I cleared my throat, wondering how to pull her up without offending her. “You needed to talk to me?”
“You probably think I’m a freaking idiot,” she told the steering wheel. “This is why I send out my assistant to talk to people.”
I found myself smiling at the remnants of my garage. “No worries,” I told her. Life goes on. What was it Coyote had told me once? Change is neither good nor bad. It’s just change. Frightening, but survivable. I’d survived a lot worse than the destruction of my garage—and I’d learned a lot along the way.
“What can I help you with?” I asked her.
She took a deep breath, glanced at me from under her bangs, and said, “I’m in love.” Then she looked horrified and surprised, and red swept up from her jaw to her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to say that. He doesn’t know.” She looked at me, this woman whose name I didn’t have, with total urgency. “You can’t tell him, okay? Not a word.”
I cleared my throat. “That’s not going to be a problem unless I know who he is. Is it someone I know?”
She shook her head. “No.” Then, “I don’t think so.” She looked at me. “Shoot me now. Shit. I practiced. I had this smooth speech-thing.”
“Yeah,” said a voice behind me. “I think that you might ought to’ve used it because we don’t got a foggy idea of what you need.” Zack’s voice was kind even if his words weren’t particularly gracious. “Mercy, it looks to me like someone managed to slide under the fence between now and the last time we looked. I don’t believe they managed to get anywhere dangerous—” Which meant he trailed their scent around, and they hadn’t gone into the building or burrowed under the large and heavy metal plate we’d put over the outside opening into the tunnel. “Still, it would be good to get this place bulldozed before someone manages to kill themselves exploring.”
“Okay,” I told him. “I’ll call Bill today and give him the thumbs-up.”
Zack’s hand came up and ruffled my hair. He was a new wolf to our pack, but once he’d gotten comfortable with us, he’d started touching everyone. I’d have thought it would bother me, bother some of the others more. But he was a submissive wolf—those are pretty rare—and all the touching had turned out to be just what the pack needed to get comfortable with all the changes that had been coming their way. Our way.
I think we were what he needed, too. When he’d come to us a couple of months ago, he’d been—as Warren described it—jumpier than a jackrabbit on speed. Now that Zack had settled down, there was a happy cloud that followed him wherever he went, spread by his touch. Maybe that’s why Adam had sent him with me today. I’d needed a happy cloud.
I gave the woman a smile in hopes that would reassure her. “Maybe we should start with introductions. I’m Mercy, and this is my friend Zack. You are?”
“Lisa Simon,” she said, sounding relieved that I had taken over the conversation. “I am so glad I found you. I have a—” She stopped, held up a hand. “I’ve got this now. I have a yard-care company centered in Yakima, but we service all the way from the Tri-Cities to Ellensburg—about a hundred-mile radius. We do everything from designing yards to maintenance, and I have two crews of four people each who work for me full-time. For the last eight years, I’ve been maintaining the lawn for Richard Albright.”
I blinked. “The Richard Albright?” Wealth, brilliance, eccentricity, and notoriety had haunted the Albright family for probably a hundred years until a couple of very-high-profile suicides, and an unsolved murder or three a decade or so ago had brought the notoriety to a cl**ax that ended up with everyone in the family dead except for Richard Albright. As I recalled, he’d been in his early twenties at the time, and his wife’s had been one of the unsolved murders.
“That’s the one,” she said.
“He moved to Canada right after the trial,” Zack said. When I looked at him, he raised both hands slightly, and said, “It was all over the tabloids. No one who ever walked into a grocery store didn’t know about the murder trial and everything.”
Lisa nodded soberly. “And after a few years, he moved, very quietly, to Prosser.” I blinked at her. No one rich and famous moved to Prosser. It was a small town about thirty miles west of the Tri-Cities. It wasn’t a “pretty people” place like Walla Walla, which was pressed up against the Blue Mountains and beautifully green. Lisa had missed my surprise and continued to impart information in a circuitous fashion. “He never leaves the grounds. Not ever.” She looked at me. “And three days ago, I found out why not.”
I could feel the headache come on. She didn’t want me to fix his ’Wagon. “Ghosts,” I said, wondering who she’d been talking to.
“His dead wife,” she said at the same time.
“I don’t hunt ghosts,” I told her. The only time I’d tried had ended up with bodies.
Her mouth firmed. “I called in some big favors to get your name.”
“Who talked to you?” I asked. The wolves knew that I could see ghosts, I was pretty sure, though I didn’t make a big deal of it. That left . . .
“My best friend’s husband is Wenatchi and Cree. He’s a historian and folklorist. So I called her and he called me back this morning with your name. He said you are a walker and a spirit speaker and that you could help me. He said to tell you that Hank Redtail owes him a favor, and he is calling it in.”
Hank’s last name on his driver’s license wasn’t Redtail—but just as I turned into a coyote, he turned into a redtail hawk. For some of the traditionalists, a person’s name had more to do with who they were than what their birth certificate said.
I pulled out my phone to call Hank, but saw that sometime in the last four hours he’d sent a text message. Ghost strong as this is bad news. Listen to the story.
I ground my teeth, took a deep breath, and said, “Hank tells me I need to hear you.”
Lisa’s Story
Richard Albright’s place used to be a horse farm. Most of the stables stood empty, if well kept and pretty, but the small, two-stall stud barn was Lisa’s for equipment storage or anything else. It had an empty office with a working minifridge stocked with bottled water, and a bathroom. Since his place was ten miles from anywhere, the bathroom was useful.