Dan Retsler left Oregon for a reason. He never planned to return. But something draws him to accept an interview for police chief in a small town near the Oregon Caves. After all, the caves call the mountains their home, not the coast, where Retsler still fights haunting memories of strange creatures. But he soon discovers that something lurks in the shadows of this mountain town. Something linked to deaths too strange to be normal. Now, Retsler must investigate the type of crime he swore to leave behind—a crime that might decide his future once and for all.
“Shadow Side” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as a standalone from Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and other ebookstores.
Shadow Side
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
HALFWAY UP THE mountain, Dan Retsler regretted returning to Oregon. He had a perfectly good job in Montana. The small town at the base of the Bitterroots had its own charm, and everyone now knew his name. He’d investigated his share of crime too—real crime, from shoplifting to domestic abuse allegations to more than the usual (to his mind anyway) number of shootings.
Yet, when he’d seen the advertisement for a police chief to handle a small town around the Oregon Caves, he’d jumped at the chance.
The Oregon Caves, he told himself, weren’t the Oregon Coast. He wouldn’t find selkies or ghosts or ugly mermaids or any other kind of fantastic creature that he failed to understand.
Instead, he’d be in the mountains, far from the ocean. Tourists would flock here, sure, but he had grown up in a tourist town. He understood how tourists fit into the local economy, and he knew how Oregon worked.
But as he turned west and south out of Grant’s Pass, heading into the Coastal Mountain Range where the spectacular Oregon Caves threaded for miles, his stomach flipped, his shoulders tightened, and he nearly turned around.
He forced himself to continue by reminding himself that the committee expected him. He’d headed these hiring committees. He knew how much of a problem it caused when an applicant didn’t show, particularly one good enough to warrant an interview.
He owed them that much. Besides, he was nearly there.
The committee set the morning meeting at the Marble Chalet, a place he’d never been to. He’d been to the Lodge at the Oregon Caves dozens of times. The Lodge was part of the National Park Service, and had actually been featured on PBS. His family loved to vacation there when he was a kid.
But everyone ignored the equally historic Marble Chalet. It had been in ruins for decades. In the flush 1990s, an enterprising private company restored it, and applied for a permit from the National Park Service to have a second public opening into the miles-long Oregon Caves complex, the opening easily accessible from the Chalet’s parking area.
The Park Service decided a second opening was a bad idea. Retsler never found out why, but it made the Chalet a second-tier hotel by default.
If he took this job, he wouldn’t work at the Chalet. He’d work in Marble Village, which the enterprising private company had originally built to house its workers, but which had grown like crazy. In the flush years before the century turned, a lot of Californians bought land and built homes here, so the village had more amenities than it deserved—from cell phone towers to high-speed Internet. It had also lost a lot of amenities to the Great Recession, like the three-plex movie theater, although the faux vaudeville theater, which played old movies and second (or third)-run films did enough business to stay alive.
Retsler had found out some of this from a quick Internet search. He remembered parts of it from his years living in Oregon, and the rest the town fathers had told him as they tried to entice him up here for the job.
They wanted an Oregonian; they made that clear. They were even happier that he was a native Oregonian, since such creatures were rare. They also wanted someone with experience in tourist areas.
He fit that bill.
He just wasn’t sure about the rest of it.
The road forked outside of Marble Village, with the steeper, more difficult part heading toward the Marble Chalet. The initial signs heading to the Chalet were modern, with lettering that would reflect a car’s headlights. But the closer he got, the signs changed, becoming rustic. Eventually, he realized these were the original signs, built in the 1930s, as the hotel itself got built as a WPA project.
For the first time, he actually felt a thread of excitement at seeing the Chalet.
He parked near the entrance to the lodge. A wide sidewalk led him around the rocks. He stopped, his breath gone.
Flower baskets hung from cut and polished Old Growth logs, harvested before anyone realized the old trees had to be protected. The logs formed the brace for a gigantic canopy that covered the walkway leading into the lodge itself. The rock way, made of cut marble, had to have come out of the Caves—again, before anyone knew this stuff had to be preserved.
The front of the lodge looked Swiss as interpreted by a group of provincial West Coasters who’d never really seen anything outside of the United States. The brown-and-white slats, along with the decorated shutters, seemed authentic enough, but the big logs that formed the foundation of the gigantic building ruined any tiny Swiss intimacy.
The word “Chalet” was wrong too. This wasn’t a tiny house with a steep roof; this was a large resort with hundreds of rooms, surprising in its audacity. He wondered if there had ever been a time when all of these rooms had been occupied.
He doubted it.
The big wooden doors stood open, and he stepped into a large lobby. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. More flowers stood on tabletops and along both edges of the reception desk. A single dark-haired woman stood behind it. She smiled when she saw him.
He introduced himself so that he could check in. She handed him an old-fashioned metal key with a beautifully carved wooden fob attached. The fob declared his room number in large font.
He had no idea that ancient keys like this still existed in working hotels.
“They’re waiting for you in the River Room,” she said.
He pocketed the key when her sentence registered.
“River?” he repeated, not liking the word. He knew there had to be water up here, but he had come to associate water with trouble—at least in Oregon.
“Well,” she said, her smile widening, “we couldn’t very well call it the River Styx Room, now could we?”
His heart rate sped up. Why the hell would anyone name a room after the river that in Greek mythology divided the living world from the world of the dead?
He hoped it was some interior designer’s twisted imagination.
“Up the stairs and to your right,” she said, as if she believed he hesitated because he was lost, not because his stomach had knotted to the point he felt queasy.
He gave her an insincere smile, then went up the flat wooden stairs and turned left. The hallway opened into a maze of rooms, but he could see the River Room at the very end, not because of the large sign above the door (he had initially missed that) but because people milled inside.
He probably should have ducked into his room first, brushed his hair, and checked his shirt for lint. But he had decided somewhere between River and River Styx that this job wasn’t for him. So it didn’t matter how he looked.
As he walked in the door, six people turned in his direction, including four women. Not the town fathers then, but the town parents. A woman walked over to him. She had her magnificent blonde hair gathered on top of her head in some kind of elaborate coiffure that he hadn’t seen outside of a photo spread in a magazine.
“Chief Retsler,” she said. “I’m Ron Bronly. Welcome to Marble Village.”
Okay. He tried not to let his surprise show. One of the drawbacks of e-mail, apparently, were the assumptions. Retsler had imagined Ron Bronly as a comfortable middle-aged, middle-income man with a slightly round belly and a lack of hair.
He hadn’t expected a woman as attractive as this one. In addition to her careful hairstyle, she wore just enough makeup to jazz up her Oregon-casual outfit of tan slacks and tailored blouse. The hand she extended to him was manicured.
He took her hand, shook, and repeated that insincere smile. Everyone else looked more like what he expected. Three somewhat tired-looking women in jeans and jackets, two middle-aged men whom he would have taken for Ron Bronly if Ron Bronly hadn’t introduced herself.
“Thank you for coming all this way,” Bronly said. Her voice was smooth, buttery, but it had a bit of an accent. Bryn Mawr, unless he missed his guess. Very Katharine Hepburn.
“I was curious,” he said. “I hadn’t been to the Chalet before. I’ve only been here a few minutes, but it looks like the restore was lovingly done.”
He could afford to be nice. It didn’t hurt that, in this case, nice was also honest.
“We’re proud of it,” she said. “It’s the jewel of our little community.”
“Have you had a chance to drive around?” one of the men asked. He wore one of those stick-on name badges that read “Martin.” Everyone else had a name badge as well, including Bronly. Hers read “Rhonda.”
No one offered Retsler a name badge. Of course, he was the only stranger here. Apparently, they were trying to make him feel at home.
The spread on the back table also should have made him feel at home. Pastries, coffee, all kinds of non-alcoholic beverages. He glanced at them, saw that the group had already partaken of some of it. He wasn’t really hungry, more tired. And he wanted to get this over with.
“I came directly here,” Retsler said.
“Pity,” Martin said. “You’d be surprised at Marble Village. Most Oregonians expect some place like Sisters, when really, it’s a lot more like Monterey, California.”
“Without the ocean,” said the other man whose nametag read “Stanley.”
Retsler trotted out his insincere smile for the third time. “I’ve done my stint around oceans.”
“Yes,” said one of the women. Her name tag read “Anna,” which somehow suited her serious mien. “We spoke to the folks at Whale Rock. They would love you back.”
“I’m sure the new chief is doing just fine,” he said.
“Why did you leave?” Bronly asked.
He looked at her. Direct. To the point. Usually he liked that in a person. Here, though, it made him uncomfortable. How could he explain that the world he thought existed didn’t? Whale Rock wasn’t so much a place he disliked as a place that confused him and made him question everything about himself.
“I was ready to move on,” he said, and it sounded true. It was true on some level, but not quite true in the way he wanted it to be.
She nodded, as if the answer didn’t satisfy her. “And what’s wrong with Montana?”
He smiled—and this time the smile was real. “Nothing really. In fact, as I drove up here, I realized I was probably wasting your time—”
“Excuse me.” The woman from the front desk peered into the room. Her eyes were wide, and her tone seemed a bit panicked. “I’m sorry, but it’s back.”
“Dammit,” Martin said and took off at a run. The others followed, leaving Retsler behind.
He hadn’t thought such conservative people could run like that, especially Bronly who wore heels too high for anyone but an actress to move quickly in. Yet she had managed.
With just a few words, the entire group seemed to have forgotten him, and just as he was getting to the important stuff. Maybe he shouldn’t feel so guilty.
But he couldn’t help it. Nor could he help himself. He had to know what “it” was.
He walked quickly into the hallway, half expecting someone to stop him. But no one did. One of the side doors stood wide open, and he heard loud, panicked voices coming from that direction.
He looked in, saw a flight of stairs that had probably been designed for employees but now modern regulations made it a mandatory exit from this floor.
He took the steps down—wooden also, and not as well reinforced as those in the lobby—and found himself on the ground level on the far side, with a door that opened toward the Caves (or so the hand-lettered sign said).
It felt like he had entered the 1930s. More Old Growth wood, expertly carved and polished to a sheen, and through an interior door made of a single pane of glass, a diner the likes of which he hadn’t seen since he was a kid.
No one manned the counters made of that same Old Growth wood, but voices echoed from the back. Voices he recognized on such short acquaintance.
“…should do.”
“…not like it sees us.”
“…the mess, though.”
He followed the sound to a swinging door, and pushed it open.
The six town parents, a man in a chef’s uniform, and two waitresses stood in front of a back door. Beside them, steel tables had fallen on their sides, and the floor was covered in flour.
They all peered out the back door, and it wasn’t until Retsler got close that he saw why. Prints from a pair of bare feet led down the path toward a rock outcropping.
“Problem?” he asked.
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 upfront 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.”
“Believe me,” he said with more feeling than he had intended. “I understand.”
Her smile widened just a little. “We thought we had a little girl. It’s not. It’s something else—”
“A poltergeist?” He’d read up on the supernatural after he moved away from Whale Rock. And as he did, that always made him speculate if he had let go after all.
“Yeah, that’s what someone called it,” she said. “But that’s not really true. We didn’t have a little girl ghost. It’s a thin young woman, I think, or a feminine boyish man, someone to whom that kitchen meant a lot. When things are running smoothly, in fact, when the hotel is full and so is the restaurant, you can see her—him—it—sitting near the door, a smile on his—her—its face as if it liked the bustle. Sometimes, it would even help one of the morning cooks. Our previous cook—a matronly woman whom everyone loved—would occasionally let it help her pick ingredients. She wrote the recipes down; they’re spectacular.”
“A cooking ghost that lives in the Caves?”
Her smile disappeared as if it had never been. Her dark eyes flashed, and her chin set. “Go ahead. Make fun.”
Retsler had used the same tone with her that he used to use with Denne. It was a reflex, a way of pushing back at information he really didn’t want to hear.
“Sorry,” Retsler said. “I didn’t mean to make fun.”
She took a deep breath. Clearly she had to overcome his tone so that she could continue. She expected him to make fun of her, and it almost shut her down.
He wondered who else had made fun, and what had changed.
“Whatever it is,” she said with a little less enthusiasm, “it loves the kitchen just the way it’s always been. We got new dishware and fortunately, it wasn’t china, because the whatever it is tossed the dishware around the kitchen for weeks, trying to get rid of it. A few pieces chipped, finally, but we replaced them.”
“When did that stop?” he asked.
“After a few months. But we can’t wait this one out. We don’t want it to trash a new grill, and you saw what it did with the flour.”
“Yes,” he said, and looked down. The footprint was fading. Had there been a wind? He hadn’t noticed. “Did you know that this creature lives in the Caves?”
“I’m still not sure it does,” she said. “But whenever it gets angry, it leaves footprints, coming to this site. We’ve actually sent people into the Caves to follow the prints, but they disappear just inside the opening.”
“So this isn’t flour.” Retsler let go of the fence and crouched down. He touched the print. It was ice cold.
“Are you sure you should do that?” she asked.
“I’m not sure about anything,” he said. He checked his fingertip just to make sure the white whatever it was didn’t transfer onto his skin. So far as he could tell, it hadn’t. “Has anyone else tried to figure out what these prints are made of?”
“By the time we get experts here, the footprints have faded,” she said. “You can understand why we’re reluctant to call folks in.”
He nodded, then stood. “You have worse problems than this ghost?”
She bit her lower lip. “Apparently—and we didn’t know this during the boom of the 1990s—but Marble Village was built on the site of one of the first settlements ever on Mount Elijah. There’s water near here—”
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “The River Styx.”
She smiled. “No. Well, yes. But no. The River Styx runs through the Caves, and that really is its name. Outside of the Caves, it’s called Cave Creek. There are tributaries all over the mountainside. One of the largest is here, although it does dry up during summers like this one.”
“And floods in spring,” he said.
She nodded. “See why we want an Oregonian?”
“Anyone who lives around mountains knows how winter runoff works,” he said. He still wasn’t convinced about the Oregonian part. “But you were telling me about the water.”
“The initial settlers thought they had a great water supply,” she said, “so they built here instead of at Cave Junction. Then they abandoned the town.”
“That’s not unusual in the West,” he said. “There’s a million ghost towns just like it, places that people tried, figured wouldn’t work, and moved on.”
“Yeah.” She glanced around him at the Caves, as if she saw something. He hoped she would trust him enough to tell him if she did. “But they didn’t leave because the creek dried up or because of a wild fire or anything. They just disappeared one night. Half the town fled and the other half was never heard from again.”
“I don’t remember reading that,” he said. Then he smiled at her. “You’re not the only one who knows how to use Google.”
“Tourist town,” she said. “Resorts. We didn’t put some of the old history on any website, and fortunately, the initial stories of Marble Village, which was called Limestone Creek back then, weren’t published in any guidebooks.”
“You think this history is important,” he said.
“I didn’t at the time,” she said, “but I do now.”
He brushed off his hands and stood. The footprints were nearly gone now, but he saw where they disappeared, and made a mental note of it.
“Why do you think so now?” he asked.
“Because we’re under assault, Chief Retsler,” she said. “That’s why we want you. Someone we don’t have to convince that this is important, that it could be an emergency. Someone who knows.”
He sighed. Back in Oregon, having the same old discussions. “Didn’t Hamilton tell you? I left Whale Rock because of the supernatural.”
“He did,” she said. “He also said he didn’t think you’d take the job, but he said I should push.”
Retsler nodded, sighed. “So, you’ve done your duty. You’ve pushed.”
The wind toyed with her hair. She grabbed some loose strands and tucked them behind her ears. “You’re going to say no, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said, and almost added, I ran away from all this. But he didn’t.
“Well.” Businesslike again. She stuck out her hand. “I’m sorry we wasted your time.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “Let’s make sure it’s not wasted completely, all right?”
Then, without waiting for an answer, he shook the fence. It rattled, warning whatever was behind it that he was coming. He wasn’t sure if he had done that deliberately. He liked to think he hadn’t.
“How do I get through this?”
“You don’t need to,” she said.
“I’d like to,” he said.
She hesitated, then pointed to an overgrown blackberry bush near one of the boulders. “Through that.”
He’d tried to go through blackberry bushes before. They were stubborn, and sometimes hid things with thorns.
“I guess I’ll climb,” he said, and gripped the mesh. The diamonds were big enough for the toes of his somewhat dressy shoes. He hauled himself up, and carefully eased over, landing in the dirt on the other side.
At least she wouldn’t follow him here.
“I’ll get someone to open the gate,” she said.
He nodded absently, not caring if she did or not. “I’d rather have an expert on the hotel’s history, preferably not a scholarly type, but someone who’s been around for a few generations.”
“Um, but—”
He didn’t listen to her answer. Instead, he followed the fading footprints down the incline to the mouth of the Caves.
The prints stopped just outside the opening. He touched them again. Cold, but damp, as if they were made of ice and the ice had started to melt. Water, again. Dammit.
He sniffed his fingers, wondering if the dampness had an odor. It didn’t, or at least, it wasn’t an odor that he could smell over the pines and the dirt and the fresh Oregon air.
He stood. The boards over the cave entrance were old and rotted. They hadn’t been replaced in years. Some had broken along the sides. He touched them, and two boards fell down, leaving a space just large enough for a young adult woman or a slender young man who hadn’t reached his full growth to slide through.
Retsler peered inside. No lights, but a chill against his skin. The Caves had an ambient temperature of 41 degrees, a fact he remembered from his childhood. As a boy, he had wondered why the settlers hadn’t built their homes inside the Caves—they would stay relatively warm in the frigid mountain winters and remain cool in the summer. He had mentioned it to his father, who had laughed.
Boy, forty-one is too cold for comfortable living, no matter what the season.
It was also too warm to keep ice frozen, so the water inside the Caves—that damned River Styx—would continue to flow.
Retsler wondered if he should break the wood and go inside. Then he decided against it. He didn’t have the equipment for one thing. Just his cell phone, which could double as a flashlight, but wouldn’t have service deep inside. And this was a part of the Caves that the Park Service had deliberately blocked off, so finding him wouldn’t be easy if he got lost or turned around.
Or attacked.
He picked up the wood. He would wait until he had permission, or even knew if he had to go inside.
Voices echoed along the path. He decided not to wait for someone to cut the brambles away from the gate opening so he could get out. He climbed the mesh for a second time, his fingers complaining as the metal dug into his skin.
He landed on the path just as Bronly returned with one of the town parents. The curled name badge reminded Retsler that the man was named Stanley. Stanley didn’t look as winded by the walk as Bronly did. Despite the extra weight he carried around his middle, Stanley was surprisingly fit.
He held up hedge trimmers. “Was gonna help you get out.”
“Thank you,” Retsler said.
“Guess you didn’t need it.”
“I figured climbing was easier.”
Stanley looked at him through narrowed eyes. Then he said, “Bronly here says you want to know about our ghost.”
He sounded calm about it, calmer than Bronly had. She glanced at him, then at Retsler.
“I did,” Retsler said, matching Stanley’s calm tone, “but I would rather have heard from someone who maybe lived here in the 1930s.”
“Ain’t got many of those folks left and what we do are down to the Village. I could give you some names of folks in a home in Medford.” Stanley wasn’t looking at Retsler. He was peering over Retsler’s shoulder at the Caves.
“See something?” Retsler asked.
“Naw,” Stanley said. “Just like to be watchful, is all. This ain’t the best side of the mountain to be on.”
“Why not?”
“Creepies, crawlies, things that go bump in the night. They like the shadow side best.”
“And this is the shadow side?”
Stanley nodded. His gaze moved from the Caves to Retsler’s face. “Let’s go to the diner,” he said. “I bet you could use you some pie.”
“You don’t have to ask me twice,” Retsler said. He glanced over his shoulder at the Caves behind him. The white footprints were gone, but his remained. His and Ron’s and Stanley’s, tromping all over each other, showing their confusion and indecision. The only odd thing he noted was that on the other side of the fence, no footprints showed at all, not even where he had jumped.
Retsler frowned. That felt important, but he wasn’t sure why.
Or, at least, he wasn’t sure why—yet.
***
Half a dozen patrons sat in the W-shaped counters lining the diner. None of the patrons were the town parents, many of whom nursed coffee near the kitchen door.
Bronly led Retsler to the farthest side of the W, facing the windows that overlooked the small manmade pond and beyond it, the Siskiyou National Forest.
This part of Oregon was pretty, he had to admit that, and pretty in a different way from Montana. Maybe it was the color of the dirt, or the narrowness of the sky or maybe it was just the smell in the outdoor air, which he shouldn’t have been able to smell in here.
That faint scent of fried hamburgers grew stronger now, particularly since one of those burgers on that grill was his. The waitress, wearing a blue-and-white checkered uniform and a little protective hat that made her look like something out of the 1930s, had already given him ketchup and mustard in red and yellow plastic squirt containers, without any labels. Nothing had labels, trying to maintain the illusion of history. He wondered what he would get if he asked for artificial sugar to go with his iced tea, then decided not to ask.
He didn’t want to spoil the illusion either.
Bronly also ordered a burger, which surprised him. He would have thought that a woman like her would order a salad. Although he hadn’t seen any salads prominently displayed on the old-fashioned menu.
Stanley had ordered a piece of apple pie à la mode, and the waitress had already given it to him, along with a cup of diner coffee—nothing fancy at all, no half-caf lattes or sprinkles allowed.
“We’re talking over here,” Stanley said as he turned his plate so that the point of the wedge-shaped piece of pie faced him, “because the others think this’s all crazy, that some kids’re doing pranks.”
“You don’t?” Retsler asked. His stomach growled again. That piece of pie looked like something out of a magazine, perfect crust, glistening apples covered in a lovely brown sauce.
Then Stanley ruined the perfection by slicing off the tip. “You seen it. You want to tell me how them footprints got where they are? And icy to boot.”
“You’ve touched the prints, then,” Retsler said.
“First time I saw them. Windy day, but the prints stayed the same. Ice shocked me. It was strange, and back then, I didn’t like strange.” Stanley shoveled the pie into his mouth.
“You do now?” Retsler asked.
“Let’s just say I’m used to it,” Stanley said around the pie in his mouth.
Bronly glanced at the town parents, still talking near the kitchen door. Her glance seemed almost furtive, as if she didn’t want them to overhear—which they couldn’t, given how far away the door was.
“So this has been going on for a long time,” Retsler said.
“This, that, and the other thing. The killings, though, those were new.” Stanley cut another piece of pie, shoving the side of his fork so hard into the surface that the plate moved.
“And Hamilton Denne helped you with those,” Retsler said, wanting to make sure.
“Theoretically. He said, though, things’re changing. He was seeing more weird things, and he blamed all kinds of nutty stuff—global warming, some kind of creature rebellion, pollution, you know. All that liberal conspiracy crap.”
Bronly leaned back just enough to catch Retsler’s eye behind Stanley’s back. She shook her head just a little, warning him off this part of the topic.
Retsler already knew to move away. He’d met this Oregon type before. They were prevalent in the mountains, guys who had their own beliefs about the world and who believed that anyone who disagreed with them was crazy or nutty or worse. Retsler had always thought of them as the precursors to the survivalists who had moved up here in the 1980s. When he was in Montana, which had a slightly different version of the same type, he realized that many of these folks were the survivalists who had moved to the “wilderness” in the 1980s. They had integrated back into society, kinda, but hadn’t lost their strong opinions about the way the world worked or about the people who disagreed with them.
“You don’t think this thing that’s visiting your kitchen is a killer, do you?” Retsler asked.
“Naw. It’s been coming here since we reopened. It gets mad, but it don’t hurt anyone.”
“But it causes damage,” Retsler said.
“Some,” Stanley said. “Don’t think we need to waste your time catching it.”
“I wasn’t thinking about catching it.” Retsler tried not to shudder. He’d actually touched some of the supernatural creatures he’d seen on the coast, and he didn’t want to touch any of them again. “However, if it is a ghost, we might be able to put it to rest. I’ve helped with that before.”
“I don’t think it’s a ghost,” Stanley said. He looked pointedly at Ron. “I know some of the others think it’s one of them poltergeists, but I don’t. I can’t find nothing about anyone what died in that kitchen.”
“What about on the land before the kitchen was built?” Bronly asked, with enough force in her tone to make Retsler realize she had asked this before.
“Naw, nothing,” Stanley said. “Not even a worker died while putting this thing up, and considering all the problems the WPA guys had sometimes, and the fact that nobody thought anybody what worked up here was worth much, that’s kinda surprising. They had to snowshoe out, you know.”
“What?” Retsler asked.
“Freak September blizzard. We’re high enough to get that kinda thing once in a blue moon.” Stanley cut more pie.
The waitress came by with both burgers. She set them down with a flourish. Retsler’s looked fat and juicy and damn near perfect, like burgers he’d had as a kid.
“They ran out of supplies,” Stanley said as the waitress walked away, “and no one could get to ’em. So they had to snowshoe out. All of them come back, though. Brought supplies up with a sled. Finished the job. “
“Back in the days when men were men and sheep were nervous,” Bronly muttered so softly that only Retsler could hear her. He was glad he hadn’t taken a bite of burger. He would have choked on it as he stifled his laugh.
“So,” he said to Stanley, “no one died here that you know of.”
“That’s right,” Stanley said.
Retsler picked up the burger. Juice dripped along his fingers. He took a bite. The burger was better than he expected, marinated in something before it was placed on that grill.
“What about in the Caves?” Retsler asked. “Anyone die in there that fits the description of this guy—or whatever?”
“Cook’s kid or a cook?” Stanley asked.
“Or someone who wanted to be chef, or maybe a tourist?”
“Hell,” Stanley said, “lots of people have died in those Caves, more than the Park Service wants us to admit.”
“All before the Park Service took over,” Bronly said primly. She clearly didn’t want Retsler to think something bad could happen in the Caves. Or maybe she was still protecting the area’s reputation.
“Most of ’emdid die before anyone kept records,” Stanley said. “And the ones we know about got written up in the papers. But I figure lots of folks got killed and left wherever. You know, they died deep inside, got stuck or something, couldn’t get out, never was heard from again.”
“The Caves still haven’t all been mapped, even now,” Bronly said. “Although I’ve never heard of anyone finding a skeleton inside one.”
“But if there are other creatures living in the Cave…?” Retsler let his voice trail off.
Both Stanley and Bronly looked at him. He immediately regretted the choice of the word “creatures.”
“I mean,” he said, “you know, cougars, raccoons, rats, anything going in and out that might feast on a carcass. Something like that might mess with the bones as well. You wouldn’t find any then.”
“Well.” Stanley ostentatiously ate the last piece of pie, chewing and talking at the same time. “Things get ate all the time up there. And we do find bones, just not human bones, so far as I know.”
Retsler ate some of his burger, thinking.
“So,” he said after a moment, “what you’re telling me is that we have no idea if someone died in those Caves who had a connection to this hotel or this land, and we have no way of finding out.”
“I don’t think it’s a ghost,” Stanley repeated.
“Why not?” Retsler asked.
“Don’t act like a ghost,” Stanley said.
“A stereotypical ghost,” Bronly corrected.
“No,” Stanley said. “A ghost. We got ’emall over the hotel. You know, folks die in their rooms or whatever. We got ghosts, we got stories, and this one, it don’t repeat actions like ghosts do, and it don’t seem stuck in the past like ghosts are. It interacts. That’s why I don’t think it’s harmful. I just think it’s young.”
Retsler looked at Stanley. “Young? What do you mean young?”
“It acts like a kid. It tosses stuff around that it doesn’t like. It gets angry when you tell it no. But it watches, like it’s learning.”
Retsler set down the last part of his burger. “When you were looking at the Caves this afternoon, when you were talking to me, what did you see?”
“I told you. I didn’t see nothing.”
“The area looked normal, then,” Retsler said.
“I didn’t say that neither.”
Bronly leaned around Retsler. “If you saw something, Stanley, tell us about it.”
“I didn’t see nothing,” Stanley said with the same emphasis as before.
Retsler frowned. The key to talking with people, he had always thought, was listening. And he hadn’t been listening.
“What kind of nothing?” he asked.
“You know,” Stanley said. “Like fog. Like a cloud rolled in over the mountain, but just for a minute. Then everything was clear again. It wasn’t nothing.”
That’s right, Retsler thought. It wasn’t nothing. It was something. But he didn’t speak out loud. He didn’t want to derail Stanley.
“Where was this fog?” Retsler asked.
“Right near the gate.” Stanley gave Bronly a perplexed look. “You know what I mean. We get that kind a thing all the time up here.”
“Not in the summer,” she said. “Fog’s for fall.”
“Or spring,” Stanley said. “We got lots of ground fog in the spring.”
Ground fog. Retsler mulled that over for a moment. Oregon had all kinds of fog that he hadn’t encountered since he’d left. Montana didn’t have nearly as much fog because it didn’t have as much moisture in the atmosphere.
Fog, ground fog, light fog, freezing fog.
Freezing fog.
Something that should have been impossible up here in these temperatures. Like ice cold footprints. Like a childish figure that overturned tables and handed cooking ingredients to a chef.
He went back to ground fog for just a moment. He hadn’t seen any in years, but he remembered it clearly. It always looked like it was seeping out of the ground, not forming in the air around the ground. He’d always thought ground fog spooky and Halloweenish, like something out of a Vincent Price movie or out of a Scottish ghost story.
Covering the ground. Brushing the ground.
Hiding footprints—his and the ice prints. Covering. Brushing. Hiding.
“Dammit,” he said softly.
“What?” Bronly asked.
“Do you have a book of local legends?” Retsler asked.
“Upstairs,” Stanley said as if he’d been waiting for Retsler to ask. “Gift shop.”
“All right then. I’ll go check those books out.” But Retsler didn’t leave immediately. He had to finish that spectacular hamburger first.
***
The gift shop was in a room just off the registration desk. The room had beautiful wood walls, so lovely that no one dared hang anything on them except photographs and single t-shirts on hangers. The rest of the merchandise stood on freestanding displays. Snacks, sundries, and local jams covered one display. A large art portfolio filled the area farthest from the window, and the clothing hung on racks in the middle of the room.
It took Retsler a moment to see the books. They were on built-in shelves behind the cash register.
The woman behind the register gave him a friendly smile. “Go ahead,” she said in a tone that told him other customers had hesitated to go back there as well.
He did. The store carried some mass-market paperbacks, some used books, and a whole bunch of local color. Books on the Oregon Caves, books on the Park Service, books on Southern Oregon, and books on the great lodges of the Northwest dominated. He saw a few books on the WPA plus a film of the building of the hotel. Then he saw the books that Stanley had mentioned, huddled together like forgotten children on the bottom shelf.
Retsler crouched, then sighed.
Ghosts of the Northwest, Oregon Folklore, Monsters of the Mountains—he’d seen all of these before. He hadn’t really looked at them with Marble Village or the Chalet in mind, but he didn’t trust the authors of these tomes as far as he could throw them.
But Stanley had recommended them, so maybe there was a kernel of truth in them.
“You’re the new police chief?” the woman asked.
Retsler grabbed the Monsters book. It was covered with dust.
“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” he said, knowing it was a lie. He’d already told Bronly he wouldn’t take the job, but he didn’t feel he should confide in this woman.
“I’ll bet you Stanley sent you here, didn’t he?” the woman said. “He thinks those books have truths in them.”
“You don’t?” Retsler opened the Monster book. Just like he remembered: hand-drawn images and tiny type. He had tried to read this thing once and hadn’t been able to.
“Oh, they have little bits in them,” she said, “but nothing like what really goes on up here.”
Retsler set the book down, wiped his hands on his pants, and stood. He hadn’t expected her to say anything like that. He had expected her to tell him that Stanley was a bit nuts, that he imagined all kinds of things.
“What goes on up here?” Retsler asked, looking at the woman carefully.
She was middle-aged, carrying just enough weight to make her seem matronly. Her hair was going gray but hadn’t gotten there yet. When it did, someone would describe the color as gunmetal gray. Right now, it dulled her red-brown hair. She’d spent too much time in the sun, judging by the faint wrinkles on her skin, and her current tan. But she had spectacular green eyes. She hadn’t been a beauty in her day, but she had turned heads.
She said, “You’re asking about the child in the kitchens, aren’t you?”
“You think it’s a child?” Retsler asked.
“I certainly hope so,” she said.
She sounded certain, as if an adult would be a bad thing. Retsler frowned. “Why?”
“Because we live on the shadow side,” she said.
He leaned against the counter. “That’s the second time someone mentioned the shadow side to me, and frankly, I’m confused. There is no shadow side to a mountain. The sun hits all parts eventually. I know there’s a shadow side in different seasons—”
“The sun does not hit all parts,” she said. “Some sections never see sunlight. They have overhangs or side croppings or there are trenches—”
“All mountains have that,” he said.
“Yes,” she said a little ominously. “Yes, they do.”
He took a deep breath, trying to control the sarcasm that wanted to flow out of him. That sarcasm had almost gotten him in trouble with Bronly, and it was going to get him in trouble here, if he wasn’t careful.
He extended his hand. “Dan Retsler.”
“MariCate Webber.”
They shook, and that gave him a moment to get himself under control. He remembered Denne once saying to him, Either you accept this stuff or you don’t, Dan. You’re an evidence guy. How much evidence do you need to realize that strange things exist?
“So,” Retsler said, “what’s wrong with the shadow side here?”
“Our shadow side isn’t unique,” she said. “But that child is.”
“You’re convinced it’s a child.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I haven’t seen it, but others seem to believe it.” Then he winced. That “seem to” would have gotten Denne to jump all over him.
MariCate didn’t seem to notice. Instead she offered what seemed like a non sequitur. “My grandfather helped build this place.”
And suddenly Retsler understood why Stanley had sent him up here. Not to see musty old books, but to talk to MariCate who, like most people in an area routinely flooded by tourists, wouldn’t answer direct questions, but might talk to someone she trusted.
“You know they got snowed in,” she said.
“Stanley told me they snowshoed out.”
“They did, but not to escape or get supplies. That’s the cover story.”
“What’s the real story?” Retsler asked.
She smiled. “It was a rescue.”
He didn’t follow. “Leaving was a rescue?”
“No, no,” she said. “Stanley must’ve also told you no one died building this place.”
“Yes, he did,” Retsler said.
“Which is true. You, as a policeman, probably know that truth hides in the words you choose.”
Somewhere in this conversation, he had stopped leaning. He placed his hands on the polished wood countertop.
“People did die then,” he said after a moment. “Just not building the place. They died during the blizzard…?”
“No,” she said. “They died in the Caves. Where they went for shelter. Most of a family died. The cook, his wife, and his adult son.”
“Most?” Retsler’s palms felt damp. He removed them from the wood, saw the prints he left, then shoved his hands in his pockets.
“The twelve-year-old daughter, she got out. They rescued her and four other children.”
“What were children doing up here?” Retsler asked. “I thought this was a WPA project.”
“It was,” MariCate said, “but a lot of families, you know, were homeless then. And when the man got work, sometimes the whole family came along. They weren’t supposed to, but they camped nearby, on Cave Creek, and probably got sheltered in the buildings the men made for themselves.”
“Probably?” Retsler asked. “You don’t know?”
“There’s a lot I don’t know,” she said. “My grandfather didn’t like talking about this. He was 81 when I divorced and moved up here. He tried to talk me out of it. He didn’t want me on this side of the mountain.”
“The shadow side,” Retsler said.
“You didn’t notice, did you, when you drove in that this is a kind of high valley? Marble Village is actually in a box valley, at 4,000 feet, mind you, but a box valley just the same. Only one real way in. At least there’s light there.”
“And not here? I seem to see quite a bit of sunlight ar