Legend of the Jade Dragon Read online

  My patience was beginning to wear thin. “No, I said I’ve already taken them to the kennel. They’ll be taken care of, and I won’t have to worry about them.”

  He backed off. “No problem, just thought I’d offer. So, ready for your trip?”

  I bit my lip. The poor guy was really trying; maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt. I’d promised Ida I’d keep an eye on him, and three years in prison had to have skewed his sense of courtesy. No doubt Ida would whip his manners back in shape once she returned.

  “Yeah, and we sure need it,” I said. “The past week and a half have been traumatic, to say the least. Maybe by the time I’m back, they’ll have caught whoever ripped off my shop.” He offered to help me arrange the tent and bags in the car. I accepted, then waved as he took off up the street.

  I put in a call to Cinnamon to make sure everything was running smoothly. She said, “Any smoother, and we’d be out of business. We have no stock, and we’re down to the lunch crowd.”

  “Good point,” I said. I made sure she had my cell number and the numbers she would need if she had to call Safety-Tech.

  By the time I went to pick up the kids at school, the car was packed except for the ice chest. When we got home, Randa raced upstairs to dig out her old telescope, since I refused to let her take her new one. I told her to double-check her window to make sure it was shut tight and locked. As she burst back into the front yard, Lori’s mother stopped her BMW in the middle of the street, just long enough for Lori to scramble out of the car. I waved, but the woman had already squealed off in a cloud of dust. Somehow, I didn’t think we’d be getting together with the Thomas family for dinner any time soon.

  One last stop at the étagère to tuck the dragon into a padded package, and we were ready. Mary Sanders’s address was secure in my purse, though I supposed she wouldn’t be hard to find in such a small town. I locked the door and went out to stow Lori’s backpack in the SUV just as Murray and White Deer rolled into the driveway, with Joe right behind them. He made us stand back while he transferred Murray’s equipment to my car. Murray grimaced when I asked how her day had been.

  “One of those ‘don’t ask’ days. I’ve been getting enough of those to last a lifetime. Hey, Joe’s done! Let’s roll. It’s going to get dark pretty quick in the mountains.”

  I gave Joe a hug; he pulled me close and tapped me on the nose. “You be careful, witchy woman. I don’t want to have to come rescue you again.”

  “You be careful at work this weekend,” I countered. “You’ve got a dangerous job, and I want you to promise me to watch your step.”

  He gave me a quick squeeze. “You’ve got it, woman! I’ll be careful. Say hi to Smokey the Bear for me!”

  Laughing, I motioned to the others, and we piled in the Cherokee, leaving Murray’s car in the driveway, and headed for the highway. Pushing aside worries about Jimbo and conks on the head and dragons that moved by themselves, I made the decision that nothing was going to ruin this weekend. Nothing.

  Chapter 9

  AS WE WOUND through the road leading to Mount Baker, the sun slowly began to sink into the west. Days in the temperate rain forest always seemed to darken earlier than they did in the city, with thickets of fecund vegetation crowding out the light. Few people realized just how alive these mountains were. The Cascade Range had given birth to a family of volcanoes. Mount Rainier, a pristine, snow-covered peak, was as dangerous as she was beautiful, towering over Seattle as a constant reminder of the destruction forces that had, and would again, overwhelm the coastal region.

  As if to prove her sister’s claim, Mount St. Helens blew her stack in 1980 and laid waste to a swath of land that now resembled the craters of the moon. I’d been there once, picking through the desolate and eerie landscape. And then there was “our” volcano. Isolated, covered in glaciers and snow, Mount Baker housed some of the most rugged forests in the state. Buttressed against the North Cascades National Park, the mountain claimed a quiet and isolated throne for itself.

  As we hugged the curves on Highway 542, Murray and I quietly discussed what I’d found out about Daniel’s past. With Lori and Miranda immersed in a debate about women astronauts, and White Deer and Kip chatting away, I didn’t have to worry about being overheard.

  By the time we reached Maple Falls, I’d been driving thirty-five minutes, and it was nearing six P.M. We made a quick stop for last-minute supplies, then headed on toward Glacier, some seven and a half miles up the road. The town, barely larger than a postage stamp, was located within a valley inside the Mount Baker National Recreation Area, and acted as a gateway to the Mount Baker Wilderness Area. We rolled on through, anxious to get to the lodge before dark.

  “Where’s the lodge?” Murray consulted her map.

  “Left on Paintbrush Loop, about five miles ahead.” I opened my window and took a deep whiff; the air was so clean and crisp here that it pierced my lungs. The vegetation grew thick as the highway curved along; firs heavy with moss crowded both sides of the road, leaving only a narrow runway of sky to filter through. As we pushed farther into the heart of the forest, the light became muted, dappled with shadow, offering dark recesses within the thickets. The racket in the car began to die down as the ever-present trickling of miniature waterfalls alongside the road grew louder.

  “There’s the turnoff,” I said, pointing at the graveled drive to our left. Named for the wide swathes of Indian paintbrush that bordered the roads during summer, Paintbrush Loop led through a thick copse of cedar and fir, out into an open meadow containing the main lodge of Tyler’s Resort, along with seven cabins. Patches of snow still dotted the upper reaches of the lea. Since the resort was so popular, I’d made reservations early, just in case, but the parking lot was nearly empty. We tumbled out of the Cherokee.

  I stretched and popped my back. A sudden gust of wind sent me reeling. Nothing like mountain air to wake up the senses. “Come on, let’s go check in.”

  The lodge had been built sometime in the sixties but had been recently remodeled. To the left, the lobby led to a dining room; to the right stood the inevitable gift shop next to the rest rooms. While Kip and Miranda headed to the bathrooms, I gave my name to the registration clerk. She pushed the book across the counter.

  “Hello, I’m Marjorie. Please sign in and list all members in your party.”

  I did as she asked and handed over my credit card. She swiped it through the slot. “Not many people here,” I said, glancing around.

  Marjorie shook her head. “April’s our transition month. Too late for skiers, too early for summer tourists. You can have your choice of cabins. They all have the same layout: two bedrooms, a small kitchenette-living area, full bath, gas heat, and a woodstove. There’s a fire pit outside each cabin, along with a picnic table, so you can roast marshmallows if you want. The firewood’s in the bin next to each cabin.”

  She showed me a map, and I chose Meadow Lark, the cabin farthest away from the lodge. It might be too cold to camp outside, but at least we wouldn’t have to be next to the main drive.

  She typed in our cabin number on the screen. “Newly-weds are staying in Briar Rose, and an elderly couple is staying in Salmon Creek, closest to the lodge. They have a chocolate Lab, but he’s well-behaved. Other than that, you’ve got the entire area to yourselves. The lodge is open twenty-four hours a day; if there’s an emergency, just come on in and push that buzzer. Somebody will be out to help you immediately.” She pointed out the emergency buzzer. I hoped we wouldn’t have to use it.

  “There’s a pay phone outside the lodge and two in the lobby. The dining room is open from six A.M. to three P.M., and from five P.M. until nine-thirty P.M. Last seating for dinner is at nine o’clock. The hot tub and swimming pool are around back, with an outside entrance. They close at ten P.M. Here’s your receipt and your key cards.”

  She handed me two wafer-thin cards. High tech meets Bambi, I thought. I thanked her, then we drove over to our cabin.
I perched myself on the picnic table while the others unpacked, turning slowly to take in the view. The place was as pretty as I’d remembered it. One time, when Roy and I began to realize things weren’t going too great in our marriage, we’d hired a baby-sitter and come up here to talk things over. I’d never forgotten the sheer beauty of the trip, even though we’d argued constantly.

  Lori and Miranda would take the back bedroom, with Kip sleeping on an air mattress on the floor. Murray, White Deer, and I would share the other bedroom. I asked Randa and Lori to go fetch some wood. They raced off, giggling. It was good to see my daughter happy. Sometimes I worried that she’d never find a close friend.

  While I put away the food, Murray went outside to set up the fire pit. White Deer and Kip finished carting in the last of the supplies.

  “Mom, can we go exploring?” Randa asked after she and Lori brought in several armloads of wood. I excused them on the promise that they wear their whistles at all times and be careful if they meet any strangers.

  “I want to go look at the stream! It’s right inside the woods over there.” Kip pointed to the edge of the woods encroaching on the open meadow.

  We walked over toward Salmonberry Creek. Wide and shallow at this point, it tumbled down from the glacier-clad mountain, with narrow forks diverting off into the forest all along its route. Eventually, these forks wore down the soil, forming ravines throughout the woods. Even from ten yards away, I could hear the roar of the whitecaps.

  “The glacial runoff is too high. It’s white-water season, and the current is rolling along at a pretty good clip. I don’t think you’d better go over there alone, you’d drown if you slipped and fell in.”

  “I’ll go with him,” White Deer volunteered.

  I laughed. “Hey, if you want to go frog hunting with Kip, be my guest.” They took off, leaving Murray and me alone. We walked back to our cabin in silence, letting the cool mountain air play over us. I inhaled deeply to flush out the stress of the last few days.

  “I’m going to start dinner,” I said. Murray followed me, and while I got out the ingredients for mac ’n cheese, she lit a fire in the woodstove. The gas heat would make a nice backup, but there was nothing like the smell of wood smoke to whet the appetite. We worked in silence, listening to the birdsong echo through the meadow as they winged their way home to their nests for the night.

  Murray stretched out in the rocking chair that sat by the bay window overlooking the back of the meadow. “I’m so glad I came,” she said.

  I poured noodles into the boiling water and began slicing tomatoes for the salad. “It’s good, isn’t it?” And it was. I sat down at the table and yawned, rolling my neck first to the left, then to the right. I eased into a full stretch. “Oh, yeah, I needed this.”

  Murray tried to smile but her facade quickly dissolved. “I’ve been so stressed out the past month that I never sleep anymore, and I haven’t had any time to give to Sid and Nancy.” Sid, a red-tailed boa, was always overanxious to make friends, and Nancy, a toothy gnarly green tree boa, delighted in climbing onto wall fixtures and leaning out to flick her tongue at unsuspecting guests. Murray doted on her reptilian babies and didn’t understand why some of her visitors cautiously sidestepped the constrictors.

  “You really hate the new job, don’t you?” I opened my purse and pulled out a Hershey’s Krackle bar. I snapped it in two and tossed her half. “Here.” I firmly subscribed to the idea that chocolate was a wonder drug whose benefits had been long overlooked by the AMA.

  She put the candy in her mouth and sucked on it a moment. Then she shrugged. “What can I say? There’s no going back. I don’t want to sell my house and move away, so I have to learn to accept it.”

  Sometimes her fatalism got to me, but usually, I kept my mouth shut. That primal acceptance of what befell her was an essential part of Murray. Today, however, I was in one of my stubborn moods. “I know you like to go with the flow, but it seems to me that the current’s heading directly for the sewer with you in tow. How can you let Coughlan get away with the bull he’s pulling?”

  She tried to explain. “Don’t you see? If I complain, I’ll be labeled a snitch, and nobody will ever trust me again. This isn’t a high-powered division in the city where bad PR will pose a threat to their image. We’re talking about the Chiqetaw police station.”

  I shook my head. “So, if they came out and said, ‘Murray, we don’t want you here because you’re Indian’ or ‘because you’re a woman,’ you’d accept it and go peacefully? Don’t ask me to buy that—”

  “This is different, Em. I can’t explain. It… it’s just different. If I do my job and prove myself, Coughlan will eventually have to respect me.”

  Different my ass, but I could see she didn’t want to talk about it. She was deliberately blinding herself from the truth, a trait Murray had never before exhibited as long as I’d known her. Something was going on, but I had enough to handle with the problems piling up in my own life. I decided to back off. I stood up and dusted my hands on my jeans, then leaned out the door, my voice echoing as I called for everybody to hightail it back to the cabin for dinner.

  White Deer and Kip trudged up from the creek; Kip’s sneakers and the cuffs of his jeans were soaked. I raised one eyebrow.

  “Frog chasing,” White Deer said. “It wasn’t the creek; he ran through a little rivulet that feeds into the stream. Ankle deep at the highest.”

  Kip grinned at me. “The whitecaps on the stream were pretty rough. I promised I wouldn’t go in, and I didn’t.”

  “Honestly. You’d manage to get wet if the nearest mud puddle were a hundred miles away. Go change and hang those near the stove so they dry out.” How boys’ clothes always managed to find the quickest route from the closet to the hamper was beyond me, but Kip kept a never-ending stream of laundry flowing my way.

  He grinned and raced off to the bathroom. A few minutes later, he handed me the wet jeans, and I draped them over a hanger and hooked it near the stove.

  While the girls washed their hands, White Deer set the table. “Oh, that smells heavenly,” she said as I dished up dinner for the kids.

  Lori wrinkled her nose as she slid into her place and grabbed her fork. “We don’t get to eat macaroni and cheese at home. Mom says it’s bur-gee-swa, but I like it. I always buy my lunch at school when they have spaghetti ’n stuff like that.”

  Bourgeois, huh? That told me just which rung on society’s ladder Lori’s parents had me pegged for. I poured her a glass of milk. “So, your parents are both lawyers?”

  She nodded, a white ring forming around her lips from the milk. “Yeah, though Mom’s on leave on account of she had a nervous breakdown a year ago when she lost a big case and got fired from her firm. Dad was offered a partnership up here by some old college friend of his. We lived in Bellevue.” That explained a lot. Bellevue, land of the uber shoppers and high-tech millionaires. I bet anything they lived on Mercer Island, where the water ran brown and the blood ran blue.

  “Well, I hope you enjoy the weekend,” I said. She gave me a thumbs-up and dug into her food. After dinner was over and the dishes put away, Miranda asked if we could bundle up and go stargazing. We gathered up graham crackers, marshmallows, chocolate bars, blankets, and her telescope, and headed outside where the night sky had deepened into a brilliant indigo, and stars twinkled overhead like icicles on a Christmas tree. We gathered around the stone-ringed pit as Murray and White Deer set a fire to crackling.

  After watching the flames for a while, I put myself in charge of the assembly line of graham crackers and chocolate bars. S’mores. Yum. White Deer had brought one of those old-fashioned cast-iron popcorn poppers, and she shook it over the fire, waiting for the kernels to explode into white cotton. Twenty minutes later, covered with melted chocolate, strings of marshmallow, graham cracker crumbs, and salt from the popcorn, we looked like we’d just finished looting Wonka-Land. We’re just a gang of rogue Oompa Loompas, I thought, passing
out the Wet-Wipes.

  Randa and Lori headed out into the middle of the meadow, telescope in hand. Deciding to brave the chill, the rest of us followed, oohing and aahing over the vista of sky that unfolded over our heads. We took turns with the scope as the girls pointed out constellations and planets until we were all thoroughly chilled and our heads were spinning with visions of stars.

  On our way back to camp, Kip froze, pointing out two deer standing silent on the other side of the lea. Randa worked her hand into mine and leaned against me, resting her head on my arm. Lori nudged her way closer to me on the other side, and I reached out to encircle her shoulders with my free arm. She relaxed when she felt my arm, and I could sense her mingled fear and wonder as she watched the hinds. Murray and White Deer knelt near the rocks. Kip followed suit.

  The deer were vigilant but unafraid, and they continued their feed until, satiated, they picked their way across the lea and vanished into the forest. As I watched them go, I had a sudden, swift longing, wishing that they would stay, that we could stay and leave everything behind. When the deer were out of sight, White Deer laughed. Her voice tinkled through the night air. “On that note, it’s time to douse the fire and go inside.”

  Kip yawned and slipped into his sleeping bag without any prompting. Lori and Randa followed suit, climbing into bed without a murmur of complaint. I left a night-light burning so they could find their way to the bathroom and opened their door just a crack so we could hear them if something happened during the night.

  We turned off the lights so that only the crackling flames from the woodstove lit the cabin. White Deer and I curled up on the sofa. Murray stood at the window, staring out into the night. She squinted, then said, “I see two bats.”

  White Deer gave her a long look. “You know what that means. Renewal through rebirth. The choice of transformation.” Murray tried to shush her, but White Deer brushed her off. “You hate your new job; you’re not being treated fairly, yet you refuse to do anything about it.”