that afternoon.

"I'm a.s.suming since we aren't there yet, I wasn't sleeping for long."

"About ten minutes," he said. "Here's our park."

"It doesn't say Horsethief Lake," I told Adam, as he turned off the highway toward the river, and we started down a long, gently bending road after pa.s.sing a sign that said "Columbia Hills State Park."

"Name sanitized in 2003," Adam told me. "Both the states and the U.S. Geological Survey are PCing geographical names all over the place. Just ask Bran. He'll go on for as long as you want to listen about Jacka.s.s Creek-he claims he knew the jacka.s.s it was named after."

"Good thing the USGS doesn't speak French, or they'd rename the Grand Tetons," I said.

Adam laughed. "You just know those French trappers were missing home when they named them, don't you?"

The drive through the park took us past an Indian graveyard that was still being used-I could tell from all the balloons and items left on the graves. It looked almost like a birthday party had gone on there, and all of the guests had departed without taking away their presents. There was a tall chain-link fence around the graveyard with "No Trespa.s.sing" signs on it.

I can see ghosts. But I've never actually seen one in a graveyard. Graveyards are for the living. In my experience, ghosts tend to hang out in the same places they did while they were alive.

So what had my father been doing in a campground beside the Columbia all the way out here when he was supposed to be from Browning, Montana?

Calvin Seeker was leaning against a chain-link fence when we parked the car on a gravel lot next to a boating dock. He looked tired and older than he'd appeared last night-like almost twenty. Without moving, he watched us lock up the car and cross the road.

The chain-link fence he was leaning on ran until it met up with the railroad that went along the edge of the water, then it followed the track of the railroad out of our sight around the bluffs. There was a sign behind Gordon, but I couldn't read it.

"Uncle Jim told me to meet you here at noon," he said, a little more politely than his posture indicated. "I'm going to be your tour guide, apparently."

"Thank you," I said.

He shrugged. "No trouble. Sometimes I volunteer to guide people on tourist days during the summer."

He scuffed his shoe in the dirt and gave Adam a wary look. "How did you manage to get in touch with Uncle Jim? He told me while we were waiting in the hospital to see how Benny was doing, but I didn't see him pick up his phone-and I know you didn't get his phone number while we were waiting for the ambulance last night."

"We didn't," said Adam. "We talked to your grandfather."

Calvin came off the fence and stood up straight, his eyes a little wide. "My grandfather?" he asked, sounding startled. "Which one?"

"He called himself Gordon Seeker," I said. "He came by last night, said your uncle had sent him. He gave me some stuff that really helped with my leg."

"Ah, that grandfather." He didn't seem too happy about it, and I was pretty sure it was the thought of Gordon Seeker that had jolted him off the fence. "I should have known."

"Something wrong?" Adam asked.