Shadow Side: Whale Rock

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Dan Retsler left Oregon for a reason. He never planned to return. But something draws him to accept an interview for police chief in a small town near the Oregon Caves. After all, the caves call the mountains their home, not the coast, where Retsler still fights haunting memories of strange creatures. But he soon discovers that something lurks in the shadows of this mountain town. Something linked to deaths too strange to be normal. Now, Retsler must investigate the type of crime he swore to leave behind—a crime that might decide his future once and for all.

 

"Fantasy creatures and paranormal powers in a great writing style."

—The Best Reviews on Fantasy Life

 

Like early Ray Bradbury, Rusch has the ability to switch on a universal dark.

—The Times (London)

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Jun 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393695615

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. She publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov's Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.   

Book preview

Shadow Side

SHADOW SIDE

KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

WMG Publishing, Inc.

CONTENTS

Shadow Side

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About the Author

Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

SHADOW SIDE

HALFWAY UP THE mountain, Dan Retsler regretted returning to Oregon. He had a perfectly good job in Montana. The small town at the base of the Bitterroots had its own charm, and everyone now knew his name. He’d investigated his share of crime too—real crime, from shoplifting to domestic abuse allegations to more than the usual (to his mind anyway) number of shootings.

Yet, when he’d seen the advertisement for a police chief to handle a small town around the Oregon Caves, he’d jumped at the chance.

The Oregon Caves, he told himself, weren’t the Oregon Coast. He wouldn’t find selkies or ghosts or ugly mermaids or any other kind of fantastic creature that he failed to understand.

Instead, he’d be in the mountains, far from the ocean. Tourists would flock here, sure, but he had grown up in a tourist town. He understood how tourists fit into the local economy, and he knew how Oregon worked.

But as he turned west and south out of Grant’s Pass, heading into the Coastal Mountain Range where the spectacular Oregon Caves threaded for miles, his stomach flipped, his shoulders tightened, and he nearly turned around.

He forced himself to continue by reminding himself that the committee expected him. He’d headed these hiring committees. He knew how much of a problem it caused when an applicant didn’t show, particularly one good enough to warrant an interview.

He owed them that much. Besides, he was nearly there.

The committee set the morning meeting at the Marble Chalet, a place he’d never been to. He’d been to the Lodge at the Oregon Caves dozens of times. The Lodge was part of the National Park Service, and had actually been featured on PBS. His family loved to vacation there when he was a kid.

But everyone ignored the equally historic Marble Chalet. It had been in ruins for decades. In the flush 1990s, an enterprising private company restored it, and applied for a permit from the National Park Service to have a second public opening into the miles-long Oregon Caves complex, the opening easily accessible from the Chalet’s parking area.

The Park Service decided a second opening was a bad idea. Retsler never found out why, but it made the Chalet a second-tier hotel by default.

If he took this job, he wouldn’t work at the Chalet. He’d work in Marble Village, which the enterprising private company had originally built to house its workers, but which had grown like crazy. In the flush years before the century turned, a lot of Californians bought land and built homes here, so the village had more amenities than it deserved—from cell phone towers to high-speed Internet. It had also lost a lot of amenities to the Great Recession, like the three-plex movie theater, although the faux vaudeville theater, which played old movies and second (or third)-run films did enough business to stay alive.

Retsler had found out some of this from a quick Internet search. He remembered parts of it from his years living in Oregon, and the rest the town fathers had told him as they tried to entice him up here for the job.

They wanted an Oregonian; they made that clear. They were even happier that he was a native Oregonian, since such creatures were rare. They also wanted someone with experience in tourist areas.

He fit that bill.

He just wasn’t sure about the rest of it.

The road forked outside of Marble Village, with the steeper, more difficult part heading toward the Marble Chalet. The initial signs heading to the Chalet were modern, with lettering that would reflect a car’s headlights. But the closer he got, the signs changed, becoming rustic. Eventually, he realized these were the original signs, built in the 1930s, as the hotel itself got built as a WPA project.

For the first time, he actually felt a thread of excitement at seeing