Who By Water Read online

  “Hello, Jo.”

  “Still asleep. I’m going to lie back down and dream of kittens or something.”

  “I’m afraid you are not asleep, kiddo.” Helena sat the mug down, but it made no noise on the table.

  “I am.” She lay back down and squeezed her eyes shut like a child pretending to sleep.

  Helena, or whatever was in her apartment looking like Helena, sat next to Jo on the futon. She lay her hand on Jo’s thigh. Her hand was ice cold.

  Jo moved as far away as she could, smack against the wall. “This is not fucking real.”

  “Calm down. It is weird, but I need to talk to you.”

  “Why do dead people keep telling me to calm the fuck down?” Jo closed her eyes again and tried to breathe, but the intake of breath felt more like suffocating. She suddenly had a lot more empathy for her mother’s habit of rocking and humming to herself when she was upset.

  Helena lifted her hand to Jo’s shoulder. Again she shivered.

  She opened her eyes and looked at Helena. Her head was still wrong, but her eyes were soft, not wide open with terrified surprise.

  “What do you want from me?” Whatever Helena was, Jo didn’t want her in her apartment. At the same time she didn’t want her to be dead.

  Helena repositioned herself on the couch. “I don’t want anything from you. I knew I had to come to you, but I don’t understand it.”

  Jo sat up, edging from freaked-out into angry.

  Helena said, “I need to tell you to be careful, but I didn’t know that until I got here. There’s something here in Ljubljana. Something new. No… Something awake. And it can find you the same way I did.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course you know where to find me. How many times have you been here?” She was forgetting that it wasn’t actually Helena sitting on her futon. It was some kind of mental projection, some kind of ghost.

  “I really don’t know how to explain it. I didn’t notice this about you when I was alive. But now that I’m, well, not alive, I can see it: you glow. You’re all silvery. I knew where you were the instant I woke up at the morgue. And I knew you were in some kind of danger.” Helena flounced back on the futon, stretching her arms out across the back.

  “I… just… what exactly am I supposed to do with this information?” She couldn’t sort out what was more incredible: what the Helena-thing said, or the fact that she was there, saying it.

  “That, I don’t know. But I feel enormously relieved having told you, and like I should probably go, though I’m not sure where exactly.” She moved to get up.

  “No. Wait.” Jo grabbed Helena’s forearm. It felt like a frozen pack of meat pulled out of the reach-in downstairs.

  “I really should go.”

  “Since you’re here. Why the fuck were you sleeping with Faron?”

  “I take it you found out last night?”

  “This morning actually. But why?”

  “Why do people climb Triglav?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Because they can, Jo. Because they can. Faron was a bit of fun, like you.”

  “I can’t decide how grossed out I am right now.”

  “Don’t be. Though I will say prowess seems to run in the family. He’s quite impressive for someone so young.”

  “Stop, I am officially grossed out.”

  “Not sorry, dear. You asked.”

  “Not about… prowess. Anything else you need to unburden yourself of?” Jo leaned back against the wall. The thought crossed her mind that treating this like a conversation with a not-dead person may be a bad idea. Either she was having a hell of a dream or she was capable of serious sensory hallucinations.

  “I really thought you’d ask me how I died.” Helena plucked a pillow feather off Jo’s skirt.

  She flinched at the touch. “I thought this was my dream.”

  “Still not dreaming, dear. To answer my own question, I have no idea. I don’t remember that part.”

  “Why did you want me to ask you?”

  “Oh, to see if I could remember if someone else asked. I have no idea how this afterlife, death, whatever you want to call it, thing works.” Helena stood up. “I really should go.” She walked to the door.

  Jo stared at her. She wanted to say how she was sorry she hadn’t asked questions about her life, about her family, but she didn’t. “You really don’t remember anything?”

  Helena stopped and turned back to her. “I remember seeing you at the museum and walking into the Emona house with a few people. I went down to look at the mosaic more closely while there were so few people there and no one seemed to be paying much attention. And I remember being surprised to find someone down there already.” She tilted her head, which succeeded only in setting everything at even wronger angles where her neck and jaw were concerned. “I guess that person… No. I must have fallen. It was stupid to go down there.”

  “The police don’t seem to think you fell.”

  Helena shrugged. “Doesn’t matter much to me now. Dead is dead.”

  “That’s funny, considering you are standing in my flat talking to me. Very unlike your average dead person.”

  “True. I think that might be more about you than me though, kiddo.”

  “Whatever.”

  Helena turned away again, then stopped. “There is actually one thing you can do for me. Would you tell my brother I’m okay, or at peace, or whatever you think might comfort him?”

  Jo looked up at her. “How am I supposed to explain I have a message for him from beyond the grave?”

  “I don’t know, love. You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.” Helena leaned over, kissed her on the cheek and brushed her icy hand over the top of Jo’s head. “It really was fun, dear.”

  She was gone. She didn’t walk through the door. She didn’t fade. She just wasn’t there.

  Blasé in death. Leave it to Helena.

  Jo’s phone chimed with a text message. “It’s Igor. I’ve finished if you’d like to come down to have a look.”

  She was a sucker for complete sentences in a text message. “I’ll be right down.”

  Wait. Not asleep. This was bad.

  Jo stood and ran her hands down her shirt and skirt to smooth them. She had her phone and went to the table to grab her keys. She picked up the gray pottery mug. It was full of cold tea.

  Gregor just forgot it this morning.

  She scooped up the keys, put her phone in her cardigan pocket and took the few steps to the door. She stepped into her clogs and then into the cool air on the landing.

  Gregor hadn’t made tea.

  Igor was outside the shop folding drop cloths with Vesna when Jo crossed the courtyard. They looked to be working in companionable silence.

  “Živjo.” Jo raised her hand to both of them.

  Vesna ran toward her and threw her arms around her like they’d been apart for years. She let go and stepped back, holding Jo at arms’s length. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “Vee, I live here. Remember?” She was still shaken from the ghostly encounter upstairs.

  Was that what it was? A ghost? Pretty fucking solid for a ghost. Maybe her mother’s mental illness was hereditary. Maybe this was how it started, conversations with dead people.

  Vesna’s weirdly enthusiastic greeting felt equally wrong.

  “I’ve been worried about you all day. Are you okay? I mean, how could you be? I felt so bad about taking off this morning, but Gregor and Faron said you’d be fine and I should go. I should’ve stayed, shouldn’t I?” Vesna stopped to breathe.

  Jo put her hand up. “Whoa. I’m fine. Or as fine as can be expected, I guess.” Jo pulled her cardigan more tightly around herself. “Let’s go look at this thing.”

  Vesna took her hand and dragged her into the shop, looking
back like she thought Jo would break at any moment.

  The shop reeked of spray paint but was stripped of the drop cloths and mostly back to normal except for the fans.

  Vesna dropped Jo’s hand and threw her arms wide. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”

  Jo nodded. It was better than she had imagined in their late night scribblings. The mural took up most of the wall. As she had imagined, the water had the stylized illustration look of The Wave, but instead of the cartoony-tattoo boat of the sketch, Igor had continued the Hokusai style in his rendering of the ship and the burning crates of tea.

  “Igor, it’s perfect.” She stood still to take in all the detail.

  “I played with your idea a bit. I know you wanted something more–”

  Jo cut him off. “My doodle was just an idea. This. This is amazing.” She searched her pockets for her phone. “I should post it on our Instagram account.”

  Vesna stopped her. “Already done.” She looked to Igor, “though he wouldn’t let me post his picture with it.”

  “A man has to retain some mystery.” He brushed off his hands on the front of his paint-flecked jeans. “Okay, ladies, I’m off. I’ll leave the fans so you can run them some more tonight and tomorrow before you open.”

  “How will we get them back to you?” Vesna, ever practical, looked up at him.

  “I’ll come by to get them tomorrow afternoon.” He held Vesna’s gaze a few beats.

  She blushed. “That works.”

  It was adorable.

  Vesna started again. “Oh. Oh. I have your money.” She patted the pockets of her perfectly-pressed, lunch-with-mom pants and produced a folded stack of euro bills from her back pocket.

  He took it from her with a nod. “Thank you. Both.”

  He picked up the stack of drop cloths with the respirator mask on top and headed out to Breg, where he’d pulled a truck up to load the scaffolding.

  Jo still stood facing the newly transformed wall.

  Vesna moved to stand beside her. “He really is good isn’t he?” She let out a little sigh.

  “And good looking. And charming. He’s interested, you know? In you.”

  Vesna giggled. “For once, I do know. He asked me to dinner. That seems too serious so we’re going to breakfast on Saturday.”

  “Nice. I’m glad you said yes.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Vesna turned to look at her.

  “Because you almost never do.”

  “There’s that.” Vesna shrugged and turned to look back at the clipper ship surrounded by burning tea.

  Jo continued to look at the ship as well. “Vee, I think I might be losing my mind.”

  Chapter 6

  A woman was dead, an artifact had been stolen from the museum the night of the murder, and Jolene Wiley was no longer dormant.

  Gustaf watched her friends bring her, stumbling and babbling, up the stairs to her flat. Her aura, which had always been purple with brilliant red streaks, now gleamed with a silver shimmer, and a faint silver plume spiraled up from her head as far as he could see. It would grow stronger as whatever drugs or booze she had in her system wore off. She’d be a beacon to every dead person, and more, for miles.

  Vesna Kos would notice it immediately, and would undoubtedly go to her uncle. The Kos family’s involvement was unavoidable, but Gustaf didn’t welcome it. It was Valter Kos, Vesna’s father, whose insistence on religion over science was at the center of the tragedy Gustaf had first come to Slovenia to investigate.

  Who would have thought the building of a simple, even ugly, carpark could be the source of so much anguish to so many? Once again, disturbing ancient soil proved to be the undoing of the unknowing. Believing that the earliest burials uncovered were consecrated graves, Valter Kos and his brother were content to leave the work of relocating them to local authorities and the Church.

  The last grave excavated was that of what Mr. Stoker would have called a vampyr. It held the skeleton of a young girl arranged in a deviant pattern, with the head removed postmortem and placed between the feet, per other vampire burials discovered throughout central and eastern Europe.

  Modernity had stripped away ancestral fear of vampires, leaving the general population with only a superficial pop-culture fascination. This burial was of interest only to the presiding archeologists, hence no precautions were taken to preserve the bane. Thus, consistent with recorded folk traditions, once the remains were reinterred with the head at the top of the body, the undead girl had gone in search of kin on which to feed. The last of her particular lineage was Berta Horvat.

  Miss Horvat kept company with Leo, the younger Kos brother. Not surprisingly given the lack of vampiric activity in Slovenia for over a century, Valter Kos misinterpreted the signs. Condemning her for tempting his brother away from taking holy orders with the Jesuits, he declared Miss Horvat possessed and confined her in order to perform an exorcism. This made her easy prey for her vampiric ancestor, and she succumbed.

  Miss Horvat’s death was the result of ignorance, not of direct malice by the Kos family. Gustaf had spoken at length with Valter Kos and cautioned him about monitoring excavation work anywhere in central Ljubljana. Lingering misgivings led to his recommendation – no, his insistence – that Bettine send Alessandro to Slovenia to keep close watch on the Kos family. But she said Trieste and Venice already kept Alessandro busy, and to be fair, that was true. And that was the reason Bettine had given Gustaf the assignment to the fledging country.

  With Valter’s death, Leo, now Brother Kos had assumed the mantle of Witchfinder. As best Gustaf could tell, Brother Kos was a modern man, despite his faith. Unlike Valter, Brother Kos did not believe that every being of supernatural origin or ability was a demonic presence in need of execution.

  That was small comfort. Gustaf still didn’t completely trust the Kos family. He wasn’t sure that delivering a vox de mortuis into their hands would be to anyone’s best interest, especially Ms. Wiley’s.

  He couldn’t help but think she was a magnet for those living behind the Veil. Rok Zorko, her friend (or lover, he was never certain) had been a puzzle for a long time. Zorko’s aura was old, much older than his face. He looked about 40 when Gustaf first encountered him, and had not noticably aged in the twenty years since then. Gustaf had not been able to find him in the registries; nevertheless, he suspected that Zorko was either an Immortal or a Long-lived.

  Through several requests for archives from India and Iceland, Gustaf pieced together some parts of Zorko’s long life. He’d been known to the Observers in other times, under other names. In Reykjavik in the late 1890s, he was Arnbjörg Valdisson; he disappeared after the death of his much older wife. Alma Arunsdóttir, who had observed him, believed him to be more than a hundred years old at that time, and not of Icelandic origins.

  Gustaf had also traced him to Kerala around 1940. Kadir Abassi had observed a Long-lived named Michael Hale, a Secret Intelligence Service officer, in India on an unknown mission. The person Gustaf knew as Rok Zorko wore a heavy beard and had much longer hair than a military officer, but Zorko matched Hale’s physical description, and his eyes were identical to the one photograph included in Abassi’s files. Hale had left Kerala before the war ended, presumably to return to London. World War II provided excellent opportunities for many Long-lived and true Immortals to go dark in the registries.

  Gustaf had no idea why Valdisson chose Slovenia, or where he’d spent the decades after the war. He’d come to Ljubljana around 1990. As Zorko, he lived in Šiška, but he traveled a good deal, often on trips with Ms. Wiley that sometimes included her son. From visa requests, Gustaf knew the two of them had traveled to India, possibly even to Kerala. He had no reason to believe that Valdisson, now Zorko, interfered in politics or engaged in other activities the Observers had forbidden to the Long-lived. But Gustaf had less trust in Zorko’s kind than he had in witchfinders and demon
hunters. Like some Observers, the Long-lived developed a form of psychoscopy with people. He could only conclude that Zorko knew exactly what Ms. Wiley was. What he hadn’t yet figured out was the purpose of Zorko’s involvement with her.

  Gustaf didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he had developed a paternal sense toward her. He’d watched her son grow up, watched her take control of her own life piece by piece. She’d built a family around her to replace the one she’d lost. Gustaf had lost his own family, but unlike Ms. Wiley, he had never allowed anyone else back in. There was once a moment when he thought Bettine might become something more to him than a colleague, but that was out of the question now.

  He didn’t believe Ms. Wiley was capable of murder, but he had read the reports of her mother’s unwinding. It was uncommon for Voices to enter the world as fragile as her mother had been. It was not uncommon for such people to be driven to insanity by the shades that haunted them. Gustaf hoped Jolene Wiley was made of sterner stuff than her mother.

  He also hoped he was right about Leo Kos. If he was the fanatic his brother had been, Ms. Wiley was in danger from more directions than Gustaf could defend alone. Asking Bettine to come or to send an assistant would only jeopardize Ms. Wiley further. The Board generally moved quickly, without trial or recourse, to quarantine any perceived danger.

  He needed to get to the heart of the matter. Investigator Klančnik hadn’t been very forthcoming after her initial interviews, other than to report that Ms. Wiley led an interesting life. That much he had gathered on his own. To get more information from Investigator Klančnik, he would have to provide more information to her. He would have to share his instinct about everything, leading back to the museum and through it to the river. He could picture the incredulity on her face.

  Chapter 7

  Vesna settled Jo into the overstuffed couch in her living room. She plumped pillows on either side and covered her lap with a crocheted throw.

  “Sit there.” She handed Jo a mug of tea.

  Vesna’s cat Cleopatra climbed up onto the back of the couch and gave Jo a gentle head-butt before clambering down into her lap to knead her thigh. Then Cleopatra stopped, looked up at Jo with doleful yellow eyes and curled up to sleep. Jo patted the cat’s smooth orange fur while Antony, a handsome tuxedo cat, sat at her feet and stared at her – or rather, at the air above her head.