Susan watched him go. Past the Tilt-a-Whirl, past the children’s train, and past Oaks Park’s hottest new attraction: “The Beauty Killer House of Horrors.” She remembered when it used to be your standard haunted house: glowing skull, hologram ghosts, scary dark hallways. Now it was all Beauty Killer crime scenes. Susan had heard they even had a mannequin made up to look like Archie, strapped to a gurney, with an animatronic Gretchen Lowell, like a giant Barbie, torturing him with a plastic scalpel. When Gretchen pressed the scalpel into the mannequin’s chest, a stream of blood jetted out three feet.

WEAR GOGGLES, a sign at the entrance warned.

Everyone loved it.

“Saw your column about the skeleton they found at the slough,” Henry said.

“I thought you only read German poetry,” Susan said. But she was secretly pleased. She’d done a long story on the skeleton. In any other news cycle, it might have gotten more attention. She’d been disappointed when it hadn’t.

Henry rubbed the back of his neck. “What do you know about Vanport?” he asked.

She should have known he’d be critical. “What I wrote. The whole town was washed away in 1948. People died. Some bodies were never found. And the dog park where the skeleton was found is right where the town used to be.”

“The skeleton’s been in the ground sixty years, so he must have died in the Vanport flood?”

“I didn’t say he died at Vanport,” Susan said evenly. She’d had the same argument with her editor. “I said he died about sixty years ago, and was found smack-dab in the middle of the area that used to be the city of Vanport, before Vanport was washed away by a flood sixty years ago.”

“Just be careful what you stir up,” Henry said.

“I exude caution,” Susan said.

Henry snorted.

A hundred feet beyond the ride, the river churned chilly and brown, the current whipping debris by at a frenzied pace. A few seagulls circled above the water, but none dared to settle in it. The oaks at the bank were dead-looking, their tops disintegrating into the low wet mist that draped the city like muslin.

Susan had a sudden feeling of dread.

“What?” Henry said, looking up.

She shook it off. “Nothing,” she said. “I just got cold.”

Chapter 3

CHAPTER

3

“Any nightmares?” Sarah Rosenberg asked.

A curtain of water fell outside her office window. Archie’s socks were sodden, his pants damp almost to the knees. More coffee would have been good. But Rosenberg only had tea.

“I’m okay,” he said. His gun pressed into his hip.

“Really?” she said. Her dark hair was knotted in back and held in place with a pencil, and she was wearing sweats. No makeup. She’d been thinking he wouldn’t show.

“No nightmares,” he said.

She raised a skeptical eyebrow.