Downpour

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Book: Downpour by Kat Richardson Read Free Book Online
Authors: Kat Richardson
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy, Greywalker, BN
“OK.”
    “And Hallie goes home from the tavern after work. It’s really late, like eleven or twelve o’clock. And she leaves the lodge . . . and she never came back.”
    The pronouncement didn’t have quite the impact on me that he’d obviously hoped for: I just made a doubtful face at him. “So . . . ?”
    Jefferson frowned. “So, like, she doesn’t come back, and Monty says she took off with some other guy and everyone’s all, ‘She musta left that creep and moved away,’ and that’s what they thought until . . .”
    I rolled my eyes, but played along. “Until . . . what?”
    “One morning in 1940, these two fishermen are rowing up on the lake near the burned-out remains of the Log Cabin Hotel—that’s the far northwest part—and they see this thing floating on the water, so they go get it and it’s . . . a body!”
    “Hallie.”
    “Yeah. But here’s the good part: She’s all turned into soap.” He was grinning and his eyes sparkled, kind of undermining the spooky effect he’d probably hoped for.
    “Soap?” I asked.
    Erika came back from the kitchen with the milk-foaming cup and put it down on the counter beside the espresso machine. “Yeah! Isn’t that gross? They must have been all, like, ‘What’s this?’ and then they get her up in the boat and all—”
    Jefferson interrupted her. “And they thought it was a hoax, at first, like maybe someone had carved a person out of soap and thrown it in the lake for a joke, except her face and fingers are all eaten off, so they don’t know who it is. So they take it down here. And there’s this medical student who figures out it’s a real dead person and her body fat all turned to soap because the water in the lake is real cold and real pure, and down at the bottom it’s more alkaline than at the top, so she saponified and got lighter and then . . . she floated up.”
    “OK, that’s kind of creepy,” I agreed.
    “It’s kind of cool,” Jefferson said. “This medical student, he’s like that forensic lady on TV and he figures out that someone strangled his soap lady and bashed her head in before they wrapped her up in some old canvas and ropes and dumped the body in the lake. And then he figures out who she is because she has this dental thing in her mouth—he finds the dentist who made it and that guy says, ‘Oh yeah, I made that for Hallie Latham.’ And everyone says, ‘Who’d kill Hallie? Everyone loved her!’ ”
    “Except Monty!” Erika added.
    “So Monty strangled his wife and threw her into Lake Crescent,” I said, “and three years later—”
    “Two and a half,” Jefferson corrected. “She died at Christmas in 1937, but the fishermen found her in July of 1940.”
    I nodded. “All right. Two and a half years later, her saponified body bobbed to the surface of the lake. It’s a really weird story, but I don’t think my client’s car is going to turn into soap and float to the shore of Lake Crescent anytime soon. And he’s been missing for about five years, now.”
    “Your client is missing?” Erika asked.
    “How do you know the car’s in Lake Crescent?” Jefferson asked at the same time.
    I ignored Erika’s question, because I really didn’t want to start down that explanation’s road. Instead, I turned my gaze on Jefferson and gave him a slightly crooked smile. “A ghost told me.”
    They both stared at me for a moment, and I took the opportunity to lay an extra tip on the counter and get out before they could ask any more questions I didn’t want to answer.
    While it was nice to know that some things do come back from the depths of Lake Crescent, I didn’t think it was going to help me prove something bad had happened to Steven Leung. If Leung had been burned as badly as his ghost looked, there wouldn’t be enough of him left to turn into soap. I’d have to find another way to draw the right kind of attention to his disappearance.
    I got into the Rover and headed back up the mountain. This time I

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